Owed Ground

I

The body was in a flat in Maryhill. Second floor, end of the corridor, door standing open because the lock had been drilled out six months ago and never fixed.

DS Rab Gillies caught the call at 11:40 PM. He drove from Partick through rain that came sideways off the Clyde and parked on a kerb littered with broken glass. The close smelled of damp concrete and something sharper underneath — the chemical smell of a meth cook two floors up that Uniform had been pretending not to notice since August.

The dead man was in the kitchen. Face down. Arms at his sides. One slipper on, one off. Fifty-three years old. Alistair Rennie. Dead approximately fourteen hours.

Gillies crouched beside the body. No blood. No visible trauma. Mottled purple where the skin pressed against the linoleum. The kitchen was clean — not scrubbed, just the ordinary clean of a man who lived alone and kept his surfaces wiped. A mug on the counter with a teabag still in it. The kettle was cold.

“Who called it in?” Gillies asked.

The uniformed constable — twenty-two at most, neck like a fence post — checked his notes. “Neighbour. Mrs. Iqbal, flat 2/1. Said she hadn’t seen him in two days and the telly was off.”

“The telly being off was suspicious?”

“She said he always had it on. Even at night.”

Gillies stood. His knees cracked. Forty-six years old. No food out. No dishes in the sink. The bin was empty. A man who was keeping house right up to the moment he stopped.

The pathologist would call it cardiac event. Sudden death, no suspicious circumstances, close the file.

He didn’t leave it there because of the filing cabinet.

It was in the bedroom. Grey metal, four drawers, office furniture that didn’t belong in a council flat. The bottom drawer was open six inches — photocopies inside. Council documents. Housing allocation records. Meeting minutes with passages highlighted in yellow. Letters addressed not to Alistair Rennie but to Councillor James Beattie, copied and annotated in a small, precise hand.

Gillies pulled one sheet. Read it. Put it back.

He pulled another.

He stood in the dead man’s bedroom for eleven minutes reading documents he had no warrant to read. Allocation spreadsheets annotated by hand. Red pen. Circles around names. Lines drawn between entries with arrows pointing to dates that didn’t match.

By the time he stopped reading he understood that Alistair Rennie had been building a case. Against the council. Against the housing association. Against a property developer called Strathdon Homes whose name appeared on fourteen separate documents in connection with the demolition and redevelopment of three tower blocks in the north of the city.

Rennie had been methodical. Documents organized by date, separated by cardboard dividers labelled in the same precise hand. He’d filed Freedom of Information requests — the acknowledgement letters all said the same thing: your request is being processed. He’d written to his MSP and received a form letter. He’d written to the housing ombudsman, who’d written back asking for a reference number he didn’t have because his case file had been closed.

Rennie had been on the waiting list for rehousing when the towers came down. His name had been removed. Four drawers of careful, sequential, futile correspondence — the record of a man who believed that if he followed the process correctly, the process would produce justice.

Gillies closed the drawer. Took a photograph of the outside of the cabinet with his phone. Did not photograph the contents. The radiator ticked. A television murmured through the wall.

II

She has been at the council for thirty-one years. She started as a temp in the housing department at twenty-two, six weeks after her father died, and the temporary position became permanent in the way that things become permanent in a bureaucracy — not through decision but through the absence of anyone deciding otherwise. She is Fiona Begg, and when people in the building say “ask Fiona,” they mean: ask the woman who knows where the files are.

She knows where the files are. She knows which files. She knows the ones that exist in the system and the ones that exist only in boxes in the basement storage that was flooded in 2019 and never properly dried out, the paper inside fused together in places, ink bleeding through from one page to the next, histories merging. She has worked on the third floor of the council building on George Square for so long that the building’s rhythms are her rhythms — the heating that comes on at seven and off at four regardless of the temperature, the lift that stalls between two and three if more than four people get in, the particular quality of light in the corridor outside Records that changes in October when the sun drops low enough to reach through the window at the end of the hall.

She is fifty-three. She has never married. She had a relationship in her thirties with a man who worked in planning — Derek, who smelled of roll-ups and wore the same corduroy jacket for nine years — and it ended because it ended, through the absence of anyone deciding otherwise. Her mother is in a care home in Dennistoun. She visits on Sundays. Her mother does not always know who she is, but she always knows who Fiona works for — “the council” — and she always says “your father would have been proud,” which is not true, because her father was a joiner who distrusted institutions the way a carpenter distrusts wet wood.

