“Aye. In his room. A full-grown adult goat. I clocked it right away, and he obviously saw me clocking it, because he says… and I’ll never forget this… He says, ‘It’s nothing weird. We’re just friends.’” Dave’s grin almost cut his face completely in half. “Nothing weird! They were just friends! Friends! Him and a fucking goat!” He laughed, shook his head in disbelief, then pointed to the card on the board. “Babies turning up out of the blue is nothing. That’s an average day. I’m not surprised that it didn’t flag anything up.”

Ben stood before the board, his hands on his hips, and followed the progression of the case so far. “They don’t have any idea where the family was heading next?” he asked.

“They asked at reception for a bus timetable to Skye,” Sinead revealed. “Dave volunteered to phone around, and we’re pretty sure they went on the eight-forty-five bus, arriving in Portree just after noon.”

“You checked with hotels on Skye?”

“We’ve gone through most of them between us, sir,” Sinead said. “But haven’t got a hit yet. Lot of Airbnbs and self-catering accommodation up that way, though, which could make it more difficult.”

“Are we getting anywhere accessing the phones yet?” Ben asked.

“Not so far, sir, no. Nothing back from the tech team, anyway,” Hamza said. “I can double-check, but they’re usually pretty good at keeping us posted.”

“Have we tried tracking movements via the network?”

“Got a request in, but it’s slow-going. I think we’re going to need to get a warrant this time.”

“Signal’s a nightmare on Skye, too,” Sinead said. “It’s mostly blackspots. There’s no saying we’ll get anything useful, even if they do give us the details.”

“Fair point, aye,” Ben agreed. He indicated a couple of blank cards to the right of the timeline. “And this is our blackspot. We know they left Inverness on Sunday morning and arrived on Skye Sunday afternoon.” He jumped the blank cards and went to the next one marked with Sinead’s careful handwriting. “We know they got the ferry on Monday—eight days later—then the train down here, and a taxi out to the house in Glen Coe. A few days later, they’re all dead.” He rapped his knuckles on one of the gaps in the timeline. “This middle bit’s bothering me, though. Why were they on Skye with a big bag of money and a mystery baby?”

“No idea about why they were there, or about the money, sir,” Sinead said. “But we might have something on the baby.”

Ben wheeled around so quickly he had to lean on the desk to stop his head spinning. “You do? How? What have we got?”