The Devil's Footprints
A Novel
Chapter One
The Evening Herald
A year ago, almost to the day, a woman called Moira Birnie and her two sons,
Malcolm, aged four, and Jimmie, three, were found dead in a burned-out car seven
miles from Coldhaven. Moira was thirty-two and was married to a man called Tom
Birnie, a local tough, with whom she shared a ground-floor flat at the dank,
lower end of Marshall's Wynd. A flat that I happen to know she rented from Henry
Hunter, now also deceased but, in his day, a notoriously mean landlord and
entrepreneur whose reputation for shady dealing went back thirty years or more
to when he bought his first house, next to the chip shop on Sandhaven Road, and
rented it out-faulty wiring, bad ventilation and all-to a bunch of students from
the fisheries college. I don't imagine Tom ... read full excerpt from The Devil's Footprints ebook
