AI
The glass slipped from Rory's fingers and cracked against the bar top, gin pooling across the lacquered wood like spilled mercury.
"Christ, Carter. Still jumpy."
She knew the voice before she turned. That particular blend of South Wales vowels and boarding school consonants, the way her surname landed like a punchline. Niall Pemberton stood three feet behind her, hands in the pockets of a charcoal overcoat that cost more than her monthly rent. He smiled, and fifteen years of friendship, three years of silence , and everything in between compressed into the narrow space of a Soho bar.
"Niall."
"In the flesh." He spread his arms . "Though somewhat less of it."
He wasn't wrong. The Niall she remembered from Cardiff had been broad-shouldered, ruddy-cheeked, the sort of boy who filled a rugby shirt as though born inside one. This version wore his clothes like they belonged to someone else. The jawline that emerged from beneath his lost weight was sharp enough to cut, and his eyes, always a shade too pale for his complexion, had sunk into hollows she didn't recognise. His hair, once a mop of unruly curls he spent lectures raking back, sat cropped close to his skull.
Behind the bar, Silas polished a glass with mechanical patience, tracking the exchange through peripheral vision. Rory caught the slight shift in his posture, that old intelligence instinct cataloguing the newcomer.
"You going to keep staring, or can I sit down?"
"Sit."
Niall dropped onto the adjacent stool and surveyed the room, the old maps and black-and-white photographs, the dim amber lighting that made everyone look like they had secrets worth keeping.
"Interesting choice of local." He ran a finger along a crack in the bar top. "Thought you'd end up somewhere with fairy lights and craft beer menus the size of dissertations."
"Thought you'd end up somewhere with a membership fee."
"I have." He signalled to Silas . "Whisky. Whatever's least offensive."
Silas poured a Talisker without comment, set it down, and moved to the far end of the bar. The silver signet ring on his right hand clinked once against the bottle. It sounded deliberate, though with Silas, everything did.
Niall drank half of it in one pull. The old Niall would have savoured it, lectured her about peaty notes and highland terroir, held the glass up to whatever light source was available like a man auditioning for a whisky advert.
"Three years," Rory said.
"Two years, nine months. Give or take."
"You counted."
"Force of habit. Barristers track time obsessively. Billable hours, statute limitations, how long it takes a friendship to expire." He finished the whisky . "Turns out, it's about six weeks of unreturned calls."
The accusation sat between them like a splinter. Rory picked up her cracked glass, realised it was empty, and set it back down. The pool of gin had spread to where his elbow rested, and he didn't move.
"You changed your number," he said.
"I changed everything."
"I noticed. Had to hear about London from your mother. Your mother, Rory. The woman can hold a conversation hostage for forty-five minutes about the price of apples at Tesco. Imagine what she did with 'my daughter's disappeared to Soho.'"
"She told you where I was?"
"Not willingly. I pieced it together. She mentioned Eva, Eva mentioned a flat above a bar, and there aren't many bars in Soho with green neon signs shaped like birds." He nodded toward the entrance . "Subtle, that."
Rory glanced at Silas. He'd positioned himself within earshot, wiping the same glass he'd been holding five minutes ago. The cloth moved in precise circles.
"So you tracked me down."
"Don't flatter yourself." Niall signalled for another whisky. "Conference at Gray's Inn. Finished early. Walked south. Spotted the sign. Thought, 'What are the odds?'"
"You don't believe in odds. You believe in preparation and advantageous positioning. Your words. Third-year moot court."
"Good memory."
"Selective memory."
That landed. Niall's jaw tightened, the new sharpness of it making the reaction more visible than it would have been on the face she remembered. He turned the empty glass in his hands.
"You look different," he said.
"I look the same."
"No. You look like someone who sleeps. Not well, mind, but the fact that you sleep at all." He paused. "Last time I saw you, you had that look . The one where the lights are on but someone's pulled the wiring out."
The crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist caught the bar light. She moved her hand to her lap.
"I didn't come here to do this, Niall."
"Do what?"
"The autopsy. Pick apart the dead thing and work out what killed it."
"Who says it's dead?"
Silas appeared between them, refilling Niall's glass and placing a fresh gin in front of Rory without her asking. He met her eyes for half a second. A question lived in that look . She shook her head, barely, and he withdrew, his slight limp more pronounced than usual. Damp evening. His knee always predicted rain better than the forecast.
Niall watched the exchange.
"You've got a minder."
"I've got a landlord."
"Right. And that's a bar, not a safehouse." He sipped the Talisker this time, slower. Progress. "I won the Cavanagh case."
"I saw."
"You followed it?"
"It was on the front page of everything for a month. Hard to miss."
"It was the most complex criminal defence in Welsh legal history. Twenty-eight witnesses. Prosecution had DNA, CCTV, a signed confession they tried to ram through as voluntary." He set the glass down . "And I won."
"Congratulations."
"Don't. Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Congratulate me like I told you I'd cleaned my gutters." His voice dropped . "That should have been us. Both of us. Carter and Pemberton. We had the plan."
"We were twenty. Plans at twenty are just decorated wishes."
"Yours weren't. You had the sharpest legal mind I've ever encountered, and I've since encountered plenty. You could read case law the way other people read novels, pull the thread that unravelled the whole prosecution in twenty minutes while the rest of us were still underlining the wrong passages." He stared at her . "And now you deliver Chinese food."
