Vicki Hewitt had finished her work in the Henderson house and it was locked. There was no light showing through the uncurtained windows. He opened the garage and found a door from the back of it that led into the kitchen. Everything was quiet. He fumbled to find a light switch and the sudden brightness made him blink. All quiet and all tidy. He’d hoped that the Fiscal might have come here. A last chance to mourn her former, secret lover. He’d imagined her brooding, a large whisky in one hand maybe. But it seemed he’d been wrong. Anxiety began to nibble at his brain. He felt his heart rate quicken. He opened doors into all the downstairs rooms. The place felt cold and dead. It was hard to believe that Henderson had been living here less than a week before.

He almost ran up the steep wooden stairs to the attic. He couldn’t find a switch on the sloping wall and turned on a standard lamp. It threw odd shadows in the room, made the colours rich and exotic. Still no sign of the Fiscal. Against the wall were some of Agnes’s canvases. Paintings she’d been working on in the last stage of her illness. On one wall there was a sketch that Perez hadn’t noticed on his first visit, and he only saw it now because the lamp shone directly onto it. He recognized it immediately as a drawing of the painting that hung in Rhona’s bedroom in the Old Schoolhouse. The large seascape. Had Henderson given it to Rhona after Agnes died? A parting gift? It seemed quite out of character for the man he thought he’d come to understand. Again, he thought this case was much more complicated than he’d realized. But there was no time to consider that now.

Outside, the drizzle had turned to rain. It flattened his hair and ran down his collar, but he hardly noticed. It was a weird thought that a few miles up the road the world was continuing as normal. People chatting about the weather and last night’s television, sitting in living rooms and kitchens, getting bored and drinking coffee. Out here, and in Jimmy Perez’s head, it was hard to believe that anything would be normal again. In his head there was a picture of Evie Watt, looking young and bonny, smiling. Then Evie Watt as a scarecrow in a make-believe wedding dress. His phone went. Reception was dreadful and he struggled to make out the words. He walked back up the hill until he found a spot where the call became clearer and spoke for a few minutes, then switched the phone off and almost ran down the road towards the pier.