Scottish noir
Clarity
Firkin Point had been an event. This made it a structure.
A woman lies at Firkin Point on Loch Lomond, arranged rather than left, with a red crayon beside her. Five days later there is another, at Stonehaven. DCI Malcolm Strachan and DS Malik have a case that arrived already resolved, by someone who controlled not just the body but the whole event. Across the city, a man with a cold cup of tea and three sheets of paper is working through a list of names. Each of them signed something, years ago, at a children's home called Calderbank.
The opening
The road narrowed before the loch appeared, bending through trees that pressed close enough to the verge to make the morning feel darker than it was. Strachan drove with the window cracked despite the cold, a cigarette burning between two fingers of his left hand, the smoke pulled outside whenever the car gathered speed and curling back towards him whenever he slowed. The car was a nine year old Vauxhall with a heater that worked on one setting, which was off. Malik had stopped commenting on the smoke ten minutes earlier. She had not stopped commenting on the heater.
"I can feel my knees," she said.
"That's what they're for."
"I mean I can feel them as separate objects."
She sat angled towards the passenger window with her notebook closed on her lap and a paper cup of coffee from a petrol station in Balloch, held in both hands like a hot water bottle. Through the trunks, in glimpses, the water came and went. She watched it a little longer each time than the job required. Strachan noticed and said nothing. He had worked beside her for six years and understood that a lake was one of the few things Malik did not discuss.
A tick was a very small thing to carry that much.Clarity
The city did not hold things in place. It took them in, worked round them, buried them under movement, and kept going.Clarity
"They saw it. They recorded it. That isn't the same thing."Clarity
