‘Sword and sorcery.’

‘First we knew about that was when they put it in the paper. The parents again, they’d been talking to some reporter.’

Wylie held the photocopy in front of her. The headline: ‘Did Role Game Kill in Highland Gun Mystery?’ The reporter’s name was Steve Holly.

Jürgen Becker was a twenty-year-old student who lived with his parents in a suburb of Hamburg. He attended the local university, specialising in psychology. He loved role-playing games, and was part of a team who played in an inter-university league on the Internet. Fellow students said that he’d been ‘anxious and troubled’ during the week leading up to his disappearance. When he left home for that last time, he took a backpack with him. In it, to the best of his parents’ knowledge, were his passport, a couple of changes of clothes, his camera, and a portable CD player with maybe a dozen or so discs.

The parents were professionals – the father an architect, mother a lecturer – but they’d given up work to concentrate on finding their son. The story shifted into bold type for its final paragraph: ‘Now, two grieving parents know they’ve found their son. Yet for them the mystery has only deepened. How did Jürgen come to die on a barren Scottish mountaintop? Who else was there with him? Whose was the gun … and who used it to end the young student’s life?’

‘The backpack and stuff, they never turned up?’ Wylie asked.

‘Never. But then if it wasn’t him, you would hardly expect them to.’

She smiled. ‘You’ve been a real help, Sergeant Maclay.’

‘Just put that request in writing, and I’ll let you have chapter and verse.’

‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’ She paused. ‘We’ve got a Maclay in Edinburgh CID, works out of Craigmillar …’

‘Aye, we’re cousins. Met him at a couple of weddings and funerals. Craigmillar’s where the posh folk live?’

‘Is that what he told you?’

‘Was I being fed a line?’

‘Come see for yourself sometime.’

Wylie was laughing when she finished the call, had to tell Shug Davidson why. He came over to her desk. The CID room wasn’t big: four desks, doors leading off to walk-in cupboards where they kept old case files. Davidson picked up the photocopied news story, read it through.

‘Looks like something Holly made up all by himself,’ he commented.

‘You know him?’

‘Had a couple of run-ins with him. Holly’s speciality is blowing a story up.’

She took the article from him. Sure enough, all the stuff about fantasy games and role-playing was kept ambiguous, the text peppered with conditionals: ‘may have’, ‘could be’, ‘if, as it is thought …’

‘I need to speak to him,’ she stated, picking up the phone again. ‘Do you know his number?’

‘No, but he’s based at the paper’s Edinburgh office.’ Davidson started back towards his own desk. ‘You’ll find it in Yellow Pages under “Leper Colonies” …’