‘And they’re probably right. Why do you sound so concerned?’

  ‘Because Raul and Inge are concerned, love,’ Bob said. ‘They’re family, near enough.’

  ‘Fine, but what can you do about it?’

  ‘For openers, I’m going to have a word with Comissari Roza, the Mossos officer who helped Lottie Mann when she was here a few weeks ago. I’ll tell her the story and ask her if she can have someone take another look, maybe an investigator rather than the patrol officers they assigned before.’

  ‘What if she says sod off?’ Sarah persisted.

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘God, you are good at getting your own way!’ Her eyes seemed to sparkle as she laughed, on screen.

  ‘You should know, baby,’ he shot back. ‘How are things at your end? Did Jazz and Seonaid get off to school?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the last day for both of them. I told Jazz he could stay at home if he wanted rather than catch the bus to North Berwick, especially as they finish at lunchtime, but he insisted. We’ve been speaking Spanish about the house since you’ve been away. I plan to keep it up.’

  ‘You probably need the practice more than they do,’ Bob said. ‘I know the University is effectively bi-lingual, but not all of your students are going to speak English.’

  ‘You forget, my love,’ Sarah corrected him, ‘that although I’m from New England originally, I practised medicine in a neighbourhood in New York City. My medical Spanish is plenty good enough.’

  ‘It’s got to be better than your shopping Spanish,’ he laughed. ‘Remember that time in Carrefour when you couldn’t remember the word for carrot?’

  ‘Just one word,’ she protested. ‘And zanahoria doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue does it. Speaking of shopping, is the fridge stocked in the apartment? We’ll be feeding a family of five plus Trish there, as from Sunday.’

  ‘McDonald’s will feed us on Sunday.’

  ‘Us if you like, but not Dawn. She’s far too young for a Big Mac.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her. ‘I did a late shop last night in Cort Ingles, after I dropped Raul at the station. Dawn can have a pizza; double pepperoni if she fancies it.’

  ‘Bob!’

  ‘Or failing that fish fingers.’

  ‘Now you’re talking her language.’

  Twenty-Six

  ‘How are your searches going, John?’ Jackie Wright asked.

  ‘They’re still incomplete,’ Stirling replied, ‘but so far we’re drawing a blank. There’s an Alexandra Bulloch in Orkney, another in Castle Douglas and one in Cumbernauld, but none of them are possibilities. The team are still working on it.’ He frowned. ‘Meantime,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been looking for her on social media, on all the main channels, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat etc. You know what? I’ve come across a few Sandras, but all of them are spoof pages, people pretending to be the actress who spells her name with a K not an H. Our Sandra doesn’t appear to have a social profile at all. I ran an internet search for her as well as the sites. There I had a couple of hits, but they were from press coverage of court cases, criminal trials in which she was a police witness, nothing current or anything like it. She’s virtually invisible. How usual is that these days, Jackie?’

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ she suggested, ‘but I’ll grant you, for somebody her age and stage it’s not what you’d expect.’

  ‘I even broadened the search, looking for her and Leo Speight together. He’s all over the place, naturally, even though he’s been dead for a few years, but there’s nothing in his coverage to link him to Sandra.’ He paused, smiling. ‘Her sister, on the other hand, she comes up alongside him all over the place. She actually calls herself Faye Speight on her Instagram profile. There are three users with that name, but she’s by far the most active. She’s Faye Bulloch on the others, but she still posts often about Leo; memorials on his birthday and the day he died, that sort of stuff.’

  ‘How touching,’ his colleague drawled.

  ‘Yes, but you wouldn’t say that about the posts that mention her sister. There aren’t many, but a couple of them . . . I don’t know how they survived the Facebook taste police.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Wright exclaimed. ‘Maybe print out some of those pages, John. They could be useful when we interview her.’

  Twenty-Seven

  ‘If you ask me to, Señor Bob, I will,’ Comissari Lita Roza promised. ‘I understand why my officers did not get excited when your friend complained. The incident with the fire was reported, so it was public knowledge. That being the case, we both know there are people who live for nothing more than to make mischief for others.’

