Ruin Me Right

Episode 4 — THE ENVELOPE

Episode 4 — THE ENVELOPE

I didn't open it that night.

I fully intended to. Got home, made toast, sat on my bed with the envelope in front of me. Didn't open it. Ate my toast. Got changed. Lay down. Stared at the ceiling for a while thinking about nothing specific, just the general rotating collection of things I'd been staring at ceilings about for six weeks, and eventually fell asleep with the light on and woke up at three AM with the envelope stuck to my cheek because I'd rolled onto it at some point.

Classy.

I put it on the bedside table and went back to sleep and that was that.

In the morning I opened it with coffee that wasn't very good because I'd run out of the normal stuff and had to use the emergency instant that had been in the back of the cupboard since my last flatmate moved out and had probably been there since before that honestly.

The key was a Yale, old, scratched. No label.

Underneath it was a piece of paper folded into quarters. My dad's handwriting, both sides, smaller than he usually wrote like he'd tried to fit a lot in.

It was a list. Names, addresses, numbers next to each one. Twelve entries. Some names I half-recognised from being Viktor Voss's daughter for twenty-four years — you pick things up, you don't mean to, you hear names enough times in enough conversations you weren't supposed to be part of and they stick whether you want them to or not. Other names meant nothing.

The numbers ranged from four figures to six. I didn't know what they represented. Debts owed, maybe. Favours. I didn't know my father's accounting system, had never wanted to know it, and now I was sitting in my kitchen at six forty-five in the morning trying to reverse-engineer it from a list he'd left with Danny Lau.

At the bottom of the second side, crammed in below the last entry:

The ledger isn't with any of them but they'll tell you where to look if you ask right. You always knew how to ask right Mara. Better than me. Don't give Drake more than he needs and don't trust him past the job. Key is for the unit. You know the one.

I read that bit several times.

You know the one.

There was a storage unit in Stratford. He'd rented it under my cousin Kevin's name since I was about ten, or maybe before that, Kevin had never seemed entirely sure, and it was the place where things went when they needed to exist quietly. I'd been there twice in my life, both times as a teenager, both times waiting in the car while my dad went in and came out with a bag he didn't explain.

I knew the one.

I took a photo of the list, put the key in my jacket pocket, and texted Callum.

Found something in the envelope. Need to go to Stratford before work. Coming?

Sent it. Immediately felt slightly stupid about the coming? like I was inviting him on a day trip. Couldn't unsend it. Put my phone down and went to get dressed.

He replied while I was looking for my other shoe.

Send the address.

He wasn't there when I arrived, which surprised me given that he'd somehow beaten me to the restaurant last night. I stood outside the storage place for five minutes checking my phone and watching a man across the car park try to get a sofa into a unit that was clearly too small for a sofa, which was one of those situations where you could see exactly how it was going to end and you couldn't do anything about it.

Callum pulled in at seven fourteen.

"You're late," I said.

"I'm on time. You were early."

"I said seven."

"It's seven fourteen."

I didn't have a good response to that so I showed him the photo of the list instead. He looked at it for a while. Long enough that I started paying attention to which names made him go still and which ones he moved past without reacting, because that seemed like information worth having.

He recognised a lot of them. I could tell, though he didn't say so.

"Your father put together a contact map," he said eventually.

"That's what it looks like."

"And left it with Danny specifically so it would get to you."

"Yes."

He handed my phone back. "What's in the unit."

"No idea. That's why we're going in."

Unit 47 smelled like damp and old cardboard and, for some reason, petrol, even though there was no reason for petrol. The strip light took three pulls of the cord to come on and then flickered for about thirty seconds before it committed. Very cinematic. Thanks, Dad.

Four boxes, unlabelled. A camping chair I vaguely remembered from a family trip to Wales in 2009. An old kettle. A toolkit. A plastic bag with what turned out to be six copies of a road map of the M25 from 2003, which told me absolutely nothing and raised several questions I wasn't going to follow up on.

I went through the boxes while Callum stood in the doorway not touching anything, which I appreciated actually, the not touching, giving me the room to do this at my own pace. The first box was files, old ones, nothing that immediately meant anything. The second was more files and a broken stapler. The third was empty except for a jumper I recognised as one my dad used to wear that I'd assumed he'd thrown out.

I put the jumper back.

The fourth box had a padded envelope on top of it. Brown, same as the one from Danny. My name again.

Less dramatic than I'd built it up to be, honestly. It was just a box with an envelope on it in a storage unit that smelled like petrol under a flickering strip light. My father's great hidden archive.

I opened it.

A photograph, printed on regular paper, slightly pixelated. Two men outside a glass building, walking out, mid-conversation. One of them was my dad. The other one was someone I didn't know, older, grey-haired, the kind of person who looked like they'd always been in charge of things and had never questioned whether they should be.

On the back, my dad's writing.

This is why he won't stop.

Five words. Nothing else.

I flipped it back over. Looked at the grey-haired man. Tried to find something in his face that explained five words and a storage unit and twelve names on a list and two months of my father apparently preparing for his own disappearance.

Didn't find anything. He was just a man walking out of a building.

I turned around to show Callum and he was already looking at it, must have moved without me hearing him, and his face was doing something I hadn't seen before — not blank exactly, more like someone had put a wall up very fast where there wasn't one a second ago.

"You know him," I said.

He didn't answer immediately. Which with Callum usually meant he was deciding something rather than that he didn't know, so I waited.

"Where did your father get this photo," he said.

"I don't know. Who is he."

"How long ago was this taken. Can you tell."

"Cal."

He looked at me.

"Who is he," I said.

"Rowan Hale," he said. "He ran the network your father worked in before he came to me." He paused. "He's been trying to get the ledger back too. Not for the same reasons I am."

"What are his reasons."

"The ledger has his name in it as well as mine."

I looked at the photograph again. The glass building. My dad mid-sentence, not looking at the camera. Rowan Hale walking next to him, completely relaxed, the body language of someone who had no idea a photo was being taken or didn't care.

"How bad," I said.

"Bad enough that your father hiding the ledger was probably the only thing keeping both of us alive," Callum said. "And bad enough that you finding it before Hale does matters considerably more than I told you last night."

Outside the unit the man with the sofa was still at it. I could hear him swearing, muffled, through the walls.

I put the photograph in my bag.

"Right," I said. "Okay." I looked around the unit one more time — the boxes, the camping chair, the kettle, my dad's old jumper in a box in Stratford. "Is there anything else you haven't told me that I'm going to find out in a storage unit?"

Callum almost said something. I saw him nearly do it.

"Not in a storage unit," he said.

Fantastic.

I pulled the door down, snapped the padlock shut, and went to find the bored woman at the front desk to hand back my visitor pass, because apparently that was the next thing, the mundane next thing after finding a photograph that had just made everything worse, handing back a laminated pass to a woman who had not looked up from her phone once since we walked in.

She didn't look up when I handed it back either.

I didn't blame her. I wished I could not look up from my phone right now. Must be nice.

End of Episode 4

Next — Rowan Hale. What Callum still isn't saying. And the first name on the list turns out to be someone who knew Mara better than she realised.