15. The Gilded Table in Daylight
The Gilded Table in Daylight
LACHLAN
She requests a whiteboard. They bring her a whiteboard. She is pleased with this.
The casino in daylight is a different building.
The chandelier is off. The bar lights are off.
The gaming floor is empty – tables covered, chairs stacked, the felt surfaces dusted and brushed.
The windows are uncovered, which they never are at night, and the daylight that comes through them is harsh and grey and shows every mark on the walls, every scuff on the floor, every place where the building’s age contradicts its evening performance.
The office level is above the gaming floor.
Three rooms: my office, the accounts room, and what Niamh calls the war room – a conference space with a long table and a projector and, as of this morning, a whiteboard that Rona had requested at seven AM and received by eight because Cillian had one in storage and Cillian, when given a task with operational logic, completed it without discussion.
Rona stood before the whiteboard with a marker in her hand and five years of financial records stacked on the table behind her and the look of a woman who had been waiting for this moment since she arrived.
I had given her the access that morning.
The casino’s legitimate financial records – five years, audited, filed with HMRC, clean in every respect that a cursory review would reveal.
I gave them to her because she had earned the access and because the leak was in the money trail and Rona was the best person I had ever met at reading money trails.
“The leak will be in the details,” she said. “Payroll anomalies. Maintenance expenditure that doesn’t match actual work performed. Revenue discrepancies between the gaming floor count and the deposited total.”
“How long?”
She looked at the stack of records. She looked at the whiteboard. She looked at Cillian, who was standing at the far end of the table with his own set of files and the quiet, attentive posture of a man who recognised a peer.
“Three days,” she said.
It took her seven hours.
I mention this because the timeframe was itself a piece of information.
Rona had overestimated because she had not yet understood the quality of the data.
The casino’s records were clean – I had made certain of that.
HMRC-compliant, professionally audited, filed correctly.
The cleanliness was the point. If your legitimate records are immaculate, the illegitimate elements stand out like a bloodstain on white linen.
Rona discovered this at the two-hour mark, when she stopped estimating and started finding.
Cillian assisted. They worked for seven hours.
I watched them from my office – the door open, the war room visible from my desk – and what I observed was two people who had never worked together falling into a rhythm so efficient it looked rehearsed.
They did not discuss their methods. They did not need to.
By the third hour they were passing documents in silence, and the silence was the sound of two people who trusted each other’s accuracy completely.
“Here,” Rona said. Her marker stopped. She circled a number on the whiteboard – a figure in the casino’s maintenance budget, quarterly, recurring.
“This expenditure has appeared in every Q3 filing for the last four years. Fifteen hundred pounds. Coded to ‘premises maintenance, electrical.’ There is no corresponding contractor invoice in any of the four years.”
Cillian was already pulling the contractor files.
“The casino uses three licensed electricians,” he said. “Bennett’s, Clyde Valley Electrical, and MacGregor & Sons. None of them have invoiced for a Q3 job in the last four years.”
“The expenditure is real – it’s been processed through the bank. The payments went somewhere. They just didn’t go to an electrician.” Rona wrote on the whiteboard: Ghost expenditure. Recipient unknown. Four years. ￡6,000 total.
She stepped back. She looked at it.
“Not enough to trigger an audit flag,” she said. “Small. Consistent. Hidden in a legitimate category. This is not a leak. This is a drip.”
The second anomaly was larger.
Cillian found it – a staff payroll entry that appeared in the casino’s records as a part-time host. The name was registered, the tax code was active, the salary was modest – nine hundred pounds per month. The entry had been active for three years.
“The name,” Cillian said. He placed the payroll printout on the table. His face had gone blank. “I do not recognise this employee.”
“You know every employee,” I said. I had come into the war room. The whiteboard was covered in Rona’s handwriting and the table was covered in files and the daylight through the uncovered windows was making the room feel exposed in a way that night never did.
“I do,” Cillian said. “This person does not work here.”
Rona took the printout. She read the name. She cross-referenced it against the casino’s HR system, the staff roster, the shift records. The name appeared in payroll. It did not appear anywhere else.
“A ghost account,” she said. “Nine hundred a month for three years. Thirty-two thousand, four hundred pounds. Paid into a bank account that I can trace if you give me the sort code.”
I gave her the sort code. She traced it in twenty minutes. The account was registered to a name I recognised. Rona wrote it on the whiteboard in red.
Boyd Sillars. Senior casino host. Employee number 0047.
Active for eight years. Shift records complete.
Performance reviews excellent. A man who served drinks and managed VIP tables and smiled at guests and had been siphoning nine hundred pounds a month through a ghost payroll entry for three years.
