She got out of the car and was struck once more by just how incredibly quiet everything was. She could see in the distance figures up and about on the hills—farmers, she imagined. Shepherds. Were shepherds still a thing? She supposed they were. She looked closer. The white shapes on the hillsides had smaller white shapes prancing along beside them. Perhaps they were lambs. It looked like something out of a children’s storybook; an old orange farmhouse set back from the road that she’d passed as she came in, with its red barn, looked like something you’d read about to a very small person.

Lissa had never in her life given her food a second thought beyond checking it was organic, sometimes, when she felt flush enough. She never cooked at all; why would you in London? Her mother hadn’t cooked, had said it would put her in a domestic servitude role, whereas her job was to break out of feminine stereotypes. Which was why the nursing had never really gone down too well.

Anyway. Lissa wasn’t going to think about that right now. Instead she drove back into the center of the village, parking right in front of the bakery, to her utter amazement. There were no yellow lines or anything. She took a photograph to send to Kim-Ange, but she couldn’t make it send.

Nothing seemed to have a street name, or at least not one she recognized. There was something called “The Binns,” something else that looked like “Lamb’s Entry,” which she didn’t like the look of in the slightest. Why they put a farm name in the case notes, when there were no directions to farms and they didn’t show up on Google Maps, was unhelpful to say the least.

She looked in the window of the bakery. There were lots of things she hadn’t seen before, including signs advertising “Puddledub!” and “Lorne!,” neither of which meant much to her, but she went in nonetheless. It was incredibly cozy and warm inside, and a cheery-looking woman looked up.

“Hello,” she said, taking in Lissa’s uniform. “Och! You’re yon lass that’s up here doing Cormac’s job for three months! Amazing, welcome, it’s lovely to see you. Now listen, do you want me to put you down for a regular ginger delivery? And also the provost says could you join the Highland Games Committee? But he says that to anyone who turns up, you don’t have to say yes just to be polite, okay? Dinnae mind it.”

Lissa had understood about one word in six of this and was seriously unnerved by why this woman was jabbering away to her and how on earth she knew so much.