Another nail in my coffin, thought Jackie in despair, her hands involuntarily gripping the wooden rail of the dock. As the evidence droned on around her, she looked despondently round the courtroom. In her seventeen years as a journalist, she’d had little experience of the courts. While she’d been a young trainee on a weekly paper in Ayrshire, she’d occasionally covered routine cases in the Sheriff Court. But after that, she had become a feature writer and had never even crossed the threshold of the imposing High Court building by the Clyde.

It wasn’t an environment she felt comfortable with, unlike the crowd of news reporters crammed into the press bench. All men, for crime reporting was still a male preserve in Glasgow. They sat there, hour after hour, like eager jackals, taking down every detail in their meticulous shorthand. And tomorrow, she knew, the bricks of evidence that were slowly building a wall round her would be reassembled to provide the foundations of sensational stories that would strip all her privacy from her. She knew most of these men. That was the hardest part of all. For ten years, she had been a leading freelance feature writer in the city, working for all the major newspapers and magazines. These were men she’d laughed with, gossiped with, drunk with. Now, as she studied them intent on their task, they looked like strangers. Familiar features seemed to have shifted, hardened, changed somehow. She wasn’t their pal Jackie any more. She was a brutal bitch, an animal with a perverted sexuality who had killed one of their number. In life, Alison Maxwell had been a talented Scottish Daily Clarion feature writer with a dubious personal reputation. In death, she had been promoted to the Blessed Martyr of Fleet Street.