“Is that a fact, Francis?” the detective asked. He buried his hands back in his pockets and flicked his gaze upwards. “How about the three of us go put that theory to the test?”

Chapter Forty-Two

Tyler had been right. The view from up here was something else. You could see for miles in every direction—out beyond the city limits towards Greenock in the west, and east to where the M8 traffic crawled its way to and from Edinburgh.

Up here, you got a sense of Glasgow’s scale, how it was growing to consume the smaller towns that had once stood proudly separate, and were now becoming just another suburb with a funny name.

You could see the history of the city, too, watch how the former industrial sites along the Clyde, and the sandstone architecture of the city’s original buildings gave way to the metal and glass of the growing financial and IT sector in the West End.

Even the High Street—the oldest road in the city, with its origins stretching back to Medieval times—had evolved into something new and improved with a crop of new buildings that, architecturally, could best be described as ‘ambitious.’

And the traffic moved through it all, like blood through a network of veins and arteries. People spoke about Glasgow as if it was a place, but Logan knew the truth. Glasgow wasn’t a place, it was an entity—a schizophrenic living thing with a personality that shifted every minute of every day, and could be transformed completely by the kick of a ball, and the foot you chose to do it with.

Logan gazed out over the living city and breathed in through his nose, enjoying the fresh air. Or fresher air than the stairwell had to offer, at least.

Way up there, you could pretend you were apart from everything going on below. You could tell yourself you weren’t part of it. That you’d managed to escape the hive mind.

It was peaceful. Relaxing. Soothing, almost.

Well, for him, anyway.

For Frankie Cowan? Not so much.

“Fuuuuuuuuuck!” Frankie’s arms windmilled as he balanced on the edge of the roof, the hand gripping his collar the only thing preventing him from plummeting into the car park that lay a dizzyingly long way below.

The tough-guy act had lasted most of the way up the stairs, then became a bit reedy and desperate-sounding when Hoon had dragged him out onto the top of the building. Now that he was being dangled face-forward over the edge with his feet frantically searching for purchase on the edge of the wall running around the roof, all bravado had upped and left him, leaving him with just his orchestra of twitches, spasms, and tics.

“Please, man! Fuck! Please, don’t!”