24. Duncan’s Move
Duncan’s Move
MORVEN
I read the letter at my breakfast table and thought about all the ways love becomes a liability.
The tray had been left outside my door – toast, butter, a small pot of jam, tea with the milk already in it the way I liked, and a folded envelope tucked beside the napkin with the careful precision of someone who wanted it to look like it belonged there and didn’t quite manage it.
The handwriting on the front was my father’s. The paper was wrong.
Duncan wrote on whatever was nearest – gas bills, Domino’s leaflets, the backs of Ladbrokes slips.
This envelope was clean and white and sealed with the kind of care that suggested someone had watched him seal it.
I turned it over. No postmark. Hand-delivered.
Someone in this house had put this on my tray.
I opened it standing at the window with the Clyde grey and churning below the cliff and the toast getting cold behind me .
Morven, hen –
Don’t do what they’re asking. The Wager isn’t what they’ve told you it is.
The man who runs the opposition has people inside the Syndicate and the plan they’ve shown you has a gap they haven’t mentioned.
If you go to the table you’re the gap. I know you think they’re protecting you but protection looks different from where I’m standing and where I’m standing I can see things you can’t see from inside that house.
Please, love. Walk away. I’ve arranged a way out through the Greenock route – you only need to get to the station. There’s a woman at platform 2 who has an envelope with your name on it. Everything you need. Don’t tell them. Just go.
Your Da
The phrasing sat in my mouth like a coin – familiar and wrong.
The man who runs the opposition. Duncan didn’t talk like that.
Duncan talked about people the way he talked about horses: by name, by habit, by the particular flavour of trouble they carried.
He would have said McInnis or the Gravedigger or that bastard from the dockyards .
He wouldn’t have said the man who runs the opposition because Duncan didn’t think in strategy.
He thought in debts and bets and the localised geography of who owed what to whom.
A gap they haven’t mentioned. The phrasing was too precise.
Too structured. Duncan’s warnings came in fragments – half-sentences, looks across the table, the way he rubbed the back of his neck when he was about to say something he knew I wouldn’t want to hear.
This was composed. This had been drafted.
And then: the Greenock route . A route. An arranged escape. A woman at a platform with an envelope. These were operational details. These belonged to a plan, and Duncan didn’t make plans. Duncan stumbled into consequences and hoped they wouldn’t last.
I folded the letter. I put it in the pocket of my cardigan. I left the toast.
Lachlan’s study was on the ground floor. The door was closed. I knocked once, opened it without waiting for the answer.
He was behind his desk. He was always behind his desk. The room smelled of his coffee and the dry, layered scent of old paper and leather from the shelves. He was reading something on his laptop and the screen cast a faint blue light across his glasses. He looked up.
I placed the letter in the centre of his desk.
He read it. His face did nothing. His eyes moved across the lines at a metered pace – automatically, thoroughly, filing each word in a system that would produce an analysis before the last sentence was finished.
He put the letter down. He aligned its edges with the edge of the desk.
“Which housekeeper? ”
“Iona. The short one with the grey cardigan. She left the tray outside my door instead of knocking, which she never does.”
He nodded. “She’ll be reassigned. Not harmed.”
The not harmed was unnecessary. He said it for me – a concession to the part of me that would have asked, that still cared about the people caught in the machinery of his operation, that hadn’t been entirely converted into the version of myself that sat in his study and reported intelligence with the calm efficiency of someone who had chosen a side.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We accelerate.” He opened his laptop. His fingers moved across the keyboard the way they moved across everything – with economy, with precision, with authority.
He’d designed the system he was operating and felt no need to explain it.
I watched him work. The screen reflected in his glasses. His jaw was set.
I sat in the chair opposite the desk and I watched Lachlan Drummond move timelines forward and I understood, for the first time, the full scale of what I had agreed to be part of.
Not the debt. Not the Ledger. Not the month of service that had become a choice to stay.
This – the operation, the Wager, the dock routes and the council contacts and the Grave-Watcher network and the careful, clinical precision of a man who waged war with spreadsheets and property law and gold ink.
I was inside it now. Not as an asset. As a participant.
He paused typing. His hands stopped over the keys. He looked at the letter on his desk and then he looked at me.
“You could have hidden that letter,” he said. His voice was quiet. The register was different – stripped of its usual administrative precision, carrying something rawer.
“I know.”
A beat. “Why didn’t you?”
The question sat between us. The clock on the mantel ticked.
The coffee cooled. I thought about Duncan standing outside the casino in the rain, watching Ewan’s car carry me away.
I thought about the flat on Clyde Crescent and the whisky bottles and the bin bag tied at the neck and the spare key under the broken planter.
I thought about a man who had written my name in a ledger he’d never shown me and called it love and called it protection and called it everything except what it was – cowardice dressed in the language of care.
“Because I’ve decided,” I said.
He held my gaze. The silence held. His fingers returned to the keyboard.
I went back to my room. I sat on the bed with the letter in my lap and I read it one more time – not the words but the shape of the thing. The handwriting. The envelope. The phrasing that was too clean.
And then I found it.
The last line. Your Da. Not the words – the rhythm. The cadence of the sign-off, the clumsy tenderness of a man who didn’t write letters and had written this one as though it were the most important thing he would ever put on paper.
Except he hadn’t. Because this rhythm – Your Da, please, love, walk away – was the same rhythm as the card he’d given me when I left for the Scottish Ballet at eighteen.
The card I’d kept in the front pocket of my dance bag for three years, through auditions and injuries and the slow, grinding erosion of a career that was always on the edge of good enough.
He’d written: Go show them what a Gault can do, hen. Your Da.
It was the most articulate thing he’d ever written. I had memorised every word.
And now I was reading those words here – not copied exactly but echoed, the cadence and the structure and the emotional frequency of a man saying goodbye to his daughter – and the echo was too precise.
Too calculated. Because Duncan wouldn’t have remembered the card.
Duncan didn’t remember things he’d written; he remembered things he owed.
Someone had asked him about the card. Someone had drawn the phrases out of him and used them to construct a letter designed to sound like him in the way that a forged painting is designed to look like the original – close enough to survive a casual glance, wrong enough to catch the eye of someone who knew every brushstroke.
My father didn’t write this letter. He described it to someone, and they wrote it for him.
McInnis’s people were already inside my family connection. They had Duncan’s voice and Duncan’s memories and they had used them to build a weapon shaped exactly like love.
I folded the letter. I put it in the drawer of my bedside table. I sat on the bed and I breathed and I thought about the cruelty of a man who would mine a father’s tenderness for operational advantage, and I thought about the tragedy of a father who had let himself be mined .
The Clyde churned below the cliff. The gulls wheeled. The locket rested against my sternum, warm from my skin.
I had decided. The deciding was done. The rest was detail.