Chapter 1

Week 1: Finding Your Identity

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Jung

I remember standing in the dock, behind a Perspex screen, in the High Court in Edinburgh. I was disappointed I was being tried in one of the newer courts, fitted out with blond polished wood, lacking the gravitas and the dignity of the older courts, which had been used for hundreds of years. Whose very atmosphere was stained with a history of pain, terror and despair.

In the gallery were the family and friends of all my victims. The courtroom was packed with expert witnesses, police, lawyers, members of the public who trundled in and out of the witness box, giving evidence over many days and weeks. For some standing in front of all those people and knowing the attention of the world’s press was on them might make them feel exposed, or unsafe. Me? I knew that there was exactly where I was meant to be, because I know exactly who and what I am.

I hadn’t just created a sense of bemusement with my primary work, when people read a headline in a paper and then turned the page, forgetting it. My most important relationship had been forged: that with my nemesis, DCI Halliday Campbell. She was there with me in court, watching everything I did, listening to everything I said, and all the time uncharacteristically coy, trying to appear like she was ignoring me. She displayed her meticulous, calculated indifference so widely. But I know I have impact. I am important.

While you will admire who I am now, you won’t realise that I was not always that person. When I was young, I was exactly the opposite. I was brought up in Rossmoore, a small village near the Black Isle in the Highlands of Scotland. It’s not a well-known place; more the type of place that, when you tell people you come from there, they give you a blank look and say, “I’ve never heard of it.”

Rossmoore was dull; more than dull. Not dull in the way that all teenagers find their surroundings dull, but dull in a nothing-has-changed-for-a-hundred-years way. It was filled with old men, and people who didn’t have the get-up-and-go. It had a shop, a bank (open only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays), a post office (open only in the mornings), a fish van that parked on what was laughingly called the high street on Mondays, and a library van that parked outside the post office on the first Thursday of every month. It had once been a thriving community, with a baker’s and a dairy, and a curling pool that was used by the whole village every winter. Come the opening of the supermarkets in Inverness, and everyone being able to afford a television, the heart of this little community shrivelled up; it was just existing as a shadow of its former self. This is what progress does.

Into that desiccated husk of a community entered I, its most famous son. My mother and father had moved there when I was born; my father left when I was three. My mother, who refused to drive, and who would stop me from learning, lived her whole life in Rossmoore using the