“Aborted starts, more like,” Pete said. He indicated the supermarket ahead of them. “The wife popped in there with the kids. Your man waited here. Right where you’re sitting now, actually. I didn’t recognise him at first. He had sunglasses on, you see? And I thought, ‘Oh, hello. He’s someone.’ Because who wears sunglasses at twenty to eight in the evening in Fort William? I thought, ‘Either he’s blind, or he’s someone.’ And then, once I’d got speaking to him a bit, it clicked who he was. I’d seen him perform, see? In the Gulf. They did a special for the troops. Fucking awful, it was, but that’s another story. Absolute shit. We were all livid. We were meant to be getting Kim Wilde.”

Hamza tried to cut in and reroute the conversation, but Pete steered it back on his own.

“Anyway, I said to him, I said, ‘Here, you’re him, aren’t you?’ and he denied it at first, but then he admitted it in the end, when I shouted to him… you’ll like this… I shouted to him, ‘Where’s the haggis?’ He owned up quick smart then, I can tell you.”

“How did he seem?” Hamza asked.

“Not like on the telly, but then you wouldn’t be, would you? He was still funny, though. Full of jokes. Full of fun. We were getting along like a house on fire by the time his wife came back with the little ‘uns and a trolley full of shopping. Chatting away like old friends, so we were. I got out and loaded the bags into the car. They’d just dumped all the other stuff in the back, so I had to move it all around. It’s a big car, I told them, but it’s not the fucking TARDIS. Archie liked that one, so I told him he could have it. For his act, like. He seemed pleased at that. So, anyway, once it was all moved around and the shopping was loaded up in the boot, the five of them jumped in and I took them down the road.”

“OK, so from there, you…” Hamza stopped. Frowned. Met Pete’s reflected gaze in the mirror. “Wait,” he said. “Five?”

Chapter Fifteen

Logan sat in the coffee shop just inside the entrance of Raigmore Hospital, enjoying a ham sandwich. Well, technically he wasn’t so much enjoying as tolerating it. It was getting later in the day, and the pieces had been sat out since morning. This, combined with a lack of butter for presumably health-related reasons, meant the bread had reached near sandpaper levels of dryness.

The ham itself was fine, though. He picked idly at it while he waited for his cardboard cup of tea to drop a degree or two below scalding, so he could finally take a sip.