“Good morning, fabulous Major Investigations Team of this fair city.” DCI John Waters’ booming voice announced his arrival into the weekly briefing. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and strong, and carried himself in such a way that made people want to listen to him. “What great duties and chores do grace our inboxes on this finest of days?”

  Hailing from the north of Scotland, his melodic cadence was typical of the Highlands and often put others at immediate ease, but it also conspired to create an impression many had misconceived over the years.

  Where some foolish individuals saw only the quaint eccentricity of a jovial Highlander, they simultaneously underestimated both his keen intelligence and his fiery opposition to those who acted contrary to his own principles.

  When assembling his team, he sought out people with a similarly scrupulous outlook and demanded the highest level of morality from them. In return, he offered an environment in which every person was treated fairly and was afforded every opportunity to develop themselves.

  It was clear to anyone observing Waters and his team that the level of respect he commanded and, in turn, the support he provided, was unparalleled.

  Now, though, his team appeared sombre and the typical electric atmosphere generated by their energetic exchanges was flat.

  “Another homicide, Boss,” sighed Detective Constable Rose McDare when it became apparent no one else was going to speak.

  Waters had personally selected Rose to make the move to his MIT unit from CID two years earlier following a coffee-room discussion with his counterpart who had been her supervisor.

  The CID Detective Chief Inspector, Neil Kelly, had described a tenacious young detective constable with a fire in her belly matched only by her hair colour. One who had rounded on the more senior officers on his team when she felt they were taking the easy road to solving a case.

  It transpired DC Rose McDare was absolutely right, and the suspect her colleagues had pegged for a robbery was, in fact, innocent.

  “Twenty-two-year-old female,” she continued. “Blunt-force trauma. The body was discovered in St Mark’s Park shortly before five this morning by a runner. We think the intention was to dump the body in the Leith Water but the killer got spooked.”

  “That’s ridiculous, DC McDare.”

  “Sir?” Rose McDare gaped back at her boss, struggling to figure out what she’d said that was so wrong.

  “What kind of person wakes up and decides ‘I tell you what, I could fair go a run’ at five in the morning? Absolutely ridiculous behaviour.”

  There was a silence lasting around a second before Waters saw the penny drop. In an action which contradicted her usual composed decorum, Rose McDare snorted a laugh, causing the rest of the room to erupt in raucous uproar interspersed with playfully well-intended grunting noises.

  John Waters was of the opinion that, in this line of work, laughter could be the tether anchored to the right side of sanity and, right now, his team needed a laugh.

  “OK,” he said once the racket subsided. “Does anyone feel like something’s amiss here?”

  “Well, she’s been murdered, Boss. That’s amiss,” chirped DC Dougal Flynn, the youngest and most cocky of DCI Waters’ troupe. Despite his conceited exterior, Dougal Flynn had a heart the size of mainland Scotland, and John Waters had always trusted that, when one of his own was in trouble, Dougal would run through walls to help them.

  Still, when an opportunity to take him down a peg or two was presented, it was only right to take it.

  Character-building, Waters told himself.

  “Aye, very good, Einstein.” He rolled his eyes as the others sniggered. “Alright, here’s a question for you, Detective Constable Smart Arse: how many homicides, on average, do we record each year in this capital city of God’s Own Country? I will accept a ballpark.”

  “Eh, twenty?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me, son?”

  Dougal Flynn cleared his throat before repeating the same statement, this time forcing his inflection to drop rather than rise on the final syllable.

  “Twenty you say…” Waters looked off out of the window towards Arthur’s Seat, his hand at his chin in an exaggerated pondering pose. “Twenty… that’s not very many… or is it?”

  “Are you asking me, or telling me, sir?” Dougal needled with a mischievous grin.

  “It’s wrong, is what it is. But that’s no’ really a big surprise seeing as it came from you. Any advance on twenty from the rest of you wonderful examples of police intelligence? DC Kumar, higher or lower?”

  “I’ll go higher, sir,” said DC Mani Kumar, the only one of John Waters’ team who had dared to make the switch from the west side of the M8 to the east.

  “Ooft! Detective Constable Kumar thinks higher, but then again he’s maybe influenced by his history in Glasgow. We’re much more civilised over this way, DC Kumar. It’ll rub off on you eventually. DC McDare?”

  “Lower, sir.”

  “See that, detectives? Not a flicker of hesitation. No hint of a question. DC McDare just made a bold statement and one she is confident in. But is she correct?”

  Waters slid one of the meeting room chairs to the front of the room and bundled Dougal Flynn onto it.

  “OK. This chair here represents our first guess from DC Bigmouth. There you are, you sit your smart arse down, please, Detective Constable. Now, those who think lower, stand to my left, and those who think higher, stand to my right. If anyone stands in the middle then you’re relegating yourself to an even lower position than Dougal here, and I will lose all respect for you as I’ve already told you he’s wrong.”

  After some shuffling and screeching of chairs and tables being shoved out of the way as the group of sixteen homicide detectives aligned themselves in one camp or other, DCI Waters surveyed the scene. There was an almost even split.

