‘Cammie said that when they took’m away he wiz screamin’ that he was innocent, had nothin’ to do with it and they got the wrong guy, and that this was a government conspiracy to persecute him for his beliefs. But then they all say that, don’t they?’

Which told Grace that Macleod and Coull were probably still down there in the austere, windowless interview room, working on grinding a confession out of Geoffrey Watkins. ‘To be continued, I suppose. Thanks for filling me in, Pete. Appreciate it.’

‘Hey, no problemo. You want a cup of the shits? I was just on my way.’

‘No, I’m good.’

‘Whatever you say, Cap’n. Gotta rush. See ya.’ Finnigan sauntered off, whistling a cheery tune.

When Finnigan was gone Grace went back to her pile of work, but any faint hope of being able to get any of it done was now dashed. She leaned back from the desk and gazed out of the window at the grey skies over Fort William and the snow-capped hills in the distance and tried to get her thoughts in order.

Whichever way she tried to look at it, the Watkins arrest just didn’t make sense to her. The logic worked, as far as it went: Watkins’ history of ideologically inspired thuggery loosely explained the motive for the attack, and certainly nobody could say the guy didn’t have a violent streak. But the more Grace thought about it, the more she doubted that Macleod and Coull had anything solid to pin on Watkins. There were just too many boxes left unticked to convince her.

Casting her mind back to the meeting between Macleod, Coull and Boonzie McCulloch, she remembered how quick her superior officers had been to dismiss the notion that the assault on Ewan and his business partner’s drowning were somehow connected, implying that Ewan’s suspicions about Ross’s death, and the involvement of the poacher, were no more than a tall tale. As though they were trying to give Boonzie the brush-off by discrediting that whole line of enquiry. Yet just moments later they’d been expressing a particular interest in the gold coins that Ross Campbell had somehow come by, and asking Boonzie what he knew about where Ross might have found them. The mention of the coins had caught Grace’s ear at the time, though it hadn’t meant anything to her – nor to Boonzie, as she’d later confirmed with him. Macleod and Coull had tried to act all casual, but their questions had been none too subtle and Grace had thought she detected an underlying sense of anxiety in their tone and manner. The real bullshit note had sounded when Boonzie had challenged Macleod and Coull about it, and they’d shut him down by saying the matter was related to a separate investigation.