It was a disaster. The case wasn’t just thrown out: the sheriff tore strips off them for wasting the court’s time and castigated Catherine in particular for ‘having not a shred of credibility’. She felt her cheeks burning as he spoke, and it was only by some miracle that she made it out of the courtroom before breaking down in tears of shame and humiliation.

Her colleagues’ responses were more measured, to say the least. Win some, lose some seemed to be the attitude, which told her that this kind of thing was standard procedure, culturally ingrained. They went to the pub later and most of the station turned up. Everybody bought her drinks, patted her on the back. Even officers who thought Howard and McLean were wankers. They thought she’d done well. She’d stood up, proven her loyalty. That was more important than a bollocks wee breach-and-resist case. Nobody regarded it as cause for embarrassment, just a hazard of the job.

They were acting like she had passed a final test and trying to make her feel accepted, but Catherine didn’t feel as though what she was being accepted into was somewhere she wanted to belong. She felt used and she felt compromised. It wasn’t about solidarity, it was about coercion, about being forced to submit your will. And once your integrity had been proven malleable, you were in a weak position to ever rock the boat.

On the plus side, it did provide something of an immunising dose. She vowed that nobody was going to make her lie for them again, no matter the consequences for her status among her peers. Maybe it was indeed a test, a rite of passage, and maybe it was the vibes she thereafter gave off, but either way, as it turned out, nobody ever asked her to.

She wouldn’t have anybody lie for her either, which sounded an easy principle to enforce by mere omission, but was far more complicated in practice. It was generally accepted that gilding the lily was the right thing to do if it meant a guilty man didn’t wriggle free with the assistance of a smart lawyer. Catherine wouldn’t have it on her cases, though. It was one thing losing a trumped-up charge because of lying in court, but losing a genuine, solid conviction because some over-enthusiastic fib had undermined the whole case’s integrity was a possibility she simply could not tolerate.

There was an argument for playing the percentages, but Catherine was never a gambler. Besides, she didn’t want to be justifying her conduct to herself on the grounds that she was better than the scum she put away. She wanted to know she was better than the scum she put away because of the way she conducted herself.