Morrow stopped at the door to the remote viewing room to watch Donald Scott before she went in to speak to him. On screen he looked perky and restless; he had been there for a few hours now. He had eaten some biscuits, drunk sugary tea and seemed revived, knowing the interview was coming and he’d get home soon. He sat looking across the table at Harris, his briefcase on the floor, his hands clasped on the table as if he was about to start a negotiation.

His suit was new and smart, charcoal gray wool, his shirt clean. Smaller than she remembered from the kitchen, he was neatly put together, tighter, but she supposed the shock had scattered him.

The viewing room was empty, everybody busy downstairs, collating the door-to-doors, retracing Sarah’s trip to New York from the documents and the receipts in her bag, mapping her life from the mobile phone. No one was expecting anything interesting to come out of the interview with the person who found the body.

She turned out the lights in the viewing room and shut the door on the gray glow of the screen, straightening her clothes before she set off for the interview room around the corner.

Her hand stroked her stomach and she smiled faintly to herself, allowing herself another stroke and a smile before she set off. Four months pregnant and no miscarriage and the scans said both were growing and all was well. She felt happy, content for them all three to stay here together forever on this cusp of disaster and worry and sleeplessness.

She looked again at the green floor, at the scuffed walls of the corridor where terrified and half-mad men and women had been dragged to interview rooms, angry, sad, kicking against officers, pathetic and passive or swearing revenge. The walls were lined with grief and fright and worry and she felt suddenly that she might be the only person in the short history of the building to find such a measure of absolute contentment there.

Knowing how few of these moments there might be, she shut her eyes, committing it to memory, before she blinked away her mood and moved on.

When she walked in and greeted Scott he stood up, formal and polite, smiling, as if noting the details of the day for the story afterwards. He was a frustrated criminal lawyer, Morrow suspected. The lawyers they dealt with were the rock stars of the profession, had interesting lives, knew tasty characters, had stories to tell at parties. Conveyancing and executory lawyers like Scott were heroes to no one except the firms’ accountants.

She put the cassette tapes in the machine and turned it on, told it who was here, the date and time and gave Scott a prompt for the events of the morning.

Scott looked at the table top, stroked it carefully with the edge of his hand as if sweeping away crumbs, and began to speak in a strange, distancing form of legalese:

“This morning, at nine thirty, I returned to my office, on time, to await the arrival of Miss Sarah Erroll. I removed my overcoat, spoke to a colleague, Helen Flannery. Further to this, I entered her office on a matter irrelevant to this matter and returned to my office—”

Morrow rolled her eyes rudely and interrupted him: “What was she coming to see you about?”

But Scott wasn’t to be put off. “We were meeting for the determination of two matters: primarily for Sarah Erroll to be a signatory in the finalization of her mother’s estate settlement. Secondly, for her to authorize my firm to handle the sale of Glenarvon—”

“The house?”

He brightened. “Yes. The house. Yes. Yes. It was in furtherance of these matters—”

“‘Finalization of her mother’s estate settlement,’ what does that mean?”

His eyes slid around the table top, his mouth contorting at the edges. “Just signing some papers—”

“What papers?”

“Authorizations.” He smiled, patronizing, and explained, “It’s a technical term.”

“Yeah.” She looked hard at him. “What does that technical term mean?”

“In what sense?”

“Don’t be slippery with me, Mr. Scott, what was she signing?”

“Finalizing an account. Further to this—”

“Paying a bill?”

“Further to this—”

“Shut up.”

Scott looked a little stunned. Next to her Harris shifted on his buttocks eloquently. He was right. They’d left him too long and he’d prepared for his interview. “OK,” she tried to reset the tone, “Mr. Scott: this is a murder inquiry, I’m expecting your cooperation. All this ‘further to this and that,’ you’re making it sound as if you have something to hide.”

He looked very small suddenly. “I have nothing to hide.”

“You saw the state of the woman. We need to find who did this very quickly. They could do it again, d’you understand?”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry.” She sounded formal and blunt and not sorry at all. “For the benefit of the tape could you say that rather than just nodding?”

“Yes,” he said obediently.

“How long were you waiting in the office before you set off for the house?”

“About forty minutes.”

“After forty minutes you were concerned enough about it when she didn’t turn up that you went all the way from the city center to Thorntonhall to find her?”

“It’s not that far. It all gets billed to the client.”

“You went looking for her to pay a bill and were going to bill her for that too?”

“It’s common professional practice.”

Morrow looked hard at him. “How much was the bill for the settlement of her mother’s estate?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’d have to look it up.”

Morrow smiled. She had a knack for smoking out lies. She could read a subtext as well as she could read a newspaper and she knew that spontaneous insistence was a virtual double negative. She sat back and looked at Scott and noted the glint of sweat on his forehead, the rapid blinks.

“So,” she leaned forward and smiled, “to recap: you were waiting for forty minutes with the papers in front of you and you don’t know how much it was for?”

He didn’t answer.