  “The group who receives a free beer – courtesy, this week, of Detective Constable Flynn for once again thinking he’s a big shot – is…” Waters hissed a sharp intake of breath in lieu of a drumroll. “Lower!”

  No sooner had the DCI’s mouth formed the ’L’, than the winning portion of his previously flat team erupted as though Scotland had just scored the winning penalty in the World Cup Final. He held out large hands – which many throughout his adult life had described as shovels – in a calming gesture.

  The respect his team had for him meant the ruckus stopped almost instantly.

  “Over the past decade, the yearly average number of homicides is five in the whole of the City of Edinburgh, and not once in those ten years has the total ever exceeded nine. Any idea what our current standing is as we approach the end of June?”

  “Eight, sir.”

  DC Rose McDare was correct again, but Waters noted the moment’s pause she’d given to allow someone else to answer. From the moment she’d joined Major Investigations, she’d been the smartest copper in the room and Waters knew that such a burden brought its own anxieties, especially for someone like Rose who had never enjoyed being regarded as superior to anyone.

  “Correct, DC McDare. Eight murders in less than six months. Does anyone know how many of those have been solved?”

  “Two were the result of domestic violence and the perps are in custody,” Dougal Flynn began, demonstrating the smarts that Waters knew lay beneath the laddish surface. “One was a drug-debt killing. The rest, I don’t know.”

  “Thank you, DC Flynn. So, our solved cases total three which sounds about normal for this point in the year. But we’ve also got five unsolved murders—”

  “Six, sir. This morning’s homicide is yet to be solved,” Mani Kumar interjected.

  “Of course. Thank you, DC Kumar. Six unsolved murders. This is quite the exponential increase, is it not? Why? Why are people all of a sudden killing each other at a significantly higher rate than we’ve ever seen?”

  “Money? Fuel prices, politics, wars? Being generally pissed off at the world?” Dougal Flynn ejected.

  “Ah, I see where you’re going with that, but the Office for National Statistics reports state we’re all happier – we even beat some of our Scandinavian cousins in the rankings. Who’d have expected that, eh? No. It has to be something else.” Waters regarded the room, looking from face to face. “Let’s look for a simpler explanation. And one that isn’t so much verbal diarrhoea, please. If I need to see your working, I’ll ask for it.” Waters shot Dougal a friendly wink.

  “That’s Occam’s razor, right, Boss?” offered Mani.

  A grimace adorned the DCI’s face. “Well, now, you see Detective Constable, this is one of those common misconceptions that I’ve got a real problem with. Allow me to educate you.”

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  At that, the entire room groaned as one. DCI John Waters was famous for veering off in all sorts of conversational tangents, especially if there was a learning opportunity to be had. While the team lightheartedly expressed frustration, the truth was that every one of them loved it when John adopted his professorial air.

  “Now, now, my talented underlings, you will hear me out because I am your senior officer and I have an adoration for the imparting of knowledge.”

  Waters perched half his backside on the edge of a table and invited the standing officers to sit for his lecture.

  “This William of Occam fella gets all the credit for suggesting that the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one, but he’s standing on the shoulders of others. You see, as far back as Ptolemy in the first century AD we can find a quote attributed to him that says: ‘We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis.’”

  The audience before him was a sea of sealed mouths and blinking eyes.

  “Folk had been applying this logic for centuries before Occam’s razor became a known thing, and yon William laddie started taking plaudits. Gets my back right up, so it does.”

  He paused expecting some kind of response from someone in the room, but, instead, was met with a silence in which the only thing missing was a passing tumbleweed.

  “Och, fine!” he scoffed. “Aye, in principle, you’re right, DC Kumar. Occam’s razor. So, what is the simplest explanation?”

  The group collectively shuffled in their seats. Not a pair of eyes met another. A few throats were cleared and all heads tended downwards, away from the DCI’s stare.

  And he knew why.

  They’d all followed his thought process and had each come to the same horrific conclusion.

  “A single person is responsible,” Detective Inspector Leanne Dewar, who’d been silent until that point, said.

  Waters looked to the ceiling and gave a deep sigh that he didn’t know he needed until he heard those words said in a voice that was not his own internal monologue. At once he felt a fatigue that shouldn’t have gripped him so early in the morning.

  “Aye,” he croaked before clearing his throat. “Aye, I think that’s correct, Leanne. I’ve thought it for a while now.”

  It wasn’t often that he used an officer’s first name in the presence of others, so his use of hers caused a lump to form in her throat.

  “In my opinion, the simplest explanation is a single perpetrator, who may not have been present in Edinburgh – certainly one who has not been active – until this year, is responsible for the sharp rise in homicides we are witnessing,” he concluded.

  Those words landed like echoless thuds in the hearts of each and every police officer in the room and no one could find a word in response.

  After allowing himself roughly thirty seconds to feel the fear and trepidation he needed to feel in order to process the gravity of what they might be facing, DC Mani Kumar mustered that granite-like strength Waters had fought so hard to bring to the team from Glasgow, and burst out of his seat.

