Working with Karen Pirie previously had meant she’d had to ‘borrow’ the facilities at Dundee University, where the old entity, Fife Police, had handed off much of its forensic work. Presuming on that relationship again had left her in a state of envy for the facilities a campaigning head of department had acquired to service the teaching and practice of anatomy and forensic anthropology. Nobody here had to feel, as River did, that her discipline was the poor relation, the budgetary afterthought in the University of North England’s reckoning. In career terms, a move to Dundee would offer so many more possibilities. But there was Ewan. DCI Ewan Rigston of Cumbria Police, as attached to his territory as a Herdwick sheep hefted to its fell. Her feelings for him had tethered her finally to one place. Cut her travelling to the bone, turned her from a nomad to someone with roots. Transformed her from a hunter-gatherer to a cultivator of a particular pasture. She’d never stayed in one place for so long, and it still surprised her that she didn’t resent that.
