Fiona swallowed. She regretted having told Mrs C and Doug about that. ‘Yes, have the police been?’

‘No, but there’s a piece in the Alyth Voice today about Lawsons, the car dealer in Main Street.’

‘Is that where Pete bought his car?’

‘Yes, you said his mate from Dundee got him onto it but he can’t have known.’

‘Known what?’

‘They’re crooks, all crooks, just been rumbled. First of all, one of the ghillies from the Glen Clova estate shopped Bill Lawson. Wait till you hear what he’d been doing.’

Fiona took a sip of coffee as Doug cleared his throat.

‘He was storing body parts of deer that the ghillie gave him, fresh carcasses, all bloody and full of gore. And he staged accidents, made it look like a driver had hit a deer, took loads of photos then got half the insurance money from the driver. Got the guys who worked for him to get weeds and stuff from down at the river to make it look real.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous!’ Fiona typed ‘the Alyth Voice’ into her Google search.

‘Strange but true. He was only found out when the ghillie shopped him as he got fed up delivering the deer that he’d shot – legally – to Lawsons whenever a gullible enough driver arrived. So, once they started investigating Old Billy Lawson, there was a lot else wrong with his books. He’d been selling stolen cars for years apparently. Thought he could get away with it in sleepy Alyth.’

Fiona gasped. ‘So Pete had no idea his car was stolen, he bought it thinking it was just a second-hand car?’

‘Certainly looks like it. The other two guys who worked for him are also up for charges as they were all in cahoots. Now they’ve just got to find out how many drivers got fraudulent insurance claims. Amazing to think there are so many dishonest folk nearby!’

‘Wow, amazing, Doug. Thanks,’ she said, clicking on the story online.

‘Mrs C said you’d be dying to hear that news. Well, I’d better go, say hi to the wee guy.’

Fiona was still beaming when she put down the phone and read the whole article. So, Pete hadn’t broken the law, he’d been duped by some criminal, in Alyth of all places. She frowned – he had taken all their savings though and there were other things unexplained, including her conversation with Debs. But at least she could delete ‘car thief’ from the list of attributes of ‘My Boyfriend the Bastard’.

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