His father who had been an advocate depute had encouraged Michael to get a bit of width into his practice: ‘I know it’s a bore doing the criminal stuff for three years but it’s good for you to be seen doing it. It will also give you a chance to show these chaps how it should be done and impress the bench. When I became a judge I found it quite useful to have done my bit in the criminal field. Got to know what the buggers are up to.’

Michael had nodded on receiving this advice though he was somewhat confused. Who were the buggers to whom he had been referred – the accused or their lawyers? Probably didn’t matter. Probably both.

He had all the trappings of legal Edinburgh: a splendid house in the prestigious New Town, a dull wife who hosted ‘At Homes’ and busied herself in an endless round of good works for sundry charities (when she wasn’t at a coffee morning with other equally dull advocate’s wives), 2.4 dull children at the Edinburgh Academy, and membership of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (though, in fact, he could not hit a golf ball to save himself), and the most dangerous thing he did with his day was to partake of a small glass of chilled sherry before dinner.

But despite all that, he could be a considerable opponent in court. He possibly lacked a feel for criminal cases in that he was unfamiliar with the lifestyle of the average Glasgow criminal (or for that matter, victim) and his ‘bool-in-the-mooth’ public-school accent made him appear remote and aloof to many jurors. There was a very good reason for this. He was remote and aloof. However, his preparation for a trial was meticulous and if a piece of evidence was there to be led, Matthews could be relied upon to lead it.

Muirhead, on the other hand, was very definitely not part of legal Edinburgh. Fife-born and bred, his family would probably be described by social commentators and Labour Party activists as ‘working class’, a term his late father despised. James admired his father more than any man he had ever known.

As a boy, his father, Hugh Muirhead, was an outstandingly bright pupil at school in Cowdenbeath. His teachers had encouraged him to go on to university and his parents were more than happy to make the necessary sacrifices which would have been required to pay for motorcars and left school to become an apprentice mechanic. During the economic depression of the Thirties, the garage to which he was indentured went out of business, as did many others in Fife, and that was the end of his career as a mechanic.