On the morning of the fourteenth of November, she arrives at work at eight-fifteen and finds a note on her desk from Councillor Beattie’s office requesting the allocation records for the Cranhill Towers rehousing programme, 2019-2022. The note is handwritten. This is unusual. Requests come through the system — a form, a reference number, a digital trail. A handwritten note means someone wants something without a trail.

She knows Councillor Beattie. Everyone knows Councillor Beattie. Fourteen years on the housing committee. A large man who wears good suits badly and speaks at public meetings with the rehearsed sincerity of a person who has learned that sincerity is a skill, not a state. His daughter is married to Gordon Kerr, managing director of Strathdon Homes, which won the contract to redevelop the Cranhill Towers site. This was in the Evening Times. It produced a fortnight of outrage and then the outrage moved on, the way outrage does, because outrage has no filing system.

Fiona pulls the records. She has always pulled the records. She pulled them for Derek when he needed planning files, for the housing officers when they needed allocation histories, for the councillors when they needed whatever councillors need at any given moment to maintain the architecture of mutual obligation that runs beneath the org charts and the standing orders.

The Cranhill Towers allocation records show 342 households on the rehousing priority list when the demolition was approved in 2019. The records she retrieves from the system show 298 households on the final rehousing allocation in 2021. She notices the discrepancy the way she notices all discrepancies — quietly, without remark, the way a person notices that a picture has been moved on a wall. Forty-four households. Not a rounding error. Not an administrative correction. Forty-four names removed between approval and allocation, and the removal logged under a batch code she recognizes because she created the batch codes: ADMIN-INACTIVE. A category that means, in practice, whatever the person using it needs it to mean.

She delivers the records to Councillor Beattie’s office. She does not deliver the discrepancy. The discrepancy she keeps.

III

DI Nadia Hardie ran the Major Investigations Team at Stewart Street. She was forty-one, divorced, childless by choice, and she had solved — clearance-to-conviction — more cases than any other detective in the division, a fact that was not celebrated because celebration implied score-keeping, and score-keeping implied that some detectives were better than others, which was a conclusion the institution preferred to leave unstated.

She got Alistair Rennie’s name from a desk sergeant who mentioned it in passing. Dead man in Maryhill. Probable cardiac. DS Gillies handling.

She wouldn’t have thought about it again except that the desk sergeant added: “Gillies asked about the housing records. Weird one.”

She pulled the file. Gillies’s notes were sparse — the scene written up straight, no mention of the filing cabinet. But he’d flagged the housing connection, and the flag generated a notification on Hardie’s desk because she was senior officer on the anti-corruption referral list, a list that existed because the Scottish Government required it, not because anyone expected it to be used.

She called Gillies in.

He sat across from her in the small interview room near the kitchen — instant coffee and old carpet tiles. Fifteen years in. Good clearance rate on domestics and pub fights. Not the type to go looking for trouble.

“Tell me about the filing cabinet,” she said.

He told her. The documents. The council records. The letters to Beattie. The highlighted minutes. The forty-four names.

“You didn’t log any of this.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He looked at her the way people look at a question when the answer is obvious and the question is being asked anyway. “Because Beattie’s name was on it. And Beattie’s son-in-law is Strathdon. And Strathdon has contracts with half the council. And if I log it, it goes into the system, and if it goes into the system — ”

“The system tells Beattie.”

“The system is Beattie.”

She sent Gillies back to his desk and sat alone in the small room for twenty minutes, thinking about forty-four names.

IV

The waiting list is a document. Fiona knows this the way a cartographer knows that a map is not the territory — professional knowledge, habitual, mostly useless. The waiting list says who is owed housing. The council says the waiting list is accurate. If a name is not on the list, that person is not owed housing. The logic is circular and airtight.

She did not remove the names. She wants to be clear about this, to herself if to nobody else. The batch processing was done by someone in IT — a young man whose name she can’t remember, or chooses not to, because remembering his name would make him a person rather than a function, and she prefers, in this matter, to think in functions. The authorization came from the housing director’s office. The housing director reported to the committee. The committee was chaired by Beattie. The chain of instruction ran through the institution like current through a wire, and at no point did anyone say the words “remove these people from the list.” What was said was: “clean up the inactive accounts.” What was meant was understood by everyone and stated by no one.