She whispered, “I can find out.”

Scott smiled unhappily. “Eighteen thousand.”

“Eighteen grand? That’s a lot of driving back and forth.”

“Not really.”

“When my mum died it didn’t cost anything.”

He smirked, supercilious, looking at her cheap nylon-mix suit jacket. “Well, no offense, but it’s contingent on the size of the estate.”

“I see.” She touched her lapel with her fingertips, feigning defensive. “I happen to like this suit.”

He blushed, uncomfortable at having the unspoken answered aloud. His own suit was expensive and his shirt looked professionally starched. She wondered at him going to all that trouble for a meeting with a client in his office.

“So, do you get a commission on the estate?”

“Commission?”

“A cut,” explained Harris, “like, if you worked at Comet?”

Morrow smiled but Scott looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand the reference to the cut-price electrical shop.

She pressed him. “You don’t shop in Comet?”

He mimed a thought. “I don’t really think I have…”

She watched closely. “You’ve never driven past a shop with a big black banner and yellow writing that says ‘Comet’? They’re everywhere.”

“There’s a picture of a comet above the writing,” added Harris.

“Well, we tend to go to John Lewis.”

Scott was pointedly trying to tell her something about himself, something that mattered to him and it wasn’t that he didn’t read shop signs while he was driving.

She ignored it. “She was planning to sell the house?”

“Yes.”

“Her family have lived there for a hundred, hundred and fifty years. That must be quite a wrench.”

“I suppose.”

“Was she selling it to pay your bill?”

Scott came out of his corner fighting. “Look, I resent the implied suspicions being mooted here. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was a difficult estate to manage, but all of the expenses are documented and verifiable. Her mother needed around-the-clock care. That’s very expensive as I’m sure you can imagine.” He let them sit with that for moment, as if it would take a thirty-second pause for them to comprehend the concept of things being expensive.

Harris sat forward. “Mr. Scott, things being expensive is just about all we can imagine.”

The two of them smiled and Scott feigned confusion again. Morrow found it an interesting tactic. Telling.

“Yes,” he said, when the moment had passed, “it was Sarah’s sole aim to meet her mother’s desire to stay in Glenarvon and die there, which she did. I wasn’t tricking money out of Sarah, I had the greatest admiration for her. She was an amazing young lady.”

Morrow watched his face. “Did she live off family money?”

“There was none,” he said, seeming sad for Sarah.

“None?”

“I’m afraid it had been a sizable estate but the three generations before were rather feckless. True what they say: we can’t choose our ancestors…” He smiled at that, as if it was a pleasing cliché they had all employed at one time or another when referring to their own diminished estates in the colonies.

“What’d she live off then?”

“Sarah had to work, I’m afraid.”

Harris affected a mock gasp.

“What did she work at?” smiled Morrow.

“Financial management. Gave pensions advice and did consultations on investments.”

“For a company?”

“No, she was a consultant.”

“Who for?”

“Big companies.”

“Mm.” Morrow felt suddenly very tired. “I’d like to ask more about that but you’ve been so bloody long-winded, I’m afraid to ’cause I want to get home tonight.”

Scott smiled at that, taking the suggestion that he was combative as a compliment. It wasn’t meant that way. It was difficult for police and lawyers not to get on, they shared so much of the same world view, but Morrow gave it another try: “Were you tempted to rip her off over the carers for her mother as well?”

But Scott had unilaterally decided they were getting on well. “I handled the carer payments and most of the arrangements, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

The twins were tickling her lungs, just gently, and she found herself smiling. Back in the real world Scott smiled back and she had to make it look deliberate. “Was it all through the books?”

“Absolutely: Carers Scotland is a certified company, all the payments and payroll done through the books. It all came out of the same account and she paid it all faithfully.”

“We’ll be looking at those accounts.” She meant to sound threatening but she was still warm from her dip into the other world.

Scott nodded. “You’re welcome to. I’ll happily make them available to you. And the bills for the settlement of the estate, if you wish. I have nothing to hide.”

“Yeah, fine.” She took a breath and whipped the carpet out from under him. “Sarah had about seven hundred thousand quid in cash hidden in the kitchen.”

“Maybe nearer six and a half,” muttered Harris.

She watched Scott pale. He struggled to speak. “In the kitchen?”

“Yeah. On a false shelf under the table.”

He looked to the right, thought his way back into the room. “The small table…seven hundred thousand?”

Harris chipped in playfully, “Possibly six and a half.”

But Morrow was serious. “You didn’t know she had that kind of money?”

“No. I didn’t know that.”

“Where do you think it came from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why didn’t she put it in the bank?”

Scott swallowed hard. “Don’t know, I don’t know, maybe she was avoiding income tax on it? She was careful with income tax.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, we had conversations, professional conversations about income tax…”

“Like what?”

“Oh,” he shook his head and she knew he was going to be vague about it, “just, you know, what was deductible, what was an allowable expense, stuff like that.”

