He drove. Four hours round trip – Edinburgh and back, the roads empty at three in the morning, the headlights cutting through the dark of the M8. The route took him through the dead industrial corridor between Glasgow and Edinburgh – the strip of motorway lined with distribution centres and retail parks, all of them dark, all of them waiting for the morning shift. He arrived at Scottish Paper Conservation before they opened. He waited in the car park for forty minutes. When the proprietor arrived at seven, Al was standing at the door with the order and the payment ready.
He arrived at the vault at seven fifteen with a wrapped parcel of paper and the look of a man who had driven four hours without complaint because that was how Al loved — not with words, not with gestures, but with four hours of empty motorway in the dark because a woman in a vault needed paper.
He put the paper on her table. He left. Rona looked at the door for a long moment after it closed. The looking was private and I did not comment on it. She picked up the paper. She tested the weight between her thumb and forefinger – the professional assessment of a woman who understood that paper had character and that the character had to match.
“This is correct,” she said.
She continued.
The false Ledger was completed at eleven on the morning of the third day.
Rona held it beside the original. The two volumes sat on the worktable – identical in binding, identical in size, identical in the age and weight of the paper and the colour of the ink and the character of the handwriting. Side by side, the documents were indistinguishable.
She opened both to the same page – a 2004 entry, a fishing boat loan, standard black ink. The handwriting was the same. The ink was the same. The paper was the same. The entry was the same in every respect except one: the marginal notation in the false Ledger, written in Rona’s pencil reproduction of Lachlan’s hand, pointed to a different network. The network it pointed to was the buyer’s own.
She wrote the final entry with the gold pen. The pen was mine – the one I used for the Ledger’s most significant notations, the entries that marked transitions and turning points. The gold ink caught the lamp light. The words were: ::: {custom-style=“Vellum Written Note”} Contested. Resolved. :::
She sat for a long time without moving. The vault was cold. The lamp was warm. The two Ledgers sat on the table and the light fell on both of them equally and the equality was the point – the buyer would see what Rona wanted the buyer to see, and what the buyer saw would be the instrument of the buyer’s undoing.
“It’s done,” she said.
“It’s done,” I confirmed.
She closed the false Ledger. She placed it in a leather case – the same case the real Ledger was stored in, a duplicate that Cillian had sourced from the same craftsman. She held the case against her chest for a moment – the gesture of a woman holding the most important thing she had ever built.
Catriona arrived at Crag Manor at four in the afternoon.
The entrance hall. The front door opened. She came in carrying a small bag and wearing the grey coat from the café. She stood in the entrance hall and she looked around – at the stone walls, the staircase, the paintings, the cold grandeur of a building she had entered once before, eighteen months ago, in the dark, to write warnings in the Ledger.
Morven came down the stairs. She stopped on the third step. Cat stopped in the hall. The two women looked at each other across the entrance hall – the two women who were once the same audition, who had been shaped by the same teacher, who had built their adult lives on opposite sides of the same loss.
“Welcome back,” Morven said.
Cat looked at her. The grey coat. The dancer’s shoulders. A woman who had won the role that Cat had lost and had built a different kind of life from the winning.
“Thank you,” Cat said.
The entrance hall was cold. The afternoon light came through the windows. Two women who had been each other’s ghost for six years stood in the hall and looked at each other and what passed between them was the beginning of whatever came next.
CHAPTER 28
Morven and Catriona
MORVEN
Ifind Catriona in the kitchen at six in the morning, making tea with the competence of someone who has lived alone long enough to have strong opinions about hot beverages. She makes it the same way Ewan makes it badly – the same steps, the same order, but correctly. The kettle at the right temperature. The milk added at the right moment. The steeping precise. She makes tea the way she holds her shoulders – with the dancer’s discipline that Isobel drilled into both of us, the discipline that said: if you are going to do a thing, do it properly or do not do it at all.
“Morning,” she said.
“Morning.”
The kitchen was cold. The AGA was running but the room had not warmed yet – the early morning cold of a stone building, the cold that lived in the walls and the floor and retreated slowly as the day advanced. Cat was wearing Ewan’s jumper – too large, the sleeves rolled, the hem falling to mid-thigh. Thewearing of a brother’s jumper was such a normal, domestic detail that it made the extraordinary nature of her presence – Catriona Alloway, six years missing, standing in my kitchen – seem briefly, impossibly ordinary.
She poured two cups. She placed one in front of me. She sat across the table.
“I never thought it was your fault,” she said.
The sentence arrived without preamble. Cat was not a woman who built approaches. She was a woman who arrived at the thing and said it.
