They could see the blue lights cycling through their sequence ahead of them. Allan MacIntyre pulled his Alfa to the verge behind the uniform car and he and Jane Coburn got out. It was a typical day in early autumn. The birch leaves were yellowing on the hillside, yet the pasture was green, all the way down and across the wide valley. With the sky clear, Loch Ness below them pooled still and deep, and deep blue. Back on the hillside, it hadn’t rained for weeks, so the ground was dry and the copper and yellow leaves that had already fallen crumpled under their feet. 

‘What a place to die,’ Allan said. A look passed between them. ‘I never get used to this bit.’ Hands on his hips, Allan breathed in lungfuls of fresh air as they waited while the first responder approached them. 

‘Hello, Sir. Ma’am. It’s the body of a young male – just a boy, really – half-way up the hill in the thick of the woodland. Age about thirteen? Looks recent. The elderly woman who found him’s a bit shocked.’ He nodded his head towards the second police car. ‘Do you want to go and speak to her first, or see the body?’

‘We’ll look at the scene.’ 

The PC held his arm out to indicate the direction then led Allan and Jane across the single track road, over a narrow draining ditch clogged with yellowed grasses and thistles festooned with fuzzy seed heads. 

The route was steep and full of tussocks. Grasses were bent aside and some of the mossy patches were smeared with foot falls – plenty of signs of someone passing in a hurry. 

He looked uphill to the young policeman. ‘Is it much further?’

‘About the same again?’

‘Jesus.’ He searched in his pockets for a bar of tablet and broke off two squares. ‘Want a bit?’ he asked the others. The PC shook his head. Jane accepted.

‘Tablet?’ There was a note of disbelief in her voice. The sweetie was basically sugar melted in milk with a vanilla pod waved over it.

‘Need a wee sugar buzz to help me tackle this mountain.’

‘Ah, southern softies!’ 

‘Aye, they don’t have terrain like this in Balornock.’

It was battlefield humour. Funny how the mood changed as they drew closer. Allan could tell they were near by the way the PC slowed down and his movements became more reverential. He talked less, with eventually a quiet, ‘Just up ahead, Sir,’ before shoving aside some thick fronds of juniper to let the DI in to the small clear patch where the body had been found.