Ruin Me Right

Episode 2 — THE RULES

Episode 2 — THE RULES

The job was simple in the way that things are simple when someone's leaving out the part that makes them complicated.

My father had stolen a ledger from Callum Drake. Not money, an actual physical book — handwritten, names and arrangements, every person Callum did business with across four boroughs. The kind of document that could burn everything down if it got to the wrong people. My father had taken it as insurance, a guarantee that Callum wouldn't come after him for the money he owed.

Callum had come after him anyway.

My father had disappeared.

The ledger had disappeared with him.

And now I was sitting in an office in Shoreditch at half past midnight being told that the reason I was useful was because Viktor Voss had spent thirty years building relationships with people who would talk to his daughter when they wouldn't talk to anyone else. People who knew the name. People who'd open a door for me that would stay shut for whoever Callum sent instead.

"So the skill," I said slowly, "is being my father's daughter."

"Yes."

I'd spent most of my adult life trying to be anything else, but sure. Fine. Good to know it was finally coming in handy.

Callum had moved to the window while he explained. He did that thing some people do where they talk to you without fully facing you, like the information is easier to deliver if they're looking at something else while they do it. I watched his reflection in the glass more than I watched him directly and I don't know why I'm mentioning that except that I noticed it and it seemed like the kind of thing worth remembering.

"Four names," he said. "People your father trusted. You'll start there."

"And if none of them have it."

"Then we keep going."

"And if it's actually gone, if he—"

"It's not gone." He said it like the conversation on that point was done. "Your father isn't stupid. He knows that ledger is the only reason I haven't found him yet."

That sat in the room for a second.

I thought about the note. I'm sorry Mara. Thought about my dad sitting somewhere writing that, knowing, apparently, that he was going to be fine, that he had his insurance policy all sorted, that his daughter could just — figure it out. I had a lot of feelings about that which I was going to have at a later time somewhere private.

"Two weeks," Callum said. "After that it becomes a different problem."

"What kind of different problem."

He didn't answer that. So that was great.

"Okay," I said. "Fine. Two weeks. I'll find it."

"There's a condition."

I looked up.

He turned from the window. "You don't go to any of these meetings alone. I'm there, or someone I trust is there. Every time."

"You literally just said these people will talk to me because I'm—"

"They'll talk to you. I'll be in the background."

"That's not how it works with these people. If I show up with someone they don't know they'll—"

"You'll figure out how to explain me." He said it like it was obvious, like I'd just told him the sky was an inconvenient colour. "Old friend. Someone you owe a favour. Whatever fits."

I stared at him. "This isn't about the ledger."

He waited.

"You don't trust me not to find it and disappear the way he did."

He still didn't say anything, which was its own kind of answer, the kind that's technically not admitting anything while also not denying it.

The stupid thing was I couldn't even argue. I'd have done the same thing in his position. If someone's father had just robbed me I wouldn't be handing the daughter free rein either. It was completely logical. It was also going to make the next two weeks significantly more complicated and I hadn't slept properly in six days and my heel hurt and I was so tired that the edges of the room had gone slightly soft.

"Fine," I said. "But I need a story. Something that holds up."

"Use the truth," he said. "Near enough to it."

"Which is."

"That you owe me something and you're paying it back." He looked at me steadily. "The people on that list will find that very easy to believe."

He said it without being cruel about it. I almost wished he'd been cruel about it. Cruelty you can do something with, you can get angry, you can use it. When someone's just honest you have to sit there and absorb it and agree, which is worse.

I owed him something and I was paying it back. Two million pounds of paying it back.

"When do we start," I said.

"Tomorrow. I'll send an address." He moved back to his desk, which was clearly him ending the meeting, so I stood up. My heel made its feelings known immediately. I pretended I couldn't feel it. "Get some sleep. You look like you haven't."

"I'm fine."

"I didn't say you weren't," he said, which was such a strange response that I was still thinking about it when I got to the door.

"The first name," he said, when I had my hand on the frame. "Danny Lau. He knew your father well. He'll be glad to see you. He thought you'd gone straight and he was pleased about it."

I stopped.

I hadn't seen Danny Lau since I was nineteen. He used to let me sit in the back of his restaurant doing homework when my dad had meetings he didn't want me around for. He'd taught me to play poker and called me little Voss and always made sure I'd eaten before I went home.

I didn't turn around because I didn't know what my face was doing.

"Goodnight," I said.

The tube home was empty enough that I got a seat, which felt like the minimum the universe owed me. I took my shoe off. The blister had fully arrived. I sat there with my bag in my lap looking like exactly what I was, a person who had just done something that probably needed more thinking through than it had received, heading home on the last Central line service, one shoe on.

A teenager across the carriage was watching a video with the sound on and not using headphones. Normally that would bother me. Tonight I found it sort of comforting, the total ordinariness of it, someone just sitting on the tube being annoying with no idea that the person across from them had just agreed to spend two weeks hunting a stolen ledger through the criminal contacts of her vanished father in exchange for clearing a two million pound debt.

Normal Tuesday, as far as he was concerned.

I thought about Danny Lau and the back of his restaurant and homework and the fact that somewhere in the years between then and now, Callum Drake had learned enough about my father's world to know things about my childhood that I hadn't told him.

I thought about you don't go anywhere alone and what that was actually going to look like.

I thought about my reflection in his office window. The version of me that had been watching him while he wasn't looking at me directly.

The train went underground. The windows went black.

I looked at myself in the dark glass and I looked fine, which was the one skill I'd had my whole life that had never let me down yet.

I put my shoe back on before I got off at my stop. It hurt. I did it anyway.

End of Episode 2

Next — Danny Lau's restaurant. Callum in a room where nobody knows who he is. And the moment Mara catches him watching her when he thinks she won't notice.