Morrow was keeping out of Bannerman’s way, staying in her quiet office, following up loose threads of inquiry. She listened to the ringing, half expecting to be put through to the answerphone, but the call was answered by a light-voiced girl speaking in a sing-song.

“He-llo?” A classical music radio station played in the background.

“Oh, hello, um, my name’s Alex Morrow, I’m with Strathclyde Police, I was calling about—”

“Oh, God, Sarah! I’d forgotten for a minute, Sarah-farah, God…”

“Yeah, could I talk to you for a minute? Have you got a minute?”

“Yeah…” Morrow could hear her sitting down, turning the radio down to a murmur. “Yeah, sure.”

“Um, I really just wanted to ask about what sort of person she was.”

“Sarah?”

“Aye.”

“Hasn’t anyone told you about her? You must have talked to people who knew her…?”

“Hmm.” Morrow wasn’t sure what she wanted from her either. “Sorry, let’s start again: could I take your name and address, just for the record? All I have at the moment is that you’re Maggie’s sister—”

“Half sister. She’s my half sister.”

“OK.”

“I’m Nora, surname Ketlin. Her surname’s Moir. Different father.”

She seemed very keen to have that made a matter of record so Morrow repeated the names as if she was writing extensive notes. She wrote down Nora’s address and swapped email addresses in case anything came up later. “So you were all at school together?”

“With Sarah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, she was in my year. Not in my house, we didn’t know each other very well at school, different groups, but we got to know each other once we’d left. We were hanging around in London, wondering what to do, sort of thing. Our school sort of trained us to be wives, really, not very academic…”

“What was Sarah like?”

“A very nice person.”

Morrow dropped her pencil. “Nora,” she rubbed her eyes, “that’s all I’m hearing about Sarah—niceness. Was she really bland?”

Nora stumbled at that. “No…she’s…no, she wasn’t bland. Sarah was…”

They listened to each other breathe for a moment.

“Look”— Morrow heard Nora sit forward; her voice became low and sounded closer to the receiver—“what you have to understand is the sort of people Sarah came from: not an old family but a good one. Reserved. Well mannered.”

“Did you know she was working as an escort?”

“I did, actually.”

Morrow was surprised by that.

“She didn’t tell me, I was looking for a bookshop on her phone once and stumbled on her emails. We argued about it.”

“What did she say?”

“That she needed the money and she had no skills and she wasn’t bright but she wouldn’t marry a wanker from the City and pump him for money. She said she could stop escorting any time. If she married for money she’d have to get a bloody divorce. And this way, the money was her money. She needed it for her mum’s care—”

“She was making about three times as much as she needed for that, you know.”

“I do know. She saved a lot of it for her next life, when she stopped. She was going to move to New York and reinvent herself. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a martyr. She had lovely clothes and always traveled first class.”

Morrow found herself smiling at that. “She sounds quite ballsy.”

“No,” said Nora simply, “she wasn’t. Thing about Sarah was she was honest. She said she got that from her mother. Her mother called a spade a spade. To do with being older when she had her.”

“Did she love her mum?”

“She worshipped her mother. It was as if she was the only person in the world for Sarah, except, well…” she stopped herself. “They were really close, yeah.”

“Except who?”

“Well,” Morrow could hear her wincing, “um, she’s—”

“Lars Anderson?”

Nora tutted and huffed.

“Did Sarah make you promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise not to say?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s dead too, you know.”

“I saw that.”

“Do you think their deaths are related?”

“No. Lars was a shit.” She spat the unaccustomed word. “He didn’t give a toss about anyone but himself. I can’t see him caring if she lived or died, frankly.”

“But she loved him?”

“Really loved him. That was what was so despicable about him—he made them all feel they were the only one, that he really needed to take up space in their lives, you know, declared his love. It was a cheap trick. I told her so at the time, I said, ‘He’s a shit, Sarah, a fat old shit,’ but she wouldn’t hear me. I think she just needed someone to love and decided on him.”

“Did she take money off him?”

“No. She wouldn’t even accept jewelry. She wanted him to know that she loved him, not his money. He knew that. He was skimming money and giving it to her to hide it for him. He knew she’d never touch it on point of principle. She wanted to differentiate herself.”

“From who?”

“All of them, the other women, the families. He had two families. Not been in the papers but everyone knows. Had one filed away in Sevenoaks and another one in London.”

“Did he have kids?”

“Yeah, four that I know of.”

“Any boys?”

“Probably. I know one of them was at his old school in Scotland.”

“Where in Scotland?”

“Um, Perth, I think.”

She saw Harris watch her from the incident room as she crossed the corridor to Bannerman’s door. She knocked and bent back to catch Harris’s eye and smile at him. He didn’t smile back.

