The sausage aroma followed her down the stairs. Rhona tried not to picture the scenario Sean had just pitched her. No, she thought. We’re over the porridge phase. Please God.

Crossing the park in spring sunshine, she noted that the devastation of Storm Birka had almost totally disappeared, council teams busy loading the remains of the debris onto pickups.

She found herself looking for the ancient yew tree, a player in an earlier case, wondering if it too had survived the storm. She almost veered off the walkway to check, but stopped herself in time.

There were some memories better not stirred.

‘Yay, you’re here,’ Chrissy called when Rhona arrived. ‘How did it go with Sean last night?’ she said with a big smile. When Rhona didn’t answer, Chrissy added, ‘Look, I’m not getting any at the moment and I can’t ask Mum about her love life, so I’m left with you.’ She assumed a crestfallen expression.

Rhona succumbed. ‘He wanted to serve me breakfast, but I declined because I didn’t want to do you out of a job.’ She looked around, realizing to her dismay that there was no sign of the paper bag, nor the smell of breakfast.

Chrissy gave her a studied look. ‘That’s a shame.’

‘Chrissy,’ Rhona said threateningly.

Her assistant’s adopted innocence should have warned her.

‘Sean called me. Said you were keen to get back on the porridge.’

‘I’ll kill him.’

Chrissy sighed. ‘That voice of his would persuade me to do anything.’

‘Find your own Irishman, then,’ Rhona said.

‘He’s offered to introduce me to his cousin when he’s next over from Dublin.’

Rhona wondered what else they’d been plotting behind her back, but the only thing she was worried about at the moment . . .

‘The rolls are in the microwave,’ Chrissy informed her. ‘For a forensic scientist, you’re very easily fooled, Dr MacLeod.’

Over breakfast, Rhona gave a brief update on the previous day’s autopsies and Dr Sissons’s conclusions on the deaths.

‘I like it when we’re right,’ Chrissy said. ‘Oh, I almost forgot, a preliminary report’s back on the vomit we sampled at the second locus. It doesn’t look like a match to the stomach contents of any of the victims.’

Might it have come from the perpetrator? Rhona mused on that briefly.

It wasn’t unknown for someone to kill on the spur of the moment, only to be so shocked at what they’d done that they were sick. The killings in the arena had been premeditated, so that seemed unlikely.

Chrissy was thinking, her brows knitted. ‘We’ve judged the deaths to be around three to five days before the ship was boarded and we know that you can’t officially judge the age of vomit, only what it contains.’ She halted there to look at Rhona. ‘Might it be more recent than that?’