“Christ, no. No. The Americans didn’t get it. They’ve no’ got the same sophisticated sense of humour as us,” Ben said, and the younger officers’ eyes were all drawn back to the two gurning men pretending vegetables were tits on Dave’s phone. “Lost a lot of money, I seem to recall. Think that’s what led to them splitting. Shame. Just flew too close to the sun, I suppose. Wonder what they’re up to these days?”

“Well… most recently, fifty percent of them were getting stabbed repeatedly in the chest,” Logan said.

Ben frowned for a moment like he was failing to grasp the punchline of a joke, then gave himself a shake. “Oh, aye. Shite. Sorry, got a bit sidetracked there. Forgot how we got onto the subject.” He blew out his cheeks. “So, Archie Tatties is dead. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“No reunion tour?” Dave guessed.

“It means we’ll have the press crawling all over the case,” Logan said.

The junior officers all looked highly sceptical. “He’s not exactly a household name, boss,” Tyler pointed out. “Once upon a time, maybe…”

“Aye, but most tabloid readers aren’t out of bloody school like you lot. They’ll remember Archie Tatties, all right. Family of tourists killed in a holiday home invasion is headline news on its own. Throw in a minor celebrity and the bastards will be foaming at the mouths to get themselves an exclusive.”

“We taking bets on the headlines?” Dave asked. “Fiver on ‘Highland Holiday Home Horror.’”

“Missing the celebrity angle,” said Hamza. “More like… ‘Tattie Planted in Highland Holiday Home Horror.’”

“‘Nobody Killed in Highland Holiday Home Horror,’” Tyler suggested. When this was met with confused looks, he clarified. “Because, you know, he’s a bit of a nobody these days.”

Logan’s voice trampled all over the rest of the conversation. “This is all great fun, of course,” he said, in a tone that very much said the opposite. “But, I’m sure you don’t need reminding that we’ve got four corpses cooling up the road in Raigmore right now—two of which are young girls—and that the bastard or bastards who put them there is still roaming free.”

“Sorry, boss,” Tyler said, beating the others to it by half a second.

Logan dismissed their apologies with a shake of his head. He couldn’t be angry at them. It was how they coped. It was how they always coped. At the end of the day, it was a job. Let it become your life, and you’d lose yourself to it. You’d lose everything.

Christ knew, he had.

So, you laughed, and you joked, and you hoped that it didn’t get to you. Prayed that it didn’t start gnawing at you, eating you up from within.