‘Wasn’t talking to you. . .’ Logan leaned over the sink and peered at the battered lump in the mirror. Both eyes were sunk into dark-purple bags. Wonderful.

‘Anyway, thought you’d want to know: Ding-Dong’s down to interview Reuben this morning, soon as his solicitor’s been round. And you’ll never guess who’s representing him.’

Logan poked a finger into the swollen bruised skin. Didn’t hurt, just looked bloody awful. ‘Not in the mood.’

‘Hissing Sid.’

Great. He let his forehead clunk against the dirty mirror. ‘When? ’

‘Dunno. PCSO says Reuben woke up about five and spewed his ring all over the floor; got a hangover like a car crash right now, so I doubt Mr Moir-Farquharson will be strutting his slimy stuff before ten-ish.’

Welcome to Monday morning.

High above, the sun burns like a furnace, baking all the people below as they trudge their way through their desperate little lives. Unaware that things walk amongst them.

A couple laugh on the pedestrian area beneath her viewpoint, wrapped up in each other like ivy around a tree. They ignore everyone marching past – the shining lights, the grey, and the darkness.

There: a woman with a small child in a pushchair. No one knows that she’s an angel, because they can’t see her. They think she’s just another fattie in a tracksuit, smoking a fag, wheeling her screaming kid about on the way to the dole office.

And there: the man with the dark-blue suit and the sunglasses, stuffing a green Markies bag into his leather satchel. Pale-blue aura swirling around him as he tries to decide who he’s going to eat today.

No one sees it but her.

She walks in the door to the ladies’ lingerie department. Plastic people in bras and pants, frozen poses for the masses. Some will come alive at night and hunt for mice and rats, cooking them on the hot radiator pipes before swallowing them whole.

An old woman pushes past, trailing thin lines of black mist that hiss and crackle.

Rowan looks away before she can turn around. Not safe. Not safe at all.

Down the escalator, into the bowels of the shop, where beasts graze the food department, hunched over their trolleys. Like torturers over their victims.

Don’t make eye contact. They can smell the fear, but unless they see your eyes they don’t know whose it is.

She reaches for a sandwich . . . then pauses. Counts three to the left. Then one down, because it’s Monday. Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato. BLT. Blood, Ligature, and Tallow. Good enough.

One of the beasts stops behind her, breath heavy on the back of her neck as it reaches past with a thick hairy paw to stroke the sandwiches she’s already touched. Feeling for her. Hungry.