Clean

Inverness. Two in the morning. A young woman on a kerb at the end of a taxi rank.

She has no jacket. It is minus two. She is shaking too hard to hold her phone, and eleven minutes after she walked out of a flat by the river she has sent her best friend four words: he wouldnt stop.

The man she names is the son of the family that owns half the hotels in the Highlands. He says she wanted it, and that she looked at her phone afterwards and was upset about something else.

In Paisley, a bus driver who threatened his downstairs neighbour on a doorbell camera is charged with murder, and the Fiscal who prepares the case writes to Crown Counsel to say she does not think he did it.

And in Edinburgh, five years after a jury in Aberdeen convicted a boy from Torry by a single vote, three judges are asked to look again at a clock in a fish bar.

Three cities, one year, and the first year in which every Scottish verdict means exactly what it says. Two juries of fifteen, in two rooms nobody else will ever see. The courts will hear their verdicts. You will see their votes.

Clean is the seventh novel in The Fifteen: a Scottish courtroom series about corroboration, the jury room, and the verdict Scotland kept for three hundred years.