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were still sections of the road where two cars would find it difficult to pass each other, and that was even before accounting for all the tourist caravans and coaches pootling up the way in summer. Still, none of these problems were technically her responsibility, and hearing about them was keeping her from doing anything productive with the day. ‘This might be better put to the council instead of me,’ Morag would gently suggest. ‘Or to your MSP .’
    Her suggestion was part of a well-worn script. The constituents knew as well as she did that an MP could do nothing about the roads. They were simply blowing off steam. Morag was of the opinion that things in Cameron Bridge would never improve. Shops stayed closed, the road stayed riddled with holes and the occasional badly placed patch of tarmac, and the outlook stayed as grey as the place they inhabited. The economy was always worse than expected, the jobs fewer. The prospects for anyone born and raised in Cameron Bridge, save perhaps for Morag herself, were not so bright.
    This had not always been the case. Only a few decades ago Cameron Bridge was busy with shoppers, drawing people in from all over the Highlands as far away as Cape Wrath and Stornoway. The forestry plantations provided valuable jobs – jobs that many young men who entered the business assumed would be for life. As the plantations came to maturity, though, the forestry companies suddenly decided that the lumber wasn’t worth the cost of cutting it down. The sawmills closed, then the paper mill. In a short time the town went from being a regional hub to a struggling backwater.
    Much the same story had played out all over the Highlands, but Cameron Bridge, compared to some other towns that were quicker to adapt to the new service economy, failed to recover. The poor roads and infrequent trains were only one part of a larger problem. Chain shops that had invaded high streets elsewhere in the country caused their fair share of problems, but even they wouldn’t touch Cameron Bridge. Foreign investment schemes kept rents in the empty shops as high as a tax scam, offsetting profits in more popular parts of the Highlands. The high street was a mix of boarded-up fronts and charity shops. Most people in the area did their shopping online these days.
    ‘It’s the incomers is what it is,’ the woman said. ‘No respect for our way of life here.’ Morag nodded with feigned sympathy. Most likely by ‘incomers’ the lady meant families who had been in the area only two, maybe three, generations. Even those too young to have ever experienced a war talked about the Clearances and 1745 like they were yesterday.
    The body found in Raasay though – now that was real news. Like many isolated Highlands towns Cameron Bridge had some local crime, though more usually drug related. The exposed West Coast was a perfect location for traffickers to smuggle in contraband, and the local police were little more than Keystone Cops in her opinion.
    But a body. She was going to have to see about this.
    Morag Munro drummed her fingers on the desk as her mind wandered. The drumming was a bad old habit that had started in boring lessons at school. It continued through insultingly basic lectures at university, worsened in her years on local committees and councils in the Highlands, and had since reached something of a frenzy in the tedious time-wasting that comprised ninety per cent of her working day since being elected as MP.
    By now she hardly even noticed when she was doing it. The same could not be said of anyone who saw her at work or on television. Early in her career, when the political press corps had picked up on it, she laughed it off as ‘nervous energy’. As opposed to what it so often was: a thinly veiled desire to throttle whomever was talking.
    And while Morag had never quite been able to break herself of the habit, she did learn to not be so loud and obvious while doing it. ‘The council are useless,’ the old