Page 45 of Iron Debt
ALASTAIR
Fergus was sweating before he sat down. I’d never seen the boy sweat indoors. His hands were in his pockets and his jaw was locked and the tendons in his neck stood out the way they did when he was three rounds into a fight and running out of air, except this wasn’t a fight and the room was cool and the tea I’d placed on the table was still steaming.
“Sit down,” I said.
He looked at the tea like it might be a trap.
The back room of the Hook was small – a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet that hadn’t been opened since before I’d taken the place over. The single window faced the dock wall, which meant the room was permanently in shadow. The strip light hummed. The walls were the same unpainted breeze blocks as the basement below, but up here the air was different – cleaner, colder, carrying the salt-and-diesel smell of the harbour rather than the iron-and-sweat smell of the ring.
I didn’t speak. I poured myself a cup from the pot. Milk. No sugar. I sat across from Fergus and I drank it and I waited.
He sat. The chair scraped on the concrete floor. He put his hands on the table – first flat, then fisted, then flat again – and his eyes went to the door and back to me and to the door and back to me, the circuit of a man who was running the mathematics of exit against the mathematics of staying and finding that neither number worked.
Four minutes.
That was how long it took. Four minutes of silence and the strip light humming and the tea cooling and the dock sounds filtering through the window – the clank of chains, the shudder of a container being stacked, the gull screaming something territorial at the sky. Four minutes during which I said nothing and did nothing and let the silence do what silence always did, which was fill the room with the weight of every unsaid thing until the unsaid things became too heavy to hold.
He broke at four minutes and twelve seconds. I knew because I’d been counting.
“His lot have Ma’s address.”
I didn’t react. I kept my hands around the cup and my eyes on his face and I let the sentence sit.
“The Gravedigger’s men. McInnis. They’ve had it since October. A man came to the house – our house, the one on Kirk Street – and sat with her in the kitchen and had a cup of tea and told her he was from the council, housing reassessment, and she showed him the back door that doesn’t lock and the damp in the bathroom ceiling and he wrote it all down in a wee notebook and he left, and the next day Kev got a call.”
Kev was Fergus’s youngest brother. Sixteen. Still atschool. He had no Syndicate connections – I’d made sure of that, the same way I’d made sure none of Fergus’s lot were pushed further than they could handle. Kev was a smart boy with a good head for numbers who should have been doing Higher Maths, not sitting in a kitchen while someone from the Gravedigger’s network assessed the security vulnerabilities of his mother’s council flat.
“What kind of call?” I asked.
“A debt arrangement. Kev owed money to someone – I don’t know how, I don’t know when. Maybe a bet, maybe a loan, maybe they made the whole thing up. But the arrangement was real. They showed him the paperwork. His signature – or something that looked enough like his signature. Two thousand. And the terms were –” He stopped. He rubbed his face with both hands. When his hands came down, his eyes were red. “The terms were information. About me. About the Hook. About the schedule.”
I put the tea down. I laced my fingers together on the table.
“How long has this been running?”
“Since October. Five months.”
Five months. Fergus had been feeding information to the Gravedigger’s people for five months, and I hadn’t caught it because the information he’d been feeding was small – shift changes, delivery times, which nights the basement ran and which nights it didn’t. Nothing critical. Nothing that would have moved the needle on any of the operations I tracked. Just the background noise of a dock operation, the kind of detail that on its own meant nothing and in aggregate built a picture.
McInnis was patient. I’d give him that.
“What have you given them?”
He listed it. Dock schedules. The Hook’s opening and closing times. Names of the Shadow Union boys – not the inner ring, just the faces, the ones who came through the door on fight nights. My running route. The time I left the Hook each morning. The license plate of Ewan’s car.
Not the Wager. Not the plan. Not Morven.
“They didn’t ask about her?”
He flinched. “They asked. I said I didn’t know anything.”
“Do you?”
“No.You lot keep that tight. I know she’s in the house. I know she’s something to Lachlan. That’s all.”
That was all. And that was why I’d structured it that way – because operational security wasn’t about trusting people, it was about limiting the cost of their failure. Fergus was a good lad. Fergus had been put in an impossible position by a man who understood that the cheapest way into any organisation was through the people it cared about, and the people it cared about were not the ones at the top.
I stood up. I went to the filing cabinet. The top drawer was stiff – rust and age and the damp air of the docks – and the sound of it opening was loud in the small room. Inside: the Ledger forms. The same gold-ink carbon copies that Lachlan used in the vault, but the version I kept here was simpler – single-page, plain language, the terms written in English rather than the legal architecture that Lachlan preferred. My forms. For my people.
