She dropped it as soon as she heard the first two words, horrified. It disappeared into the footwell and rolled beneath her seat among a thousand fragments of glass.

‘Okay,’ she decided. ‘No cops. You can come with me, but no guns either. Singular or plural.’

‘This is Glasgow we’re talking about,’ he replied, his accent sounding all of a sudden like he belonged to. ‘I’m not going there without one.’

‘Then you’re not going there with me. In my experience, men with guns attract men with guns.’

‘Your experience? Your experience of being around men with guns amounts to the past hour.’

‘Yes, and one hundred per cent of my experience has involved me ending up getting shot at by other men with guns.’

‘And as you just saw, they’re a lot less lethal if you can return fire.’

Jasmine knew he was right, that she was being irrational, but even the memory of how the pellet felt between her fingers made her squirm and shudder.

‘Just tell me there’ll be no more guns,’ she said. ‘Lie to me if you have to.’

‘I won’t lie to you,’ he replied, though he left it at that.

They didn’t speak for another mile or so. They came to a large roundabout, which was when it occurred to Jasmine that they weren’t going back the way they had come, but had carried on their original course.

‘Aren’t we going back to the refuge?’

‘I’m going to get the part I need for the shredder.’

‘I thought you said you needed a new shredder altogether.’

‘I was being shifty and evasive, remember?’

‘I don’t mean to sound needy or inconsiderate, but in light of recent developments, can’t it wait?’

‘No. It’s important if I’m going to help you. Rita’s used to me taking off at short notice, but if I leave work unfinished, she’ll worry about me. I only ever want her worrying about running the refuge.’

Jasmine marvelled at the concept of anybody actually worrying about the welfare of someone as scary and dangerous as Ingrams, then it occurred to her that maybe he did a little more for Rita than she had let on.

As she pulled the Civic into the office car park, Jasmine could see a telltale shimmer of broken glass on the concrete.

‘That’s Jim’s surveillance van,’ she told Ingrams. ‘Looks like it’s been tanned.’

They had reached Glasgow around half-seven, Ingrams requesting her to take them straight to Sharp Investigations.