The exhaustion he was feeling must have been written across his face, because the sergeant offered to make him a coffee. Corstorphine watched him as he made ponderous progress towards the corner of the shared office that served as a kitchen, before looking again at the young girl’s picture in the photograph. Could that really be June Stevens’ daughter? Spirited away from the orphanage to Toulouse – and was Jenny Peck the same person, just some twenty years older? What if he was wrong? He massaged his temple, attempting to allay the fog of indecision. The only evidence he could bring to bear was the woman in the CCTV waving at the camera the same way Jenny had waved to him the first time they’d met, beckoning him over to her table in the restaurant. Corstorphine re-ran the recording, squinting at the screen as though that would bring the grainy image into some kind of focus. If he could only prove the girl in the photograph was Henri Dupont’s daughter, the love child of June Stevens. She would have had the motive – God knows what she had experienced after her mother’s death. She also had the opportunity to learn how to make mechanisms out of bone. Could Abigail Stevens really be Jenny Peck?

It was a long shot at best, and if his gut feeling was right then he was about to question a woman whose life had already been destroyed, who’d already paid more than enough for the harm that had been done to her. Had she been so wrong to take the law into her own hands? Corstorphine knew the orphanage abuse would never have come to light if it hadn’t been for her actions. He started searching online for a more recent photograph of Joie Dupont, eventually finding her pictured beside one of her own artworks which had sold for thousands of dollars just two years previously. He stared at the picture in shock, there was no room for doubt now.

One by one the team arrived at the station and Corstorphine told them to be ready for a briefing at 8:00. When they were assembled and waiting patiently, he took a deep breath and left his office, standing against the crazy wall.

“Morning, all.” The humour had been sucked out of the phrase. He looked each one of them in the eye – they were a loyal bunch, worried about what he had to tell them, bewildered by the deaths.

“Lord Lagan died last night as he drove back from the Inverness Ball. It very much looks like the same killer was responsible, this time using a timing mechanism to inject a lethal toxin into his neck.”

“How did they get to his neck?” The desk sergeant spoke for all of them.

“The syringe and delivery system were concealed in his car headrest. It very much looks as if she swapped headrests over whilst his car was parked up at the Strathcarron Hotel.”