As Ava waited for her prescription to be filled at the chemist, a man armed with nothing more lethal than a fish supper walked the streets of Edinburgh, peering into windows carelessly left uncurtained. Dr Selina Vega had offered to cover a shift for a colleague who’d called in sick, knowing she wouldn’t get to sleep after seeing the man she loved and had lost. Pax Graham, sitting at his brand-new desk, read the statements taken from the staff at the nursing home and wondered how he was going to tell his boss on the second day of his new post that a colleague was the prime suspect in a murder case. And Mrs Fenella Hawksmith – Fenny to her bingo friends who’d been wondering where she was for the last three weeks – was being wheeled out in a body bag for transfer to the Edinburgh City Mortuary.

Fenny had assumed for the last three years of her life that death would be something of a relief. Losing her husband to cancer had been bad but fast. Unable to continue living in the house they’d shared, she’d taken the cheaper, anonymous one-bedroomed flat on Easter Road. What pained her more was the daughter she’d lost to drugs in Glasgow. Alice had run away twelve years earlier. Came back. Went to rehab. Relapsed. Ran away again. Lived on the streets. Came home. Stole from them. Ran away again. For the last five years, Fenny hadn’t known if her precious girl was alive or dead. She couldn’t even share the knowledge of her father’s passing with her. There had been no one to hold her as she’d grieved, and no one for her to comfort and give her a reason to live.

Fenny’s doctor had been sympathetic but overstretched, prescribing antidepressants on request when she’d described her feelings of hopelessness. Her husband’s hospice had reached out to her, but there had been too many ladies in flowery dresses. ‘Edinburgh posh’, her own mother would have said, and a million miles away from the Glasgow poverty she’d grown up in. It wasn’t that they were judging her, she just hadn’t felt like she belonged.

Her first attempt at exiting the miserable world she’d found herself inhabiting had come to an abrupt end when she’d simply thrown up all the tablets she’d taken, together with the bottle of cheap red wine used to wash them down. The only lasting result had been a nasty stain on a beige carpet and a hangover that had lingered for days.