Logan shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. “Aye, well, I’m going to hand that over to your team down here. I’d imagine the grandparents might want to take the baby. Going to be messy, though. If I was you, I’d pass the whole thing on as quickly as I could.”

“Like you’re doing right now, you mean?”

“Aye. Exactly like that,” Logan confirmed. “You can feel free to kick it over to CID, if you like.”

“Oh, can we?” Heather sniped back. “Thanks for your permission, Detective Chief Inspector.”

“Ha!” the Gozer slapped a hand on Logan’s shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. “Just like old times, right enough!” He patted the shoulder a couple of times, noted that Logan did not appear to share his amusement, then cleared his throat. “So, you catch up with Shuggie’s nephew, then?”

“I did.”

“And how is the heir to the Cowan throne?”

“He’s a tricky wee bastard,” Logan said.

The Gozer shrugged. “I did try to warn you. There’s a lot of loyalty to him on that scheme, too.”

“So I noticed. Had a big fella with him, too. Bit of a brute.”

“Ah, yes. I probably should have mentioned him,” the Detective Superintendent admitted. “Brendan ‘Budgie’ Bowman. No idea where the ‘Budgie’ bit comes from. Used to be one of Shuggie’s. His father and Shuggie go way back. Barry Bowman.”

“Christ, aye. I can see the resemblance, now you mention it,” Logan said. “Dead now though, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Poor old Barry passed peacefully about twelve years back,” the Gozer confirmed. “In the boot of a car we fished out of the Clyde.”

Logan remembered the case, but just vaguely. He’d been deep in the Mister Whisper investigation at that point, to the exclusion of everything else. “Shuggie’s doing?” he asked.

“Oh no. Far from it. A warning to the Cowan clan, if anything. Shuggie went out of his way to make sure the rest of the Bowman family were all well looked after.”

Heather snorted. “Such a lovely man.”

“Yes. A real softy!” the Gozer agreed.

For some reason that he would never be able to put into words, the way the other two officers were talking about the convicted criminal and feared gangster was rubbing Logan up the wrong way. He almost wanted to say something—to stand up for the vindictive old bastard.

He didn’t, of course. Doing so would lead to doubts, and funny looks, and questions he couldn’t even begin to answer. Questions he didn’t know how to answer. Not without admitting the terrible truth to himself.

The terrible truth that, despite their years of differences—despite all the many terrible things he knew Cowan had done, and the even longer list he didn’t know about—Logan quite liked the old bugger.