Stop it, she told herself. Liam had laughed at the idea of a job with his non-father and that was unlikely to change – or was it?

Edward had money and power. Who knows what he would do to get what he wanted? Fiona, his wife and the power behind the throne, immediately came to mind. Edward would never have made that move at the university dinner were Fiona not aware of it.

Maybe it was Fiona she had to worry about?

The buzzer went as Rhona was pulling on her clothes and she headed through to answer it.

‘Great to have you back, Dr MacLeod,’ Stevie, her pizza delivery bloke, announced. ‘I thought you’d given up on us or moved away. Or even worse, you were sticking to curry and Chinese,’ he added with a grin.

‘Not when you make the best pizzas around here,’ Rhona told him.

Carrying the box through to the sitting room, she lit the gas fire. By then the scent of hot food had brought Tom through to take up his place next to her on the sofa.

While she ate her pizza, Rhona continued to contemplate what the reason for Edward’s interest in Liam might be. And then a thought struck her. Could it have anything to do with Jonathan, his son with Fiona?

Edward had made it plain on a number of occasions that Jonathan was a disappointment to him. His manner of response to her enquiry at the dinner had echoed that, when he’d muttered something about art school, then shifted the focus. He’d been furious when Jonathan had chosen not to go to university . . . unlike Liam.

God, what was he thinking? That he could somehow choose Liam as the favoured one? She could almost hear him at the press conference. How he’d found his son again and was so pleased to put things right between them.

Get a grip, Rhona told herself as she went through to the kitchen to fill up her wine glass. Liam had too much sense to take anything like that on board.

Heading back through, she took her laptop with her. The only thing that would stop her thinking about Edward was concentrating on work instead.

Former DI McCreadie had given a pretty full picture of the previous investigation at the strategy meeting. His talk had now been made available online for those involved in the investigation, together with the transcribed notebooks he’d handed over to the police. Putting her concerns about J. D. Smart and his actual role in the investigation to one side, Rhona settled down to read the material.

Her first impression of the contents of the notebooks was that McCreadie, or J. D., wrote the way he spoke. It was as though you were right there with him in the interviews, sharing his thoughts and his observations, especially on the emotional impact of dealing with a child’s abduction. She wondered if McCreadie had ever been married or had had kids of his own. Was that why this particular case haunted him so?