The story took all of ten minutes to recount, and Dan began to cast surreptitious glances at his wristwatch. He was meant to be up at the yacht marina in fifteen minutes. He realized now why the lorries had taken so long to load. Tommy was a born storyteller. Dan wanted to grab the boxes on which the forklift driver rested his hands and get on with the loading, but he knew that it would be taken as an unfriendly action, so he resigned himself to listening to the whole drawn-out account.

“Aye, he’s a fine man,” Tommy concluded eventually, picking up the boxes and thus allowing Dan to dive in for his next load. “Right, just one more pallet after this one.”

Dan groaned quietly.

Exactly at the time of his rendezvous with Ronnie, Dan slammed shut the backdoor of the van and pulled down the heavy levers on the airtight doors. Pulling off his gloves, he glanced toward the narrow entrance gates, just to get a judgment on their width before he reversed out. “Oh for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, throwing his gloves to the ground in frustrated fury. “What the hell is he doing parked there?”

The red BMW, which he had seen earlier down at the harbour, was drawn up perfectly into the gateway, leaving no more than six inches’ gap between each of its bumpers and the gate pillars. Dan ran over to the entrance, squeezed his way past the car, and looked up and down the street. He saw the bulky figure of the man waddling his way jauntily up the street.

“Hey, mate!” Dan yelled out.

The man turned and looked back towards him. “Are you, by any chance, addressing me?” he asked in an aggravatingly high-pitched voice.

“Too right I am. What the hell are you doing parking your car there? It’s a bloody gateway.”

“Well, that may be so, but there’s no sign of a yellow line. I’m quite within my legal rights to park there.”

“Come on, that’s being bloody obtuse. There are no lines at all on this street. You could have parked anywhere.”

“And I choose to park exactly there.”

Dan realized that being rude to the man wasn’t going to help matters. “All right, then. Would you mind please moving your car? I happen to have a pretty valuable load of prawns on that van, and I have to get them back to Fort William as soon as possible.”

The man’s flabby features spread wide into an ingratiating smile and he took a few steps back towards Dan. “Do I have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Dan Porter?”

Dan breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that his diplomacy was working. “You do. And you must be Mr. Maxwell Borthwick.”