Leaving the retiring room he walked slowly and deliberately along the corridor towards the entrance to the court. Each time he made this journey he was acutely aware of his surroundings. He was about to enter the famous (some would say infamous) North Court of the Justiciary buildings opposite Glasgow Green on the south bank of the River Clyde.

The High Court may be an impressive edifice with columns flanking either side of its imposing entrance but it is not for its architectural splendour or picturesque location that it is noted, but rather the reputation of some of the more notorious visitors who have passed through its marble-floored halls. The very room from which the jury would soon emerge had been occupied in the 1950s by the men and women who had brought in the guilty verdicts which sent mass murderer Peter Manuel to meet his maker at the end of a hangman’s rope.

Muirhead paused while the last of the public filed in through the rear door.

Law courts are the last places of free entertainment. In the days of capital murder, the queues of the concerned, the curious and the ghoulish would stretch along the street outside the building, eagerly anticipating the day’s events. In recent years, murder trials had become so commonplace that they invariably attracted little public scrutiny and minimal media attention. It was not unknown for the public benches to contain a solitary bored hack and the family of the accused (the latter consisting of a pregnant girlfriend, an alcoholic father and a greetin’ mammy with a bad perm).

This case was different. The public galleries had been packed and every word had been reported in the press. A legal cause célèbre was about to reach its conclusion.

Muirhead reached the vestibule which gave access for counsel and solicitors to both the North and South courts. Looking into the courtroom, he watched the comings and goings of the pre-match warm up. The Advocate Depute and his assistant were already seated at their places in court. The Clerk of Justiciary was animatedly arranging documents on his table. Police officers were stationed at the various entrances of the court. The jury box was empty. A policeman appeared at the head of the stairs leading from the cells to the dock, followed by the accused. Charles Gallagher was nearly six feet tall with short dirty fair hair and was as thin as the proverbial rake. (His granny used to say that there wasn’t room enough between his shoulders for a pain.) He had a prominent scar which ran the length of his left cheek – a souvenir of some previous skirmish with the pond-life of Glasgow’s criminal class.