‘Good,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll get all the information you need about staff. Let me know when your officers can attend to go through our records. Will it be DI Callanach attending?’

‘More likely it’ll be Detective Sergeant Tripp,’ Ava said, walking him to the door. ‘Callanach’s about to go on leave.’

She had no idea when she’d made the decision, but it was suddenly clear in her mind and inevitable. Callanach simply couldn’t continue working inside MIT while both Jenson’s and Western’s murders remained unsolved.

Rune Maclure reached out his hand to shake hers. ‘I wish we could have met in almost any other situation than this. It feels like a terribly guilty pleasure coming to see you today.’

Ava watched him leave, considering his final words and realising that for the previous decade she’d only ever met men courtesy of investigating violent crimes. Small wonder every relationship she had went wrong. She picked up the phone and dialled Callanach’s number.

Chapter Twenty-Four

13 March

Ava was watching the clock in MIT’s briefing room. As it flicked to 8 a.m., she stood and began to speak, ignoring the squad members still filing in and the conversations still taking place noisily in the background. The quiet didn’t so much settle across the room as drop like a rock. The latecomers hustled into corners and raised eyebrows were exchanged.

‘As of yesterday afternoon, having checked the records of a national suicide prevention charity called Reach You, we’re officially treating the death of Stephen Berry as probable murder. The crime scene at Tantallon Castle offered us no evidence at all, but that was expected after the storm that followed the discovery of the body. However, both victims were spoken to by a counsellor from the charity who works in the Edinburgh branch, Rune Maclure. Mr Maclure came forward and raised his concerns with us after seeing Osaki Shozo’s name in a news article.’

‘What about Fenella Hawksmith? Any link there?’ Janet Monroe asked.

‘There’s no link at all to Reach You – teams checked that extensively yesterday – but her medical records show that she received treatment for severe depression and previous suicide attempts from other agencies, and she spent time in at least one hospital unit having been committed by her GP.’

‘So is this some sort of quasi-medical psychopathy? Does the killer think he’s putting these people out of their misery?’ was Monroe’s follow-up question.

Ava liked Janet Monroe. She paused to consider the question.

‘It’s possible, but unlikely. You’re suggesting something like “angel of death” syndrome and typically in those cases the victims are killed by medication or without extreme violence. These deaths have all been traumatic to an extreme.’

‘More like a punishment,’ DS Tripp contributed. ‘These feel more like hate crimes.’