The Same Words

Four witnesses. Four statements. Not one word out of place.

Fraserburgh, October 2018. Sandy Gatt, owner of the biggest taxi firm in the Broch, is found beaten to death in his own yard. Jamie Forbes, nineteen, sacked a month earlier, is charged with murder, and four Crown witnesses put him at the scene.

Elspeth Cardno spent twenty-eight years in Grampian Police and left in 2013 under a cloud she does not discuss. Now she works for the defence. Solicitors send her the Crown's witness lists, and she sits in kitchens and harbour offices and takes precognitions: what each witness will actually say in the box. It is patient, unglamorous work, done in shorthand that nobody else can read.

When Catriona Duthie sends her the Gatt papers, Cardno notices what a defence lawyer would not. The four statements run alike, in the same order, with the same careful phrases. She knows the shape. She taught it to the detective who took them.

Fifty miles of the A98 a day, a back room above a chip shop on Broad Street, a seventeen-year-old niece who does her searches for cash, and a woman who wants her father found. Somewhere in the Broch, somebody knows what happened in that yard. To find out, Cardno will have to test her own methods against the one friendship she has left.

The Same Words is the first 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.