Chapter Eight

The official verdict took nine days to arrive in total, three of them spent in the numb aftermath of the funeral, and when it finally landed in his inbox — forwarded by Nair, with a covering note that read only I’m sorry, Mr Spencer, I fought this as far as I was permitted to fight it — it arrived in language so careful and so hollow that Callum, who had spent a professional lifetime learning to read the specific hollowness of official language, understood immediately that someone had decided, at some level considerably above DS Priya Nair’s pay grade, exactly what the verdict was going to say before the last piece of evidence had even finished being gathered.