Dr Graham backed off a pace. ‘Look, I identified them, didn’t I? Can’t you just tell your bosses I’m not faking it here? I really do know what I’m talking. . .’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did Dempsey put you up to this? Is he the halfwit who ruined them? ’

‘Was someone eating them? ’

‘Because if he did, you shouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. He’s a bitter, twisted old sod and I’m doing a good job here!’

The cutting table was cool beneath his fist. ‘Was someone eating the meat off those bloody fingers or not? ’

She pulled her chin in. Then picked up the bone again, held it up to her nose and sniffed. ‘You smell that? Bleach: that’s why it’s so chalky and crumbly. Who’d eat something they’d boiled in bleach? ’

Oh thank God. . .

Dr Graham picked all the bones up and held them in the palm of her hand. ‘It wasn’t a test? ’ They made a dry sandpaper sound as she rolled them back and forward. ‘Seriously? ’

‘Someone’s been leaving them outside my house.’

‘Phalanges? ’ She put them back on the paper hand. ‘My life coach told me Aberdeen was weird. . .’ She cleared her throat, then dug a ruler from her stack of books and measured each of the bones in turn. ‘You can estimate height and sex from phalanges, but it’s unreliable. And I mean seriously unreliable. I wouldn’t even put it in writing.’

Logan licked his lips. ‘Thought they were chicken bones.’

‘You have to promise not to quote me on this, but best guess: these belong to a woman, about five-two, five-four, something like that. There’s a touch of arthritis, so she might be in her fifties, possibly sixties? They’ve been boiled, so you can whistle for DNA, but you could try stable isotope signature analysis? ’

‘Human fingers.’

‘There’s a professor I know in Dundee who does pro bono work for police cases. I can give him a call if you like? ’

‘I’ve been chucking them into the bushes. . .’

Rowan shifts sideways on the wooden bench, making enough room for the woman with the shopping bags to puff down beside her. Pregnant. Taking the weight off her swollen ankles. A tight coil of green and blue spirals out from her tummy, making a question mark in the air that shimmers with antici-pation.

St Nicholas Kirk graveyard basks in the warm morning, the ancient granite headstones turning their crumbling lichened faces to the sun. The church building gnaws at the sky with jagged dark-grey teeth, dirty stained-window eyes glowering out at the dead and the living alike.

A comforting place.

The Kirk is my mother and father. It is my rod and my staff. My shield and my sword. What I do in its service lights a fire in God’s name.