Not Proven

In 2012, Detective Sergeant Elspeth Cardno told a High Court that an identification parade had been run wrong. A man walked free on a verdict of not proven, and she was finished in the job.

January 2025. Derek Ritchie is charged with a vicious new assault in a lane in Peterhead, and he has asked for Cardno by name. She takes precognitions for the defence now, along the Buchan coast, and she takes this brief because she has to know whether she was right the first time.

Two witnesses say they saw his face. A Facebook post has put his name in front of eleven thousand people. A street lamp was out for five weeks. And in a box room in Banff, in a cardboard file tied with string, is a shorthand notebook from 2012 that she has never opened.

With her niece Shannon digging through a dead man's boxes and an old colleague who has kept quiet for thirteen years, Cardno goes back to the first case while she works the second. The question she has asked of other people's stories all her working life, is it true, is harder to ask when the story is hers.

And the clock is running on the verdict itself. Parliament has abolished not proven, and this trial is one of the last in which a Scottish jury can return it.

Not Proven is the fifth and final Cardno Precognition novel: a Scottish crime series about the defence side of the courtroom, where the question is not who did it, but whether the Crown's story is true.