1

In a lay-by on the B 8044, Heather Kilbride fought to refold the map. No way was there room in the front seat of a Ford Fiesta for a steering wheel, a driver, and the Ordnance Survey’s Road Map 2—Western Scotland and the Western Isles. The thing was as tall as she was and twice as wide, and the more she flapped it around, the more it beat back like a malevolent paper bat. And this had been her idea—to forgo GPS and follow a route traced in faded pink highlighter on a map left in the glove box ten years ago. Brilliant.

She punched the map’s midsection.

A punch isn’t progress. Calum’s voice in her head. The memory of it.

Heather closed her eyes. Dropped the map. Folded her hands over her heart. Waited through sixty beats. Sixty more.

When she opened her eyes, the map was draped over the steering wheel, as though it had always meant to be helpful, letting her focus on the sign staring at her through the windscreen: Give your litter a lift—take it home. Fair enough. She wouldn’t stuff malign bits of paper out the window. Not today. She flattened the map across her lap, folded, flattened, repeated, no longer worried about crumples. A shame about the rip separating Lewis and Harris up there in the corner, but no matter. She was heading for the coast, not the isles—certainly not that island—and not that far north.

She pressed one more fold flat and judged her handiwork. A rumpled rhomboid. Gone for good were the smooth surface, compact shape, and crisp lines she’d optimistically unfolded that morning. And Calum was gone for good, too. Did that make the wad in her lap symbolic?

Heather flipped the map over her shoulder into the back seat and started the car. The Fiesta coughed and died. She counted ten heartbeats and blew her nose. “Dinnae fash, Cal. I’ve got this.”

She started the car again and pulled onto the B 8044 heading west.

Half an hour later, a gull’s-eye view opened before Heather—harbor, headland, lighthouse, sea—with rooftops and chimneys hugging the coast of blues and grays. A scene of purpose and prosperity, and even on a dreich day like this, a scene of comfort.

Her first view of Inversgail disappeared as the road wound down through the hills toward the town. Heather lowered her window and called a question to some sheep in a field. “Don’t your bums get cold sitting on a wet hillside?”

She raised the window, but imagined she heard an old ewe bleating back, “You’ll care when it’s your own bahookie you’re blathering about.”

“Aye, too right,” Heather said. That was why she’d packed carefully. And why she didn’t trust that idyllic bird’s-eye view of Inversgail. That illusion of ease and safety. She’d done her homework. She knew she’d find a decent library and local paper, pubs and coachloads of tourists, and, with luck, she’d also find her bedsit. Then there was the other wee matter—of murder.