She processed the authorization. She filed it. She created the batch code — ADMIN-INACTIVE — because a batch code was needed and creating batch codes was her job. She has her batch codes and her filing system and her thirty-one years of knowing which drawer to open.

She thinks about Alistair Rennie. She remembers him vaguely, as one remembers a face seen repeatedly in a waiting room. He came to the office three times in 2020, asking about his rehousing application. She directed him to the correct department. She was polite. She was efficient. She did not tell him that his name had already been removed, because she did not tell anyone anything that was not asked for, because that is how you survive thirty-one years in a building where knowledge is currency.

He is dead now. She reads it in the Evening Times — a small paragraph, six lines, no photograph. Sudden death. No suspicious circumstances. She folds the paper and puts it in her bag and goes back to the records room, where the fluorescent lights buzz at a frequency that has given her a low-grade headache every afternoon for eleven years.

V

Hardie ran it off the books. Had to. The anti-corruption referral process required her to notify the Procurator Fiscal’s office, which required a formal complaint, which required evidence, which required access to council records, which required a warrant, which required probable cause, which required — this was the geometry of it — the very evidence she was trying to obtain.

She told Gillies: “Get me the names.”

“Which names?”

“The forty-four. The ones removed from the list.”

He got them. Not through the council — through Rennie’s filing cabinet, still in the flat because nobody had asked for it and the flat hadn’t been cleared because the housing association was slow because funding had been cut because the council had redirected money to — Hardie stopped following the chain. Every chain led back to the same place.

She worked through the names. Fourteen had been rehoused through other channels — moved in with family, left the city, found private lets. Eight were untraceable. Twenty-two were still in temporary accommodation or on the streets, three years after their tower was demolished to make way for Strathdon’s development.

One was Alistair Rennie, who was dead.

She pulled Rennie’s medical records. Irregular GP visits. No diagnosed cardiac condition. No medication beyond paracetamol for a bad knee. Six weeks before he died, chest tightness — the GP attributed it to anxiety, prescribed sertraline, told him to come back in a month. He didn’t come back.

She pulled his employment record. Warehouse work, mostly. Agency contracts. Short stretches of unemployment that lengthened as he got older. His last job ended fourteen months before his death — a packing centre in Cumbernauld, shift cut. Universal Credit. The flat in Maryhill was supposed to be temporary. Every flat Alistair Rennie had lived in for the past three years was supposed to be temporary.

The post-mortem was done by a locum covering three mortuary sites because the health board wouldn’t fund a second pathologist. Cardiac arrhythmia. Natural causes. No toxicology — non-suspicious death, budget constraints. Hardie stopped following the chain.

She went to see Rennie’s neighbour, Mrs. Iqbal. Seventy-one and sharp. She told Hardie that Rennie had been agitated in the weeks before his death. He’d said he was “getting somewhere” with his complaint. He had documents. Someone from the council had been to see him — a man in a good suit — and had offered to “sort it out” if Rennie would stop writing letters.

“Did he say who the man was?”

“He said he was from the councillor’s office.”

“Which councillor?”

Mrs. Iqbal said a name. Beattie. Hardie wrote it down, though she didn’t need to. She asked if Rennie had been frightened. Mrs. Iqbal considered this. Not frightened, she said. Angry. He’d become careful in those last weeks — locking his door, checking who was in the close before he went out. Watchful. She said: “He told me he trusted the system. Up to the end, he trusted it.”

Hardie thanked her and left. She sat in her car outside the building. Rennie’s window was dark. Mrs. Iqbal’s was lit, the blue flicker of a television. The building — pebble-dashed, four storeys, broken intercom — was the kind that gets described in council reports as “fit for purpose.” No one important lives here.

VI

Fiona receives a phone call. Not from Councillor Beattie — from his assistant, Tricia, who speaks with the measured neutrality of a person who has learned to say things without saying them. Councillor Beattie would appreciate it if the Cranhill allocation records could be “reviewed for accuracy” before they are archived. This is not a request. It is an instruction delivered in the grammar of a request, which is how all instructions in the council are delivered, because the grammar preserves the fiction of voluntariness.

