Heather’s tut was audible only to the man beside her. And even then, it took some effort. “Actually, I was thinking of the book.”

“So. Senga,” Logan prompted, ignoring what he knew to be a jibe from the other DCI. “What made you choose that name?”

“It’s my wife’s mother’s name. Was. She’s no longer with us,” Billy said. He was saying very little, but he was saying it quickly, as if the words were all lined in his mouth like tiny paratroopers waiting to be deployed. “We—she—my wife, that is—thought it would be a nice thing to do.”

“Come back to us in fifteen years and we’ll see if wee Senga agrees,” Heather said.

“That’s assuming you’re still around in fifteen years, of course,” Logan said, which won a look from Billy that could best be described as ‘puzzled horror.’

“I’m sorry?” he asked.

“Sorry, that was very blunt of me,” Logan replied. “I’m just saying, you’re an older parent. Fifteen years would make you… what? Pushing eighty? Bold choice to be starting a family now.”

“How old’s your wife?” asked Heather.

“She’s… younger than me.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know how old your wife is,” Logan said. “That’ll no’ win you any brownie points, Billy.”

“Will we put him out of his misery?” Heather asked. She tapped her notepad. “See, we looked it up, Billy. She’s forty-seven. We can even give you her date of birth, if that’d be useful? Maybe you could write it down for future reference.”

The solicitor sighed, mainly for the detectives’ benefit. “Could we get to the point?”

“The point is that not a lot of forty-seven-year-old women are having babies,” Logan said. “In fact—and we checked this, too—zero forty-seven-year-old women have had babies anywhere in Scotland in the last month.”

“We adopted,” Billy said. “That’s… That’s all there is to it. We adopted.”

Logan sat back in his chair. “You adopted?”

Billy nodded. There was something mouse-like about the movement. “Yes. We adopted.”

Logan groaned. “Well, this is embarrassing,” he said. “Here’s us checking the hospitals for older mothers giving birth, and they adopted, DCI Filson. We didn’t bloody think of that, did we?” He crossed his arms over his barrel chest. “Or did we?”

“We did, DCI Logan,” Heather confirmed. She shrugged. “Technically, we’re still in the process of doing so—turns out there are a lot of adoption agencies in the UK.”

“And?”

“And nothing so far,” Heather replied. She smiled across the table at Billy and picked up her pen. “Actually, if you could tell us the agency you used, it would help us get everything cleared up.”