Part one

The numbers came up on a Saturday in November, at 8:15 p.m., while I was giving my daughter her bath in our flat in Shawlands.

3, 9, 17, 22, 31, 44.

I didn’t need to check. I had known them by heart for nine years, like a door code. My phone started buzzing on the edge of the bath and wouldn’t stop. The office WhatsApp group. Forty messages in two minutes. Capitals, exclamation marks, bottles of champagne. Gordon, who never writes anything, had just put: “Elspeth.”

£2.4 million. Divided by twelve.

On Monday morning, Moira came into the office with red eyes and her mascara running. She sat down at her desk, put her hands flat on the keyboard and said, in a tiny voice:

“I’m so sorry. I lost my handbag. On the Subway, on Saturday. It was in it.”

The winning ticket had disappeared.

I need to tell you about the fourth-floor syndicate.

My name is Ewan, I’m thirty-four, and I’m an accountant at Baird & Lennox, a firm of chartered accountants on West George Street in Glasgow. Fourth floor, with a view of a red sandstone wall and the grey sky, which is the same grey nine months out of twelve.

For nine years, twelve of us have played the lottery together. Two pounds each, every week. We play one fixed line, always the same, and lucky dips with the rest. Everyone put their own number into the fixed line, right at the start, on a Post-it note that’s still stuck on the fridge in the kitchen. The 3 is Ailsa’s daughter’s birthday. The 9 was my shirt number when I played for Queen’s Park. The 44 is the house Craig grew up in, in Paisley. And the 17 is the 17th of April, the birthday of Elspeth, Gordon’s wife, who died four years ago.

The one who has organised everything, from day one, is Moira.

Moira is fifty-six. She has been an admin assistant for twenty-two years, she knows everyone’s birthday, she brings in home-made tablet on Fridays, that Scottish fudge so sweet it makes your teeth hurt. Every Friday lunchtime, she goes round the desks with a brown envelope, collects our two pounds, walks down to the newsagent’s on Hope Street and buys the ticket. Then she posts a photo of the ticket in the group. Nine years. Never missed a week. We called her “the bank”.

Two hundred thousand pounds wasn’t an abstract dream for me. Kirsty was on maternity leave, we were paying £1,150 a month in rent for a one-bedroom flat where the mould came back behind the wardrobe every winter, and the wee one had been coughing every night since October. That Saturday night, leaning over the bath, I had already viewed three houses in my head.

That Monday, nobody blamed her. That’s what still makes me feel sick today.

We comforted her. Ailsa made her a cup of tea. Craig said it was fate, that money doesn’t buy happiness, birthday-card stuff. Gordon said nothing. He went into the kitchen, looked at the Post-it on the fridge for a long time, and went back to his desk.

Moira explained that she had reported the loss to the lottery’s customer service in writing, the way you have to within thirty days. But without the ticket, she told us, we shouldn’t get our hopes up. And she had reported her bag stolen to the police. Somebody must have dumped it in a bin on Buchanan Street after taking the purse.

“If someone finds it and cashes it in,” she said, “I’ll never get over it.”

Two weeks later, we read in the Evening Times that the winning £2.4 million ticket, sold in Glasgow city centre, had been claimed. The winner had asked to remain anonymous.

Moira cried all morning. She blew her nose on paper tissues that she piled up on her desk, a little white mountain. She said, “Some bastard found my bag.” We comforted her all over again.

Something was niggling at me. I’m an accountant. My job is to look at two columns and work out why they don’t add up.

On the Friday before the draw, Moira hadn’t posted the photo of the ticket. For the first time in nine years. She had just written, at 12:14: “Done! Same numbers as usual 🍀”. And when Craig asked for the photo, as a joke: “My camera’s playing up, sorry!”

It was nothing. A phone that glitches, it happens.

Only, that Friday, I had seen the ticket.

I was late with my two pounds. I went past her desk at about 2 p.m.; she was in a meeting. The ticket was there, tucked under her stapler. I took a photo of it on my phone, for a laugh, and sent it to my partner, Kirsty, with a daft message: “Our future.” Then I slid my two coins under the stapler and went back to my desk.

I had forgotten about that photo. It was in my chat with Kirsty, between a shopping list and a video of our daughter eating mashed potato.

I looked at it for a long time that evening. You could see everything. The date. The shop. Our six numbers. And, at the bottom, the long serial number of the ticket.

I did nothing with that photo for ten days. I told myself I was getting paranoid. Moira had looked after our two pounds for nine years. She had organised the leaving do for Craig’s mother, the collection for Elspeth’s funeral. She had brought me a box of tablet when my daughter was born.

And then, one Tuesday in December, it was bucketing down on West George Street and I was at the window with my coffee when a car pulled into the building’s car park. A low, metallic grey car that made the windows rattle as it parked.

The door opened. A pair of ankle boots I knew. A tartan scarf I knew.

Moira got out of a Porsche.