“No, no. I was coming over anyway. Have a surgery in a short while. Listen to the people I represent. No, I just offered to pass it on as I was going to be here anyway. My pleasure.”

Corstorphine was sufficiently well-informed to know that the ACC held the post of Senior Warden or whatever ridiculous title he had, and that he was several levels up on the MP who in all probability owed his job to the murky machinations of the Lodge. So, he’d been told to pass on a message and like a good errand boy had delivered.

“I’ll let the Assistant Chief Constable know that our focus is on finding the killer before anyone else is found murdered. Thank you again for passing this on.”

“Not at all. My pleasure.” He made a show of looking at his watch, a self-important man with things to do. “Look at the time,” he said, rather unnecessarily. “Must dash. Love to the wife.”

Corstorphine watched his progress as he strutted down the road before entering the town hall, where another crowd of flunkies would be anxiously awaiting his arrival with tea and biscuits. He hadn’t been particularly bothered about his parting comment – passing his love onto a wife who’d been dead for five years. The man was, as he knew, an imbecile. The message from the ACC however, now that had been a deliberate attempt to steer the investigation away from June Stevens’ death. Why should that be? Corstorphine was never going to be a top-flight detective, he lacked the showman’s flair or the shameless appropriation of his team’s work as his own. This was why he’d been posted to a quiet backwater where nothing ever happened. Ever used to happen.

The ACC had just made three mistakes. Firstly, Corstorphine’s interest in June Stevens’ death had just been promoted to the top of his agenda. A death that looked like a cover-up at the time, which now was trying to be hushed up again with an untraceable directive from the top. Corstorphine didn’t take kindly to being told what to do, or how to do his job – not a character trait that the Assistant Chief Constable would have been familiar with, of course. He also wouldn’t know that Corstorphine would never let go of an investigation once he had his metaphorical teeth sunk into it.

The third mistake he’d made was in choice of messenger. Reginald Lagan MP might be an idiot, but he knew who to please in order to stay in power. The ACC was a powerful man, there was no doubt of that, but for the MP to be willing to become his message boy, someone even higher up must be pulling some strings. Someone who had influence over both the police as well as an MP, and that had just lit a fuse under Corstorphine’s interest in Stevens’ death.