Chapter 3
Skye
The tracing paper remained spread across my worktable long after I had stopped pretending I was merely studying it.
Four words had occupied my thoughts since I pulled the thin strip from inside Isla’s passport the night before—West corridor still doesn’t balance—and no matter how many times I compared her tiny hand-drawn plan with the official drawings for Blackridge Hall, the conclusion remained the same.
Isla had not been pointing out a measurement error.
She had been telling me where to look. The problem was that Blackridge Hall sat across the border in England, the Covenant Renewal Foundation had already made it painfully clear that they considered our involvement with the project finished, and I had no intention of arriving on their doorstep without understanding exactly what Isla had discovered first. If someone had gone to the trouble of returning her passport to the Edinburgh police while leaving a message hidden inside it, there were only two possibilities I could accept.
Either Isla had managed to get the passport out herself, knowing it would eventually reach me, or someone else had returned it without realizing she had concealed anything inside.
Neither possibility made me feel better.
Both meant the people surrounding her disappearance were close enough to manipulate the investigation while remaining confident nobody would recognize what she had left behind.
I arrived at Thistle & Stone before seven, locked the front door behind me, and switched on only the lamps above the drafting tables rather than illuminating the entire studio.
Edinburgh was barely awake beyond the windows, the rain leaving the pavement dark and reflective beneath the amber streetlights while delivery vans moved quietly between businesses preparing for another day.
Normally I loved this hour. Isla and I had built some of our best designs before clients began ringing, contractors started arguing about schedules, and the entire world seemed determined to make every decision urgent.
This morning the silence felt different.
Her desk remained exactly as it had the previous evening, the cactus still leaning toward the window, her mug still sitting in the cupboard because I had not been able to make myself move it, and the calendar beside her computer still displayed appointments she had never returned to keep.
I forced my attention away from the empty chair and opened the Blackridge files across both of our workstations, telling myself that if Isla had trusted me enough to leave one clue, then the least I could do was stop looking at the project the way the Covenant Renewal Foundation wanted me to see it.
Thistle & Stone had not been the primary architectural firm on Blackridge Hall.
That distinction belonged to a larger practice based in York, while our contract covered interior restoration, historical finishes, furnishing plans, and consultation on adapting the old estate without destroying the features that made it worth preserving.
Isla had handled most of the site coordination because she could look at a contractor’s schedule, a procurement ledger, and a room full of unfinished plaster and somehow hold all three inside her head at the same time.
I handled the visual design, historical research, materials, and spatial planning.
Between us, very little escaped notice for long.
That was precisely why the contractor revisions bothered me.
I opened the original tender package, then the final construction schedule, and began tracing every company attached to the west wing.
Stonework. Electrical. Fire safety. Security.
Joinery. Mechanical systems. Most were ordinary regional contractors with years of public work behind them, but one name appeared more often than its role justified.
Calder Heritage Developments Ltd.
According to the original contract, Calder had been hired only for structural stabilization in the west wing and portions of the basement.
Yet their invoices extended into door hardware, internal security, ventilation, electrical access, and something vaguely described as resident movement compliance.
I read the phrase three times before sitting back in my chair.
No legitimate historic-restoration contractor used language like that.
Accessibility compliance, yes. Fire egress, certainly.
Resident movement compliance sounded less like construction and more like someone designing where people were permitted to go.
I opened the company-registration documents we kept for vendor verification and found almost nothing remarkable until I reached the directors.
Calder Heritage Developments belonged to a holding company called Northmere Property Group, whose registered address led to an office outside Newcastle.
Northmere, in turn, shared a director with another company called Alderwick Residential Holdings.
That one was registered in Edinburgh.
I stared at the name for several seconds before opening another search window.
Alderwick owned six properties in Scotland, most of them ordinary investment flats and commercial units.
The seventh was different: a Georgian townhouse in New Town, purchased nine years earlier through a restoration trust and subsequently removed from the normal rental market.
There were no current letting photographs, no business listed at the address, and no planning applications newer than five years despite substantial renovation expenses appearing in Calder’s accounts.
Twenty-three days earlier, I might have dismissed the connection as coincidence, but I had learned too much since Isla disappeared to ignore another overlap, so I printed everything.
By eight thirty, my worktable had disappeared beneath company records, invoices, contractor lists, and copies of Isla’s drawings.
I began circling repeated names until a pattern emerged.
Calder Heritage. Northmere Property Group.
Alderwick Residential. Covenant Renewal Foundation.
Different companies. Different addresses.
Different stated purposes. Yet the same two directors drifted through them with minor variations in job title, while payments moved between the organizations in amounts small enough to look routine until someone laid them beside one another.
Isla had done exactly that. I knew because halfway through an archived project folder I found a spreadsheet she had created three weeks before she disappeared.
It had no dramatic title, no warning attached to it, merely BHR Cost Reconciliation, the sort of boring file name guaranteed to make almost everyone ignore it.
The final column contained a series of highlighted payments, and beside one of them she had typed a note.
Why is Edinburgh paying for Blackridge security?
My throat tightened.
“You saw it,” I whispered.
The Edinburgh address connected to the payment was not Alderwick’s registered office.
It was the Georgian townhouse.
For several minutes I considered calling Detective Kerr.
The sensible part of me knew I should. I had complained for weeks that the police were not taking Isla seriously, and withholding evidence the moment I actually found something would make me a hypocrite.
I photographed the documents, copied them onto an encrypted drive, and sent Kerr a message asking him to call me as soon as possible.
Then I waited exactly six minutes before accepting that patience had never been my strongest quality and Isla did not have the luxury of waiting for me to develop it.
There was one place I needed to go first.
Isla’s flat.
The police had released it days earlier after finding nothing they considered suspicious, and I had avoided returning because the last time I stood outside her building I had spent nearly ten minutes staring at the buzzer beside her name without being able to press it.
Today I had a reason beyond grief. If Isla had been following the same company trail I was now following, she might have taken work home, and unlike the officers searching for evidence of violence or a planned departure, I knew exactly what her professional chaos looked like.
Mrs. MacKenzie opened the communal door before I managed to use my key, peering at me from beneath a halo of silver hair with the suspicious expression she usually reserved for delivery drivers who parked across the pavement. “Any word?”
“Not yet.”
Her face softened immediately. “Poor lass.”
I managed a smile I did not feel. “Did anyone come by after the police finished?”
She considered the question. “Not that I saw.”
Her answer should have reassured me, but the moment I opened Isla's flat, I knew something was wrong.
Nothing obvious had changed. The police tape was gone.
The sitting room looked tidy. Her books occupied the same shelves, the throw remained folded across the arm of the sofa, and a pair of boots sat beneath the radiator.
I stood just inside the doorway and forced myself not to move.
Years of walking into historic houses had taught me to look before touching.
A room always told you what had happened if you gave it the chance.
Isla hated perfect symmetry, yet her cushions had been positioned evenly across the sofa and the magazines on her coffee table were stacked neatly by size.
The brass tray beside the door, normally overflowing with receipts, keys, coins, and at least three pens that did not work, contained only her spare keys.
I closed the door quietly behind me.
The police might have straightened things while searching, but Detective Kerr’s team had photographed the flat before leaving. He had shown me several images during one of our endless interviews. I pulled them up from the copies he had emailed me and compared the sitting room.