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too.’
    ‘Anything else on Scott?’
    ‘They’ve just sent the basics. I’ll see what I can get off the PNC though our last contact with her was more than ten years ago, so I’m not hopeful there’ll be much. Probably worth doing some digging. Birth certificate and any other documentation we can find. Any relatives locally. Anything we might have on file. Assume she probably went to the Academy. We can see if they’ve got any details on her family and so on.’
    Horton smiled. ‘This is what you live for, isn’t it, Alec? The chance to get your teeth into a proper case.’
    ‘Too right, lass, too right. Better than some wee scrote stealing knickers off the line in the backstreets of Inverness.’ He leaned forward in his chair, chewing enthusiastically on his gum. ‘My advice is to make the most of it.’
     
    ***
     
    ‘So what about that woman last year?’
    ‘What woman?’
    They were in the small garden at the side of the Plough Inn in Rosemarkie, trying gamely to make two Cokes last the afternoon. Greg was eighteen now and so in theory could have had a beer, but he was driving, and these days there was no point in risking even the smallest amount of alcohol. She’d be eighteen in just a few more days, and generally got away with ordering alcohol when she was with Greg. But the truth was that both of them actually still preferred Coke though Greg would never have admitted this to any of his male friends.
    ‘You know the one. The one who went missing. She did some cleaning for your dad.’ Greg’s dad was a farmer and owned a stretch of land between here and Cromarty. He still did some dairy farming but there was no money in that anymore, so he’d gradually diversified. He’d built a cluster of upmarket holiday chalets on the hillside with views over the Firth and then more recently had opened a farm shop selling produce from other local farmers. One way or another, he managed to make a decent living for himself. ‘We chatted to her a few times.’
    ‘What about her?’
    ‘Well, she went missing. Maybe it was her.’
    ‘Maybe what was her?’
    ‘Christ, Greg, you can be thick sometimes. I mean, maybe it was her up at the Clootie Well.’
    ‘It wasn’t. I saw her face, remember?’ Greg blinked and took a sip of his Coke, his expression suggesting that, for his own part, he’d rather forget.
    ‘I know. But dead people look different, don’t they?’ She thought she’d read that somewhere. It sounded the kind of thing that could be true.
    ‘Do they? I don’t know. But I’m sure it wasn’t her. Anyway, the police are bound to have followed that up, aren’t they? They were all over it at the time.’
    ‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ Kelly said. ‘Probably wouldn’t even have occurred to them to link the two.’
    Greg batted away a huge seagull intent on stealing any scraps of discarded food that might be lying around. The cawing of the gulls was an unremitting backdrop to their conversation. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t her.’
    ‘Well, maybe she’s another one then. Maybe we’ve a serial killer on our hands.’
    ‘What was her name, anyway?’ Greg asked, partly to change the subject. He still hadn’t quite recovered from the shock of stumbling across the body. The word had got out among their mates over the last couple of days as the story hit the media. Both he and Kelly had been interviewed, briefly and over the phone, by some local journalist. Neither had had much to say but that hadn’t stopped the journalist making up some suitably juicy quotes. The two had become minor celebrities among their circle of friends, but Greg was hoping the glamour would soon fade.
    ‘Lizzie something, wasn’t it?’ She paused, thinking. ‘Hamilton? I liked her. She was a good laugh.’
    ‘My dad thought she did a runner because she owed people money.’
    ‘Did she?’
    ‘I don’t know. It was just a theory. But the police didn’t seem all that interested. They must have thought