Chapter 13: The Facilitator

The facilitator's name was Archibald Muir and he was, as Rowan had said, eighty-three years old and living in Edinburgh in a flat that had the organized quality of a man who had spent his life managing things that needed to be managed and had not stopped managing. Reid brought Yuna and Bea. The conversation was not a formal interview — not yet. It was the kind of conversation that happened before formal interviews, when the purpose was to establish whether formal process was necessary or whether the right approach was a different kind of accounting. Muir opened the door and looked at them with no surprise. 'I expected something like this,' he said. 'Eventually. Come in.' He made tea. This was not an evasion — Yuna had the sense it was the hospitality of a man who wanted to do this conversation correctly, which required some kind of ordinary human scaffolding. 'You know why we're here,' Reid said. 'The MacPhee woman,' Muir said. 'I've wondered for forty years if she'd kept what she found.' He looked at the folder on Reid's knee. 'She did.' 'She did.' Muir was quiet for a moment. 'I was thirty-seven years old,' he said. 'I was three years into a career I'd worked my whole life to build. The men who asked me to— they were the men who could end that career with a phone call.' He turned his cup. 'I drove her to the ferry. I gave her money for the crossing. I told her to go and stay gone. I didn't harm her.' 'But you frightened her,' Yuna said. 'Yes.' No argument. 'I frightened her. I've lived with that.' He met her eyes. 'For forty years I've lived with that. And with knowing that the fraud was never addressed and the charities never recovered their funds.' 'Will you cooperate with the formal proceedings?' Reid asked. 'Yes,' Muir said, without hesitation. 'I've been waiting for someone to ask.' Yuna thought about Lord Hirst and Rowan Marsh and Archibald Muir, all three carrying forty-year-old weights, all three waiting for someone to come and help them set them down.