Bannerman called her to come in. He was reading a manila file incident report.

“Sir,” she said firmly, “remember the priest in Perth?”

He sighed, reluctant to discuss Perth again.

“Well,” she carried on, “Lars Anderson, the man in the iPhone photos? He has two sons. One of them is at boarding school in Perth.”

She stood back and smiled at him. Waited. She saw his eyes glaze over. He looked back at the sheet of paper in front of him.

“I want you to call the Serious Fraud Office. Get some background on Anderson.”

Background gathering was a DC’s job, a chore.

“You’re determined to ignore this.”

“Morrow, you got to ask everyone if they’d been to Perth, we’ve phoned Perth, Sarah Erroll never went to Perth, you’ve made extensive notes about what little we’ve got from the Perth lead, give it up.”

Morrow backed out and slammed the door. When she turned away she found Harris standing at the door of the incident room, watching.

A skeptical Met officer took her name and said he’d have to phone her back through the station switchboard, for verification that she was a Strathclyde police officer. He sounded very up himself, not at all collegiate, and made it clear that the information he’d be prepared to share with her was very curtailed and she was lucky to get it.

He was relieved when she made it clear she didn’t want specifics about the company. He was even happier when she said there might well be hundreds of thousands to be reclaimed from Sarah Erroll’s estate.

“So, what’s the paper trail?”

“Um,” she tried to think of a way to bullshit him and then lost the will, “what does that mean?”

“Receipts for the money, transaction notes, that sort of thing. What have you got?”

“What, like from a till?”

“Or handwritten would do.”

“Um, there’s almost certainly none. Is that bad?”

He laughed at her. “Yes, it is, if there isn’t any evidence the money can’t be recovered.”

“I see, probably why it’s there, eh?”

“You’ve got nothing?”

“Well, we’ve got sightings of them together in a hotel in New York.”

“No use at all. Can you fax over a photo of her?”

“Yeah, you got anything you can give me in return?”

“Hmm, how about records of missing funds?”

“Good—specifically chunks of euros missing from New York?”

He hesitated, she could hear a keyboard in the background. “Well, I’m going home in a minute but, straight off, I can tell you I’ve got several big euro cash withdrawals from a Manhattan bank branch?”

“Why would he do that? Why not just take the money out here?”

“Less tracking there and he knew we were watching him.”

“So New York was the easiest option?”

“Safest, probably. But he’d have to smuggle it into the UK.” He read something, she heard him whispering “let’s see” to himself. “Yeah, this account is a personal one. An expenses deposit account.”

“What does that mean?”

“Slush.”

“Slush? It’s a hell of a lot of money for slush.”

“You wouldn’t believe how much these people get through.”

“Is it like petty cash?”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“But there’s hundreds of thousands of it.”

“I know. Businessmen are emptying these accounts all over the world right now. No one in the office watches them all that closely. The amounts are peanuts to them usually so there are few safety checks. The office just tot it up every so often and make sure no one in the bank is siphoning it off. As long as he took it out consistently and admitted he did there would have been no checks at all.”

“So, with no receipts, where does that leave us?”

“Well, out of our investigations anyway. We’d like as much as you have on Sarah Erroll though, where they met, how often and so on.”

She managed to get off the phone and call Perth CID to ask about the drunken priest. She got bounced around from department to department. She knew the sound of a ricochet well enough: no one had been to see him. She was hanging on the phone listening resentfully to classical music when Harris knocked briskly and stepped in, shutting the door behind him.

He thought she was through to someone and made a big thing of signaling that he wouldn’t say anything but would just wait here until she was finished.

“I’m listening to a recording of Vivaldi.”

He looked at the shut door. “Ma’am, Bannerman wants to know what you’re doing.”

She hung up.

Harris was looking at her expectantly. Bannerman had made a tit of himself over Frankie and Joe and he was throwing his weight around the men, picking on her to make it seem fair. He was hassling the good workers, questioning everything they did. The injustice of it was infuriating. It didn’t seem to occur to him that police officers, more than office workers or insurance salesmen or any other profession, might have an innate sense of the rightness of certain things.

Harris raised his eyebrows and muttered under his breath, “You know, ma’am, you’re not the only one who feels that way. The men—”

She held her hand up abruptly. “Ah!” She’d had other people’s fights made hers before.

“Sorry, you seem a bit annoyed.”

“I’m always a bit annoyed.” She stood up. “This isn’t about Bannerman for me. I’ve hated every boss I’ve ever had.” She gathered a pen and notebook from her desk, put her handbag in her bottom drawer and made sure it clicked locked as she shut it.

Harris was still nodding when she looked up again. “I haven’t.”