It was five days since he’d visited Alice Hamilton’s house and spoken with her father. The man’s initial reaction had been to call the police, but Tony had begged him not to, for so doing would surely result in Tony being killed.

‘How’s that my problem?’ the man had said, receiver in hand.

‘I’m risking my own life being here,’ Tony said. ‘If they know I warned you, I’m dead.’

‘Who is they?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

Hamilton dialled the first number on the phone, allowed the dial to circle back, a rapid unspooling.

‘I can’t tell you,’ Tony said again. ‘I don’t want anyone’s blood on my hands. Yours or theirs.’

‘They know what they’re getting into when they target policemen.’

A second number dialled.

‘They said the same about you when you targeted a child,’ Tony said, glancing past Hamilton to where Alice sat on the step at the turn of the stairs, listening.

He saw something shift, almost imperceptibly, in Hamilton’s expression: a wounding, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.

‘I know Alice,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to her.’

‘So you’re the teacher from the North who bought her lunch and that?’

Tony nodded.

Hamilton considered for a moment, not taking his eyes off Tony, then replaced the receiver on the handset. ‘You’ve two minutes. Get up the stairs, Alice.’

They waited until the heard the child’s footfalls pad across the floor above them and the creak of her bedsprings. Hamilton nodded for Tony to speak. When he did so, he still spoke in hushed tones in case the girl was listening from her room.

‘Someone will plant a device under your car this evening. It might already be there. They know who you are, what you did, what your routines are. Church on Sunday, your runs to the supermarket on a Friday, when you go out, when you come back.’ He could see the man’s expression grow a little wilder as he recognised the details of his own weekly routine.

‘How do you know all this?’

Tony held his gaze, but fear prevented him from speaking. Irrespective, the man clearly guessed at the truth for he straightened a little, his mouth curled in disdain.

‘It doesn’t matter how I know,’ Tony said, almost pleading now. ‘You need to leave here. Go and don’t come back. You find the device today, there’ll be another one sometime down the line. For Alice’s sake, you need to leave, go somewhere else, away from Glasgow altogether.’

‘We can’t just leave,’ he scoffed. ‘What about Alice herself?’

‘What about her?’

‘I can’t just uproot her from her school, her friends.’

‘She hates school,’ Tony said. ‘And I don’t think leaving behind friends is going to be an issue for her.’

‘Balls!’ Hamilton spat.