It had been painted in a pebble grey, with glossy white skirtings and wall-fitted lights. Because of the apex of the roof, and the angle of the walls, the lights pointed at the carpet like spotlights at a stage floor. They were all currently on, lending some much-needed support to the weak grey daylight that meandered listlessly in through the windows.

There wasn’t much in the way of furniture. A double bed—queen size, maybe—took centre stage, with small wooden bedside tables standing guard at either side of the headboard. The bed had been made to a standard roughly on par with Logan’s own. The quilt had been flattened out so it roughly covered most of the sheet below, and the pillows were more or less in the position you might expect to find them. No more than a few seconds had been invested in making it, and the fitted sheet looked perilously close to pinging free from at least two corners.

The bed was a divan type with a base that went all the way to the floor, leaving no room to stash anything beneath it, and reducing the number of places he needed to bother searching.

A dressing table with a large mirror mounted on top stood on the same gable end as the built-in wardrobe, taking advantage of one of the two walls that didn’t dramatically slope towards the centre of the room.

The surface of the dressing table itself was a masterclass in chaos. The contents of a makeup bag lay scattered across it—lipsticks, mascaras, blushers, and half a dozen things Logan could only guess the purpose of. There were several varieties of each, mixed in with a series of metal implements that were designed either for personal grooming or torture purposes, and very possibly both.

All fairly standard so far, but the dressing table was just getting started. There were two TV remote controls on there, half-hidden amongst the makeup. A small plastic wallet pinned beneath a tub of face and neck cream held four train tickets for the Mallaig to Fort William line, all scribbled on to show they’d been used. There was a receipt in the wallet, too, for a taxi journey totalling almost thirty quid. Presumably from the train station to here.

The tickets and the receipt were all dated from a week before, coinciding with what the house’s owner had said was the family’s arrival date.

When he’d first arrived, Logan had assumed that the kids would have been sleeping upstairs, but this was not a children’s room, even if one of the children was a teenager. The adults had slept up here, which would’ve made it less difficult for a single invader to keep everyone under control. Still not easy, but definitely less of a challenge.