The Wanting Years

Portsoy, May 2011. Cormac Buchan is eleven weeks a detective inspector, forty miles from the woman who taught him everything, and the first thing he does at his first murder is look at the water.

An old deckhand has drowned off the west steps of the old harbour, walking home from the inn on ground he has crossed for seventy years. The town files it in a morning: black steps, three drams, an old man, a winter tide.

But the tide table hangs on a nail in the harbour office where anybody can read it, and there is exactly one forty minute window in the whole of that night when the harbour will hold a man where it takes him. And five days earlier, at an open meeting nobody was listening to, a man stood up with his cap in his hand and said that the wanting years were back in Chae Mowat's memoir at last.

At the Salmon Bothy, a postgraduate student cataloguing a dead boatbuilder's papers has found sixteen leaves cut clean against the fold.

The last of the Early Years mysteries: the case Buchan runs alone, with nobody behind him and nobody to think out loud at.