‘I’ll keep the questions simple, Mr Warwick. Please just calm down and try to answer them as best as you can. Did you converse with a particular prisoner?’

Warwick hesitated, clearly unsure as to whether there was any merit in a further outburst. He thought better of it.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Charles Gallagher.’

‘Can you point him out if he is in court?’

Warwick thrust his arm towards the dock, but his eyes stared resolutely ahead of him.

‘In what circumstances did you have a conversation with the accused?’

‘There’s a caged-in yard next to the cells. You get to walk about inside it for an hour each day. It’s what they call exercise. Bloody farce, more like. Anyway, his cell had a little window thing which looked onto the yard. He used to talk to me through it.’

‘Were there any prison officers present?’

‘The yard is enclosed. Sometimes one would hang around the door for a bit but normally they left you to it and went for a cup of tea or something.’

‘What did you and the accused speak about?’

‘The first few times, nothing much. Just where we came from, what family we had, football, that sort of thing.’

‘Who instigated the conversations?’

‘He did.’

‘Did you talk about your respective cases?’

‘Yes, we spoke about what we were in for.’

‘Did he ever tell you anything about his own case?’

‘Once.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘Everything.’

‘Tell the jury what he said, please.’

Warwick was beginning to look more relaxed. He was warming to his task.

‘He told me he was a big noise in Glasgow.’

‘Big noise?’

‘He was making out that he was this big time villain. He said that this guy Boyle had been causing him serious grief. Muscling in on his business. He said he had decided to get rid of him. He had some of his people follow him. He got a phone call one morning that this guy was shacked up with some tart. He was picked up, driven to some street in a stolen car, waited for the guy to come out of her gaff, got out of his car, walked up to him and shot the cunt in the head. He said it was easy, dead fucking simple. Walked away, cool as you like.’

‘Did he say what he did with the gun?’

‘He said one of his boys dumped it in the Clyde.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Sure. I said he had taken some risk doing this himself as he might have been recognised. He told me there was no chance of that. He had pulled on some kind of mask thing. Said he wasn’t daft. He’d worn gloves to stop any powder staining on his hands. The gloves got dumped along with the gun. This showed what a smart operator he was.’

‘Did he mention anyone else?’