  “We need to examine every homicide file from this year with a tooth-comb – what does that even mean? Why is that a thing?”

  “A fine-tooth comb,” Waters corrected. “It’s a comb with fine teeth. Not a tooth-comb that happens to be fine.” Mani’s blank expression stared back at him. “The teeth of the comb, they’re fine as in narrow… Och, forget it. Carry on!”

  “Right, sorry. Let’s get all the files and see if there’s any kind of correlation.”

  “Rose, bring the records up, please.” DI Leanne Dewar, John’s second-in-command, borrowed some of Mani’s energy and bounded across to the whiteboard. “Let’s get started with what we’ve got in our heads. Everyone, start calling out case details.”

  All sorts of details, demographics and deadly weapons volleyed around the room. Leanne Dewar expertly swept each out of the air and documented it in place on the large whiteboard. John Waters sat back and watched his team of diligent detectives, a tiny smile caressing the corners of his mouth and a much larger lightness inflating in his chest.

  Despite only working from memory, the team were able to recall a surprising amount of information which was augmented once DC Rose McDare had cast the case files up onto the screens.

  Over the next hour, additional facts trickled in from the team processing that morning’s case, and those were instantly added to the already burgeoning mosaic which spilled from the screen to the whiteboard, to the walls to the desks. Waters’ fatigue had evaporated, his team’s fervour and enthusiasm invigorating him with each passing minute.

  Once every last detail from each case file was on display somewhere in the room, the real pattern-spotting process began. Waters facilitated it by calling out the most common facets of a homicide where investigating officers could expect to see connections.

  “Method?”

  “Varied,” Dougal Flynn replied, then he moved around the room pointing to various cases and punctuating his answers. “Blunt-force trauma with a hammer or mallet – unrecovered. Stabbed in the abdomen from behind with a kitchen knife. Stabbing to the abdomen from the front twenty-six times, again kitchen knife but smaller. A paring knife; the other was a chef’s knife. Strangled with some kind of synthetic rope. And blunt-force trauma with a stone or brick – also unrecovered.”

  “And this morning’s weapon?” Waters asked.

  “Something pointed and heavy, Boss. SOC tentatively think a pick-axe.”

  “OK, thank you, DC Flynn. What about the victims themselves? Any correlation there?”

  “No, sir,” Mani Kumar said, taking over. “Ethnically diverse, so the motive isn’t hate-crime. Same can be said for sexual orientation and gender. We’ve got representation from across the board.”

  “Wait!” Dougal yelped.

  The others obeyed as he took his time scanning each piece of paper, section of board and pixel of screen. Waters felt an impatient tension begin to rise, but he knew better than to try to force the young officer to a conclusion before his mind had gone through its process. “Why didn’t I see this before?” he muttered eventually.

  “See what?” Mani was the type of detective who wanted the full story in one go and Dougal Flynn’s piecemeal approach irritated him no end. Both young men complemented the other better than they would likely ever realise, and Waters knew his team would be nowhere near as efficient without either of them.

  “They’re all girls.”

  “Incorrect, Detective,” DI Dewar interjected. “Two victims over here are men. Alix Bergen and Bo Carter.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I mean they’re actually girls, though—”

  “AFAB,” Rose corrected as she approached the screen. Waters saw the workings of her mind all over her face. They’d found something.

  “You what?” asked Dougal.

  “AFAB – Assigned Female at Birth.”

  When she saw the blank look on Flynn’s face, that fire which had so often spurred the team on in the past emerged.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Dougie! See if you actually paid attention to the world around you, or at least went to the diversity training just once, you’d be a better man.”

  “Aye, well, whatever you call it. They’ve got the machinery is what I mean.”

  “So, could the motive be sexual?” asked DI Leanne Dewar.

  “Ah, no. Not likely. See, this is how I saw that they were all… what do you call it? AFAB? Aye, AFAB. I mean you’d never guess looking at the pictures. Look at this one! Never in a million years—”

  “Thank you, DC Flynn,” Waters sighed. “Get on with it, please.”

  “Aye, sorry. It’s the coroner’s report. Each one says there was no sign of molestation or penetration. I wondered why they would specifically use that word and that made me realise they all had a… you know…”

  “A vagina.” Leanne Dewar rolled her eyes. She often thought working with Dougal Flynn was like working with a child. She turned to Waters. “I’m not sure I like how he got there, John, but he’s got a point.”

  “It could be something,” he agreed, then regarded the room. “Good work, detectives. Now, let’s see if we can figure out what this means.”

  He turned back to the DI.

  “Humour me for a spell, won’t you?” he whispered. “Go see if our Uniform colleagues have any unexplained deaths that didn’t make their way to our merry little band.”

  There was a moment when Leanne’s face was blank as she tried to figure out out Waters’ logic, and then she gasped. “You mean unexplained deaths that weren’t listed as homicides, don’t you?” She ran a hand through her blonde hair which had been pulled back into a tight ponytail. “John… you don’t think there are more, do you?”

  “Just humour me. Please.”