Rhona had responded with ‘You and McNab have been doing quite a lot of that yourselves recently.’

‘Not any more,’ Sean had said.

‘Are you going to tell me what it was all about?’

Sean had given her a thoughtful look. ‘Are you really interested?’

‘About as interested as you are in my shop talk.’

‘That’s why we go so well together,’ he’d said. ‘If it puts your mind at rest, McNab checked out a guy who was giving me grief about a loan I took out on the club. Turns out he’s not bona fide. McNab had a word with him regarding harassment. So all is well.’

Chrissy broke into Rhona’s thoughts once more. ‘Shall we take bets on whether McNab and Ellie will be a couple again by the end of tonight?’

Rhona shook her head. ‘There’s no winning that one.’

Recalling that conversation as she gazed around the dinner table, Rhona was a little surprised at how well it was going. Maybe it was the excellent food and the copious amount of wine that was being drunk, but she was actually enjoying herself.

Then began a brief foray into work topics, which Paula allowed. One of which was McNab’s tale of Lucifer the devil cat, and the surprise discovery of the lighter used to start the fire.

‘The lighter Dr MacLeod forensically linked to the perpetrator,’ he said with a congratulatory look at Rhona.

At that point the amusing aspects of the story – the cat as hoarder, the dead mouse, the bird, the sock and the lighter stashed under an old man’s bed – suddenly ceased to be amusing because they all led inevitably to what the lighter had been used to do.

As silence fell like a stone and Rhona caught the shadow crossing McNab’s face, she registered again what she’d always known.

It wasn’t what a detective did in a case. It was what the case did to them.

Seeing Ellie’s expression at this point showed just how hard it would be for her to stick with McNab. She wanted to, Rhona thought, but probably couldn’t.

Rhona wondered if McNab already knew that.

Sean eventually saved the day, as he was often wont to do, by using an Irish tale to make them all laugh, and suddenly life was light again. However briefly.

The evening ended well enough. Sean had decided on a break-out phrase, to be used if required.

In fact, it was Rhona who used it first, but Sean happily obliged by standing up and agreeing with their need to go home because of her cat, Tom, having been shut out on the roof.

As they climbed into the taxi and therefore out of earshot of their hosts, he said, ‘You’re a terrible liar, Dr MacLeod. Sure, not a soul in there believed you. Especially McNab. They just thought you wanted home to have sex with me.’