  ‘Of course, and I agree that if everything was investigated, no matter how trivial, you’d be doing nothing else. But the second incident,’ Skinner said, ‘it makes this one a little different. Madrid’s about five hundred kilometres away from Barcelona, so the car incident wasn’t reported there. Yet both packages were hand delivered, indicating we are looking at a network of sorts. Even without the link to the client product, it’s worth investigating.’

  ‘There I agree with you, and so I will. I’ll assign two investigators to revisit the case. Does Señora Hoverstad or her company still have the packages that were delivered?’ Roza asked.

  ‘I’m assuming she disposed of the rat,’ Skinner chuckled, ‘but otherwise yes, hers and the one in Barcelona. I told her husband to make sure they were wrapped to prevent further contamination. As things stand they’ve only been handled by the recipients and an assistant in each office. Will you talk to the Policia in Madrid?’

  ‘Yes I will. You’re right when you say that the second incident is a significant escalation. I will take the threats seriously, I promise. Do you know if the company has any sort of security at its offices?’

  ‘Yes, I asked that. Each one’s within an office block. The owners employ security staff. In Madrid they’re ex cops: in Barcelona, I’m not so sure.’

  ‘They should be briefed. I’ll speak to someone senior in Madrid and ask that your friend’s home be put under discreet observation and the same with the Barcelona partner. I’ll have my people look at the first package. If we get anything from that, I’ll pass it on to the Policia, or get their agreement to send my team there. I’ll let you know how things develop. For now you can give your friends a little reassurance.’

  ‘Thanks, Comissari,’ Skinner said, ending the call just as his aircraft came to a halt, close to the border control area to the south of Edinburgh Airport. Normally, after customs clearance he would have been picked up by a taxi, from the area beneath the multi-storey car park; instead, he walked the short distance through the tram station to the Doubletree Hotel. Lottie Mann was waiting for him in the foyer, as she had told him in a text.

  ‘I’d have come to the terminal building if you’d wanted, sir,’ she said as he approached.

  ‘Hell no!’ he exclaimed. ‘I hate that fucking place and everything it’s become; a big engine for screwing as much cash as possible out of the travelling public. If there was another private airport in reasonable distance I would use it. Come on, let’s get a coffee. I had one on the flight but it’s worn off.’

  He found a table in the hotel foyer, and gave a quiet order to the waiter who approached them. As he withdrew, he turned to the detective. ‘So, Sandra Bulloch: that’s the biggest shocker I’ve had since . . .’ He stopped for a few seconds. ‘You know what? It’s the biggest shocker I’ve had since I was told that Sandra had left traces of herself all over Leo Speight’s bed. Do you remember that the chief constable and deputy asked me to interview her after that came to light?’

  Mann nodded. ‘Yes, I do sir, and that’s partly why we’re having this discussion. My team are operating in an information vacuum. We know nothing at all about Sandra’s life after she left the force. We don’t even know where she lived. It took us two days to identify her and that was pure luck. When she resigned from the service, her DNA was taken off the database, since it had only been there for elimination purposes. The same should probably have been done with her fingerprints but it wasn’t. There was one print left at the scene and we found it. Otherwise . . . we might never have known who she was.’

  ‘Maybe that would have been better all round,’ Skinner said quietly.

  She stared at him. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘For her sake, I suppose. Sandra was a private person with a very sad back story. She left the police under a cloud, after she held back facts from you and Dan Provan. Now she’s dead, you’re investigating and it’s all going to come out. I’m sorry for her, that’s all. I always have been, truth be told.’

  ‘She shagged her sister’s partner,’ Mann pointed out.

  ‘Ex-partner,’ he corrected her. ‘And they were due a free pass on that one. You know what Faye was.’

  ‘Yes, I do. But it’s not relevant. There’s been a murder, and it has to be investigated. Where would you look if you were me?’

