The Inquiry

Nobody has to speak to her. That is the first thing Elspeth Cardno learns about a Fatal Accident Inquiry.

Strichen, April 2019. Danny Milne, twenty-three, three days into a job on a farm a mile south of the village, is killed when the telehandler he is driving rolls over in the silage yard. The machine was sound. The ground was soft. And the training certificate that says he was fit to drive it was signed by the farmer's son, five days before he died.

There is no accused and no indictment. The inquiry will sit at Peterhead Sheriff Court in October, and Catriona Duthie has been instructed to watch the family's interests. She sends Cardno to precognosce the witnesses: the farm hands, the dealer, the training provider in Huntly, the neighbours who saw the yard that morning.

This is civil work. Cardno has no warrant and no power behind her knock, and in the farms and steadings of inland Buchan a woman from Banff asking questions about a neighbour's son is not welcome at any door.

Eight miles down the A981 from the Broch, and a world away from the harbour, Cardno has to find out what a certificate is worth, who knew what it was worth, and what a family is owed when the answer is nobody's crime.

The Inquiry is the second 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 official story is true.