Chapter 61

The Aberdeen records take eleven days, three separate requests, and a data protection argument that Veira wins by knowing more about subject access provisions than the facility's compliance officer.

What comes back is a visitor log.

It is photocopied badly and the ink has gone brown at the edges and it lists, in a receptionist's handwriting, every person who signed into Braehead Lodge between January 1994 and December 1997.

Eilidh Ashcroft appears fourteen times.

Not four. Fourteen, across three years, the last on the second of September 1997, twelve days before Morna Croft died and twelve days before Veira was born.

She reads the log at the kitchen table with Roman opposite and Variable on the third chair and the February light going long across the flat, and she does not cry, and she notes that she does not cry, and she wonders briefly whether that is composure or whether the thing Croft described has already started taking pieces of her she can't inventory.

"Fourteen visits," Roman says.

"Fourteen visits over three years to a woman in permanent care who could not, by 1995, hold a four-minute conversation." Veira runs her finger down the column. "She wasn't visiting for information. There was nothing to get. Morna couldn't tell her anything."

"Then why."

She looks at the dates. Spread evenly. Never more than four months apart. The kind of pattern you get from a person who has made a commitment and is keeping it.

"Because someone should have," she says.

Roman does not say anything for a moment.

"That is a better answer than any I had," he says.

"It's the only one that fits the data." She sits back. "My mother found out about Morna somehow I don't know how yet, and it might be the last thing I never learn. She went and sat with a dying woman who couldn't recognise her, every three or four months, for three years, for no strategic reason whatsoever. And then eight weeks after her fourteenth visit she gave birth to me, and the Vein moved, and she must have understood almost immediately what had happened."

"And said nothing for nineteen years."

"And said one sentence, at the very end." Veira closes the log. "Which everybody in my life has since interpreted as a warning about the Folklore, including me, for eight years."

Roman is watching her with the expression she has learned to read as the one that precedes something he is not certain he should say.

"Say it," she tells him.

"Croft doesn't know."

She goes still.

"He was thirty-two years old and petitioning an Assembly that would not see him," Roman says. "He believes he has believed for thirty years, and it is the engine of every position he holds that his sister died alone and unwitnessed, abandoned by an entire civilisation that knew where she was." He nods at the log. "That is not true. It has not been true since 1994. And the only person who could have told him has been dead for eight years."

Veira looks at fourteen entries in a receptionist's handwriting.

She understands, with a clarity that arrives all at once and unpleasantly, exactly what she is holding. Not evidence. Not leverage. Something considerably more dangerous than either, because it is the one thing capable of dismantling a man's thirty-year architecture, and she will be in a room with him on the seventeenth of March, and she will need him to lose.

"If I show him this before the Assembly," she says slowly, "it changes what he's fighting for."

"It might."

"It might also break him in a way that has nothing to do with the vote, four weeks before the most important professional moment of his life, using his dead sister, for tactical advantage." She sets both hands flat on the table. "Which would make me exactly the person he says I am. Someone with enormous power over other people's lives and nobody to stop her using it."

"Yes," Roman says.

"You could have argued the other side."

"I could have. I have spent three hundred years watching people use true information as a weapon and call it honesty." He stands, and picks up his coat, and pauses at the door in the way he does. "I gave you everything at once in Vienna because I believed the truth was owed and the timing was mine to choose. I was wrong about the second part, not the first."

"So what's the rule."

"That the timing belongs to the person it will cost," Roman says. "Which in this case is not you."

The door closes behind him.

Veira sits alone in a flat in Edinburgh with a photocopied visitor log and twenty-seven days until the Assembly, holding the one document that could win it and knowing precisely what winning that way would cost her, and finds that the decision has already made itself and she does not like it at all.