Page 58 of Iron Debt
She was looking at me like she was still choosing.
I looked back at her. The casino was quiet. The dock lights came through the windows and made the green felt gold and made the locket gold and made her face gold, and I stood in the middle of a room full of subdued men and broken plans and the settling weight of a fight that was won, and I thought:this is what the hands are for. This is what they were always for.
Not for the holding. For the after. For the standing-there-looking-at-her when the holding is done and the room is quiet and the woman at the table is standing because you made sure she could stand, and the standing is the proof, and the proof is enough.
CHAPTER 31
What Duncan Gets
MORVEN
He 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 gameis 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’tclimb 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 wordout. “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 wordfree.”
“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 drippingradiator 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.”
