The coroner wouldn’t be preparing his report on the deaths for another few days yet, but the head of CID had left a note on Gorrie’s desk asking when the case might be wrapped up. The tabloid chaps had come up from London as well as Glasgow and Edinburgh, and now were calling him every few hours to see if there were new developments. At least he shielded Gorrie from the rabble.

Gorrie wended his way from Rosmarkie through Inverness, off toward Clava Cairns and the hamlet where Cardha’s flat lay. He turned off the main road into a small set of apartment buildings, then took another turn and found his way blocked by an ambulance.

“Inspector—we were just sending for you,” yelled a voice from the other side of the ambulance.

It belonged to Robertson, the constable who had changed the nappies on the Mackay child.

“What’s going on here, Sergeant?” he asked the constable.

“Another suicide, looks like, Inspector, according to the ambulance people. Been dead since sometime last night, they think.” Robertson frowned deeply and shook his head. Handling three deaths in less than a week might rate as a record for a constable in the Inverness Command Area as far back as the war.

“Wouldn’t be at 212?” said Gorrie.

“It is, sir. A Cardha Duff, going by the license. Not a good photo.”

“Rarely are,” Gorrie told him, walking up toward the building.

The thing that struck Gorrie immediately was that Cardha Duff could in no way be considered beautiful, especially in comparison to Claire Mackay. Few people looked good in death, and this woman looked especially bad, her nose and eyes swollen red, her mouth frozen in what might have been an agonized shout for help. But even allowing for all that, it was clear that she offered no challenge to Ed Mackay’s wife in the looks department. The most attractive thing about her was her red hair, which even Gorrie, no expert, could tell spent most of the week frizzed into unmanageable odds and ends.

Just now the hair lay matted to one side of her head, a twisted dirty tangle that pointed away from her ghost-white face. Cardha Duff’s body sprawled face-up in front of a TV, a few feet from the couch. Her left arm lay out as if in supplication. She had a bandage at the inside joint of the elbow; she’d obviously given blood the day before she died.

A final act of charity before death.

“Has forensics been called?” Gorrie asked the constable who’d been watching the door.

“On the way, sir. Sergeant Robertson took care of it straightaway.”

The ambulance people stood at the side of the room, waiting to hear what they should do. Gorrie wanted to know how the body was when they found it; they assured him they’d only moved it a little, ascertaining she was dead.