She was a little more than two years into the job at the time. Not a wide-eyed probationer but definitely still finding her feet. They wouldn’t have asked a probationer to do this, and they bloody well shouldn’t have asked her. It was their mess, their pit, and they dragged her down to help them keep digging.

It happened on an otherwise quiet Thursday night, at her first station, Barnes Street over in Braeside. The officers concerned were Roddy Howard, an authoritarian automaton who was born forty-five, and the willing young Padawan to his Yoda, Mark McLean, whom even the young Catherine could tell wore his insecurities brightly on his sleeve.

Howard was classic constable-for-life material. Every station needs one: straight as a die, unquestioningly dutiful, humourlessly literal-minded, and thick as mince. McLean was not so much someone who was bullied at school as someone who had wanted to be doing the bullying but had never been hard enough. Now that he had the full force of the law as backup, he was fast making up for lost time.

According to the defendants (and Catherine now unequivocally accepted the three adolescents’ version of events), they were walking back from the pub at around eleven o’clock when two of them, Anthony McGuire and Allan Reilly, decided they couldn’t hold back the tide long enough to get home. It was, as stated, a quiet night. The streets were all but empty; indeed, the street they were walking along – Barnes Street – was completely devoid of life, otherwise they would have kept their legs crossed for another quarter-mile, what with the polis station being just across the road. However, with nobody in sight, they both nipped into a narrow passageway between the bank building and the tenement block next door while their stronger-bladdered mate, Steve Gallacher, waited on the pavement. They were mid-pee when Howard and McLean came around the corner from the Main Street in a police van. Noticing Gallacher loitering on the pavement, they pulled in to investigate, at which point they noticed two figures along the dark passageway. One of the cops shouted ‘Hoi!’ prompting the pair of them to swiftly get off their marks, zipping up as they ran out the back of the passageway and into the bank car park.

As McGuire later told the court, when they heard the shout, they assumed that it was either an irate resident or, just as plausibly for Braeside, some heidthebaw wanting a bit of late-night action. Either way, they didn’t hang around to find out. Then, when they saw two polismen enter the car park from the far end, they ceased running. Reilly stated that at the time he was actually relieved.