Taylor sat down on the garden bench and breathed in the crisp sea air. She thought about the day of the accident. She remembered it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. Probably she always would. It had been the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes Night. It had been cold and damp, as it always was in Edinburgh in November, and Taylor had been called out to investigate a burglary. Fireworks were going off all around the city and the air was thick with smoke and the stench of sulphur. Other than that, it had a been a pretty ordinary evening.

When she got back to the station, nobody would look her in the eye. Had she done something wrong? If so, she had no idea what. Eventually, Inspector Morag Childes, a hulking mass of a woman, appeared and asked Taylor into her office.

The look in Childes’ eyes was something Taylor would never forget. She remembered the conversation in that office word for word.

“Take a seat,” Childes had said.

“What’s going on?” Taylor sat down. “Everybody around here is treating me like I have the plague.”

Childes looked out of the window. A huge bang went off and the sky lit up with red, blue and green light.

“There’s been an accident down on the Lothian Road,” Childes said to the window.

“An accident?”

“A lorry hit a car head on. The people in the car didn’t stand a chance.”

“That’s terrible. But what’s it got to do with me?”

“I’m afraid Daniel was driving the car.”

She went numb at the sound of her husband’s name. Daniel ‘Danny’ Taylor was a property developer in the city. They had been married for two years.

“Daniel was killed instantly,” Childes continued. "The woman in the passenger seat died on the way to hospital.”

It didn’t take Taylor long to realise what had been going on. The woman in the car with Danny was a client — and she was not the first woman to go for a late-night drive in Danny’s car. As Taylor dug a bit further and discovered the sordid details of Danny’s cheating, the initial grief turned to anger and then pure hatred. Her husband had been playing around from before the time they were married. Everything suddenly fell into place — the late-night property viewings, all the evenings supposedly spent working. Danny had been making a fool out of her since the day they met.

When Taylor had finally returned to work after the funeral, things started to get worse. Underneath the sympathetic faces and hidden in the undertones of the kind words, something else was happening. Her colleagues were laughing at her. People she had risked her life with were now mocking her. Harriet Taylor, the policewoman who hadn’t even realised her husband was having an affair.

In the end she had woken up one morning and decided enough was enough. She needed to get as far away from Edinburgh as possible. She started frantically searching through the jobs on the internal website and the DC post in Trotterdown was perfect. It was far enough away from the ghosts in Edinburgh, and a promotion to boot. Taylor begged Inspector Childes to recommend her for the post and Childes agreed. The insurance money from the accident more than covered the cost of the expensive house and Taylor had started her new life in Trotterdown in January that year.

And still, after six months, it still did not seem real. Growing up on one of the less desirable estates in Edinburgh, she would never have dreamed she would one day own a house like this. But then she wouldn’t have expected quite a lot of the other things that had happened either.

This is all that’s left of Danny Taylor, she thought, a house with a sea view and a heart full of hatred.

Her mobile phone rang, with a number on the screen she did not recognise. “We’ve got word from forensics,” said her colleague DI Jack Killian. “I tried to get hold of Duncan but he’s not answering his phone.”

“He’s at the Unicorn with his wife. What did they find?”

“They’ve gone over the whole car,” Killian told her. “They’ve got some new diagnostic equipment they use these days and they found something interesting.”

“Sir?”

“The handbrake was off when the car went over the edge and they reckon the engine was off too.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not finished. All four doors were locked. Not just locked but jammed closed. Forensics could tell. They’re not a hundred percent sure but the head technician reckons the woman was locked inside the car and then it was pushed over the cliff.”

“Murdered?”

“Alan Littlemore doesn’t usually make mistakes.”

“What about the body?”

“There was definitely somebody in the car when it went over the edge. Littlemore reckons it went over nose first and hit the rocks at the bottom, and the woman was thrown out the windscreen on impact. They found traces of blood and hair on the broken glass. I’ve checked the tide tables — the car was jammed in the rocks but the tide could easily have washed the body of a woman out to sea. Milly Lancaster was not a large woman, by all accounts.”

“So it was definitely Milly Lancaster?”

“We’re not one-hundred-per-cent sure yet. We’ll need a sample of her DNA to compare with what we got from the car.”

“I can drive over to her house and bring in a hairbrush or toothbrush.”

“It can wait until tomorrow. The tech guys haven’t quite finished yet. I just wanted to fill you in on what we have so far.”

“Thanks,” Taylor said. “Murder. Are we any closer to any motive?”

“We’ve got nothing. Nasty, though, whatever it was.”

She rang off and looked at the ominous bank of clouds forming in the west. Time for bed. She took out the pink pillbox she usually carried in her bag, shook two blue capsules into her hand and swallowed them with the last of the ginger beer. She had started taking the sleeping pills shortly after the accident and now she found she couldn’t cope without the dreamless sleep they gave her. She knew that in half an hour or so, her eyes would start to feel heavy and her mind would slowly fill with dark mist. She put the pillbox back in her pocket and went upstairs to bed.

CHAPTER NINE

Taylor woke to the sound of her phone ringing beside her.

“There are two police cars outside Milly’s house,” Alice Green said without any preamble. “They’ve been there since early this morning.”

“They’re probably just having another look around.”

“Have you found something?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

“Milly’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Like I said, we’re not sure yet. We’ll know more during the course of the day.” She tried to sound as steady and reassuring as possible.

“I’m going to go over and ask them what they’re doing.”

“Please, Mrs Green, please just let them do their jobs. If anything turns up, I promise I’ll let you know.”

“Will you be popping round this morning? I’ll make us some tea and we can have some honey and bread. The honey’s a bit odd, but it’s still good, you know.”

“I have to go to work.” Taylor looked at the clock on the microwave. She was going to be late already.

“Milly was my friend.”

“I’ll see if I have time to come by later.” She felt obliged to — after all this was an old lady who’d lost one of the few people she was close to. “I have to go to work now, though.”

The police station in Trotterdown was a far cry from the hovel Taylor had worked at in Edinburgh. The outside of the station was clean and fresh. Flower-boxes had been placed on each side of the entrance. The car park was almost full, for once, with unfamiliar cars. She realised why when she went inside the station.

Unsurprisingly, the story of a car going over the cliff at Merryhead had attracted reporters, who were now pestering PC Hargreaves at reception. “I don’t have anything to tell you,” Hargreaves insisted. “I’m just manning the front desk. I’m sure you’ll all be informed in due time.”