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something soon. Let’s hope we can get an ID.’
    McKay nodded. ‘Aye. Ideally one that means we can throw the whole case in some other bastard’s direction.’
    ‘You don’t fool me, McKay,’ Grant said. ‘That’s the last bloody thing you want.’
     
    ***
     
    Ginny Horton slowed to a halt and took a deep breath. Not bad, she thought. A good five miles at a decent pace, and she was barely short of breath. She was never going to break any speed records, but she had the endurance and tenacity to keep going for as long as it took. Story of her life, really. Lately, she’d been upping the pace on these shorter runs. At first, she’d been surprised by how much it took out of her. Now, after a few months’ practice, she was getting to the point where she could combine speed and a reasonable distance without undue effort.
    It was a glorious early summer’s evening, the sky clear, the waters of the Moray Firth a rare deep blue. She had no great expectations of the weather up here, which seemed to operate to its own, unique meteorological laws, but she tried to make the most of whatever decent weather they did get. Last summer hadn’t been too bad. Maybe they’d be lucky again.
    She walked over to one of the benches on the shoreline, and sat down to watch the play of the water on the rocks below. She’d been adamant, when they’d decided to move up here, that she wanted to live near the sea. They’d ended up here in Ardersier on the southern side of the Moray Firth. It was convenient for them both in terms of getting into Inverness, and handy for the airport when Isla had to make one of her frequent work trips south. It was a pretty enough little village with its mix of stone and white-rendered cottages. Their own house was small but comfortable, exactly the kind of place that Ginny had dreamed of living during her painful adolescence in red-brick Surrey suburbia.
    Best of all, she could enjoy this regular run along the waterside between the village and the army barracks at Fort George. Fort George was typical of this place, she thought. A fortification built in the eighteenth century to strengthen control of the Highlands after the Jacobite rising, but still a working army barracks. She would run alongside the towering orange stonework, marvelling at its sheer presence in the landscape.
    The evening was mild rather than warm, and the sweat on her body was beginning to cool her as she sat gazing out across the calm waters. Across the firth, she could see the southern edge of the Black Isle, the linked villages of Fortrose and Rosemarkie, the jutting tip of Chanonry Point. It wasn’t unusual to see dolphins playing around the point, sometimes close to this shore, but she could see no sign of them today.
    Time like this helped her clear her mind. She was happy to work whatever hours the job needed, but she wasn’t one to bring her work home. At some point in the drive along the A96 from Inverness, she’d flick a mental switch and put it behind her, preparing for her evening with Isla.
    But sometimes while she was running, her conscious mind virtually in neutral, she had ideas and insights that would never have come to her otherwise. Tonight, as she’d pounded along the shoreline, her thoughts had drifted unbidden to the Black Isle across the water and to the case she and McKay were currently investigating.
    Her mind had somehow made a semi-conscious link with the missing person case they’d dealt with the previous summer over on the Black Isle. It had been something and nothing, that case, or at least that had been Horton’s opinion. A woman with a history of doing a runner whenever life got on top of her appeared to have done another runner. There were circumstances that merited further investigation but no strong evidence that a crime had been committed. They’d looked into it, done their duty, but in the end the case had simply been left open, awaiting any reason to close it or take it further.
    McKay,