12. What Niamh Knows
What Niamh Knows
MORVEN
The flat above the chip shop is not what I expected.
I was not there. I learned this later, from Rona, who told it to me in the kitchen at Crag Manor the following morning while the kettle boiled and the dawn came in through the window grey and cold.
She told it the way she told everything – in order, without editorialising, with the precision of a woman who believed that facts were more persuasive than feelings.
She was different that morning. I noticed it before she started speaking – a quietness in her posture, a softening of the professional rigidity that she wore like body armour.
Rona had been changed by what she heard.
Changed at the foundation. The forensic accountant who categorised the world into data sets and compliance frameworks had encountered a piece of human information that refused to be filed.
This is what she told me.
Niamh’s flat was immaculate. Full of books.
The shelves ran floor to ceiling on two walls and the books were organised by subject rather than author – history, economics, criminal law, three shelves of Scottish literature, and one shelf of romance novels with cracked spines and the covers worn smooth.
The flat smelled of coffee and someone else’s cigarette smoke drifting up through the floorboards from the chip shop below.
The windows were clean. The kitchen was small and the cups hung from hooks above the sink and there were two mugs on the counter already, which meant Niamh had been expecting company.
“Sit down,” Niamh said, and took the mugs from the counter. It was not entirely a request.
Rona sat. The kitchen table was a fold-out, pressed against the wall, large enough for two people if neither of them needed elbow room.
Niamh made coffee – instant, strong, no milk – and placed the mug in front of Rona and sat across from her with her own mug and the two of them looked at each other in the warm, smoke-scented quiet of a flat above a chip shop at midnight.
“Catriona Alloway,” Rona said.
“I heard you the first time.”
“Tell me what you know.”
Niamh drank her coffee. She held the mug in both hands and her face was doing the thing Rona had already learned to recognise – the undecorated honesty recalibrating, deciding how much to give.
Niamh was not a person who withheld information out of strategy.
She withheld it because she understood that certain truths were heavy and she had been carrying this one alone for eighteen months and the carrying had worn a groove in her.
“Eighteen months ago,” Niamh said. “October. A Tuesday. She came into the chip shop downstairs. I was eating chips at the counter. She sat beside me.”
“You recognised her?”
“Not immediately. She was thinner. Her hair was different – shorter, darker. She was wearing clothes that cost money. Good coat, good shoes, the kind of watch a woman buys herself when she has access to funds. She looked like a professional. She did not look like the girl I knew from St. Jude’s.”
“When did you recognise her?”
“She said my name. My actual name – the one I used at St. Jude’s, before. Nobody else in Cairndhu knows that name.” Niamh paused. “She ordered chips and sat beside me and said my name and I looked at her and I saw Cat.”
Rona was building the timeline. Rona was always building the timeline. She had produced a small notebook from her coat pocket – not the blue one, a different one, older, with a worn cover – and she was writing in the dense, tiny script that was her version of thinking.
“She was alone?”
“Alone. No car – she came on foot. She was staying at the bed and breakfast on Marine Terrace, under a different name. She told me the name but asked me not to write it down. I didn’t.”
“How long did she stay?”
“One night. She left the next morning. She took the early bus to Glasgow.”
“Did she contact Ewan?”
Niamh looked at her coffee. “No.”
“Did she explain why not?”
“She said it wasn’t safe. She said the people watching her would follow any contact she made with family.
She said staying away was the only way to keep him out of it.
” Niamh’s voice was steady, but the steadiness was effortful – the composure of a woman who had rehearsed these facts in her own head for eighteen months and was now hearing them aloud for the first time and finding that the hearing was harder than the knowing.
“She said she had been moving for four years. Different cities. Different names. She said she had money – she didn’t say where from.
She said she was doing work that mattered and that the work was dangerous and that the danger was the reason she couldn’t come home. ”
“What kind of work?”
