Cormac squinted at it crossly. This was very much not all right. Cameron Blaine had an incredibly difficult family background; he’d been excluded from school, his father was in prison, and his mother was not in prison only to save the council a ton of money on trying to rehome all five of the children. The boy desperately needed help and he had . . . he’d been doing not too badly. Mostly just hanging out with him. He’d gotten Cameron to wash his car once or twice, overpaid him, but tried to make it clear how you did it thoroughly, how you managed not to figure out how to palm the keys in case you wanted to hijack it later. He’d spoken to Gregory Duncan, the amiable local policeman, for whom the Blaine family provided more or less 99 percent of his active work that wasn’t about parking, and they both tried to be casually walking by street corners Cameron was on whenever things looked like they might be getting a bit tasty. Cormac also had an old friend in army recruitment, but he thought that might be a step too far for Cameron, at least at the moment.

It had been a couple of years of good, solid work of trying to build up trust, and Lissa was letting it all collapse in two minutes by behaving like exactly the kind of snotty posh woman Cameron had mistrusted all his life. He was angry and emailed back quickly something exactly on those lines, basically instructing her to get back there and get things sorted out.

“He was very grumpy,” she complained to Nina in the bus the next day.

Nina squinted. “Cormac MacPherson?” she said. He’d done the health visits for John when he was tiny and had bounced the little creature up and down, then dangled him from his fingertips, turned him upside down to glance at his bum, said, “Yup, perfect bairn, A-one,” and gotten him straight up again, while she had watched in horror. Lennox had allowed himself a private grin, given how much Nina fretted about the baby and whether he was all right and if a snuffle meant he was going to die. Lennox knew livestock, and obviously his only son wasn’t livestock. But he wasn’t exactly not livestock, and Lennox knew something bouncing with glorious health when he saw it.

“I know,” said Lissa crossly. She was more upset than she’d let on; she’d kind of thought they were becoming . . . friends didn’t seem to quite work. Pen pals?

However, she’d made sure every other note she’d sent that day had been entirely professional in possibly quite a passive-aggressive way, and he had, equally passive-aggressively, not gotten back to her at all and left her in quite the temper.

Her face softened, though, as she spied the new Kate Atkinson novel and Nina handed it over.