‘What kind of a name is Tron, anyway? How did you know that gunman was even there? Why have you got a gun under your car when you work at a women’s refuge? Who were those men? Oh yeah, and why were they trying to kill you?’

Ingrams made a placatory gesture with his hands, asking her to calm down. She thought for a moment that he was about to touch her, grab her arms, maybe hold her like she was going to cry. She stiffened, ready to bat away any contact, yet part of her deeply wanted it to happen.

‘I realise you’re pretty shaken up,’ he said, ‘and I apologise in advance for answering a question with another question: but could you please tell me precisely why you think they weren’t trying to kill you?’

The Mercy of the Court

Catherine crossed the river on Gorbals Street and proceeded along Bridgegate, heading for the car park at St Margaret’s Place. It was early enough to get a space, for which she was grateful on a morning like this. A train rumbled across the bridge overlooking the car park, making her wonder briefly where Drew was by now. Coming up the stairs at Buchanan Street underground, perhaps, maybe already inside Queen Street, getting a coffee for the train.

She hurried along the pavement and beneath the shelter of the cylindrical plinth that fronted the High Court building. Supported by half a dozen columns, it always made her think of a gigantic occasional table, the kind of thing her great-aunts might have sat the telephone upon. Like every public building these days, the entrance was lightly shrouded in smoke, but the real mystical portals lay beyond. For some, the door they left this place by decreed where their future lay, sometimes for a decade or more.

Catherine had never been at the mercy of such a fate, but the interior of the building never failed to make her uneasy. It had been the scene of many satisfactory results, but in the way some people said the mere sight of a police officer made them feel guilty, court buildings had a similar unsettling effect on cops. It was the same principle: the awareness that you were subject to a higher power over which you had little control or influence, whose fleeting caprice could affect you disproportionately, irrevocably and unaccountably. In Catherine’s case, though, it went a little deeper, a little more personal, to an anger that still simmered and a shame whose flame still flickered in the dark somewhere in her mind, never quite quenched despite the smallness of the source and the passing of the years.

It hadn’t been this court, but just across the river at Carlton Place. Nonetheless, Sheriff Court or High Court, the memory could sometimes creep up on her as soon as she saw the liveries, the benches and the briefcases.