The Picture House

A fire in a top-floor flat. A man who got out of the window. A man who did not.

Peterhead, September 2020. Ryan Clyne dies in a fire in a top-floor flat in King Street. His flatmate, Steven Tait, who got out through the kitchen window with a broken ankle, is charged with wilful fire-raising and murder, on the word of one witness: a young plumber who ran into the burning close three times, and who says he saw Steven carry a petrol can out of it at two in the morning.

Every statement in the case was taken in lockdown, on doorsteps, over the phone, through half-open doors. Catriona Duthie sends Elspeth Cardno, a former Grampian CID sergeant who now takes precognitions for the defence, to find out what the Crown's witnesses will really say. Nobody will let her into the kitchen. A woman of seventy-nine in a porch in Buchanhaven, a girlfriend with a telephone, a planning application, a bridging loan, a building that needed to be empty.

And when the trial comes the jury will not be in the court at all. They will be in a cinema in Aberdeen, watching the evidence on a screen, and a screen shows a face and hides a room.

The Picture House is the third 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.