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Chapters (55)
  1. PERFECT CRIME
  2. Dedication
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  42. Chapter Forty
  43. Chapter Forty-One
  44. Chapter Forty-Two
  45. Chapter Forty-Three
  46. Acknowledgments
  47. Can’t get enough of the Perfect series?
  48. Chapter 1
  49. Loved Perfect Silence? Then why not get back to where it all started with book one of the D.I. Callanach series?
  50. Welcome to Edinburgh.Murder capital of Europe.
  51. The worst dangers are the ones we can’t see …
  52. When silence falls, who will hear their cries?
  53. About the Author
  54. By the same author:
  55. About the Publisher

In the lounge, he brushed up the broken glass and made sure there were no outward signs of the chaos in his head. By then, it was lunchtime. The easiest option by far was coffee and toast, but he forced himself to grill some fish and prepare a salad to go with it.

Then he did the one thing he really didn’t want to do. He got in touch with his friend, Lance, arranged to join him for dinner and prepared to tell him everything. Absolutely everything, missing none of the details of what he’d been through before and what he was going through now. It was the final hurdle, learning to trust again, and he couldn’t lay it all at Ava’s door. He had to find some balance in his life, that careful layering of family, friends, colleagues and lovers.

As he stacked the dishwasher, Ava’s final words came back to him, as they had every few minutes since she’d left his flat, echoing with so much pain that he’d thought he might never be able to hear anything else. The man she’d thought she’d fallen in love with, she’d said. He wondered how much she regretted that now.

Chapter Twenty-Five

14 March

The Crow didn’t have to use either ingenuity, force or persuasion to get into the farmhouse and he felt cheated. Folks out at East Saltoun were old-style, apparently, leaving their doors unlocked until late into the evening. He stepped inside, taking a deep breath and catching a strong waft of manure from a pair of discarded boots before tasting the unmistakeable sweetness of an apple pie baked with a generous helping of cinnamon as it wafted from the oven.

The resident farmer was presumably seated in front of the television, where he’d been during each of The Crow’s previous visits, although on those occasions he’d restricted himself to peering through the windows. The main concern with a farmhouse was dogs, but with no sheep, the owner kept only one mutt for company and that appeared to sleep in front of the fire almost constantly. His assumption that it was half deaf had been borne out by its complete lack of reaction to an intruder.

He took his time and was careful in spite of the fact that by now he was surely invincible. His strength was increasing daily and since he’d consumed the original feathered version of himself, he’d noticed a substantial improvement in both his eyesight and his balance, real – not imagined – in spite of what others would say if he told them.