  ‘You just brought her up. Faye Bulloch must be your first port of call. When are you seeing her?’

  ‘Later on today. DCC McGuire and I are going to interview her at her place. She’s still in Troon; hasn’t moved.’

  ‘Will you do it under caution?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘I’m not quite at that stage. We’ll see how it goes, how she reacts, what information she volunteers. If it becomes necessary I’ll be prepared to stop the proceedings and advise her that she has the right to a lawyer.’

  ‘She didn’t do it,’ he said, abruptly, taking Mann by surprise.

  ‘Why are you so sure of that?’ she asked.

  ‘Lottie, sororicide went out of fashion with the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s very rare, and when it does happen the majority of victims and offenders are young. If Faye was going to kill Sandra she’d probably have suffocated her in her sleep when she was a kid. Granted they didn’t like each other: I knew that before the Speight investigation. But still . . .’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘When Sandra worked for me in Strathclyde,’ he explained, ‘she mentioned Faye a couple of times, and each time she almost spat on the floor, as if the very name left a bad taste.’

  ‘Why would that be?’

  ‘I never asked; I understood the feeling. I always hated my older brother. I almost killed him once, but my dad hauled me off him.’

  ‘Hazard a guess,’ Mann challenged.

  ‘A lifetime’s experience? Or possibly . . . possibly Sandra carried a torch for Leo for far longer than she admitted to me at interview. She told me that Faye got pregnant on purpose with her first child, and that story holds up. However . . . and this is just me thinking you understand . . . Sandra and Speight got together when Faye was giving him serious grief, taking him to court. If he felt vulnerable that would have been a new experience for him. Did Sandra use that to set him up in her own way?’

  The DCI seized on his hypothesis. ‘If so, might that not have provoked Faye? Aren’t you arguing against yourself, sir?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows? You’re right, Lottie. Ignore me and keep an open mind when you see her.’ He paused as the coffee arrived and as the waiter poured. ‘How else can I help you?’ he asked, as the man withdrew.

  ‘You were pretty much the last person in the circle to see Sandra,’ she replied, ‘when you interviewed her, when Chief Constable Steele asked you to. My big problem is finding out what she’s been doing since then. My people can’t trace any recent activity or any movements; nothing at all. They can’t even find bank records. Did she say anything on that day that might point me in the right direction?’

  He shook his head, vigorously. ‘Back then? No, she didn’t. She was still in shock; I mean finding him dead, Lottie. The girl was in bits, just too tough to show it to you and Dan at the scene. She said nothing, but . . . I did. I gave her a piece of very specific advice.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘By that time,’ he continued, ‘when I interviewed her, we knew about the will, and that she was the main beneficiary of a multi-million pound estate. By that time I also knew its components, or most of them. Leo had property in the Bahamas that she was going to inherit. I suggested to her that she get the keys from the executors, at their discretion in advance of the estate being confirmed, and that she piss off there, to let her get her head back together. Charles Baxter was the property specialist in the executry team, as I recall. You might ask him if she listened to me and did that.’

  ‘He’s on the interview list, sir. I’ll raise it with him. I do know already that the house in Ayr was sold very soon after Speight’s death.’

  ‘She was always going to do that, wasn’t she?’ Skinner observed. ‘Could you live in a house where your partner died an unnatural death?’

  ‘Some people have to,’ Mann murmured. ‘I’ve known a couple of neighbourhoods where there was a suicide and afterwards the bereaved wife couldn’t sell the house for love nor money.’

  ‘It would have been different with the Leo Speight mansion though,’ he countered. ‘I will bet you it went for a large chunk above the asking price. You ask the man Baxter about that too when you see him. Not that the answer will help you trace the movements of Sandra Bulloch.’

  He paused to drain his coffee cup. Refilling it from the cafetiere, he looked at her across the table. ‘Lottie,’ he said, ‘it looks like this will be a proper investigation, one without shortcuts, where you have to rely on old-fashioned pre-computer detective work. When I lecture on that subject, my favourite analogy involves seagulls in winter, when the ground is hard and you see them standing there, like they do on my lawn in Gullane, pounding the grass with their feet to see what sticks its head out, and then harvesting it as it does. That’s what you and your people need to do, Chief Inspector. You have to keep drumming up worms.’

