And then there was tax. She should probably look into that at some point. It seemed quite complicated, though, and no one had come looking for payments in the three years since she’d started up, so she felt it best just to keep her head down and hope this state of affairs continued.

From that poor start, the day had gone rapidly downhill when she’d entered Mr Boyle’s holiday rental and found… what she’d found in the living room.

She couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud. She couldn’t express quite what she’d felt when she’d seen what lay there on the floor—not in English, and probably not in Polish, either. There were no words for what she’d felt. Not in any language.

Hamza offered her the box of tissues that the sergeant at the Glencoe station had dug out of a cupboard. The box had been bashed around and squashed down at some point so the corners had all ruptured, but there was still a good supply of tissues in it, albeit far fewer now, than there had been when the shellshocked cleaner had first arrived.

“Take your time, Magda,” Hamza said. They were sat across from one another on mismatched chairs in a room that served a variety of purposes, and lent itself well to none of them. It was part interview room, part office, part canteen, and a couple of pillows and a blanket tucked away in a corner suggested it was sometimes part sleeping quarters, too. “Take your time, there’s no rush.”

Hamza gave her an encouraging smile, then stopped talking and tried to tune his ears in readiness for her reply. Her English straddled the line between ‘poor’ and ‘incomprehensible,’ and he’d had to ask her to repeat herself several times already in what had been a short and thus far largely unproductive conversation.

His Aberdonian accent wasn’t exactly making it a barrel of laughs from her point of view, he had quickly realised, and her reply to most of his questions had been to stare blankly at him for several seconds before bursting into tears.

He was starting to understand how she felt.

“There is am dead. On floor. Yes? Four.” She held up the corresponding number of fingers. “Four?”

“That’s four, yes,” Hamza confirmed.

She stared at his mouth, concentrating. “Again?”

“I just said… Nothing. Forget it. Go on.”

Magda shook her head, still fixated on his mouth like she was reading his lips. “I no… Sorry. Sorry, I no…”

Hamza waved his hands, crossing them over as he tried to dismiss her concerns. “You don’t have to be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said, speaking so slowly he almost lost the thread of what he was saying halfway through. “Just tell me what happened at the house.”