Cillian shook his head. “Utility accounts dormant since 2023. No council tax payments. No registered tenants.”
But someone had activated a device there. Someone who knew Ewan’s code. Someone with enough Syndicate knowledge to access the vault’s terminal system remotely.
3 AM on the second night. Forty-three hours since Al’s blood had been wet on a doorframe.
The house was wrong without him. The corridors were the same width, the rooms the same dimensions, but the proportions had changed in a manner I could not express mathematically and could not therefore correct. The kitchen felt too large. The doorframes felt too wide. The silence where his footsteps should have been was a silence that carried mass, and the mass was seventeen stone.
I had known Al for fifteen years. I had hired him when he was twenty-two and built like a wall and had the quiet, steady intelligence of a man who understood systems without needingto be taught their language. He had grown into the Syndicate the way a tree grows into a building – slowly, permanently, until the building and the tree were the same structure and removing one would compromise the other. He was the Syndicate’s physical presence in a world that respected physical presence. He was the man who stood in a doorway and the doorway changed. He was the man who sat in a room and the room had a centre.
He was sitting in a warehouse on the Greenock route. And the house had no centre.
Ewan found me in the study.
He stood in the doorway with two mugs of bad coffee and his eyes red-rimmed and the bruise on his head now the colour of a December sky. He put one mug on my desk. He did not ask how I was. This was one of Ewan’s better qualities – the social intelligence to know when the social machinery was not required. He sat in the chair opposite. The chair that Morven usually occupied. He sat in it differently, legs apart, leaning forward, elbows on knees, the posture of a man holding himself upright through an act of will.
We drank bad coffee in silence for approximately two minutes. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The fire had died hours ago and neither of us had relit it, and the study was cold in the way that stone buildings are cold when the heating fails – a deep, structural cold that lived in the walls.
“If we don’t get him back,” he said.
“We get him back.”
The tone was not reassurance. It was instruction. I said it with the flat, absolute certainty that turned a statement into a fact by the force of the saying. Ewan looked at me. His face did the brief calculation it always did when he was deciding which version of himself was required. He chose the man instead of the Fixer. He nodded. The nod was small and the relief behind it was visible – the relief of someone who needed another person to becertain right now because his own certainty had run dry hours ago.
“The warehouse,” I said. “Tomorrow. First light.”
“Full team. The Shadow Union.”
“And Morven?”
I looked at the doorway. Beyond it, the corridor. Beyond the corridor, the stairs. Beyond the stairs, her room, where she was either sleeping or not sleeping and either way holding herself together with the discipline that had carried her through a casino floor and a card table and the discovery of blood on a doorframe.
“Morven stays here,” I said.
Ewan looked at me with the look of a man who knew exactly how that conversation would go.
“Good luck with that,” he said.
He was correct. She would come. She would tell me she was coming. The sentence would not contain a question mark. And I would let her, because the alternative was an argument I would lose, and I preferred to lose it quickly and move on to the operational problem, which was solvable, unlike the problem of Morven Mackie’s will, which was not.
The Shadow Union’s confirmation came at 4 AM. One man inside the warehouse. Large. Alive. Sitting upright. Not moving, which could mean injured. Could also mean waiting. Al was patient. He sat with situations the way other men paced through them – still, watchful, gathering information through the walls.
And the second figure. Smaller. Still present. Three hours inside a building on a route that belonged to us, sitting with a man she had apparently come to find on her own.
I closed the laptop. The dock light was fading into the first grey suggestion of dawn. The coffee was cold. The study smelled of old paper and the faint herbal trace of Ewan’s hair, left on the headrest of Morven’s chair.
The blood returned one more time. The smear on the doorframe. The warmth of it. The wrongness of finding it in a house where nothing was supposed to be wrong.
I set it aside. The variable was located. Located meant recoverable.
Tomorrow.
CHAPTER 3
The Return and the Warning
MORVEN
The warehouse smelled of diesel and standing water and the cold of a building that was never meant to hold anything alive. He was sitting in the centre of it like a man waiting for a bus – patient, upright, deeply annoyed.
