Cat went ahead. She had seen the time on her phone and she wanted to change before Ewan came back from the Hook –she said this, the practical reason, the normal reason – and she walked ahead of me on the path, her stride long and even, the dancer’s walk that covered ground without appearing to hurry. I watched her go. She rounded the corner of the manor and disappeared.
I was alone on the cliff path.
The path was narrow here – three feet wide, grass on the left, the cliff edge on the right. No rail. The wind was off the Clyde and it pushed at my coat and my hair and the push was the ordinary push of a Scottish coast in winter, constant, impersonal. The dock cranes were visible in the distance. The sky was white.
The man was standing at the narrowest point.
He was between me and the house. Thirty feet ahead. Dark jacket. Hands at his sides. The earpiece – the small, clear-wire kind, the same configuration I had seen on the man who followed me through Cairndhu, the same configuration Al had described from the dock road. He was not moving. He was standing on the path with the patience of a person who had been placed there and was waiting for me to arrive at the place where the path was narrowest and the cliff edge was closest and the options were: stop, turn back, or come to him.
My phone was in my coat pocket. Al was on speed dial. One button.
I did not press it.
I kept walking. The wind pushed. My hair was in my face. I put it behind my ear with my left hand and the gesture was ordinary and the ordinariness was deliberate – I was a woman walking on a path, fixing her hair, going home. The man watched me. His face was blank. Professional. The blankness said:I am here. You are here. The distance between us is closing and the closing is the message and the message is: we can stand on your path.
Twenty feet. Fifteen. The path narrowed. The grass was wet under my boots. The cliff edge was to my right – six feet of rough ground, then the drop, then the Clyde, grey and flat and a hundred feet below.
Ten feet. I could see his eyes. Brown. Calm. The eyes of a man doing a job.
I did not stop. I did not slow. At five feet – the point where stopping was the expected response, where a woman alone on a cliff path was supposed to calculate the threat and choose retreat – I shifted my weight. Left foot forward. Right hip dropping. The dancer’s centre of gravity, low and precise, the base that Isobel had built into my body with fifteen years of barre work. The fouetté preparation. Not on a studio floor – on wet grass, on a cliff path, with the wind at my back and a man in front of me and the drop to my right.
I went around him on the cliff side.
My right foot found the ground between the path and the edge. The grass was slick. My boot held. My weight transferred – smooth, controlled, the way weight transfers in a turn, the momentum carrying me past him on the outside. Eighteen inches from the edge. The wind caught my coat. My hip passed his hip. He was close enough that I smelled his aftershave – something sharp, chemical, not expensive.
His hand reached for my arm.
Too late. I was past him. The fouetté completed – not the spin, just the pivot, the transfer of weight from one foot to the other with the centre low and the body moving through the space the man occupied as though the space were mine, because the spacewasmine, because this was my path and my cliff and my home and a man in a dark jacket was not going to make me turn around on my own ground.
I walked to the manor. I did not run. I did not look back. My heartbeat was in my ears and my hands were shaking insidemy pockets and my right boot was muddy from the edge and I walked and I walked and I reached the kitchen door and I opened it and I stepped inside and the warmth of the AGA hit my face and I breathed.
I told no one.
I told none of them. I did not tell them because telling would have produced a response – Al’s fury, Lachlan’s strategy, Ewan’s protective recalibration – and the response would have been about them, about their need to protect me, and what had just happened on the cliff path was not about them. It was about me. It was about the dancer’s body doing the thing it was built to do – reading space, finding the line, taking the turn – and I had done it, and the victory was mine, and I was not going to surrender it to the machinery of their concern.
I washed the mud from my boot. I made tea. I sat at the table.
We came inside. The kitchen was warm now. The AGA had done its work. Ewan was at the counter making coffee and he looked at the two of us coming through the door – his sister and the woman he loved – and his face did the thing that Ewan’s face did when the charm was off and the real feeling was visible, which was that it became younger and softer and entirely undefended.
“Coffee?” he said.
“Please,” Cat said.
She sat at the table. I sat beside her. Ewan made coffee for three. The kitchen was warm and the coffee was excellent and the morning was advancing and in two days a woman would carry a forged document into a room full of people who wantedto destroy the system that had produced this kitchen and this coffee and this morning.
“Mackie doesn’t know I’m here,” Cat said. She said it to both of us. Her voice was calm and precise. “But his buyer does. His buyer has been watching me for three months.” She paused. “Which means I’m the one who walks into that meeting.”
The kitchen was still. The coffee steamed. Ewan’s hands were on the counter. My hands were on the table. The information settled between us like a weight placed carefully on a surface that might or might not hold it.
“I know,” Ewan said. His voice was steady. The steadiness cost him everything.
“I know,” I said.
Cat looked at us. The dancer’s shoulders. The grey coat over the back of her chair. The silver ring on her right hand. A woman who had spent six years becoming the person who could walk into that room and who was now telling us, in her kitchen, over coffee, that the becoming had been for this.
CHAPTER 29
The Eve of the Merchant Villas
