“That may have been your original intention, Billy,” Logan conceded. “But when everything fell through, it had another purpose, didn’t it? It let you find him when he didn’t want to be found. And we know you found him. Even if we discount the sighting of your car for the moment.”

“You can’t prove it was his car,” the solicitor pointed out.

“Like I said, we can discount the sighting of the car. The fact is, Billy told us himself he found Archie. Didn’t you?”

Across the table, Billy frowned. “What? I didn’t… What did I…?”

“You’ll have to forgive me for paraphrasing here, Billy,” Logan said, producing a small notebook and flipping through the pages. “My colleague, Detective Constable Neish, did the transcribing, and his writing’s no’ the best. Ah. Here we go. I can actually make this out OK for once. You said that Archie hated holidaying in this country and that he’d never—and I quote—‘take himself out there to the middle of nowhere. Not on purpose.’”

He closed the notebook and waited. Heather waited, too. Even his solicitor seemed to be holding her breath.

“What? So what?” Billy asked. “You said he was in Glen Coe.”

And there they had it. On tape.

“We didn’t, Mr Pinnock,” Logan replied. “We told you he was in the Highlands. Nobody ever said anything about Glen Coe.”

Billy’s cheeks, which had been a skelping shade of red, rapidly lightened until they were almost white. He shook his head and prodded a finger on the tabletop like he was either trying to make a point, or was hunting for the button that would activate an ejector seat.

“No, you did. You said. You must’ve told me.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” Logan told him. “All we said was that he was in the Highlands. And that’s a big area, Mr Pinnock. Huge. I think we can all agree that you pinpointing the exact spot where Archie and his family were killed would be one hell of a lucky guess.”

“One in a million chance, that,” Heather agreed.

“Oh, at least. So, how about we cut all this shite, Mr Pinnock,” Logan said. He cracked his knuckles, flexed his fingers, then picked up his pen. “And you start telling us the truth?”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Hamza’s windscreen wipers ka-thunked out a regular beat as he sat in his car across from the guest house. The weather had taken a turn for the worse halfway up the Kyle of Lochalsh road, and by the time he was approaching the Skye bridge, he’d half expected to find it closed due to high winds.

He’d made it over, though, and then made the forty-minute meander north until he’d reached Portree at the opposite end of the island.

It was dark now, and his headlights picked out the carved wooden sign on the garden gate—‘The Coorie Doon.’