The words hung in the air , acrid as smoke.
"Yu-Fei runs a Cantonese restaurant, actually. Not Chinese."
"Rory."
"It's a distinction that matters."
"So does wasting a first-class mind on egg fried rice."
She picked up the gin. Put it down again. The condensation left a circle on her palm. She rubbed it against her jeans.
"You didn't call about the case," she said.
"What?"
"When you won Cavanagh. I kept my email. Same since university. If you wanted to gloat, to reconnect, you had the address. But you didn't write. Not after the verdict, not after the appeal, not after you made senior partner." She turned to face him. "You only came looking now. Two years and nine months later, give or take. So what happened?"
The glass in his hand stilled.
The bar hummed with low conversation from the scattered tables behind them. Someone fed coins into the old jukebox near the toilets, and Tom Waits growled about the things you lose with time, which would have been on the nose if either of them had been listening.
"Alys left," Niall said.
"When?"
"April."
"Kids?"
"She took them. Swansea. Her parents' place."
Rory processed this. Alys with her broad laugh and her habit of making Welsh cakes at inappropriate hours. Alys who'd once told Rory, at the kitchen table of their Cathays flat, that Niall was the only honest man she'd ever met.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He passed the rim of the glass across his lower lip without drinking. "I earned it."
"Niall."
"Different earning than you're imagining. Nothing so dramatic as, what's his name. Evan." He said the name like a verdict. "No bruises. No police reports. Just a slow, methodical disappearance. I became the work. Convinced myself it was for them. The house in Penarth, the school fees, the holidays in Provence. All necessary. All evidence of what a good provider looks like from the outside." He exhaled. "Turns out, children don't need a provider. They need a father who remembers their bedtime."
Rory's knuckles whitened around her glass.
"You knew," she said. "About Evan."
"Everyone knew."
"And you did nothing."
"I reported my concerns to Eva. I assumed she'd-"
"Delegated. You delegated. Like a brief you couldn't be bothered to prep yourself."
His throat worked. The pale eyes found the bar top.
"Yes."
One word. No defence. No mitigation. The barrister who'd dismantled a twenty-eight-witness prosecution sat before her without a single objection.
"I rehearsed this," he said. "On the train from Paddington. Three different versions. One angry, one measured , one with a joke at the top to ease into it. All rubbish."
"Which version is this?"
"The one where I'm shaking and hoping you can't tell."
She could tell. His left hand, the one not holding the glass, had a tremor she'd have called imperceptible if she hadn't spent years learning to read the body language of men pretending to hold it together.
Behind them, the bookshelf on the far wall caught a sliver of green neon from outside, and Rory noticed Silas had migrated to that end of the bar, near his hidden back room, polishing yet another glass with the attentiveness of a man who could hear everything and would remember all of it.
Niall straightened on the stool. Drew himself up to something resembling the rugby player she'd known.
"I should go. The hotel's in Bloomsbury. Early train."
"Sit down."
He stopped, halfway off the stool.
"You came to Soho, found the bar, ordered two whiskies, and told me your marriage collapsed. You're not leaving for a Travel Lodge in Bloomsbury."
"Premier Inn, actually."
"Niall."
He sat. The tremor in his hand spread to his jaw. He locked it tight.
Rory reached across the bar and took the Talisker bottle Silas had left within arm's reach. She refilled his glass, then poured a measure into her own, gin be damned.
"You should have called," she said.
"You changed your number."
"Not about me. About Alys. About the children. You should have called someone."
"I'm calling now." His voice splintered on the last word. He covered it with a cough that convinced nobody.
The jukebox clicked to silence . In the gap between songs, the bar felt stripped bare, every surface reflecting light it wasn't designed to hold. The old photographs on the walls stared down at them, strangers frozen in someone else's history, smiling at cameras that no longer existed.
"There's a flat upstairs," Rory said. "A sofa. It's uncomfortable and the springs are shot, but the shower works and Silas makes breakfast at seven."
"Eight," Silas corrected from the far end of the bar, not looking up.
Niall stared at the whisky. His reflection stared back from within the amber, distorted, unrecognisable.
"I didn't deserve to lose them."
"No."
"But I didn't deserve to keep them either."
Rory said nothing. She lifted her glass and held it between them, waiting. Niall raised his, hand still trembling, and the clink of cheap glass on cheap glass cut through the silence of the bar like something breaking, or something, after a long time, being set.
The front door of The Raven's Nest swung open. Cold air knifed through the room, carrying with it the sound of Soho on a wet evening, taxi horns, laughter, a busker murdering Bowie two streets over. A woman stepped inside, shaking rain from a red umbrella. She scanned the room with the efficiency of someone looking for a specific face.
She found it.
"Niall Pemberton." Not a question. "Your wife said I'd find you here."
Niall's glass froze at his lips. The woman reached into a leather satchel and produced a Manila envelope, thick enough to contain something that would change the shape of a life.
Rory looked at Niall. Niall looked at the envelope. The tremor in his hand stopped, replaced by something worse, a perfect , practiced stillness.
"Shall I sign here," he said, "or will you need to explain what I've already lost?"