The Pitlochry team had left, none of them impressed by his delay in spilling Margaret Pargiter’s secret. He feared he might soon be back in uniform. The previous evening he had met a friend from schooldays, Olly Norman, who was doing well in the Foreign Office. Years ago, he had introduced Olly to hot, spicy curries, while Olly had organised rite-of-passage, under-age, drinking sessions. Out on the town, they had rolled back the years, and, at mid-morning, Baggo still had a sore head and a churning gut. He wondered if Olly felt much better; as a schoolboy, he had always been the last to throw up. Baggo’s thoughts kept returning to Cilla Pargiter. He sensed something about her that was good. It could not have been a coincidence that she happened to be driving along Bayswater Road just after Robertson was killed, so, despite Margaret’s certainty that she did not, she must have known the identity of her father. But, despite the evidence that was building against her, he could not believe that she was Crimewriter, or that she was capable of firing a nail gun into her father’s back then scraping a message on his forehead.
