Fleming smiled at the woman on the front desk. ‘Lot to do today,’ she said as she passed. She didn’t stop. FCAs had replaced desk sergeants, ‘for efficiency’, they claimed, though a chat with Jock Naismith had always seemed quite an efficient way of catching up with what had happened overnight. Now she got a report on her desk instead: more paperwork, less real information. Fleming sighed. She was getting more like her father all the time. And thinking of her father . . . The case had been on her mind ever since she’d been forced to leave it yesterday and she was in a hurry to get back to it. She had left the papers ready on her desk, with the second set of interviews with the Grants on top. She switched off her phone, paired them with the earlier ones, and settled down to read. Robert Grant, Ailsa’s father, had accepted her suicide unquestioningly and even after the pathologist’s findings seemed unconvinced. The words ‘some mistake’ featured – had he special reason to block an enquiry?
