Chapter Twenty

Melissa met him again two days later, this time at a café two streets back from the Sheriff Court in Inverdrum rather than the lay-by they’d been using — a deliberate choice, she told him, settling into the seat across from him with her coat still buttoned against the cold outside, for its distance from anywhere either of them was supposed to be seen together while a murder case involving her own force’s jurisdiction was actively being prosecuted. A café full of strangers, she’d explained on the phone arranging it, was safer than an empty lay-by precisely because nobody in a busy café ever really looked at who else was sitting in it.