“How did you find out about James Laidlaw’s racket?” Ramsay asked. They drank tea with a little whisky in it. They were at the top of the building and there were no blinds on the windows. Outside spotlights lit up the old walls that surrounded the town and the ruins of the abbey.

“It was just really a wild guess at first,” she said. She was more herself, excitable, proud. She was showing off. “ His decisions about which stories to run were so arbitrary. The Brinkbonnie development was just an example. When the plans first went before the council, he wrote an editorial about the destruction of rural communities. It didn’t bother him that Alice Parry was his aunt. Then, when the village started its own campaign, he began to talk about objectivity and ordered me off. I thought it was just some weird autocracy—that he wanted to show me who was boss—until I did court duty on the morning after Mrs. Parry died.”

She paused to catch her breath. He waited patiently and smiled to encourage her.

“People who appear in court are often much more worried about being in the paper than they are about the fine they receive from the magistrates,” she said. “ James usually did the monthly magistrates court and that was strange in itself. Most editors think themselves too superior to mix with petty criminals—they’re more likely to be taking the magistrates out to lunch. James said it was his way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the town, but of course it wasn’t that at all.”

Ramsay interrupted gently, reluctantly, showing her that he was entertained by her conversation, but that he needed all the details.

“What did happen when you were in the court that Monday?” he asked.

“There was this drunk driver,” she said, making the most of the drama, playing up to him, watching his reaction. “He’d been in court before and he was disqualified for twelve months. But he had his own business and was much more worried about the bad publicity than about losing his licence. He came up to me in the waiting room and asked if there was any way of keeping his name out of the paper. Of course I said it was impossible. He got quite cross and said he had heard it was possible to come to an arrangement about it. He was a wealthy man, he said. Money was no object. At first I thought he was just an isolated loony who was trying it on, but when I considered it later he seemed indignant, almost self-righteous, as if I was treating him unfairly.”

“So James was taking bribes from people who had appeared in court and wanted the fact kept secret?”

“Yes,” she said, and her eyes sparkled because he was listening to her so carefully and following her line of thought so well. “But that wasn’t all he was doing.”