“She didn’t say. I didn’t push. You learn, in the world I come from, not to ask questions that the other person has already decided not to answer.
” Niamh paused. “She sat with me for two hours. We ate chips. We drank tea. She asked about the town – who had left, who had stayed, whether the Hook was still standing, whether the dock cranes were still operational. She asked about Isobel. I told her Isobel was ill. She went very quiet.”
“Did she ask about anyone else?”
“She asked about Lachlan. Whether he was managing. I said yes. She asked about the Ledger. Whether it was secure. I said it was.” Niamh looked at Rona. “And then she asked the question.”
The flat was quiet. The chip shop below was closed and the street outside was empty and the only sound was the central heating ticking in its pipes and the distant murmur of the Clyde at the end of the High Street.
“She asked me one question,” Niamh said. “She looked at me and she said: ‘Is he happy?’”
“And you said?”
“I said: ‘He’s getting there.’”
Rona wrote this down. The pen moved in small, careful strokes and her face was doing the recalculation that Rona’s face did when she encountered information that did not fit the professional model – the model that said people were systems and systems could be mapped and the mapping mattered more than anything else.
Catriona Alloway did not fit the model. A woman who had been gone for six years, who had returned for one night, who had not contacted her brother, who had asked a single question about his happiness and left before dawn – that woman was not a system.
She was a person, and Rona’s face showed the moment when the distinction became real.
“What are you actually here for?” Niamh said. She asked it plainly, because Niamh asked everything plainly.
Rona put her pen down. “I want to destroy the network that destroyed me.”
“Using us.”
“Alongside you. If you’ll let me.”
Niamh studied her. The studying lasted perhaps ten seconds – a long time to be assessed by a woman who had spent her adult life reading people in bars and back rooms and the cold corridors of a casino.
Rona did not fidget. She did not fill the silence.
She sat with her pen down and her notebook open and she let Niamh look.
“You’re good at this,” Niamh said. “The patience. The questions. The way you don’t push.”
“I was an auditor. Auditors listen.”
“No. Auditors look for numbers. You listen for people. That’s different.”
Rona said nothing. The observation had landed.
I could hear it in the way Rona described the moment to me the next morning – the slight change in her voice, the pausing before the next sentence, as though she was still processing a compliment that she had not expected and did not know what to do with.
Niamh looked at her. The flat was warm and the coffee was cooling and the books on the shelves stood in their silent rows and outside the window the High Street was dark and cold and empty.
“Ewan doesn’t know she was here,” Niamh said.
A pause.
“I’ve been trying to decide whether to tell him for eighteen months.” She looked at Rona. Her face was stripped of everything except the weight of the decision. “You can help me decide.”
Rona looked at her. The notebook was open on the table. The pen was beside it. The coffee was cold.
“Yes,” Rona said. “I can.”
Rona told me this in the kitchen the next morning.
She told it with the same precision she told everything – clean, chronological, the facts in order.
But her voice was different. Quieter. The voice of a woman who had been moved by a piece of information about a person she had never met, and the being-moved was new to her, and she was still learning how to hold it.
I stood at the counter and I listened and I thought about a woman who had come home for one night and asked a single question and left before anyone could answer it properly.
“Niamh’s been carrying this alone,” Rona said.
She put her mug down. “Eighteen months. She didn’t tell Ewan because Cat asked her not to.
She didn’t tell Lachlan because telling Lachlan would have activated an operational response and Niamh understood that Cat was not an operational matter – she was a woman asking about her brother. There’s a difference.”
“There is,” I said.
“Niamh understood the difference. That’s why she kept it.” Rona paused. “And that’s why she told me. Because I asked, and because I asked correctly, and because she’s been waiting for someone to ask.”
I looked at Rona. The morning light was on her face and her eyes were clear and focused and I thought: This is the moment where the forensic accountant became one of us.
Not because she chose to. Because a woman’s question about her brother’s happiness broke through the professional casing and found the person underneath.
Is he happy?