Arm's Length

Kirsty Dunbar counted the exits before she counted the men in the room, because that was the order that had kept her people breathing for fourteen years, and she saw no reason to change it for a football club.

Three exits. The door she'd come in by. A fire door behind the reception desk, propped with a rolled-up fixture poster because the girl on the phones liked her cigarettes. And a full-height window onto the car park that a determined man could put a chair through in under four seconds. She clocked all of it in the time it took the receptionist to say, "He'll see you now, if you want to go through," and to gesture with a biro toward a corridor that smelled of instant coffee and boot polish and the particular damp of a building that had housed sweating men for sixty years.

The club's administrative offices were nothing like the glass cathedral of the stadium a mile away. Up here it was strip lighting and trophy cabinets gone slightly foxed with age, framed shirts, a photograph of a title-winning side from before she was born. Ordinary. Underfunded where it didn't show. Kirsty preferred it. Ordinary was easier to read than money.

Davie Reoch's office was at the end of the corridor, and Davie Reoch himself was exactly what the file had promised: sixty-odd, thick through the neck and shoulders in the way of a man who'd been a defender before he'd been a manager, a tracksuit top zipped to the sternum over a shirt and tie as though he couldn't decide which life he was living. He didn't stand when she came in. He looked her over the way men like him always did — the swift, dismissive inventory, five foot six, compact, no obvious muscle under the plain dark jacket — and she watched him decide she wasn't what he'd been expecting and file the disappointment away for later use.

"You're Dunbar."

"I'm Dunbar." She sat without being asked, in the chair that put her back to the wall and her eyes on the door and the window both. He noticed her choose the seat. She let him.

"Thought they were sending—" He stopped himself, which she gave him a small amount of credit for. "You come well recommended. Very well. That fella from the diplomatic outfit down in London wouldnae shut up about you."

"He talks too much. That's why he's in an office and I'm not."

Reoch's mouth did something that wasn't a smile. He slid a manila folder across the desk toward her, two fingers flat on it like he didn't much want to let it go. "Three of these. Over eleven days. First one we thought was a crank — you get them, a player scores against the wrong team, some clown with a keyboard tells him he's going to die. Ninety-nine out of a hundred, it's nothing."

"And this is the hundredth." Kirsty opened the folder.

She read the way she'd been trained to read, which was to say she read for the things a normal person skated over. Not the words — the words were the words, ugly and predictable, you won't see the derby, you won't walk out that tunnel — but the shape of them. The first message was general. Rage without a plan. The kind of thing that burned itself out in the sending. But the second one named a road. Named the turn onto Marco Ferreira's private street, a street that did not appear on any map with his name attached to it, a street the man had moved to precisely so that it wouldn't. And the third named a time. Thursday. You train Thursday mornings. You always train Thursday mornings.

She sat with that one longer than the others.

"You see it," Reoch said, watching her.

"I see it." She closed the folder but kept one finger inside it, marking the third page. "The first one's noise. Anybody could have sent the first one. The second one, whoever wrote it knows where he sleeps — and that's a small number of people, Mr Reoch, that's a number you could probably write on the back of your hand. The third one knows his training schedule to the morning. That's a smaller number still." She let the silence do the arithmetic for him. "This isn't a stranger on the internet. This is somebody who's near him. Or somebody a person near him is talking to."

Reoch's jaw set. She'd expected that, too. Nobody who ran a club — who ran a dressing room, a family of thirty men and their agents and their hangers-on — wanted to hear that the danger was already inside the walls.

"We've a good group of lads," he said. "I'd trust any one of them at my back."

"I'm sure you would. That's not my job to trust." She set the folder down on the desk, squared it. "My job's to assume the worst about everyone in his life until each of them's cleared themselves, and then to keep assuming it about the ones who can't. You'll not enjoy how I do it. Nobody does. That's rather the point of hiring me instead of somebody nice."

He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched him revise the inventory a second time — the compact frame, the flat voice, the absolute absence of anything she was trying to sell him — and land somewhere closer to the truth. Good. She hadn't come to be liked.

"So tell me what you want," he said. "And then I'll tell you what you're getting, because they'll no be the same list."

