Chapter 74

"How long have you known I had it," Veira says.

"Since the eleventh of February. Braehead's compliance officer telephoned the Folklore liaison desk in Aberdeen to verify whether a subject access request touching a former resident engaged any restricted interest." Croft has still not moved from where he is standing in the corridor. "The liaison desk has been mine since 2006. I built it. It exists so that nobody could ever again make a request about my sister without me knowing."

"You could have blocked it."

"I could have blocked it in eleven minutes." He looks at her steadily. "I authorised it instead, and then I went home and did not sleep for three days."

Veira leans back against the wall.

She has a photocopied visitor log in a drawer in Edinburgh. She has had it for three weeks. She has taken it out four times and put it back four times, and she has not told a single person except Roman, who advised her that the timing belonged to the person it would cost, and she has been holding to that with a discipline she has been privately proud of and is now, in a corridor in Geneva, entirely ashamed of.

"You've been waiting for me to show it to you," she says.

"I have been waiting for you to use it." Something in his voice thins. "That is not the same thing and I want to be precise. I assumed you would bring it into the chamber. I have spent three weeks preparing for a morning in which you would stand up and produce evidence that my sister was not abandoned, and I would have to hear it for the first time in a room with twelve Elders watching my face."

"That's why you handed me your own folder."

"Partly."

"And the rest?"

"The rest is that I have known for thirty years that Morna died alone, and it is the load-bearing fact of my entire adult life, and if it is not true then I do not know what I have been doing since 1997." He says it without any self-pity, which makes it worse. "So yes. I would rather have found out in a chamber. It would have been faster."

Down the corridor a door opens and three advocates come out carrying boxes and go the other way.

"I'm not going to give it to you here," Veira says.

His jaw tightens. "Ms Ashcroft"

"Not because I'm withholding it. Because you're going to want to read fourteen entries in a receptionist's handwriting somewhere that isn't the corridor outside the chamber where you just lost thirty years of work." She straightens off the wall. "It's in Edinburgh. Come on Saturday and I'll put it in your hands and leave the room."

He does not answer immediately.

"Why leave the room," he says.

"Because I don't want to watch you read it, and you don't want to be watched." She picks up her bag. "You're not my enemy either, Elder Croft. I've spent a month working out how much I resent that and the answer is a great deal."

She is at the end of the corridor when he says, "It was fourteen visits?"

She stops. She does not turn around.

"Fourteen," she says. "Between January 1994 and September 1997. The last one twelve days before she died."

She hears nothing behind her for a long moment.

Then, very quietly: "Thank you."

She keeps walking, because if she turns around now she will have to watch a sixty-year-old man stand alone in an emptying corridor with the first good news of his life, and that is not hers to see.