Part 2
Mara looked toward the place where the stopper had landed.
It was gone.
She had not seen anyone take it. During the seconds after it passed through the candlelight, her eyes had closed and every person at the table had become still. Yet the white cloth near her plate was empty. No faceted glass. No silver base.
Her father followed her gaze.
“What are you looking for?”
“The stopper.”
Isobel’s expression barely altered. “Must we inventory the tableware now?”
“Yes,” Mara said.
She looked toward the doorway leading to the service corridor. The butler, Mr. Kerr, stood there with his hands behind his back. He was sixty or near it, narrow-shouldered, with the expression of a man who had spent his life learning how not to exist inside wealthy rooms.
“Mr. Kerr, please ask the staff not to clear anything.”
He looked at Isobel.
That glance told Mara more than an answer would have.
Adrian turned. “Nothing in this room is to be moved.”
One of his security aides stepped away from the entrance, then stopped when Mara lifted a hand.
“No,” she said. “They are not to touch anything either.”
Her father’s eyes narrowed. “Mara.”
“If this becomes evidence, I don’t want your employees handling it.”
The statement struck him harder than she had intended. She saw it in the brief tightening beside his eyes.
Isobel saw it too.
“How modern,” she murmured. “Distrust distributed equally.”
Mara took her phone from the small silver bag beside her chair. The screen showed no signal. That was not unusual in parts of the manor, but she had checked before dinner. There had been two bars.
“Has the signal blocker been switched on?” she asked.
Malcolm looked toward Julian.
Julian looked toward his mother.
Adrian removed his own phone. No service.
Isobel gave a soft, impatient sigh. “Cairnross has dreadful reception. It is a nineteenth-century house beside a cliff, not a communications hub.”
“The Wi-Fi is down too,” Mara said. “It went down after I asked Julian about the engineering files.”
Julian pushed his chair back an inch. “I didn’t switch anything off.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
“No. You only arranged the sentence so everyone could hear it that way.”
It was the first trace of anger he had shown, and it vanished almost as soon as it appeared. He lowered his voice.
“I told you I would explain.”
“You asked me to wait until after the engagement announcement.”
“I asked for one evening.”
“Two men died eight months ago.”
His eyes closed briefly.
Isobel’s hand settled on the stem of her wineglass. “The accident has been investigated. Compensation has been paid. Every required authority was informed.”
“Were they informed that three inspection reports had been rewritten?”
The lawyer who had spoken before rose. “Lady Strathairn, I recommend that this conversation end immediately.”
“You recommend that because you are paid by her,” Adrian said.
“I recommend it because accusations concerning corporate records, made in a room full of interested parties, can prejudice any legitimate inquiry.”
“Then there should be an inquiry.”
“There was one.”
Mara looked at the lawyer. “Your firm drafted the settlement agreements for the Dunrath families.”
He became very still.
She continued. “You also advised Strathairn Infrastructure during the internal review. Did you disclose that overlap to the independent engineer whose name appears on the report?”
“Mara,” Julian said.
She turned on him. “Did they?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were on the risk committee.”
“I missed three meetings.”
“You signed the minutes.”
His face reddened. “I signed a circulated copy.”
“Without reading it?”
“I read what I was given.”
“And what were you given?”
Isobel set down her glass. “Enough.”
The word carried no volume, but the room responded to it. Malcolm lowered his gaze. The lawyer stopped speaking. Mr. Kerr seemed to withdraw another inch into the doorway.
Mara watched the instinctive obedience move through them. That was what had frightened her when she first read the altered reports. Not the technical details. Not even the signatures. It was the ease with which so many intelligent adults had accepted that certain facts would be handled elsewhere by people above them.
Her father removed his wet coat and handed it to no one. One of the aides stepped forward, but Adrian draped it over an empty chair instead.
“How did you obtain these documents?” he asked.
Mara hesitated.
Isobel noticed.
“That,” Isobel said softly, “is the question you should have begun with.”
The files had arrived ten days earlier on a memory card sealed inside a plain envelope. No return address. No fingerprints that Mara could see, though she had known enough not to touch the card directly after opening it. She had used a clean handkerchief from her desk drawer, an absurd square of linen embroidered with her grandmother’s initials, and placed it in a paper envelope.
The contents were copies, not originals: inspection forms, email chains, photographs of corroded fittings, meeting notes, and a draft risk memorandum that differed from the version approved by the board.
At first Mara had assumed the package was meant to stop the acquisition.
Then she found her own name.
Six months before the accident, she had initialed a due-diligence summary concerning Strathairn’s offshore assets. The paper she remembered had described Dunrath’s structural risks as manageable. The copy on the memory card included an earlier paragraph, deleted before it reached her, warning that the support assemblies had exceeded recommended stress tolerances.
She had still signed the summary.
She had still asked only three questions.
She had still wanted the acquisition to go through.
“An anonymous source,” she said.
Isobel’s gaze shifted to Julian for less than a second.
Mara saw it.
So did Adrian.
He moved toward the table. “Was it you?”
Julian looked tired suddenly. Not the polished fatigue of someone who had stayed late at an office, but the older exhaustion of a child who had spent too many years listening for footsteps in a corridor.
May you like
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
