31. What Duncan Gets
What Duncan Gets
MORVEN
H e looked smaller than I remembered. Standing in the doorway of the private room behind the casino floor, he looked like a man who had already received his answer and was only here to see it delivered.
The room was one of Lachlan’s. Everything in the Gilded Table was one of Lachlan’s – designed, appointed, positioned with the obsessive attention that turned a building into an argument.
This room was small. A table. Two chairs.
The walls were the same dark panelling as the main floor and the carpet was the same deep green and the single lamp threw a circle of amber light that made the room feel like a confessional, which was probably the point.
Duncan sat down. His hands were on the table and they were shaking, and the shaking was more than alcohol – it was the full-body tremor of a man whose last card has been played by someone else and the game is over and the table is being cleared.
He wore the same coat. The same collar. The shirt beneath it was clean, which told me someone had dressed him for this, the way you dress someone for a hearing or a funeral.
“Morven –”
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t start with my name like it’s something you’re allowed to hold.”
The word sat in the room. His hands stopped shaking. They went still. The stillness was worse.
I sat across from him. The table between us was narrow enough that I could have reached out and touched his sleeve, the way I used to when I was small, pulling at his cuff to get his attention while he watched the afternoon race at Ayr. The gesture would have looked the same. Nothing else would.
“Tell me,” I said.
He told me.
It came out fractured, the way Duncan’s truths always did – not in order, not in full, but in the jagged, circling way of a man who had never learned to organise a thought because organising a thought required believing that the thought was worth having.
He started with the debt. Not the Syndicate’s ten thousand – that was almost clean by comparison, a single figure on a single page.
The real debt. The gambling debt that sprawled across every bookmaker and back-room card game in the central belt – eleven thousand and then it was fourteen and then it was the kind of number that stops being a number and starts being a geography, a landscape of consequence so vast that the man standing in it cannot see the edges.
McInnis had found him. McInnis found everyone – that was his gift, the Gravedigger’s patient talent for locating the people who had dug holes they couldn’t climb out of and offering them a ladder that turned out to be a rope.
The terms were simple. Duncan’s debt cleared.
His bar tab settled. His life returned to the version of itself that didn’t involve men arriving at his door at midnight with the quiet, courteous menace that was the Gravedigger’s house style. In exchange: the girl.
“He said he’d get you out,” Duncan said. His voice cracked on the word out . “He said the Drummond lot had you trapped – the Ledger, the debt, the manor. He said he had a way to release the entry. He said you’d be free.”
“Free,” I repeated.
“Aye. Free. That’s what he said. Free.”
He looked at me. His eyes were wet and red and old.
Duncan was fifty-three. He looked seventy.
The years between his actual age and his apparent age were the years the whisky had taken, one at a time, the way the tide takes sand – not dramatically, not visibly, but with the patient, incremental theft of a force that doesn’t stop because it doesn’t know how.
“He told you he’d free me,” I said. “And you believed him. The man who buried three businesses and two families and who runs Greenock like a private cemetery – you believed him when he said the word free .”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You could have asked me.”
The sentence landed. It landed the way true things land – without drama, without volume, with the quiet weight of a fact that does not need emphasis because its weight is sufficient.
He could have asked me. He could have told me the debt, the number, the situation.
He could have sat across from me in the flat on Clyde Crescent – the flat with the damp and the dripping radiator and the window that looked out onto the bins – and said: Morven, I’m in trouble.
He could have done the simple thing, the honest thing, the thing that would have treated me as a person rather than a currency.
He didn’t.
“I didn’t want you to see me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like this.” He gestured at himself – the coat, the hands, the wet eyes, the body that had been dressed by someone else for a meeting with his own daughter. “Like something that needed saving.”
“Da.” My voice was quiet. “You signed me over. Twice. To two different men. All you had to do was ask me for help.”
He put his head in his hands. The sound he made was not a sob – it was smaller than a sob, more private, the compressed sound of a man who has run out of excuses and is sitting in the empty space behind them and finding that the space is very cold.
I sat with him. I sat with the sound and the lamp and the dark panelling and the narrow table and the memory of being eight years old and pulling at his cuff while the race played on the television and his face did the thing it always did when the horse he’d backed came in third – not anger, not disappointment, just the flat, defeated acceptance of a man who had been losing for so long that the losing had become the thing he was built for.
I sat until the sound stopped. He didn’t look up.
“I’m all right, Da.” My voice was steady. “I want you to know that, wherever you go from here. I am all right.”
He looked up. His face was a ruin. His eyes searched mine – looking for the lie, the performance, the version of all right that people offered because the truth was too expensive.
He didn’t find it. I wasn’t performing. I was all right.
I was all right in the way a building is all right after a storm – standing, intact, changed at the foundations in ways that didn’t show from the outside.
I stood. I straightened my dress. The silk was cool under my palms.
“What happens to me?” he asked.
“Lachlan has cleared your Ledger entry. Your debt to the Syndicate is settled. You’re exiled from Cairndhu – not harmed. You have your life.”
“And you?”
“I’m not part of the terms.”
He looked at me. I looked at him. The lamp hummed.
The room smelled of carpet and old wood and the faded cologne that Duncan had been wearing since I was born, the one from the Superdrug on Sauchiehall Street that came in a blue bottle and cost four pounds fifty and smelled of everything I associated with the word father – inadequate, persistent, present in the way cheap things are present, by being everywhere and lasting longer than they should.
“Goodbye, Da.”
I walked out.
The corridor was dim. The casino’s back hallway, the staff route, the one the guests never saw – concrete floors, strip lighting, the practical architecture that existed behind the gilt and the felt and the chandelier. The infrastructure of the performance .
Lachlan was standing in the corridor.
He was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets and his glasses on and the posture of a man who had been waiting and had used the waiting productively – his phone was in his hand, the screen dark, the call already made, the instructions already issued. He looked at me. He didn’t ask.
He offered his arm. Not a gesture of support – a gesture of presence. The Lachlan way of saying: I am here. I am beside you. I am not going to ask you how you feel because the asking would diminish what you just did, and what you just did was not small.
I took it. His arm was warm through his jacket. The fabric was expensive and real and solid in a way that nothing else in this evening had been.
We walked. The corridor stretched. The sounds of the casino – distant, muffled, the residual hum of a room that had just been the site of something seismic – filtered through the walls.
“Thank you,” I said. “For not being in the room.”
“You didn’t need me in the room.”
“No.But you were in the corridor.”
“I was in the corridor.”
The words sat between us. We walked. The strip light hummed above. Somewhere ahead, the door to the main floor was open and the smell of the casino came through – champagne and felt and the exhausted quiet of a room that had held too much for one evening and was now holding its breath.
I leaned into his arm. He let me.