‘What woke you up?’ Connie whispered, brushing a strand of hair back from Angela’s face. ‘Was it a noise?’ She closed her eyes, imagining the crash of a leg into the chest of drawers in a house that was supposed to have been otherwise unoccupied. ‘No. A noise like that would have had you moving immediately. He was right behind you when you woke. That’s how your head got injured.’

Sitting up, she took hold of Angela’s left leg and rolled it over the right, following with the left arm until Angela was on her side. Careful not to part the two gurneys and end up crashing to the floor, Connie moved herself behind Angela’s body until her nose was within smacking distance of the back of Angela’s skull, had there been life enough left in it to do so.

Sliding one arm over Angela’s waist, she joined the scene.

‘He spoke to you,’ Connie said. ‘He was holding you like a lover, but it was his voice that roused you. This man wanted you. He watched you and found something about you appealing. What was it? Did you remind him of someone? Maybe the two of you met previously, and you paid him attention.’

Connie lay quietly for a while, stroking Angela’s hair as she considered how the corpse and her murderer might have crossed paths.

‘The first thing he did when he had the opportunity was hold you. He’d longed to be where I am now, memorialising the moment you knew he existed. I don’t think it was someone you knew. You’d have talked to them first, tried to reason with them.’

‘I’m going to put the lights on now,’ Ailsa Lambert’s reedy voice informed her.

Connie stayed where she was and waited until Ailsa had brightened the room and come to stand over her where she lay.

‘I thought I’d seen everything,’ Ailsa said.

‘I need to figure out if Elspeth Dunwoody is alive or dead. To do that I need to know what he whispered to Angela as he held her.’

‘All right, I’ll accept that as an explanation on a preliminary basis. I’d prefer it if we could continue the discussion with you in less close contact with this poor lady.’

‘Sure,’ Connie said, shifting off the table and rolling the sheet back over Angela’s body.

‘Unusual methodology. If I saw one of our Police Scotland officers trying something like that, I’d have reported them by now.’

‘Are you after an apology, or for me to plead with you not to report me?’ Connie asked, stripping off her gloves and throwing them into the disposables bin by the door.