She understands what is being asked. The records she delivered last week contained the discrepancy — the 342 and the 298, the forty-four ghosts in the batch code. Someone has noticed that the records, if read by someone inclined to read them carefully, tell a story that Beattie does not want told. So the records must be reviewed. Reviewed means altered. Altered means the 342 becomes 298 in the original documentation, and the forty-four households are not removed from a list but were never on it in the first place.

She could do it. She has done similar things — smaller things, adjustments, the routine maintenance of institutional memory that is, she tells herself, no different from a gardener pruning a hedge.

But Alistair Rennie is dead, and she processed his name out of existence two years before his body stopped working, and there is a filing cabinet in a flat in Maryhill that contains copies of everything she might be asked to alter, and she is not stupid.

She tells Tricia she will look into it. She hangs up. She sits at her desk and thinks about the thirty-one years and the pension and what Alistair Rennie looked like the third time he came to the office — the time she directed him to the correct department knowing that the correct department would tell him his application was not on file, because it wasn’t, because she had filed the authorization that made it not be.

She opens the records on her screen. The cursor blinks on the field where the number 342 could become 298 with three keystrokes. She does not make the keystrokes.

She prints the original records — both versions, the before and the after, with the batch code and the authorization chain — and she puts them in an envelope and she puts the envelope in her bag and she leaves the office at 4:47 PM, thirteen minutes before the heating switches off.

VII

Gillies found the connection on a Wednesday. Egg mayonnaise sandwich at his desk, cross-referencing names from Rennie’s cabinet with council property records he’d accessed through Aisling in planning, who owed him a favour from a domestic he’d handled discreetly three years ago.

The connection was this: of the twenty-two displaced residents still in temporary accommodation, eleven had originally lived in Cranhill Tower Block C. Block C’s site had been acquired by Strathdon Homes for £1.2 million. The site’s estimated value, according to a District Valuer’s report that had been completed but never published, was £4.8 million. The difference — £3.6 million — had been absorbed into the development agreement as “community benefit credits,” which were tax-deductible and which funded, among other things, a youth sports facility that had been announced in 2020 and had not yet broken ground.

Gillies had driven past the Block C site. It was a hoarding-enclosed rectangle of mud and rubble in the shadow of the M8 motorway, with a Strathdon Homes banner promising “Cranhill Gateway — Luxury Living, Coming 2024.” It was not coming in 2024. The hoarding was weathered. The banner was faded. The site was a hole in the ground that was generating community benefit credits for a facility that did not exist, on land purchased at a quarter of its value from a council that had erased the people who used to live on it.

The community benefit credits were administered by a trust. Board members: Beattie, Kerr, the housing director. Annual disbursements of forty thousand to “community programmes.” Gillies could not find the community programmes. He found invoices from Kerr Associates — no relation to Gordon Kerr, according to Companies House, except the registered address was the same building as Strathdon Homes and the sole director was Kerr’s business partner from a previous venture, a man named Rab Fulton with a mortgage on a Merchant City flat that cost more than Gillies would earn in ten years.

Gillies put down his sandwich.

He took the information to Hardie.

She read it. She read it again. She put the paper face-down on her desk and said: “Who else knows about this?”

“You. Me. Aisling in planning, but she doesn’t know what she gave me.”

“The filing cabinet. Is it secure?”

“It’s in a dead man’s flat in Maryhill. The housing association will clear it eventually.”

“Get it. Tonight.”

He got it. He drove to Maryhill at 9 PM and loaded the filing cabinet into the back of his Vauxhall and drove it to Hardie’s flat in Hyndland, where they put it in her spare bedroom, which was already occupied by an exercise bike she’d never used and three boxes of case files from her divorce.

They stood in the spare bedroom looking at the filing cabinet and the exercise bike and the boxes, and neither of them said what they were both thinking, which was that they were now in possession of evidence removed from a scene, obtained without warrant, stored in a private residence, and that everything they had done in the past two weeks was procedurally indefensible.

“We need the council records,” Hardie said. “The originals. Not copies. Not what Rennie had. The actual allocation files, with the audit trail.”

“The council won’t give us those without a warrant.”

“The council won’t give us those with a warrant. Not while Beattie chairs the committee.”

“So.”

“So we need someone inside.”

