By nine o'clock, a raw grey daylight had crept over the Moray Firth, doing nothing to warm the glass-walled incident room on the third floor of Burnett Road Police Station in Inverness.

Vance stood before the digital whiteboard while DS Rory Fraser pinned up the high-resolution blow-ups from Loch Maree and Braemore Lodge.

"Let's strip away the theatrics and look at the logistics," Vance told the twelve detectives assembled in the room. "Eleven years ago, on the fourteenth of November 2015, twenty-one-year-old Morag Kerr drove north from Inverness toward Gairloch to interview former staff of the old Balblair Residential Assessment Centre for her postgraduate criminology dissertation. She never reached her bed-and-breakfast. Her car went into Loch Maree. Yesterday, someone severed the ring finger from her left hand while she was still alive and left it in a surgical bag for Dr. Kerr and me to find."

A murmur ran through the room. Most of the younger constables only knew the 2015 case as a cautionary tale whispered in the canteen—the inquiry that had ruined a rising Edinburgh detective's career when he accused a senior Highland officer of tampering with evidence.

"Sir," said DC Kirsty Munro from the cyber unit, raising a printout. "We ran the pharmacy dispense log Dr. Kerr flagged at Raigmore. The ketamine and surgical suture packs were signed out on Tuesday evening at 19:40 under the credentials of Professor Alistair Dunbar, Head of Forensic Medicine."

In the corner of the incident room, holding a untouched paper cup of black coffee, Isla Kerr stiffened. "Alistair Dunbar has been my mentor since my first week at Raigmore. He was the one who hired me when nobody in Edinburgh would touch me after the inquiry."

"He was also the Crown Pathologist who signed the provisional drowning certificate on your sister's empty car in 2015," Vance said quietly. "Kirsty, where is Professor Dunbar right now?"

"His wife reported that he left their house in Culcabock at eleven o'clock last night after receiving a phone call on his landline," Munro replied. "His Mercedes was picked up by an ANPR camera heading west on the A835 toward Garve at 23:48. It hasn't crossed another camera since."

Vance walked over to the ordnance survey map of Ross-shire taped to the side wall. He traced a finger along the A835, past Garve, past Loch Glascarnoch, to the point where the old eighteenth-century military road branched off into the forestry plantations before Braemore.

"He went to meet Galbraith at the lodge," Vance said. "Galbraith gets spooked, starts burning the records in the Aga, and somebody walks into that kitchen with a surgical kit signed out in Dunbar's name."

"You think Alistair killed Galbraith?" Isla asked, stepping forward. "Alistair is sixty-eight years old with arthritis in both wrists. Look at the cortical bone striation on Galbraith's phalanx—whoever used that saw had the upper-body strength of a man half his age."

"Which means Dunbar didn't go to Braemore to kill Galbraith," Vance said, tapping the vast, roadless expanse of moorland between Loch Glascarnoch and Loch Maree. "He went to pay him off—or to warn him that the keeper of the cage had gone rogue. And now Dunbar is either dead in a forestry ditch or he's leading us straight to where Morag has been held."

Vance grabbed his coat from the back of his chair. "Rory, get Mountain Rescue drones up over the forestry tracks between Loch Glascarnoch and Fannich. Isla, you're with me. Before Dunbar left his house at eleven last night, he took a call on a BT landline—which means even if the caller used a payphone or a burner, the exchange logged the trunk route."

They were halfway down the concrete stairwell toward the car park when Vance's personal mobile vibrated inside his jacket.

It wasn't an Inverness number. The screen flashed 01445 — Gairloch Exchange.

Vance hit answer and put the phone on speaker between himself and Isla in the stairwell.

At first there was only the sound of wind whistling through cracked slate and the rhythmic drip of water onto stone. Then an old, patrician voice spoke—breathless, terrified, and unmistakable.

"Isla? Thank God... they let me make one call."

"Alistair?" Isla gripped Vance's forearm. "Alistair, where are you? Is Morag with you?"

"Listen to me carefully, child, because the tide is coming into the sea-cave and my legs are tied," Professor Dunbar gasped over the line. "You were never supposed to look at Balblair House. We thought Galbraith burned the admission ledgers in ninety-eight, but Morag found the fourth register—the one with the names of the boys from the procurator's shooting syndicate."

"Alistair, tell me where she is!" Isla cried.

"She isn't in a house, Isla. She's been right under the water line at—"

A heavy iron door slammed in the background, echoing like a gunshot down a concrete tunnel. Footsteps splashed through ankle-deep water.

Then a second voice came onto the line—calm, educated, speaking with the clipped vowels of an Edinburgh advocate.

"Good morning, Chief Inspector Vance. You have six hours before the sluice gates at Glascarnoch Dam open for the evening hydro release. If you bring a single patrol car past the cattle grid at Achnasheen, both the Professor and Miss Kerr will be thirty feet underwater before you reach the shore. Come alone. Bring the fifth tape from Galbraith's table."

The line went dead.

COLD IS THE LOCH

Whose Name Was Printed on That Bloodstained Warrant Card?

BLOOD ON THE HEATHER (A DCI Callum Vance Thriller — Book 2)

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