“That he made them uneasy,” Cowan replied. “Can you imagine? Skinny wee teenager, and he’s making these big bastards nervous. And these were not lads who spooked easily. Far from it. But, to his credit, he kept the head screwed on straight, and did his job. Kept asking to get involved in my… other interests, but I kept him out of it. His maw, my sister, she’d have done her nut if he’d got messed up in anything less than legal. I’d have never heard the end of it.”

Cowan looked around for an ashtray, remembered that he wasn’t going to find one, and stubbed the cigarette out on the tabletop. He lit a second before continuing.

“Then, she goes and fucks off with some new fella she met in Spain. He’s twenty years younger than her. More. Right slimy bastard, he was, but she thinks it’s love and moves over there. Six months later, boat accident kills them both.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Logan said. “How did your nephew take it?”

“He, eh… he saw it,” Shuggie replied, choosing his words with care. “He was there with them on the boat. When it happened. He’d gone over to visit for a few days. He hadn’t been keen, but we’d talked him into it. Be nice to get a bit of sunshine, see his maw.” Cowan waved a hand, and a zig-zag of smoke followed it. “They found him clinging to the upturned boat. The… hull, is it? Found him there, brought him in. The other two…they were never found.”

“You think Frankie did it,” Logan said. It was a statement, not a question.

Shuggie regarded him across the table, and his eyes said something very different to the words that came out of his mouth.

“I wouldn’t know. But, I do know that things changed after that. Once he got back. He started pushing more and more to get involved with the business—the bigger business, I mean, not the shop. Eventually, God help me, I agreed.”

“And now he’s running the show?” Logan asked.

“Not all of it, no. He took over my share of the production company, but I’d already shut most of my other interests down.”

Logan laughed drily. “Sure you did, Shuggie.”

“I don’t really give two shites if you believe me, Jack,” Cowan bit back. “I’m trying to help you out here. Frankie took over the por—the adult entertainment stuff, and that was meant to be that. He’s a lad with big ideas, like I say, but anything he does beyond that didn’t come from me. That’s all him.”

There was something buried in the lines of Shuggie’s face. Logan had sat across tables from the man dozens of times before, in pubs like these and in polis stations, and he’d never seen what he was seeing now.

Fear.