Chapter Twenty-Nine

The week that followed the photograph passed with a deceptive, almost ordinary calm that Callum would understand, much later, as exactly the kind of stillness that precedes something arriving fast. He spent it doing everything Melissa had asked of him — drafting, carefully, with Grant reading every paragraph twice and sending him back to verify details he’d have once simply trusted his own memory on; sitting through a long, careful phone call in which Rob confirmed, in the guarded language he now used for anything connected to this case, that the chaplaincy volunteer’s vetting file had several irregularities that a proper internal review would eventually have to answer for, whenever such a review was finally permitted to happen. He had not gone anywhere near the marina. He had told himself, each of the seven days since the car park in Inverdrum, that this was patience rather than fear, and had mostly managed to believe it.