Ruin Me Right

Episode 3 — DANNY LAU

Episode 3 — DANNY LAU

The pin Callum sent at seven in the morning was Lucky Eight on Cambridge Heath Road, which I'd have known even without the pin because I'd spent enough Tuesday evenings there at sixteen doing homework in the back booth while my dad had meetings in the room behind the kitchen that I wasn't supposed to know about.

No message. Just the pin and a time. Eight PM.

I stared at it for a bit. Put my phone down. Made coffee. Picked my phone up again because I kept doing that, the compulsive checking, like something was going to change in the thirty seconds I'd had it face down.

Nothing had changed.

I got dressed and went to work.

The day was one of those days that happens around you while you're somewhere else. I translated seventeen pages of a shipping contract between a company in Rotterdam and one in Lagos, answered four emails, ate a sandwich at my desk that I don't remember tasting, and spent a significant portion of the afternoon doing calculations in my head that had nothing to do with marine insurance.

Twelve people on a list I hadn't seen yet. Two weeks. A man called Cal who was going to stand in the back of Danny Lau's restaurant tonight being a friend or business or someone I owed a favour and I hadn't decided which yet and it was now six forty-five and I was on the tube and I still hadn't decided.

I went with old friend on the escalator at Bethnal Green. It had the advantage of being vague and the disadvantage of requiring Callum Drake to look like someone's old friend, which I wasn't convinced he was capable of.

He was outside when I got there, on the pavement in his coat looking at his phone, and I had about four seconds before he noticed me — long enough to see that he looked tired in a way that wasn't exactly visible, just present, something around the edges that the office version of him didn't have.

Then he saw me and it was gone.

"You came," he said.

"You keep saying that like you're surprised."

He put his phone away. "Danny Lau doesn't know who I am. Keep it that way."

"What do I call you."

"Cal."

I waited for more. More didn't come.

"Just — Cal. That's the whole thing."

"It's what people call me."

I thought about what kind of people called Callum Drake Cal and decided I didn't want the specifics.

"Danny's going to ask questions. He won't stop until he gets an answer that makes sense."

"Tell him the truth. Near enough to it. You got into something, I'm helping you get out."

"And what do you get."

"Leave that part vague."

"Danny Lau has been in this world for thirty years," I said. "Vague doesn't work on him."

"Then tell him I get the satisfaction of a debt repaid and leave it at that."

I didn't have a better option, so that was what we went with.

Danny was behind the bar. He always was. Same spot, same way of watching a room that looked like he wasn't watching it, same gold chain he'd worn my whole life. When he saw me the smile arrived in his eyes before his mouth and I had to look somewhere else for a second and then look back.

"Little Voss," he said.

He came around the bar and hugged me and I wasn't ready for it. He hugged me and I kept my face together and stepped back before I couldn't.

"You look like your mother," he said.

People said that sometimes. I never knew what to do with it so I said "Danny, you haven't aged at all" which was almost true.

"I've aged a hundred years," he said. He was already clocking Callum, the kind of look that filed and categorised and came to conclusions. "Who's this."

"Cal. We've got some business together."

"What kind."

"The kind I'm sorting. Dad left some things unresolved and I need to find something he had. Thought you might know where it was."

His face did a thing. Tiny, quick, the kind of thing you'd miss if you hadn't known him since you were twelve and learned to read the small adjustments he made when information landed somewhere it mattered.

He knew something.

"Sit down," he said. "You'll eat. You're too thin."

He said something to the kitchen in Cantonese and steered us toward the back booth. The one I'd done homework in. Same slightly sticky laminate table, same paper lantern overhead that had gone slightly brown at the bottom from being there so long.

Callum and I sat down across from each other and it looked, from any angle, like a date.

"Don't," I said quietly.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to look at the menu," he said, picking up the menu, which he then studied with an expression that wasn't technically a smirk but was doing a lot of the same work.

I knew the menu by heart. Wontons, roast meats, clay pot tofu my dad used to order every time without fail. Five years of being a person who didn't come to places like this. Paid her rent, translated her insurance documents, called herself sorted. And here I was in the back booth at eight on a Wednesday with a criminal and a menu I'd known since I was a teenager, and the five years felt suddenly like something I'd told myself rather than something that had actually happened.

Danny came back with tea and sat down across from us like he'd always planned to join us and nobody thought to ask him.

"Your father. Last time I heard from him he said he was going to fix it."

"He says that a lot," I said.

"He meant it."

"Meaning it and doing it are different things."

Danny turned his tea glass in both hands. Glanced at Callum. "You're the thing that needs fixing."

"Something like that," Callum said.

"You're not going to tell me more."

"Not tonight."

Nod. Danny had spent thirty years knowing which questions had ceilings and which ones didn't — genuinely the reason he was still here and still operating — and he turned back to me with the look of someone who'd assessed the situation and filed it.

"He left something with me," Danny said. "Viktor. Two months back. Said if you came asking I should give it to you." He paused. "Said you'd come. Said you were the only one he'd trust with it."

The only one he'd trust.

I thought about the note. I'm sorry Mara. Six weeks of nothing. The disconnected phone. This was what trust looked like from my father — not a warning, not a phone call, just an envelope in Bethnal Green on the assumption that his daughter would eventually show up to collect it.

Danny went to the back. Came out with a padded brown envelope, sealed, my name in my dad's handwriting on the front.

He put it on the table between us.

Callum didn't reach for it. Didn't say anything. Just let me sit there looking at my own name for however long I needed, which was longer than I'd like to admit.

I picked it up. Light. Something small and hard inside.

"He said you'd know what to do with it," Danny said.

I nodded like that was true.

Outside after, Callum held out his hand.

"No," I said.

"I'm not taking it."

"Then why is your hand out."

"I want to know what's in it."

"Tomorrow," I said. "I'll open it at home and tell you in the morning."

He dropped his hand. Looked at me with the expression I still hadn't found a name for — not quite calculation, not quite something else, living in the gap between the two.

"You're not going to run," he said.

"I'm going home. I'm going to eat something, sleep, and open this in the morning." I met his eyes. "And you're not following me home."

A pause.

"Okay," he said.

Just that. I'd been braced for an argument and he'd given me okay, which was somehow more unsettling.

I went down into Bethnal Green station, got on the first train, sat with the envelope in my bag and my shoe off because the blister had fully won, and thought about Danny's face when I walked in.

Pleased about it. That was what Callum had said last night. That Danny was pleased I'd gone straight. Like it had mattered to people I hadn't thought about in years that I'd gotten out.

The train went underground.

I left the envelope in my bag.

Some things kept until morning.

End of Episode 3

Next — The envelope. What's inside. And the moment Mara realises her father didn't just leave her a debt to clear. He left her a map.