The Teller

Ellon, 2005. Two careful old souls have drowned within a year, in the same half mile of the River Ythan, and the town has grieved twice and asked nothing, because the Ythan is old and age is age.

But a ghillie's spate log says the water was far too low to take anybody. A sergeant with a wet coat drives to Turriff on his day off to say so. And two elderly sisters cannot stop thinking about a pencil that came home without its notebook.

DI Jean Sangster and DS Cormac Buchan come quietly down the road to a granite square where everyone banks with the same man their fathers banked with, and begin the gentlest and coldest case of their partnership: pennies missing from passbooks, a carbon copy in a shoe box, a frost that remembered a shoe, and a journal roll that will not stop printing.

The second of the Early Years mysteries: trust compounded like interest, a town that kept everything without knowing why, and the winter DS Buchan's left ear went deaf and never, officially, recovered.