‘I’m sure you’ll be equally tender with him tomorrow,’ Graham grinned. ‘You wanted to see the footage from Bruce Jenson’s care home again?’

He set the laptop down on Ava’s desk and pressed play. She leaned in, still chewing rubbery ham, and stared at the screen.

‘So when this is over, to the extent that any of it’s ever really over, can I call in your raincheck on that drink, or were you deliberately avoiding the subject?’

‘I was deliberately avoiding the subject,’ she said, keeping her eyes focused on the body running through the grounds: slim, leggy, tossing her hair. ‘You’re junior to me. We work together. It’s too complicated.’

‘It’s just a drink,’ he said as she replayed the footage again.

‘Nothing’s ever just a drink, but I appreciate you asking. Did we get any footage of this person sneaking onto the care home grounds?’

‘Nothing clear enough to be sure it’s her. There was some shadowy movement through bushes, but it was three hours earlier and we couldn’t define a body shape clearly enough. Whatever it was kept low to the ground. It could even have been a deer. I didn’t add it to the briefing because there was a substantial possibility it might end up being a mislead.’

‘Three hours earlier? So if that was the perpetrator entering the grounds, they’d have been there all the time Callanach was visiting Jenson. Depending on where they’d positioned themselves in the garden, they might have been able to watch his visit through the patio doors,’ Ava said, a sense of déjà vu making her wish she hadn’t attempted the sour sandwich.

‘You okay?’ Graham asked.

‘I think … I’m not sure,’ she said, wondering if insomnia was pushing her imagination beyond its reasonable bounds or if she was finally seeing the bigger picture. ‘That woman …’

‘Ma’am!’ Tripp raced in. ‘The message left for you earlier by a traffic officer while we were at Bott’s flat. I just chased it up.’

‘Slow down, Sergeant. What is it?’

‘The woman – the illegal worker – who was living with Jon Moffat, the farmer out at East Saltoun, has been found. She and several others were stopped trying to get on a truck bound for Amsterdam.’

‘That’s fantastic news.’ Ava stood up. ‘Get her here. Let’s see if she can identify Bott in a line-up …’

‘She won’t,’ Tripp interrupted. ‘Mariam – that’s her name – is still traumatised. She confirmed it was her who called the pub landlady to report Moffat as dead, so the information she gave is verifiable. Her description of Moffat’s killer was limited. She got a brief glimpse in a mirror as she sneaked down the stairs to see what was going on. All she could confirm was that the perpetrator was male and that he was black.’