She paused. She placed a document on the desk — the Land Registry confirmation letter, stamped and signed.
“So I fixed it.”
I looked at the document. I looked at her.
“You fixed it.”
“The covenant was based on a transcription error in the original land registry entry — a clerk transposed two digits in 1834. The error has persisted for a hundred and ninety years.” She tapped the confirmation letter. “I submitted a correction twelve days ago. It was approved on Tuesday.”
I sat down. The chair creaked. I read the letter — the bureaucratic language, the reference numbers, the date stamp. Twelve days ago. She had filed this correction the same week she arrived.
“Mackie’s application cites the old entry,” Rona said. “The old entry no longer exists. The application is dead on arrival.”
“The injunction has no ground.”
“None. It won’t reach a hearing. I’ve already submitted the corrected entry to the Cairndhu planning office as an interested-party filing. The planning officer will receive both documents simultaneously — Mackie’s application citing the old entry, and the confirmation that the old entry has been superseded.”
The study was still. The morning light was pale through the window. I looked at the document on my desk — Rona’s counter-filing, prepared twelve days ago, updated, processed, approved, and sitting in a folder labelled CONTINGENCY that she had built during her first week in a house she had been acquired to enter.
“You built this without knowing you were building it,” I said.
“I built this because the vulnerability existed and leaving a vulnerability unaddressed is not acceptable to me.” She paused. “Whether I knew the threat would materialise is irrelevant. The preparation was the point.”
I sat with this. The forensic accountant who had arrived with a briefcase and a debt and a professional assessment of every surface she touched had, in her first week, identified the legal mechanism that Mackie would deploy six weeks later and had pre-emptively neutralised it.
“Thank you,” I said.
She looked at me. The looking was brief and it carried a warmth that was new – not the professional warmth of a colleague being acknowledged, but the warmer thing beneath it, the warmth of a person who had done important work for people she had started to care about.
“The implication is more important than the counter-filing,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“Mackie filed this application knowing it would be contested. He didn’t expect it to succeed – he expected it to slow us. To force us to engage with the legal process while he completed the handover to FOCR.” She placed a second document on the desk. “The filing timeline tells me his schedule has accelerated. Heexpected more time. He’s moving faster than planned. The buyer meeting is imminent.”
The phone rang at two in the afternoon. Catriona.
She called from a number I did not recognise – a burner, rotated weekly, the operational discipline of a woman who had been careful for long enough that the carefulness was reflex. Her voice was clear. She spoke in the measured, precise sentences of someone delivering intelligence under time pressure.
“I have the date,” she said. “Four days. Wednesday evening.”
“Location.”
“The Merchant Villas. The private dining floor – the same one Mackie used for that dinner with the harbour master. The buyer has booked the room under a company name I’ll send you. The Ledger will be presented as a live demonstration – not a copy, not a summary. They want the physical document.”
“They want to see it opened.”
“They want to verify that it’s real. The format, the binding, the age of the paper, the handwriting. They’ve been promised the original and they want to confirm authenticity before the financial transfer.”
I was writing. The pen moved across the notepad with the same precision I applied to every operational plan – the details in order, the variables identified, the timeline locked. Four days. Wednesday. Merchant Villas. The Ledger as a live demonstration. The buyer needed to see the physical document.
Which meant the buyer would see a physical document. Not the Ledger. Rona’s Ledger. A replica so precise that a buyer whohad never touched the original would not be able to distinguish it from the real thing.
“Catriona,” I said. “Are you willing to carry the document into the room?”
The line was quiet for three seconds. The quiet was not hesitation. It was the quiet of a woman considering a request that would place her inside a room with the man who had been trying to destroy her brother’s world.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m the only one who can. The buyer knows my face. I’ve been to three of Mackie’s events. If anyone else walks in with that document, they’ll know it’s a setup.” She paused. “I’ll carry it. I’ll present it. I’ll walk out.”
