Page 17 of Dirty Rotten Love

Frasier opens his mouth.

The boots start.

It is remarkable how quickly a room full of people can transform when they hear a specific sound. One second Green Crew are a barely contained explosion of burning questions and significant eyebrow activity, and the next they are eight men sitting up straight with expressions of total professional neutrality, papers shuffled, eyes forward, the picture of a shift that has absolutely nothing on its mind except the safe and efficient operation of a North Sea oil platform.

I straighten up with everyone else. My cereal bar wrapper makes a noise in my pocket. I go very still.

MacLeod comes through the door.

He looks exactly like MacLeod always looks. Same dark hair. Same jaw. Same presence that fills every available inch of whatever room he walks into. He has his clipboard. His expression is its standard baseline of a man who has high expectations of the world and has largely accepted that they will not be met.

And he is whistling.

It is a low, quiet, almost-under-his-breath kind of whistling. The sort of thing you might not even notice if you weren’t already listening for it. If you didn’t know that in six days and some number of hours, MacLeod has never once made any sound that was not a word or a silence or that particular noise of concentrated professional disappointment.

He is whistling.

I watch, in my peripheral vision, as the information travels around the table. It moves like a current, person to person, the microscopic widening of eyes, the almost imperceptible straightening of spines, the tiniest intake of breath from Frasier that he will absolutely deny later. Dazza’s foot makes brief contact with mine under the table. I do not look at him. I am looking straight ahead, at MacLeod, with an expression that I am working very hard to keep completely neutral and that I am fairly certain is failing in ways I cannot fully control.

I did that. That whistling is… I mean, objectively, I don’t know that for certain. It could be completely unrelated, MacLeod is a human being with an interior life that has nothing to do with me, obviously, but.

The whistling.

MacLeod sets his clipboard down on the table and looks at us. His gaze travels the room in that way it always does, steady and thorough, taking attendance and inventory at the same time. It reaches me. I look back at him with the focused calm of a man who is completely fine. MacLeod holds my gaze for half a second, exactly as long as he holds everyone else’s, and moves on.

My heart is doing something I am choosing not to examine.

“Right,” says MacLeod. “Let’s go through it.”

He runs the briefing exactly as he always does. Precise, efficient, no words wasted. The overnight readings. The maintenance schedule. A valve on level two that needs monitoring. He has notes on Grigor’s documentation from two days ago, delivered in that quiet voice that makes everyone want to disappear, though notably the quiet today has a fractionally different quality to it. Still professional. Still focused. Still entirely MacLeod. But somewhere in the baseline of it there is something that is almost, almost not grim.

Green Crew are exquisitely, painfully attuned to MacLeod’s moods in the way that people become attuned to things when their quality of life depends on reading them correctly. And so while objectively nothing is different, while anyone walking in off the street would see a perfectly standard briefing conducted by a perfectly standard supervisor, Green Crew are sitting here experiencing something closer to witnessing a solar eclipse. Technically the same sun. Technically the same moon.

But not the same sky.

Dazza’s foot presses against mine again, slightly more insistently this time. I press back briefly to acknowledge it without looking at him, because looking at him right now would end me.

MacLeod works through the schedule. He assigns the shift tasks with his usual decisive efficiency. When he gets to my name, I sit up a fraction straighter, which is automatic and involuntary, and I’m not examining it.

“Gallacher. Level three inspection with Whelan.”

“Aye, boss,” I say.

My voice comes out completely normal. I am extremely proud of this.

MacLeod moves on without missing a beat. Whelan glances at me sideways. I look at the table.

The briefing wraps up with the same words MacLeod always uses, clear and clipped, and then he picks up his clipboard and he is done, and Green Crew have approximately two seconds before he leaves.

He gets to the door.

And then, just before he steps through it, quiet enough that you would miss it if you weren’t listening, the whistling starts again.

The door closes behind him.

Nobody speaks for a full five seconds.

Then Dazza says, very quietly, “What did you do to him.”