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘Thanks Maya,’ John Stirling said, as the tall detective constable returned to her desk after delivering her report.

  ‘For what?’ Jackie Wright asked as she approached him.

  ‘For nothing, really. DC Smith co-ordinated the trawl through the electoral register. Sandra Bulloch’s sense of social responsibility was lacking, I’m afraid. She hasn’t been a registered voter anywhere since she left the address in North Kelvinside. Nor,’ he added, ‘can I find her paying council tax anywhere in Scotland. It’s beginning to look like she really was a travelling person.’

  ‘When was the motor home bought?’

  ‘The manufacturers say that it was ordered in February last year, but it wasn’t collected until October.’

  ‘When did she actually inherit? Do we know that?’

  ‘As soon as Speight’s estate was cleared,’ Stirling said, ‘and inheritance tax was paid. Such as it was: he must have had a fucking brilliant tax adviser. The sale of the house in Ayr pretty much took care of it.’

  ‘And what did she inherit? How much?’

  ‘Property, a specific bequest of five million pounds, and thirty per cent of the residue of the estate, the other seventy going into trusts for each of his three minor children, Leonard, Jolene and Raeleen. Gordon, his older son, was eighteen when his father died. When he turned twenty-one he inherited property in London and a number of hotels.’

  Wright persisted. ‘Fine but what did her share add up to? In money?’

  ‘I’d need time and a slide rule to get it right,’ her colleague replied, ‘but it has to be at least twenty million. Possibly more, because the property element is hard to nail down.’

  ‘Could it be that we’re looking for her recent past in the wrong place. Have you thought about checking Monaco?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ Stirling replied, ‘but get me the resources. Anyway,’ he added, ‘wherever she was, she turned up dead in Irvine, and my experience such as it is, tells me that the motive for her murder and her killer can’t be too far distant from there.’

  ‘I might argue with that,’ Wright countered. ‘But there’s something else that I’ve thought about. I was going to take it to Lottie but I’ll try it on you first. Are we sure that we’re looking for the right person?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean by that, Jackie?’

  ‘Not too long ago,’ she replied, ‘a pal of mine was bereaved, in her late thirties. Her husband contracted cancer and didn’t make it. She grieved, deeply, for a year at least, until she decided that she had half of her life in front of her. She considered her options, and she talked them over with me. She’s a nurse, and retraining to become an oncology specialist was at the top of her list. I pointed out that if she did, it would remind her of Billy every single working day. “Fuck it,” I said to her. “Do something out of character: go on a singles cruise and take it from there.” She did, for a month, and came back with a new partner. She was Mrs Betty McGurk. Now she’s Mrs Elizabeth Lindsay, and she’s happy again. Sandra Bulloch could have afforded to sail round the world for a year; maybe she did and reinvented herself like my pal. Could she have become Mrs Alexandra Something Else?’

  ‘Fuck,’ Stirling muttered. ‘You’re right. Would you like to tell DS Smith to do a search of the General Register Offices in Scotland and England or will I?’

  Twenty-Nine

  Being a large lady, Lottie Mann rarely felt dwarfed by another human, but the sheer bulk of Deputy Chief Constable Mario McGuire always had that effect on her; even more so when he wore uniform, as he did, standing at Faye Bulloch’s impressive doorway.

  When it was opened, they were greeted by a man, instead of the woman they had come to interview. ‘Moss Lee,’ McGuire said, with a humourless smile on his face. ‘I take it that you’re not here as a family friend.’

  ‘I might be,’ the solicitor advocate replied, ‘but as it happens my client has requested my presence at your meeting.’ He tilted his head as he looked up at the DCC’s colleague. ‘Detective Chief Inspector now, I hear. I suppose congratulations are in order.’