Towards the end of February 2008, I was invited to write a short story for Shattered: Every Crime Has A Victim, an anthology of crime stories for the charity, Victim Support Scotland. The remit was to write a story written from the perspective of the victim. For a long time, I'd been looking for an opportunity to explore a very unusual idea, one that I wasn't sure would work, and this seemed like a great chance to try it out. The story turned out pretty well. At least, I was happy with it, the editor was happy with it, and once the book was published, I received more positive feedback on it than any other story I've written. I realised there were a lot more possibilities for telling this story, particularly if it was narrated from an outsider's perspective. So I approached Barrington Stoke, an Edinburgh-based publisher, to ask if they'd like to see a novella based on the original idea. They said yes, and I set about writing it. I found I had to make several changes to the original for the longer version to work. Changing the perspective was only a small part of it. But the premise remains the same. What follows is the novella. The original short story it was based on is included afterwards for those who might be curious to see how the central premise unfolds from a different perspective.
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