Magnus had chosen a selection of men to interview based on the length of their sentences and the educational courses they’d picked during their incarceration. Alec McLaughlin was one of the long-stay prisoners who’d worked his way through three Highers and on to degree level. Interestingly, the degree he had been taking through the Open University was in Magnus’s chosen area of psychology.

The white-haired man sporting a small, neatly trimmed beard was, according to his details, approaching sixty-one. The red cheeks, bulging waistline and welcoming smile only added to the image of a jolly Santa Claus, which was further enhanced by the red fleece.

As Magnus entered, his interviewee rose with some difficulty and, leaning on the walking stick in his right hand, extended his left in welcome.

‘Professor Pirie. Alec McLaughlin. I’m delighted to meet you. I am so enjoying reading your work on psychopathic personalities, especially your study of the Reborn dollmaker, Jeff Coulter.’

When Magnus didn’t immediately respond, he continued, ‘I wondered if you truly ever came to a decision on whether Coulter was a psychopathic personality, pretending to be ill. Or was he in fact in remission due to the drugs administered in hospital for a debilitating mental illness?’

It was a valid question, although not one Magnus particularly wanted to respond to. His whole research around Coulter had been to try and establish either a psychotic illness, treatable in part by medication, or an untreatable psychopathic personality.

Jeff Coulter had been imprisoned for killing his baby son. Locked up in Carstairs and treated with drugs, he had reinvented himself as the Reborn maker, fashioning realistic baby dolls modelled on actual photographs of dead infants for their grieving parents. His work and apparent rehabilitation had made him something of a cult figure. Magnus remembered Coulter’s Reborn workshop, the wall festooned with photographs of the dolls he had made, pictured with their loving and grateful parents.

It was a case that haunted Magnus to this day.

‘My conclusions are in the research paper, so I presume you know them already. Besides, I’m not here to discuss Jeff Coulter, but to talk to you about your studies.’

Alec sat back at this point and for a moment Magnus caught a disgruntled look, which was quickly masked.

‘So,’ Magnus began, ‘can you give me a potted history of your involvement with the educational unit here at Barlinnie?’

Alec did just that, succinctly and with occasional self-deprecating humour. He’d had very little formal education as a child, he told Magnus. Abandoned by his mother, he’d been put in a Catholic orphanage from the age of two to five.

‘Then my bitch of an aunt took me in. As for her husband . . . They had no kids of their own, so they could concentrate all their love on me,’ he said in a tone that suggested the experience had been anything but pleasant.

He’d skipped school a lot and suspected his various teachers were rather glad about that.