‘I’m on my way then.’ Just from the way the inspector spoke those words Sandy knew Perez was blaming himself for Hattie’s death and he always would. He wished Perez didn’t have to see the white face in the shadow of the trench, the long, deep cuts to the white inner arms, the blood that looked like tar. He would like to protect his boss from that sight.

While they waited for the doctor to arrive, they stood by the edge of the pit that Sandy now thought of as Hattie’s grave. Perez was in control again, quite professional.

‘I recognize the knife,’ he said.

‘Does it belong to the girl?’ Sandy had assumed that it did. Surely if you were going to kill yourself you would use an implement familiar to you. You wouldn’t drag a stranger into your suicide by using someone else’s knife.

‘No, it’s Berglund’s.’

‘He must have left it here on the site,’ Sandy said. ‘They put all the equipment in the shed close to the house overnight.’

‘For the time being we treat this as a suspicious death,’ Perez said. ‘Keep everyone out. And I want the knife fingerprinted.’

‘But she killed herself.’ Sandy thought that was obvious: the posed position, the slit wrists. This was an overwrought lassie with a vivid imagination and a taste for the dramatic.

‘We treat it as suspicious death.’ This time Perez’s voice was loud and firm. Sandy thought it was the guilt getting to him. Hattie had asked the inspector for help and now he felt he’d let her down. Sandy couldn’t think of anything to say to make things better.

Perez looked up at him. ‘How would she know to cut herself in that particular way? Most suicides fail because they make tentative slashes across the wrists.’

‘I don’t know,’ Sandy said, almost losing his patience. ‘She was a bright lass. She’d look it up. There are probably sites on the internet.’

There was a moment of silence then Perez turned away from the trench. ‘Your father was here last night,’ he said. ‘He was at Setter. That was one of the reasons I didn’t stick around. He looked upset.’

Sandy didn’t answer that either. He knew his father would never hurt anyone and that Perez was feeling so bad about the girl’s suicide that he was looking for someone else to blame.

Chapter Twenty-four