VIII

She does not think of herself as a whistleblower. The word implies a single dramatic act — a person standing up in a room and declaring: this is wrong. What she is doing is smaller and more like what she has always done, which is filing. She is filing documents in a different location. An envelope in her bag, then her kitchen drawer, the one with the takeaway menus and spare batteries and the instruction manual for a microwave she replaced in 2018.

The detective finds her on a Thursday. Not at the council — at the Tesco on Sauchiehall Street, where she is buying milk and bread and a packet of digestive biscuits, and the woman standing beside her in the self-checkout queue says, without looking at her: “Ms. Begg. I’m DI Hardie. I need to speak with you about the Cranhill allocation records.”

Fiona does not look at her either. She scans her milk. She scans her bread. She says: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You created the batch code ADMIN-INACTIVE. In 2020. You processed the authorization to remove forty-four households from the rehousing priority list. One of those households was Alistair Rennie, who died on the second of November in a flat he should never have been living in.”

The self-checkout machine says: unexpected item in bagging area. Fiona removes the biscuits and replaces them. The machine accepts this.

“If you’ve come to arrest me,” she says, “you should know that I have copies of every authorization I’ve ever processed. Every one. For thirty-one years.”

Hardie is quiet for a moment. Then she says: “I haven’t come to arrest you.”

“Then what.”

“I’ve come to ask you what you already know.”

Fiona pays. She walks out and Hardie walks beside her and they go along Sauchiehall Street in the dark, past shuttered shops and lit pub windows and bus shelters where people stand in the rain waiting for buses that come or don’t come according to a schedule that bears no reliable relationship to reality.

She says enough. Not everything. She gives Hardie the shape of it — the allocation records, the batch code, the authorization chain, the community benefit trust — without giving her the documents, because the documents are her only protection. She speaks in reference numbers and committee dates, and she watches Hardie translate this into the language of the law, which has different grammar but the same subject: who did what to whom.

They walk for twenty minutes. Fiona talks more than she has talked to anyone in years. Not about the case — about the council. The committee system, the delegation of authority that runs from elected members through directors through clerks, each level insulated from the one above by procedural language that allows instructions to pass downward without ever being stated. She is describing a machine. She built parts of it. She oiled it, maintained it. The machine processed Alistair Rennie’s name into a batch code and the batch code into an absence and the absence into a flat in Maryhill where a man died making tea.

Hardie says: “I need the originals.”

“I know.”

“Will you give them to me?”

Fiona stops walking. They are outside a chip shop. The light from the window is yellow and warm and it smells of vinegar and hot fat, and for a moment she is twenty-two again, walking home from her first day at the council, eating chips from a paper bag.

“I’ll think about it,” she says.

She goes home. She eats the digestive biscuits. She does not sleep.

IX

Hardie moved fast. She had to. The council was reviewing the records — Gillies had heard from Aisling, who’d heard from someone in housing, that the Cranhill files were being “consolidated,” which was the word people used when they meant destroyed.

She filed the referral. Formal. Through the Procurator Fiscal. She named Beattie, Kerr, the housing director. Everything from Rennie’s filing cabinet, catalogued and cross-referenced, with a cover note acknowledging the procedural issues. She spent three nights on the cover note. Each draft got shorter. The first was twelve pages. The final version was four. She cut the analysis, the context, the institutional history. She left names, dates, numbers. Four pages was the maximum a fiscal deputy would read before deciding whether to act or defer.

The Fiscal’s office acknowledged receipt. A week. Under review. Two weeks. Under review. Three weeks. She drove to the office in person and sat for forty minutes until a deputy fiscal told her the referral raised “significant questions about evidential provenance.” A meeting would be scheduled.

On the fourth week, she was called into the Superintendent’s office. Ewan Geddes. Thirty years in. A man who had navigated the upper ranks of Police Scotland with the careful, lateral movement of a chess piece that never attacks and never retreats but is always, somehow, in the right square.

He sat behind his desk with the referral document in front of him, and he said: “Nadia. This is ambitious.”

She said nothing.

“The Procurator Fiscal has asked us to review the evidential basis before proceeding. There are concerns about chain of custody.”

“The chain of custody is documented in my report.”

“Yes. It is. That’s the concern.” He smiled. “The filing cabinet was removed from the premises without authorization. The council records were accessed through an informal contact. The approach to Ms. Begg was — ”

“Lawful.”

“Unconventional.”

“Lawful.”

