Not much for the skinny latte and blueberry muffin, our Bob. He wasn’t eating his way towards an infarct either, though: wholemeal roll, no butter, grilled bacon, grilled tomato and brown sauce. He was still a fit man for close to sixty, though there was undeniably more of him these days than there had once been. Catherine had heard he’d missed work yesterday too, which was virtually unheard of. Guys his age, especially the super-dependable ones, you always feared that bit more for whenever you heard they were ill.

There didn’t appear to be much wrong with him today, though. He had his phone sitting on the table next to a steaming mug of black tea, an alert, slightly restless air about him as he tucked into his breakfast. It was a look Catherine recognised: a cop who knew that something was in the wind and was impatient for his cue.

He didn’t smile when he noticed them; just gave a subtle nod of the head by way of beckoning them to join him. He wouldn’t necessarily have known they were coming here this morning, but he would have been expecting Catherine at some point. Bill Raeside had relayed to her that Cairns had some fresh information regarding the McDiarmid murder, but in typical Cairns style, he preferred to pass it on face to face rather than over the phone, and preferred to do so in a place like this rather than anywhere so boringly convenient as a police station.

Catherine knew she had to indulge him. As she explained to Laura, on the surface it might appear unnecessary, but when you looked a little deeper, there were many subtle ways in which it was quite the opposite. For one thing, with old-stagers like Cairns and Fletcher, you had to play their game a wee bit in order to keep them sweet, especially when you outranked them. Guys like that needed their due, and respected you more if they believed that you genuinely understood what they brought to the table. If you didn’t know what they were worth, they thought you were an idiot, and generally they’d be right. So if they asked you to meet at a grotty caff rather than just give you the gen over the phone, you didn’t moan about it.

‘A little deference goes a long way,’ she told Laura. ‘And the corollary is doubly true. Officers with that much experience, that many contacts and that level of understanding of the system have an unofficial rank, regardless of what it says on their warrant card, and you’ll pay a heavy price if you don’t recognise it. Get on the wrong side of them and while they might not make it their job to screw you over, they would certainly regard it as one of the perks.’