Chapter 9: The Man in the Car

Ireland was grey and green and smelled of peat, and Rowan Marsh met them at the door of her cottage in County Galway as if she had been expecting them for forty years. Because she had. She was sixty-seven, small, with the particular quality of a person who had made peace with caution and then, very recently, decided she was done with it. She shook Bea's hand and then Yuna's and looked at all seven of them with the specific assessment of someone who had spent four decades being careful about who to trust. 'You have the photographs,' Bea said. 'In the safe deposit box. I'll take you in the morning.' She stepped back from the door. 'Come in. There's more that isn't in the photographs.' The cottage's sitting room held the organized life of a careful historian: bookshelves, files, a wall map of the county estate system in the 1970s and '80s. And on the table, a folder she had clearly prepared for this visit. 'The man in the car,' she said, opening the folder. 'The one who drove me to the ferry. I knew his face and I knew I'd seen him before. It took me six months after I got here to remember where.' She turned a photograph toward them. 'He was at the 1979 transaction. Not as a principal — as a facilitator. He worked for the firm that structured the deal.' Yuna looked at the photograph. At a face she didn't recognize. Then at the name Rowan had written under it. 'He's still alive,' Rowan said. 'I've been watching. He's eighty-three, retired, lives in Edinburgh. He was the operational link between the transaction parties. When the decision was made to frighten me out of the estate, he was the one they called.' The room was very quiet. 'Westfield,' Bea said, 'you mentioned an integrity prosecutor in Edinburgh.' 'I did,' Westfield said. He was already reaching for his phone.