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wall. Lander had previously been MI5's director of Irish counterterrorism, and had every intention of expanding his war against the IRA and its splinter groups, using every MI5 resource available to him.
    Molly Fraser did not share his passion. Although she was appalled by the renewed spate of IRA bombings that had so incensed Lander, her heart was in espionage. When they asked her to go undercover, using her gift for dialects and her red-cheeked cherubic face to pose as Irish and work her way into a cell, she declined, and then turned in her resignation.
    Though Molly did not approve the tactics of the IRA, neither could she bring herself to fight against them. There was more kinship between her and them than language, however; they'd had their country stolen as well.
    Ten years before she might have done it, but those ten years had been spent in the pursuit of, among other things, history, the history of not only the Irish and the English, but the Scottish as well. Though she had known the history of her homeland, she had learned it from an English perspective. When she looked at it from a purely Scottish point of view, it became a scenario in which one country had used its superior military strength and numbers to first conquer and then subdue a proud and noble land, then allied itself with the greediest natives by promising wealth for those few in return for obeisance from all.
    Over the years, she had learned how England had used the Scots. They had used the technological brilliance of the finest Scottish minds, and sent their English dullards to Scottish universities; they had formed Scottish regiments of the bravest soldiers in the empire, and then marched them into cannons' mouths or set them upon native peoples in Africa and Asia, allowing the conquered to conquer, but only for their English masters; they had taken the resources of the North Sea, and allowed only a small portion of those billions from suboceanic black gold to filter back to Scotland.
    The more she read and the more she learned, the louder the songs of English betrayal and domination rang in her ears: Falkirk, Glencoe, Culloden, the highland clearances. True, they had happened centuries before, but present-day Scots were still living with the results of their ancestors' defeats and deprivations. If she, as a Scot, felt this resentment, how much greater anger then would the Irish feel, with England's far more recent injustices toward them?
    So she had resigned. The director of counterespionage had offered to clear her way into MI6, the foreign intelligence service, but Molly had politely declined. She had had enough of the government. She did accept his offer, however, to assist her in finding the police job that she sought in her native Scotland.
    As luck would have it, there was a chief inspector's opening in the Gairloch district on Scotland's northwestern shore, not far from her hometown of Torridon. The pay wasn't much, but with her MI5 pension she didn't need much. The director had provided her with an unbreakable r ésumé , which included police experience in London and Australia, as well as exemplary letters of recommendation from several highly placed police officials in London and Sydney.
    In the three years she had been living in Gairloch, she had come to love the job and the people. There were hardly any acts of violence except for the occasional pub brawl, and few major larcenies. The primary crimes were petty thefts and vandalism, most of which she and her two deputy inspectors were able to solve readily enough.
    Her mother and father still lived in Torridon, and she spent many of the weekends she wasn't working with them, helping around their house. The modest needs of her love life were met by Alan Keith, a fifty-year-old widower who owned a gift shop in Gairloch, and whom she dined with, and afterward circumspectly slept with, every few weeks. All in all, it was a pretty boring life, and extremely satisfying, although every now and