Tyler picked up a beermat between thumb and forefinger and tapped it lightly on the edge of his plate. “Aye?”

“So it seems. Bad, too. Was going to do its worst before too much longer,” Logan explained.

“What, like, kill him you mean?”

Logan nodded, moved the partially masticated ball of meat-mush around in his mouth, then continued. “Silly bugger was refusing treatment, would you believe?”

“So… what? They could’ve cured him?”

“No. Don’t think so. He was way too far gone for that,” Logan replied. “Left it too late to get checked. Kept putting it off. So the medical records say, anyway.” He shook his head. “Daft bastard.”

Tyler turned the beer mat over. He looked at the writing on the back, but didn’t read it. “I suppose… maybe he was just, you know, scared. Or whatever.”

“Lot of bloody good being scared did him,” Logan said. “He was already a dead man walking when he got to Glen Coe. Getting murdered just sped the process up. It might’ve been the best thing for him, in fact. Probably no’ for the rest of the family, obviously, but for him.”

Tyler frowned. “How do you work that one out?”

“Well, it’s not a nice way to go, is it? Cancer,” Logan said. “Can be a bloody horrible thing. Bastard of a disease. No rhyme nor reason to it.”

“No. Suppose not.”

“Amazing what they can do these days, mind you,” Logan said. “All the new treatments they’ve got. Makes a big difference.”

Tyler folded the beer mat in half, then folded it in the opposite direction. Logan used a mouthful of flat lemonade to coerce the lump of grey meat down his gullet.

“Which one is it?” he asked, once he’d forced it down.

The bending of the beer mat stopped. It took a second for the frown to fully develop on Tyler’s face. “Boss?”

Logan pointed with the end of his knife at the table. Were someone to draw a straight line through the wood from the cutlery’s tip, it would stop roughly in the same neck of the woods as Tyler’s testicles.

“Which bollock?”

Tyler looked down at his crotch, then back to the DCI. “I don’t know what…” He turned the beer mat over again, then chewed on his bottom lip before replying. “How did you know? Did Hoon tell you?”

“No.”

Tyler’s face fell. “Not Sinead? I asked her not—”

“Nobody told me, Tyler. I’m a Detective Chief Inspector of the bloody polis. They don’t give that out in boxes of cornflakes, you know?” He tapped the side of his head. “I figured it out.”

Tyler stared back at him in amazement. “How?”

“Lots of wee things. You getting cold feet at the wedding was a big billboard that something was wrong, but there were signs before then, too. Little things.”

“Like what?”