“See, that’s odd.” Morrow flicked through her notes. “Because as far as we can gather Sarah had never paid income tax.”

He considered it for a moment, sitting very still, and then shook his head. “No. That’s wrong.”

“I can assure you it isn’t. We used her passport number and got her national insurance number from it. She wasn’t even registered.”

“No, sorry, but she did pay income tax. She paid me to give her advice about income tax, specifically about what was and wasn’t deductible from income tax. She sat in front of me in the office and listened for forty minutes just a year ago. If she had told me she wasn’t paying income tax I’d have been obliged to report her…” His voice trailed off as the alternative explanation occurred to him.

“Hmm.” Morrow nodded at him. “Who initiated that meeting?”

“I did. I said, you must ensure that you are maximizing your income. She had so much to pay out for the care plan, for her mother. She didn’t understand taxation, she said. Bewildering, she said it was. Why would she…?”

“She was a financial consultant who didn’t understand income tax?”

He could see how stupid it seemed now. Sarah had let him lecture her, paid him to lecture her about income tax to stop him prying into her affairs. “She sent me a Fortnum’s hamper to thank me for all my help…the money in the kitchen was in cash?”

“In euros,” she said, watching his face to see if he registered the significance. It didn’t. “We may have missed her tax records, she could be under another name. Did she use any other names?”

“No.”

“Never married…?”

“No.”

“Why would she not bank the money?”

Scott had paled. “Dunno,” he said, looking distant.

“You look worried.”

He cringed. “Maybe she knew something we don’t know?”

“About the financial situation? What could she know? That we’re all doomed? It’s not a secret.”

Scott looked genuinely haunted. “Sarah, she knew people, a lot of people, she gave me tips sometimes…”

“Like shares tips?”

“No, no, no, deals. Money deals, buildings going up, where to buy flats for resale, things like that.”

Morrow was looking at his mouth. The accent was so well hidden she had missed it until now. She mouthed the give-away word to herself. “Dee-uulz,” working class, South Sider. Not deellz, not middle class, not the world he professed to be of.

“Dee-uulz,” she said, watching his expression wilt as he realized he’d given himself away. “Mr. Scott, where is it you’re from?”

“I live in Giffnock.”

“No,” she said carefully, “where is it you’re from. Where did your parents live when you were born?”

“South Side.” He blinked.

Morrow cocked an ear. “Priesthill?”

“No,” Scott said carefully, “Giffnock.”

“Aye,” she nodded, “Priesthill.”

He sat back, his mouth twitching with disgust. “Giffnock,” he said quietly.

She put a consoling hand on the table. “Listen, we won’t tell anyone, ye don’t need to lie to us.”

He chewed his cheek unhappily and Harris added, “We can find out…”

“Kennishead high flats,” he said quietly. They would have laughed at him but his shame was so raw that it took the fun out of it. “What’s that to do with anything?”

“What university did you study at?”

“Glasgow Uni Law School.”

Morrow nodded again. She’d been to the Law School to interview someone once. If she’d been a student there she’d have lied about her background too. “Sarah was as posh as you can get, wasn’t she?”

He blinked defensively at the table top, adopting his posh voice again. “As I say, she was a well-bred young lady.”

Morrow watched discomfort and conflict ripple across his face, as if his idea of himself was melting. “Sarah asked for you specifically?”

“Yes.”

“D’you think she knew you were a bit impressed by how posh she was?”

“I was always respectful—”

“No, no: d’you think she spotted you passing for white? Knew she could intimidate you?”

Scott sat back in his chair and glared at her. His eyes flicked to the cassette tapes whirring in the recorder and he narrowed his eyes and mouthed at her—fuck off. A criminal lawyer would have known not to do that.

Morrow looked hard at him. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Scott, could you just repeat what you said for the benefit of the tape?”

“Didn’t say anything,” he smirked.

Slowly Morrow raised her hand to the corner of the room. He followed the trajectory of her finger and froze when he saw the red light on the camera.

Morrow leaned across the table to him. “Did Sarah Erroll seem bright to you?”

“No,” he told the camera quietly, “not really.”

“Violent?”

“Violent?” Still looking at the camera. “God, no.”

“Talk to me, please, Mr. Scott.”

He turned his remorseful face to her but his mind was on the watcher. “Sarah was harmless. Horsey.”

“We found a taser gun in her house disguised as a mobile phone. The initial forensic traces suggest she carried it in her handbag.”

He forgot the camera then. “A taser gun? What, like an electric shock gun?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Nine hundred thousand volts,” said Harris and left it hanging in the air.

Scott shook his head at the table. When he spoke his voice came from the high flats, “I’d her down as a diddy.”

Morrow watched him, reading his confusion, seeing him rerun every meeting with Sarah Erroll, looking for clues, wondering if he could have known. She watched him and saw yet another person lose sympathy for Sarah Erroll.

She watched him until a tiny heel, no bigger than her thumb, karate-kicked her heart and stole her away from the world.