The walrus had no argument for that. More importantly, he was finished with his Danish. He rose.

“You have to close these cases out, Frank. The London papers are having a field day with us.”

“I wouldnae thought you cared about a London tabloid, Nab.”

The phone interrupted a recapitulation of the earlier lecture. Gorrie reached over and picked it up.

It was the detective in charge of the Cameron traffic accident case. They’d just found the truck they thought had hit the council member.

Gorrie caught a glimpse of an ancient stone house on his right as he turned down the road near Loch Ness where the truck had been found. Fifteen years before, the stone house had been the residence of Kevin and Mary Mac-Millan; it had been the scene of the first murder he’d ever investigated. Tidy case that—wife on the floor with her head bashed in, husband holding the hammer he’d done it with when the constables rushed in. Sergeant Gorrie spent more time typing up the report with his two-fingered typing than he did interviewing the suspect.

The truck was a year-old Ford, registered to and stolen from Highland Specialty Transport the night Cameron had been killed. It was a large diesel tractor, its front fender scratched slightly, one of its headlights smashed, and on its fender a small speckle of “something red and dried, foreign, not part of the finish”—the young detective’s exact words in his preliminary report—had been found.

“Tip came in directing us here on the hot line,” said Lewis. “Newspapers good for something, at least.”

The two investigators stood near the cab as one of the forensics people ran a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner across the floorboards. The exterior of the truck seemed fairly clean, not what you’d expect if it had sat on the side of the road gathering dust for a week.

“Cleanest lorry I ever saw, inside and out,” said Lewis. “You could eat off the floor.”

“Vacuumed?”

“Maybe.”

“But that’s likely blood on the fender. And the glass.”

“Aye.”

They could do a DNA test on the fender, and attempt to match the headlamp glass with glass at the scene. If this truck had killed Cameron, they would know it.

“We’re under five minutes from the spot where Cameron was found,” said Lewis. He pushed back the hair on his forehead. He seemed to be combing it down to hide a bald spot, except that he had no bald spot. “If it was here the morning after the accident, two dozen constables missed it, along with myself at least twice.”

“When do you think it was left here?” Gorrie asked.

Lewis shrugged. “We’ll set up a barricade and ask people who pass this way going from work.”