He put the document down. “I’m transferring DS Gillies to Paisley. Administrative move. Good for his career. I’m recommending you for the leadership programme at Tulliallan — six months, starts in January. Also good for your career.”

By the time she returned from Tulliallan, the records would be consolidated. The filing cabinet would be irrelevant. Alistair Rennie would be exactly what the post-mortem said he was.

She said: “And the forty-four names?”

“The council has its own processes for housing allocation. That’s not a police matter.”

“A man died.”

“A man had a cardiac arrhythmia.”

“A man was removed from a housing list and died in a flat that was falling apart and the post-mortem was done by a locum who didn’t run tox and the council is now destroying the records that document — ”

“Nadia.” Quiet. Final. The way a superintendent says a name when the conversation is over.

She left his office. She went to the car park and sat in her car and thought about the geometry — promotion moves you up, transfers move you sideways, and both movements serve the same function.

X

Gillies took the transfer. Wife, mortgage, daughter starting university in September. The pension was fifteen years away. Paisley was not the end of the world.

He packed up his desk at Partick. He did not take any files. He drove to Paisley on a Monday morning in January and walked through corridors that smelled different — different cleaning products, different carpet, the same institutional architecture — and sat at a new desk. Assaults and break-ins and a fraud at a car dealership. None of it had anything to do with council housing or a dead man in Maryhill.

He thought about it on the drive home. The A737 through Johnstone. Rain on the windscreen. A horse in a field beside a scrapyard, the spire of a church converted to flats. He thought about Alistair Rennie’s kitchen — the mug, the teabag, the cold kettle.

His wife asked him once why he was quiet. He said work. His daughter was applying for student loans and he helped her fill in the forms and he thought about the distance between what a form asks and what a form means.

XI

Fiona gives the documents to Hardie on a Saturday, three weeks after the chip-shop conversation. She does it in the car park of the Botanic Gardens because the car park has no cameras — she checked.

She hands over the envelope. Both versions of the allocation records. The batch code authorization. The chain of instruction from Beattie’s office through the housing director to IT. Thirty-one years of careful maintenance.

Hardie takes the envelope. She says: “You know what happens now.”

“I know what happens now.”

What happens now is: nothing. Or not nothing — something that moves through the institution the way water moves through limestone, slowly, dissolving things that cannot be seen from the surface. The Fiscal has the referral. The referral has the evidence. The evidence has the chain of custody problems, which means a preliminary hearing, which means disclosure, which means Beattie’s lawyers, which means a process that will take two years or five years or forever.

Fiona goes back to the council on Monday. She sits at her desk. She pulls files. She processes requests. She creates batch codes. Tricia from Beattie’s office calls and asks about the “review” of the Cranhill records, and Fiona says it is in progress, and Tricia says fine, and the conversation lasts forty-five seconds and contains no information that could be used in a courtroom or a newspaper or anywhere else.

The heating comes on at seven. The heating goes off at four. The lift stalls between two and three. The fluorescent lights buzz.

She is fifty-three. She has a pension. She has the knowledge of who owes what to whom, which is the only power she has ever had, and she has just given a portion of it away, and the portion she has given away will change nothing, or will change something so slowly that by the time it changes, the institution will have already adapted.

XII

Hardie took the leadership programme at Tulliallan. Six months. Strategic command, stakeholder engagement, organizational resilience. She was good at it, because she was good at everything that could be measured, which was her weakness and her strength and the thing the institution would continue to reward as long as she permitted the reward to function as it was designed to function, which was as a leash.

She graduated in June. She was promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. Command of a new financial crimes unit in Glasgow — budget, staffing, a remit that included, in theory, local government fraud.

She returned to Glasgow. New desk, new office. She opened the Cranhill file.

The council records had been consolidated. The filing cabinet was in evidence storage, logged and sealed. The Fiscal’s referral was in a queue. Fiona Begg’s documents were in a safe.

She had the rank. She had the budget. She had the remit.

She picked up the phone.

She put it down.

She picked it up again.

On the wall of her new office there was a framed photograph of the Scottish Police Authority’s founding ceremony, 2013. Rows of officers in dress uniform. Somewhere in the back row, if you looked carefully, you could see a younger Ewan Geddes, and beside him the current Chief Constable, and beside him, smiling, Councillor James Beattie.

She put the phone down.