“I was with a lawyer called Claire Ogilvie until about quarter past three. Then I drove straight to Caird House. I walked up from the garage to the sixth floor, stood on the landing for about three or four minutes, then traveled down in the lift with Ruth Menzies from Flat 7B. Then I drove to Wunda Wines on Dumbarton Road, bought two bottles of Italian wine, and drove back to my friend’s flat. Where your boys picked me up today. I arrived there about four. A woman called Cordelia Brown, who’s staying with Miss Ogilvie, was waiting for me in the street. I spoke to her for a few minutes, then went upstairs. My friend Helen Christie told me about the burglary, and we went round to Rosalind’s flat. Inspector Ainslie saw me there later.”

“I’ll want a statement to that effect,” Fraser said, getting to his feet. “Do you want to call your lawyer before you commit yourself to paper?”

Lindsay nodded, and at last she was escorted to a phone. She caught Jim Carstairs just as he was leaving his office, and he promised to come right away. To her surprise, Lindsay found her hand was shaking with relief as she replaced the receiver. Being in the hands of the police again had clearly frightened her more than she was prepared to admit to herself.

An hour and a half later, she stood with the lawyer in the police station car park, having written out a full statement of her movements the previous day.

“I don’t think they’re going to give up on you that easily,” Carstairs said.

“No,” Lindsay sighed. “It looks like I’ve got a burglary to solve now as well as a murder.”

8

Lindsay drove past the floodlit car park of the Daily Clarion and parked on the street just past the modern skyscraper that housed the plant and offices of Scotland’s top tabloid newspaper. She got out of the car, shivering as the damp evening chill made her fasten her sheepskin jacket, and walked toward the security office by the back door, the entrance used by the paper’s many staff. It felt strange to be taking the familiar route back into a building that had once been as much home to her as her own flat. What felt even more strange was her certainty that inside she’d find the answers that would lead her to Alison Maxwell’s killer.

Disneyland, she thought with a smile as she crossed the forecourt. That’s what the printers had christened the building when it opened, moving the Clarion titles into the vanguard of the new technology. They’d been the first national daily paper to use computerized typesetting and full color printing, and the initial hiccups in the system had led to the nickname, as frustrated workers had spent their shifts muttering, “This disnae work, that disnae work. This is Disnaeland.”