“The ghost account and the maintenance expenditure both connect to the same bank,” Rona said. “Different accounts, same branch, same sort code prefix. Whoever set this up used the same financial infrastructure for both.”
“It’s not sophisticated,” Cillian said. His voice carried the flat disapproval of a man who managed the Syndicate’s books with forensic precision and found incompetent financial crime personally offensive.
“It doesn’t need to be,” Rona said. “It needs to be invisible. And it was – until you looked.”
The senior host’s name was Boyd Sillars.
I knew him. He had worked the casino floor for eight years.
He was competent, reliable, well-liked by the regulars.
He was also, I now understood, the person who had been feeding Mackie operational intelligence in exchange for a financial arrangement that was considerably less generous than Mackie could have offered.
Which meant Mackie was not buying loyalty.
He was buying access at the cheapest available price.
The calculation was telling – a man who paid less than he needed to was a man who understood that the currency was not money but leverage.
Boyd owed a debt. The ghost account was the interest on that debt.
The arrangement was not a salary – it was a leash.
I thought about Boyd Sillars at the Gilded Table on Friday nights.
The professional smile. The attentive posture.
The way he managed the VIP section with the competence that had made me trust him for eight years.
He had been reporting to Mackie while serving drinks in my casino, and the dual performance had been seamless – which meant either Boyd was a gifted actor, or the reporting had become so routine that it no longer registered as betrayal.
Neither option was reassuring.
“One more thing,” Rona said. She was looking at her phone. She had pulled up the guest list from the Merchant Villas dinner – the list Lachlan had provided from memory, supplemented by Ewan’s network intelligence.
“Boyd Sillars was on the guest list,” she said. “He was at the Mackie dinner. Table four. Seated between the harbour board member and the solicitor.”
The war room was quiet. The daylight was fading. The whiteboard was covered in the evidence of a leak that had been running for three years beneath the surface of the casino’s accounts, and the name of the man responsible was written in red.
“He’s the leak,” Cillian said.
“He’s the leak,” I confirmed.
Rona capped her marker. She placed it on the table.
She looked at the whiteboard – the full landscape of it, the columns and circles and cross-references, the blue and red and green of seven hours’ work mapped onto a surface that had been blank that morning.
Her face carried two expressions simultaneously: the satisfaction of a woman who had found what she was looking for, and the wary recognition that finding it meant the next phase would require a different kind of precision.
Cillian stood beside her. His hands were clasped behind his back.
His posture was formal, attentive, the posture of a man who had served the Syndicate’s administrative needs for decades and understood that the moment between discovery and action was the most dangerous moment – the moment when decisions were made that could not be unmade.
“What do you want to do with him?” she said.
I looked at the whiteboard. I looked at the name in red. I thought about Boyd Sillars serving drinks at the Gilded Table on Friday nights, smiling at guests, managing the VIP section, and reporting everything he saw to a man who was building a fence around the Syndicate’s world.
“Bring him in,” I said.
That evening, a delivery arrived at the manor.
Cillian brought it to my study. A wooden case – varnished, brass-latched, the kind of presentation box used for wine that costs more than a week’s wages.
The courier had been a man in a dark jacket who had not given a company name.
He had handed the box to Cillian at the front door, nodded once, and driven away in a car Cillian did not recognise.
I opened the box. A single bottle. Chateau Latour 2005. First growth. The same vintage Mackie had served at the dinner – the same wine Lachlan had described in his briefing, the wine that had been poured into crystal glasses at a table where the partnership proposal was made and refused.
A card was tucked inside the lid. Handwritten. The handwriting was neat, forward-sloping, the penmanship of a man who had been taught to write properly and maintained the skill.
Congratulations on the new addition to your team. I hear she’s excellent.
I read the card twice. The second reading was slower than the first. The words did not change between readings, but the temperature of the room did – the study, which had been warm from the fire, was suddenly a room that contained a card from a man who knew about Rona.
Who knew she was here. Who knew she was working for us.
Mackie knew. Mackie knew because Boyd had told him, or because the harbour master had told him, or because one of the dozen tendrils of his intelligence network had carried the information from Cairndhu to wherever Mackie processed his data and made his plans.
The method of discovery was immaterial. The card was the message: I see inside your house.
I see who you bring. I see the woman you’ve hired to find my footprints, and I am not alarmed by her, and the not being alarmed is the thing you should find alarming.
I placed the bottle on my desk. I did not open it. I placed the card beside it. The bottle sat on the oak surface – dark glass, gold label, the extravagant gift of a man who understood that generosity and threat were the same gesture performed at different volumes.
The bottle would stay on my desk. Unopened. A reminder.