‘Flowers and balloons maybe?’ ‘I think my warrant card will suffice,’ Catherine told her. They were standing at an arrival gate at Edinburgh airport, waiting to intercept Gordon Ewart after he disembarked his flight from Heathrow. Catherine had made several fruitless attempts to contact him throughout the day; he was steadfastly ignoring the messages she was leaving on his mobile, and she had been consistently rebuffed by his secretary to an extent that made her suspect the woman was under explicit instruction to do so. He would be in meetings all day, she said: that was why he was away in London. He was back down south in two days’ time, and had a full programme in between. Catherine didn’t even get offered an intentionally discouraging ‘how about a week on Thursday?’ The message was that he was incredibly important and immeasurably busy. But what was also implicit, and rather intriguing, was that he appeared to believe that if he stalled long enough, Catherine would give up and go away.
