Final Edition. V. McDermid L.

living room.

      Rosalind was sitting in an armchair, looking dazed in the midst of the chaos that surrounded her. Her violet eyes were red-rimmed, as if she’d been rubbing them, her white hair in a disarray that was all the more shocking because of the contrast with her usual neatly groomed appearance. Papers were thrown everywhere, furniture had been overturned, carpets pulled up, and pictures hurled from the walls into corners where they lay surrounded by shards of broken glass. The drawers of the desk had been pulled out and emptied on the floor, and a bottle of ink had broken, leaving a permanent-blue puddle on a scattered pile of envelopes. Lindsay, who had only been in the flat a couple of times before, remembered how neat and orderly it had always been and felt a dim version of the shock that clearly possessed Rosalind.

      Helen rushed impulsively across the room to hug Rosalind. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea,’ Lindsay said, feeling useless. She went through to the kitchen where the burglars had also been active. All the storage jars had been emptied on the floor, and the contents of the cupboards were strewn everywhere. It didn’t have the air of random vandalism, however. Odd, thought Lindsay. Almost as if they knew they were looking for something specific. Lindsay raked through the wreckage till she found a mound of teabags and put the kettle on. She stuck her head into the hall and asked the policeman if he wanted a cup of tea.

      ‘Thanks very much,’ he said gratefully, following her back into the kitchen.

      ‘How many are there of you?’ Lindsay asked.

      ‘Just me,’ he replied. ‘I was told to hang on here till the CID could send somebody round. They’ve made some mess, eh?’ he added almost admiringly as he looked around.

      ‘You’re not kidding,’ Lindsay said absently as she brewed up. ‘I’ve never understood why they feel the need to do it.’

      ‘Anger and frustration, so they say. If they don’t find any money or decent jewellery that they can sell easy, they take it out on the householder. I always tell the wife, leave £20 in a drawer in the living room. That way, if we do get some animal breaking in, they might not make a mess of the place.’

      Crime prevention from the horse’s mouth, Lindsay thought wryly. She handed a mug of tea to the constable and returned to the living room where Helen was sitting with her arms round Rosalind, who looked smaller and more vulnerable than Lindsay could have imagined possible. She handed them both a cup of hot tea, then settled down to wait for Rosalind to tell her what had happened.

      Rosalind took a gulp of tea then gave Lindsay a weak smile. ‘If I hadn’t gone white at twenty, this lot would have done the trick. I’m sorry to drag you into this,’ she said, clutching her mug as if it were a lifebelt in a stormy sea. ‘But I needed your advice.’

      ‘What happened?’ Lindsay asked.

      ‘I came back from the office in Edinburgh at lunchtime because I had a report to finish for my Minister by tomorrow morning,’ Rosalind said. ‘You can never get any serious work done in that office. The Minister’s in and out all afternoon, wanting his hand held about something or other, so I thought I’d just pack up the draft and bring it back here.

      ‘When I went to print out the finished report, I realised I was nearly out of computer paper. So I drove down to Byres Road and bought a box, then came straight back. I was only gone for about twenty minutes. As soon as I got out of the lift, I knew something was wrong. The front door was open, you see. I dithered for a minute or two, wondering whether there was still someone inside, but then I decided, to hell with it, and went in. The place was empty, but it was like this. The policeman said he reckoned they must have been keeping an eye out for me, and just did a runner when they saw my car come back.’

      ‘That’s funny,’ Lindsay mused.

      ‘What’s funny about that?’ Helen objected. ‘It’s exactly what I’d do if I was a burglar.’

      ‘Well, how would they know it was Rosalind’s car, unless they were specifically targeting her? In a block this big, you’d have to be dead unlucky if the one car that came in while you were turning a flat over actually belonged to that flat’s owner. It looks to me as if they came here with a particular goal in mind and they knew exactly who to keep watch for. This was no random opportunist burglary,’ Lindsay said.

      Rosalind paled. ‘You mean, they were actually spying on me? Surely not! I don’t have anything valuable.’

      ‘Did they steal those papers you brought home?’

      Miserably, Rosalind nodded. ‘They walked off with the lot. And the disc from the computer with the finished report. They took all my other discs as well. Luckily, I’ve got back-ups of most of them safely stowed in Helen’s flat.’