Chapter Twenty-Four

Blackwood's home stood on a private estate outside Perthshire, considerably grander than anything the Fellowship's own Pitlochry property had ever suggested, and that difference, more than any document the investigation had ever properly uncovered, told Callum precisely what kind of man he was about to confront. The Pitlochry house had been careful, modest, pebble-dashed Presbyterian restraint. This was something else entirely. Low-lit sandstone behind high gates, a parkland that rolled away towards the dark line of the Tay woods, security lights set carefully at intervals up the long driveway so that the gravel seemed to float, amber, out of the November dark. The Highlands pressed close here even this far south, in the smell of wet pine and turned earth and cold coming off the hills behind the house. Callum understood, walking up that long, carefully lit driveway alone, the recording device concealed against his own chest feeling considerably heavier than its actual weight, that he was walking into the single most dangerous conversation this entire two-year reckoning had ever required of him.