Greg could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stir as he exited the incident van, and knew that Snyder’s eyes were upon him. All he could hope was that the astute detective wasn’t able to read his blackened soul.

As he passed the roped-off area around the forensic tent, he noted the suited figures minutely examining the area and thought of all the ways he and Colin might have left their mark. As for Josh and his gang, they’d left plenty of forensic evidence with the piss and fingerprints they’d decorated their work with.

Beyond, in the woods, he could see the team fanned out among the trees. He’d been there too, alone, and in the company of Joanne. Left his own mark against the tree.

As head keeper, he could go wherever he pleased on the estate, but that didn’t mean that his lies wouldn’t follow him.

The most recent ones, and those he’d hoped he’d left in the past.

Joanne

Kath had been right. Forrigan couldn’t be seen from the track to Beanach. It was tucked in a hollow, its back against an outcrop of grey rock, its front facing slightly east of Blackrig towards the neighbouring hills.

Traditionally stone-built, long and low, with two small attic windows, it had a walled garden out front. Glancing through the gate, Joanne saw beds of flowers surrounding an overgrown patch of grass, with a wooden seat looking out over the nearby hills.

A sunny sheltered spot, where even now she could hear the lazy buzz of bees among the flowers.

She wondered what she would have thought had her parents scooped her teenage self out of London only to deposit her on some remote hillside near a village the size of Blackrig.

She would have definitely run away. Of that she had little doubt.

Why then had Ailsa’s parents brought her here? Kath hadn’t spelled out the reason for the family’s move, but Joanne had picked up a sense that something had gone wrong in Glasgow and they’d wanted to remove Ailsa from it. Had she been seeing a boy they didn’t like? Or been mixing with a bad crowd?

Who hadn’t at that age? She certainly had.

As an only child of aging parents, she’d always felt like a late mistake. One they regretted. The years between fifteen and seventeen, before she’d finally left for university, had been hell, for her and her parents. She still blamed them for it, or at least their inflexible view of the world and her place in it.

And once away, she’d never gone back for longer than a weekend. She suspected that suited them as much as it did her.