“You have it,” he said.
The room cleared slowly. Ewan went to call Catriona. Lachlan went to the study. Al stayed – he was washing the cups, the domestic act that was his version of processing.
I stayed too. I was standing at the table, looking at the documents Rona had spread before leaving – the McInnis file, the FOCR mandate summary, a handwritten timeline of Mackie’s property acquisitions.
“There’s one more thing,” Rona said. She had stopped at the door. Her briefcase was in her hand. Her face was doing the thing it did when she had information she was reluctant to deliver – the slight tightening around the eyes, the professional composure deployed against personal discomfort.
“The secondary source,” she said. “The intelligence Mackie has been receiving about the Ledger’s location and Morven’s access to it – it didn’t come through Boyd. Boyd’s information was operational. Casino floor, guest lists, shipping schedules. The Ledger intelligence came from someone in the family orbit.”
“Family orbit,” Al said. He had stopped washing the cups.
“Someone who knows Morven’s routines. Someone who knows when she’s at the manor, when she’s at the Hook, when she visits Duncan. Someone who has been answering questions– weekly, Catriona thinks – about the domestic architecture of Morven’s life.”
The kitchen was still. The tap dripped. The AGA ticked.
I knew. Before she said it. I knew.
“Duncan,” I said.
Rona looked at me. Her face confirmed it.
The kitchen was cold. The tea was cold. The information was cold. And the man who had sold me once at the Winter Wager had been selling the details of my daily life to the man who was trying to dismantle everything I had built since.
CHAPTER 24
The Second Mole
ALASTAIR
She goes alone. She drives with the window open so the cold keeps her from feeling the thing she is about to have to feel.
I watched the car leave from the kitchen window. Morven’s car – the small one, the one she used for errands and visits and the kinds of journeys that did not require the manor’s formal vehicles. The window was down. The morning was cold – February cold, the kind that settled into the lungs and stayed. She drove with the window down because the cold was armour. I knew this about her. I knew that when Morven needed not to feel, she chose discomfort, because discomfort occupied the part of the brain that would otherwise be occupied by grief.
She had not told me where she was going. She did not need to. Rona’s revelation the night before had moved through the house with the quiet efficiency of information that changes the atmospheric pressure of every room it enters. Duncan. The secondary source. The man who had been answering questions about his daughter’s daily routines – when she went to themanor, when she returned to the Hook, when she visited him – and the answering had given Mackie a map of Morven’s life that was more detailed than any surveillance operation could have produced.
I stayed at the window. I watched the car disappear down the drive. I waited.
She told me later. Not that evening – the following morning, when she was ready, when the words had settled into the shape she wanted them to take. She told me in the kitchen, standing at the counter, her hands around a mug of tea she was not drinking.
Duncan’s flat. The same flat I had never visited – the two-room exile on the waterfront, the clean surfaces, the folded blanket, the photograph of Morven aged twelve on the bookshelf. She pulled up outside and sat in the car for three minutes with the engine running and the cold coming through the open window and she looked at the building and she breathed.
She went up. She knocked. The door opened.
He knew. She could see it in the way he stood – the posture of a man who had been expecting this visit, who had been dreading it, who had rehearsed his responses and forgotten them all the moment his daughter’s face appeared in the doorway. He was already crying. The tears were silent and they were running down a face that was thinner than it had been three weeks ago and the flat behind him was still tidy and still clean and the tidiness was the saddest part, because it meant he had been maintaining the routine – the six o’clock walks, the paper,the cleaning – while simultaneously betraying the person the routine was supposed to prove he had changed for.
“Come in,” he said.
She went in. She did not sit. She stood in the kitchen and she looked at him and she waited.
“They came every week,” he said.
He was sitting at the table. She was standing at the counter. The positions were the reverse of every parent-child conversation that had ever taken place in a kitchen – the parent seated, diminished, confessing; the child standing, elevated, judging. The reversal was the architecture of the Mackie family’s damage – everything turned inside out, the protector become the threat, the child become the authority.
“A man. The same man each time. He came on Thursdays. He brought things – groceries, sometimes. A newspaper. He asked about my week. He asked about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him –” Duncan’s voice broke. The breaking was not dramatic. It was the sound of a hinge that had been carrying too much weight for too long. “I told him when you visited. I told him about the manor. I told him you were well. I told him about your life because he asked and because nobody else was asking and because the asking felt like –” He stopped. He looked at his hands. “Like someone cared.”
