The price of her forgiveness

THE NUMBER

Chapter 9: The Number

Lachlan's 

Harold Carmichael did business the way he did: fast, and without apology.

"December," he said around a mouthful of rare beef. "The sixth. It's a Saturday. My people have already looked at the church."

"It's March."

"It was March. Now it's December."

"We agreed last Sunday."

"You agreed. With my daughter and your uncle. Nobody asked me." He pointed his fork at me. The private dining room on the fifty-first floor of Carmichael Shipping was all dark wood, brass and framed photographs of ships, a place built to make a visitor feel already trapped inside the hull. Below the windows, Circular Quay. Ferries, gulls, and a cruise liner the size of a suburb parked at the terminal like a joke.

Gideon Marsh sat across from me, cutting a piece of fish into very small, very exact pieces. He hadn't said a word since the main arrived. He'd smiled when Harold spoke, and nodded now and then, like a man who'd rehearsed on the way over and was waiting for his cue. I'd barely touched my food. Since the bench in Rose Bay, I'd been running on coffee, and one thought: somebody who knew me very well had spent three years arranging my life, and I hadn't felt a single piece move.

"Harold, bringing it forward three and a half months is a lot to ask. Briony's booked the venue. There are four hundred people on the guest list."

"Four hundred people can read a new invitation."

"Why the rush?"

"Because my board is nervous." He tossed his napkin onto the table. "Your name's been in the paper three times this fortnight and not for anything good. There are rumours about your debt. If this merger's going to close, I want it closed before somebody gets cold feet."

"Has someone said something to your board?"

He didn't answer. He glanced, very briefly, at Marsh.

I saw it. A flick of the eyes, there and gone, the way a man checks his pocket for his wallet.

"Harold's concerned about the twelve per cent," Marsh said smoothly. It was the first thing he'd said all lunch. He dabbed his mouth and gave me the kind, grave look he used on shareholders. "We all are. Whoever's behind it has been very patient."

I didn't move.

Down on the Quay, a ferry sounded its horn, long and low, a sound from another world.

"Twelve per cent," I said.

"That's the figure I've heard."

"From whom?"

"The treasury reports, I imagine. Or Dev mentioned it." He shrugged. "My friend, there's no need to be defensive. It's what we're paid to know."

"Dev didn't mention it."

"Then somebody did."

I laid my fork down and squared it with the edge of the tablecloth. My uncle used to do that, little tidy gestures, when something made him angry, and he didn't want anyone to see it.

"The twelve per cent isn't in any treasury report, Gideon. Dev worked it out on Saturday night from settlement records and told me over the phone. It isn't on any system. It exists in his head and mine." I held his eyes. "And now yours."

Harold slowed his chewing. His gaze moved between us.

Marsh's face did not change, and that was the interesting part. A normal man, caught out, flinches or bluffs or looks wounded. Marsh went still, the way you go still when you've stepped on something and aren't sure it's a stick.

"Then Dev has a loose mouth."

"Dev doesn't."

"I'll ask him."

"Do. And where did you get the number?"

The wall clock ticked, a ship's chronometer in a brass case, absurdly formal.

"Treasury," Marsh said again, and picked up his fork. It was the answer of a man who wasn't going to give another.

"Enough." Harold put both palms on the table, and the cutlery jumped. "I don't want this over my lunch. Move the date, Lachlan."

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?"

"Briony's agreed to March."

"Briony agrees to whatever I tell her." The words came out flat, and I think he heard them half a second late. "She's young. She wants to please."

I thought of Briony at the window at Watsons Bay, thumb moving, deleting a thread of messages line by line. I thought of her grey, drowned face when I asked where she'd got the file.

Briony agrees to whatever I tell her. It wasn't the whole of it. But it was part.

His eyes drifted to the sideboard, to a small silver frame I hadn't noticed. A little girl in a yellow raincoat on the deck of a ship, squinting into the wind, one front tooth missing. She looked fearless.

"Her mother died when she was nine," he said to nobody in particular. "I did what I could. I'm not good at the soft stuff." He cleared his throat roughly. "She's all I've got. When I say I want her settled, I mean safe."

It was the first honest thing he'd said all lunch. I didn't know what to do with it. I looked at the girl in the raincoat and thought of the woman at the window, and understood that Harold Carmichael had no idea how frightened his daughter was.

Then the colour came back into his face, dull brick red, the vein at his temple beating. He was sixty-four and had been moving cargo since nineteen. He wasn't used to being told no by men half his age.

"I like you," he said, lower now, nearly a growl. "But I didn't build this company so a boy could refuse me. You and my daughter will be married by the sixth of December or the merger's off. And if it's off, there's a lot of money in that debt, and plenty of people who'd love to buy it."

It was the oldest threat in the world, and it still landed.

I looked out at the harbour, at a ferry crossing toward Manly with its deck full of tiny faceless people. I thought of a forged signature folded small in my breast pocket.

"I need a week."

"For what?"

"To talk to Briony. To make sure she wants it. You'd want that, wouldn't you? A daughter who isn't dragged to the altar?"

"She's not being dragged."

"Then you've nothing to fear from a week."

He studied me a long moment, then barked a laugh. "You've got your uncle's tongue. Smooth as oil. All right. A week. But I want December."

"You'll get an answer."

Under the table, my phone buzzed against my thigh. I read it below the edge of the cloth.

Daddy told me about December. Please just agree for now. I'll explain, I promise. Not by text. B.

I looked up. Marsh was watching me over his water glass. He lowered it unhurriedly, and smiled, and said nothing at all.

Marsh walked me to the lift.

I'd expected him to find an excuse and vanish. Instead he fell into step beside me with his hands clasped behind him, as though we'd arranged to talk. The corridor was long and dim, lined with more framed ships. We passed a painting of a steamer going down in a gale, its funnel at a crazy angle.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "The twelve per cent. It was careless."

"What's hurting the company, Gideon?"

"I don't know." He sounded sincere. "I've been on this board eleven years. I watched you build something extraordinary. I'd hate to see it hurt, so I listen. I hear things."

He stopped beside the lift and pressed the button, watching the numbers fall.

"The Pacific Maritime Gala is in two weeks," he said mildly. "Darling Harbour. Your fiancée's father is a patron."

"I remember."

"I hear the buyer means to reveal themselves there."

I turned my head slowly. "From whom?"

"A friend. One who's in a position to know." The doors slid open on an empty box of mirrors and brass. He stepped back and let me go first. "I'd bring Briony, if I were you. Hold her hand. Let the cameras see you. If you don't go, they'll know you're afraid. And be kind to her. She's frightened, you know."

"I am kind."

"Then be kinder."

I nearly asked him straight whose side he was on. But a question like that only works on a man who hasn't decided what to say.

He smiled. The doors began to close.

I watched his face narrow to a strip, then a line, then nothing. The brass rail was cold under my palm. The floor numbers counted down, slow and unhurried.

Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. I counted them like a pulse that wasn't mine, and by forty-seven my hands had gone cold.

Gideon Marsh had just told me, with perfect calm, when and where the buyer would appear. Nobody should have known that.

Unless he'd been told by the buyer.

Or by someone who already knew exactly what the buyer was planning.