Chapter Eight

The safe house sat on a quiet street outside Perth, an ordinary, unremarkable semi-detached property with damp-proof paint and a small, squared front lawn that gave onto the road to the Highlands, and Douglas Fairweather understood, settling into its small back bedroom on his first night there, that it was very possibly the safest he had felt in twenty years, and understood, in the same breath, that safety of this kind had never once, across his whole adult life, come without its own particular cost.