‘We can pick up a new one in the morning. Meantime we’ll find a hotel.’

‘I don’t have any money,’ she said apologetically.

‘I do.’

‘Why would you help me?’

‘Rita would boot my balls if I didn’t,’ he replied.

She accepted that for now, as she was in no state to dig deeper, but they both knew it was bullshit.

They went first to a big twenty-four-hour supermarket where she picked up some toiletries and a change of clothes, then Ingrams booked them two rooms in a hotel by the Clyde. It was big and corporate and faceless, a good place to blend in and not be noticed.

Upon his advice, bordering on insistence, she ordered some room service. She didn’t think she was hungry, but ended up demolishing a club sandwich, having remembered that she had barely eaten all day. As soon as she had finished the last of it, tiredness struck like a net thrown over her, pulling her down to the bed.

Sleep didn’t come immediately, though. More tears came first. Finally, alone and unwitnessed, she could let go, let it all go.

She was crying for Jim, and crying because his loss was making her feel such an echo of the death of her mum. But somewhere within her pain and sadness there was a tiny seed of reassurance, because the loss of Jim wasn’t as bad. Nothing would ever be as bad again.

Explosive Information

Catherine and Laura found Bob Cairns in a café on Robertson Street, just off the Broomielaw on the banks of the Clyde. It was an old-fashioned and unapologetic greasy spoon joint, the sort of establishment you increasingly only found tucked away in the back streets, so that there was almost something illicit about it. Not that the consumption of saturated fats was in any danger of going out of fashion in these parts; just that it had become more of a dirty little secret, something the city didn’t want to wear on its sleeve.

Bob was sitting at a booth, his back to an expanse of PVC upholstery so riven with scratches, scars and stitching that it resembled a Glasgow hard man’s face. As they walked in, Catherine thought she could smell cigarette smoke, but it was just the immediacy of her mental association; either that or the years since the ban hadn’t been long enough to quite clear it from the place. There was actually something reassuring about this kind of establishment still being here, just as there was something reassuring about finding a polisman like Bob Cairns sitting in it. You knew that the men with faces resembling the upholstery were still out there, so you needed cops of Bob’s ethos and generation to maintain a kind of equilibrium.