Chapter 60

Callum meets her on the Tuesday, as always, at the cafe on Stockbridge high street with the bad chairs and the good coffee, and she has come to rely on this in a way she has not yet said out loud.

He listens to the whole of it without interrupting: Morna, the vote, Croft, the rite, the two dissenting documents. He turns his cup while she talks, and he does not offer sympathy, and she notices with real gratitude that he has worked out what she needs from him and it is not comfort.

When she finishes he sits with it for a while.

"Nineteen ninety-five," he says. "Your mother went to Aberdeen four times that year."

Veira looks up.

"I was in Cork. I got the movements second-hand through a contact who watched her for me, which is a thing I did for thirty years and am not proud of." He says it without excusing it. "Four trips, all to the same postcode. I assumed it was a friend or a course. She was doing an evening qualification at the time and I never questioned it."

"What postcode."

He tells her.

She does not need to look it up. She has been reading Croft's folder for three days and she knows the address of the care facility where Morna Croft spent the last two years of her life, and it is a nine-minute walk from where Callum has just placed her mother, four separate times, in 1995.

"She knew her," Veira says.

"She may have known her. She may have been visiting someone else in the same building. I'm giving you a coincidence, not a fact."

"You're giving me a coincidence about a woman who taught me that the most respectful thing you can do for a person is give them what they need to make their own choices." Veira is already reaching for her phone. "And who died with a warning she couldn't finish. Don't let them be the first voice."

Callum has gone very still.

"You've always read that as being about the Folklore," he says.

"I've always read it as being about people who'd try to define me. Yes."

"And now?"

She looks at the words in her head the way she looks at a transaction that has been sitting in a spreadsheet for eleven weeks looking innocent.

There are people who will tell you what you are. Don't let them be the first voice.

Not: they will lie to you.

Not: they will come for you.

They will tell you what you are.

"She wasn't warning me about the Folklore," Veira says slowly. "She was warning me about a specific thing that had already happened to somebody else. In a building in Aberdeen. To a woman who was told what she was by a system that had already decided, and never got to say it herself." She sets the phone down. "My mother watched a hybrid conduit die of not being told, and then had a daughter who was one, and she had eight years between Morna's death and her own diagnosis to work out how to warn me, and she got as far as a sentence."

Callum's hands are flat on the table. "I didn't know."

"I know you didn't."

"I would have" He stops. He starts again, differently, and she watches him choose it. "I don't know what I would have done. That's the honest answer. I had already decided to stay away and I had thirty years of practice at deciding it."

"That's the right answer," she says. "The other one would have been a comfort and I'd have known it was one."

She looks out at Stockbridge doing its Tuesday. A woman with a pushchair. The deli man moving crates. The specific ordinariness that has, since October, become the thing she is fighting for rather than the thing she is missing.

"There's something else," Callum says.

She waits.

"If Eilidh visited that facility four times, there'll be a visitor record. Care facilities keep them for decades and the Folklore doesn't own them." He looks at her. "The compact can control its own archive. It can't control an NHS-adjacent private care provider's admin filing in Aberdeen."

Veira sets down her cup.

"There's a record," she says, "of a human woman visiting a hybrid conduit in 1995, held somewhere outside compact jurisdiction, that nobody in the Folklore has ever thought to look for."

"If it exists."

"If it exists, it's the only independent documentary evidence that Morna Croft was a person and not a case file." She is already standing. "Which is the entire argument I need to make in March, and I'd have gone into that room without it."