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out here. Too cold to survive in a summer blouse and bare legs.
    ‘You seen this?’ Jessie said.
    She had brushed snow and frost from the woman’s arm, to expose a hand with fake fingernails, red to match her belt and shoes. One of her nails was missing, the middle finger of her left hand, probably broken off in the fall. As his gaze shifted to her wrists, a frisson chilled the length of his spine. He knew what it was but felt compelled to ask anyway.
    ‘Some sort of bracelet?’ he tried.
    Jessie fiddled with the knotted rope, ran her fingers along its short length to a frayed end. Then she stared up at him. ‘I think you’ve got some serious shit going on up here.’

CHAPTER 5
    Jessie was still taking statements from Clive and Jayne Watkins when the SOCOs arrived and spilled from their white Transit van like students at a beach outing. Gilchrist led them to the body but the ground was too uneven, and the wind too strong, for them to erect their Incitent. They were in the process of roping off the path and slope when a black Range Rover eased in behind Gilchrist’s Merc.
    He watched the door open and a pair of green Hunter wellington boots reach for the ground, followed by the suit-clad legs of the forensic pathologist, Dr Rebecca Cooper, who had taken over after old Bert Mackie retired six months earlier.
    She gave him a warm smile as she shook his hand. ‘We must stop meeting like this,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you just ask me out?’
    ‘I don’t think Mr Cooper would approve.’
    ‘Mr Cooper wouldn’t know,’ she said, then looked beyond him. ‘What have we got?’
    Gilchrist explained his thoughts as he escorted her along the path, where she then faced the wind in that imperious manner of hers that he found attractive. Her blonde hair whipped her shoulders, long and thick with a natural curl – not tight like a perm, but loose and soft. He had run his fingers through it once, and he struggled to shift the image.
    ‘Who’s the new face?’ she asked him.
    ‘DS Janes. Transferred from Strathclyde.’
    ‘First name?’
    ‘Jessie.’
    ‘Jessie Janes.’ She almost laughed. ‘Isn’t she a bit young for you?’
    ‘Everyone’s a bit young for me these days.’
    ‘That’s what I like about you.’
    ‘That I’m becoming old?’
    ‘That you’re an older man.’ The bluest of eyes held his for a tad too long, he thought. Then she turned, and marched down the slope.
    Off to the side, Jessie closed her notebook, and Clive and Jayne Watkins departed on their unfinished morning walk, holding hands in mutual comfort, Skip nose to the ground, tail brushing the grass with renewed vigour, it seemed.
    ‘Anything of interest?’ he said to Jessie.
    She shook her head. ‘They live in Kingsbarns. Retired. Moved up from England four years ago. Why do they do that?’
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Make fun of the Scots, then when it’s time to retire, come and live among us. We should put a gate at the border.’ She raised her hand, ran it along an imaginary signboard. ‘No English welcome. Stay out.’ She chuckled. ‘Or better still. Exchange rate – two English pounds to one Scottish. That would keep ’em out.’
    ‘Got something against the English?’
    ‘1966 World Cup. You’re old enough to remember it.’
    ‘And you’re not,’ he said. ‘Which proves a point.’
    ‘What point?’
    ‘That children are influenced by what their parents tell them.’
    He thought it odd how her lips tightened – not just pursed as if silenced but white and bitter as if reining in her anger. Too late, he realised that he knew nothing of her upbringing, knew only what he had read from her Police Records, and from his call to DCI Peter ‘Dainty’ Small from Strathclyde HQ –
Reliable, rock solid. Bit of a tongue on her, but so do most women. She won’t let you down. I’d recommend her
.
    ‘Looks like I stuck my foot in it,’ he said.
    ‘Forget it.’
    ‘I would like to,’ he went on, ‘but if we’re going to