The constable smiled feebly, nodded, and left the room. Gorrie noticed he hadn’t once glanced at the bed. No great wonder. With the low violent crime rate in Inverness, and this his first year with the Force, he’d most surely never encountered anything comparable to the scene in this room.

Gorrie looked down at his spiral notepad, flipped to a clean page, and was about to add a few words to his notes when Christine Gibbon resumed her emotional narrative to the officer he’d stationed in the hallway. Gorrie perked an ear. No telling whether she’d come out with something he hadn’t yet heard.

“I told Claire a hun’red times . . .”

Claire Mackay, the wife, Gorrie thought.

“. . . a hun’red time’s over ’n more, you want to count, that she’d be doin’ herself a favor by leavin’ the bloody mutt . . .”

Said mongrel dog being Ed Mackay, the husband. Gorrie had needed to coax the Gibbon woman into giving his name in her initial statement, as she’d insisted the very utterance of it would rot her tongue.

“. . . to his drinkin’ and erse-chasin’, but I couldn’t get her to listen. See how he provides for me an’ the baby, she’d say. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in the lands, she’d say. Got to forgive him his weaknesses, and so on, and so forth. Well, I say good riddance to the besotted radge, an’ keep your sympathy for Claire . . .”

Never mind that it was her mate who appeared to have been the victim in what was shaping up to be a murder-suicide case, Gorrie thought.

“. . . poor girl, she’d been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good’s his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally . . .”

Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The “high place” was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The “high job,” taking Christine Gibbon’s comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.

“. . . tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they’d gone their separate ways. I’m not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous shit. Always figured he’d take a hand to Claire when he was in one of his moods, though I can’t claim she declared it out and open. He’d got her so mousy intimidated, she kept everything bottled inside. And now the bottle’s broke. What she did, she was pushed to do. Pushed, you can be confident. A hun’red times I told the poor girl . . .”