Suddenly, gracelessly, JT slithered between them, staring at Paddy though his face was inches from hers, his eyes bright and shiny. “All right, Paddy? How are you?”

JT hadn’t managed a career as chief news reporter by being gracious or having manners. He was drawn to good stories, had an astute nose on him. Only last week he’d won the news journalist of the year award at an annual industry celebration that Paddy wasn’t invited to. He never did anyone a favor if he could possibly get out of it. She had once seen him sit at a crowded table and eat an entire packet of Polo mints without offering one of them.

“What is it, JT?” She shoved her hands into her coat pockets and pulled them out as suddenly. The fifty-quid note was still in there, where she had left it untouched since last night, crumpled in among the crumbs from biscuits and bits of gray pocket fluff. She was waiting for a blistering fit of conscience to tell her what to do, hoping that if she waited long enough the police would catch the guy and she might not have to hand it in.

“Saw your in-brief this morning,” said JT. “Did you and Billy stop there?”

“Aye, yeah, for a few minutes.”

“And the police walked away and left her with her killer in the house?”

Paddy shrugged.

“Why did they leave? Were they in a hurry? Were they called to something else?”

“Dunno.”

JT moved in close. “See anything else?”

“Nothing. It was just a domestic.”

“But the woman was bleeding when the police were there?”

“Aye.” Paddy touched her mouth. “I think she’d cut her lip or something.”

“Well, you’re wrong. She had teeth pulled out all along one side of her jaw. Then they caved the back of her skull using a hammer. Left her for dead but she wasn’t. She managed to drag herself twenty feet in four hours, out to the front door. Trail of blood all the way through the house. Found her behind the door, curled up, like she was waiting.”

Paddy cringed. “He took her teeth out?”

“Didn’t you notice?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Both McVie and JT looked at her, one gleeful, the other saddened by her incompetence.

JT slid out from between them, holding up a hand as though, regretfully, he would have to leave them alone, JT-less until the morning when his star would rise again.

She waited until he was gone. “I did so notice the blood. I just didn’t want to give anything away to him.”

But McVie wouldn’t look at her. “Guy’s a dick,” he muttered.

Kate looked out between two rotting planks of wood. She could see the cottage from here, though the drop to the loch side was so steep that she was almost invisible. A stranger, someone who had never visited before, wouldn’t know the boathouse was part of the same property. She was chewing her tongue, knowing she could gnaw it raw again if she kept it up. She stopped herself, stepping back from the rotting boards and opening her mouth wide, rolling her unnaturally pink tongue around in a wide circle.

A small yellow rowing boat hung high above the lapping water, tethered to the ceiling. The oars were fixed to the wall, everything where it should be, nothing changed in the two decades she had known it. She should sell the cottage, advertise it in the Times and sell it to a Londoner with bags of dough as a highland retreat. She had only owned it for three months but the caretaker handed in his notice and the property was already falling into disrepair. The garden was overgrown, the mint in the back had tumbled over everything else, choking all other vegetation as it crept toward the house.

She drank some more watery powdered milk out of the measuring jug and looked out through the crack again.

She had the tin of ham with her but no can opener. Stupid. She needed a bath as well and hadn’t even turned on the immersion heater before she took sudden stomach-churning fright and, grabbing what she could, had run out of the cottage and come down here to hide. She had brought the jug of reconstituted milk. It tasted nasty but she drank it down like medicine for thirst. It was good but not what she needed. Even knowing that she was about to give in made her shoulders relax away from her ears, her face soften, her outlook calm.

She put the jug down carefully and took a flat silver box from her handbag. It had a secret compartment in the side and she stroked it with her thumb, reminding herself of all the good times. Looking around for somewhere to sit, she chose the big orange plastic box they kept the life jackets in. She sat down, wiggling backward one buttock at a time, imagining how pretty she looked while she did it. She smiled as she opened the box.

“Fucking hell almighty fucking shit god.”

It was all gone. Every grain. Even the corners were empty and she couldn’t get in there with her spoon. She must have hoovered it up with a note. She didn’t like that. The spoon was the mark of a lady. Sad addicts used notes. She tried to think who else had been there so that she could blame it on them but she had been alone for days and days.

Angry and disappointed at her lapse in manners, she wiggled off the orange chest, the heels of her pumps landing on the wooden deck with an emphatic clack-click. All sense of danger was lost now that she had promised herself relief and been denied it. She walked quickly along to the door and pulled it open without even listening for cars or people outside, her heart skipping a beat when she realized what she had done. She paused and heard exactly nothing. The water lapped against the shore outside. Wind ruffled the trees. Stupid.

Hurrying and breathless, heart racing, Kate scuffled sideways down the steep incline to her car parked at the water’s edge. She fitted the keys in and opened the boot in a single, graceful motion. She smiled down at it.

The bag of coke was as big and full and welcoming as a freshly plumped pillow.

Working carefully, her hands suddenly steady as a surgeon’s, she unpeeled the tape from the top seam of the bag and dipped her snuffbox into it, scooping, overfilling it so that the gritty powder spilled over the sides. She was being anxious and greedy about it. That was very sad addict. She poured a third of the powder back into the pillow and snapped the snuffbox shut again, reapplying the tape to the open wound, smoothing the edges down. She couldn’t stand the thought of the pillow coming open during a drive and her not knowing until it was all blowing out of the back and gone.

He had left a lot of tools in there, heavy-duty things for heavy work. She wondered what he needed such things for and why he needed to hide them in her car before the familiar trap door shut in her head. He did a lot of odd things. Men who made money like he did couldn’t go about explaining themselves all the time, silly girl. None of my business.

She shut the boot, holding her snuffbox tightly as she tiptoed back up the muddy slope and along to the boathouse. She sat the snuffbox on the orange box and opened it, pulling the spoon out of the little compartment on the side, scooping a single portion for one nostril and breathing it in like powdered oxygen.

Her head rolled back on her slim neck, her eyes tickled. The first spoon took the edge off the world, restarted her heart so that she could hear it pounding and nothing else. The second spoon would give her the buzz and bring the noises and colors of the world alive again, but she lingered between the cold of the deep water and the ragged heat of the dry shore for a moment, thinking of nothing, remembering nothing, imagining herself nowhere but here, present in the moment and content to be there.

She didn’t even need to open her eyes to fill the second spoon and find it with her nostril. The cocaine fired her up, making the blood too warm, lubricating it so that her brain slipped its moorings and slid sideways, crashing into the wall of her skull. She collapsed onto her side, her blond hair fanning out around her head, her legs bent and to the side, perfectly parallel with one another in a symmetry she would have found pleasing. A trickle of dark blood ran from her left nostril, crossing a white cheek and disappearing into her yellow hair.