"They never are." She'd braced for this the moment she read the brief. Football clubs hired protection the way they hired everything — late, cheap, and with one eye on the sponsors. "I move into the house. Today. Same roof as him until the derby's played and this is closed one way or the other. I want the alarm codes changed and I want to be the only person besides him who has the new ones. I want his schedule — real schedule, not the one his agent hands the press — twenty-four hours ahead, and I want the authority to cancel anything on it. Public appearances. Sponsor events. Anything that puts him in an open room with a queue of strangers."

"No." Reoch said it before she'd finished the sentence, flat as a slammed door. "The appearances stay. We've a derby in a fortnight, hen, and half the money that keeps the lights on in this building's tied to that boy shaking hands and smiling for cameras between now and then. You can wrap him in cotton wool at home, aye, fine. But he honours his commitments."

"His commitments are the easiest place in the world to kill him."

"His commitments are why there's a club for him to be alive at." Reoch leaned forward, forearms on the desk, and for the first time she saw the thing underneath the tracksuit — the pressure, the ledger, the board above him and the fixture below. "You think I don't know it's a risk. I know it fine. But you're one problem I've got, and I've got forty. The sponsors, the telly, a manager two divisions up who'd love an excuse to say we've bottled it. I'll pay for a minder. I'll pay well. I'll no pay for you to cancel my derby build-up because a coward with a phone got lucky with a home address."

There it was. She'd known it would be there and she'd priced it in on the drive up. This was the shape of every negotiation she'd ever had that mattered: the client wanted the reassurance of protection and none of its cost, and the job was deciding how much of the cost she could take off the table without walking away from a man who'd actually get hurt.

"Then we'll do it like this," she said, unhurried. "The appearances I can't stop, I run. I see the guest list first, I see the room first, I pick where he stands and how he moves and when he leaves, and none of that's up for a discussion with a marketing girl who wants a better photo. On those terms, he goes. On any other terms, he doesn't, and you can put that decision in writing over your own name, because if it goes wrong it's going to be your name it goes wrong under. Not mine. I'll have told you."

Reoch held her eyes. She let him. She was very good at being looked at.

"And the house?" he said at last.

"The house is mine. That part isn't negotiable, and if it is, you've hired the wrong woman and I'll drive back the way I came with no hard feelings." She meant it, and he could hear that she meant it, which was the only reason it worked. "Changed codes. Real schedule. Me under his roof. He'll hate it. I'm told he hates most things that aren't his idea."

Something moved at the corner of Reoch's mouth, wry and tired. "Aye. You've read him, then."

"I've read the file." She stood, because she'd got what she needed and there was no percentage in staying to be liked once the deal was done. "I'll want the address and the current codes before I leave the building, and I'll want you to have phoned him before I arrive, so I'm not something else that turns up at his door uninvited. He'll take it better from you." She paused. "Marginally."

Reoch stood too, this time, and put out a hand the size of a shovel. She shook it. His grip tested her and hers didn't give, and she saw him note that as well, and add it to the revised picture he was building of the small dangerous woman who'd sat with her back to his wall.

"He's a good lad, Ferreira," he said, and it came out almost like a warning. "Better than the papers make him. He plays the daftie because it sells, but there's a footballer under it works harder than any man I've had. Try no to break him before Saturday week."

"I don't break my principals, Mr Reoch." She collected the folder, tucked it under her arm. "I keep them breathing. Whether they enjoy the experience is between them and God."

She was already cataloguing the man she hadn't met — the smiler, the showman, the boy who played the daftie because it sold. She'd guarded a dozen of them, the golden ones, the ones the world arranged itself around, and not one of them in her experience had ever been in as much danger from the threat as from his own conviction that nothing could touch him. That was the real risk in a job like this. Not the coward with the phone. The principal's ego, wide open, sure of itself, walking cheerfully into every blind spot she'd spend a fortnight trying to close.

She carried the certainty of it out through the coffee-and-boot-polish corridor, the codes to a stranger's house folding into her jacket pocket, into the grey Edinburgh morning like something settled.

Three exits, she thought, out of habit, crossing the car park. She found her own car. She checked the back seat before she got in, the way she always did, the way she'd done ten thousand times, and pulled out into traffic toward a house she'd never seen, to guard a man she was already certain she'd have no trouble not caring about at all.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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