“You left the van,” she said.
“Aye.”
“Ewan–”
“Don’t.”
She looked at me. The look was the look of a sister who understood what it had cost her brother to leave the command post and walk into a building and climb three flights of stairs and perform a catering worker while his hands were shaking inside the pockets of a borrowed jacket. The look said:I know. And I will not say it. And the not-saying is the kindest thing I can do.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She put her hand over mine. We stood like that for three seconds. Then she walked to the car Ross had positioned on the side street, and I went back to the van, and the operation continued.
In the dining room, Maitland stood. He watched the door through which Catriona had departed. His face was doing the calculation – the rapid assessment of a lawyer who was watching an operation collapse and was computing his own exit strategy.
And then he turned. On the camera feed, I saw the turn – the head moving from the door to the dining room interior, from the corridor where Cat had disappeared to the room where the remaining occupants were processing the disaster.
And then the dining room door opened again.
Morven walked through it.
She was not supposed to be in the dining room. She was supposed to be in the corridor – the service corridor, the position we had agreed, the position where she would intercept Maitland on his way out. But Morven had changed the plan. Morven had decided that the corridor was not sufficient. The corridor was private. The corridor was hidden.
She walked into the dining room and she looked at Andrew Maitland and she said nothing. The saying-nothing was louderthan anything she could have said. She stood in the doorway – black dress, dark hair, the posture of a dancer and the stillness of a woman who had been waiting twelve years for this moment and was not going to rush it.
Maitland looked at her. He did not recognise her – not yet, not in this context. He saw a woman in the doorway. He saw a face he had never seen before. But the eyes were doing a thing that made him pause. The eyes were looking at him with an intensity that was not anger but recognition – the recognition of a woman who had been carrying a man’s name in her memory since she was nine years old and was now seeing the face that belonged to the name.
Hale was still at the table. The administrative woman was gathering her papers. The false Ledger was on the table – Cat had put it down before her exit, a calculated deviation from the plan. The Ledger sat between the buyer and the lawyer and the woman in the doorway and the document was doing its work even in stillness, because the buyer had already read his own name in its pages and the reading had already ended the operation.
Maitland looked at the door. He looked at Morven. The recognition was not yet complete – he did not yet know who she was. But he knew, in the way that lawyers know when a room has changed, that the woman in the doorway was not incidental. She was the next thing.
I watched on the camera feed. I did not breathe.
CHAPTER 32
The Fire Law
MORVEN
The corridor smells of carpet cleaner and good cooking. He comes round the corner and I am exactly where I knew I’d be. I say: “Hello.”
The service corridor. The Merchant Villas, third floor. The corridor connects the private dining floor to the service stairwell – a narrow passage, low-ceilinged, the kind of corridor that exists behind the scenes of expensive buildings, where the mechanics of hospitality are conducted out of sight. The carpet is dark. The walls are cream. The lighting is the functional kind – bright enough to work by, too bright for the intimacy that the public rooms maintain.
I had positioned myself at the junction of the corridor and the stairwell. The positioning was deliberate. The junction was the only exit from the dining floor that did not pass through the main lobby, and a man who had just watched a government operation collapse would not use the main lobby. He would usethe service corridor. He would come round the corner. He would find me.
Andrew Maitland came round the corner. He was walking quickly – the pace of a man who had made the decision to leave and was executing it with the urgency of someone who understood that the distance between the dining room and the street was the distance between containment and exposure.
He saw me. He stopped.
“Hello,” I said.
He looked at me. The look was the assessment of a lawyer – rapid, professional, categorising. A woman. Young. Standing in the service corridor of the Merchant Villas at nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening. Not staff. Not catering. Not the woman who had just left the dining room with the Ledger. A different woman. One he did not recognise.
“Do I know you?” he said.
“Not yet.”
I stepped forward. The step was measured – one pace, enough to bring me within the range of a conversation rather than an encounter. Close enough to be heard. Far enough to allow him the illusion of space.
“My name is Morven Gault,” I said. “My mother was Elspeth Gault. She died in the Clyde Fire at the McCallum Dockyard on the fourteenth of March, twelve years ago. I was nine.”
