‘I mean, just to be clear, this is the first time I’ve asked for money to talk aboot this. I’ve never gone to the papers: they’ve always come to me.’

He folded his arms and sat back again, content that he had made his point.

Ingrams let loose a derisory snort of laughter.

‘Something funny, son?’ Bain asked, rising aggression in his voice.

‘Wee bit, yes.’

‘Well why don’t you speak up and say it to my face, instead of acting the smart cunt from behind your tripod over there?’

‘Sense of duty?’ Ingrams said, peering over the top of the camera.

When he spoke again, his accent had changed.

‘You’re the kind of guy that wouldnae let somebody else smell your farts for free if you could charge for it.’

Bain got to his feet, bristling with anger, but there was a confused caution about his face too.

‘I want the pair of you oota here. Sorry, hen,’ he told Jasmine, ‘but I’m no’ listening to this in my ain living room. And I’ll tell you this, smart-mooth, if I was twenty years younger, I’d kick you up and doon the street like a wet tracksuit.’

Ingrams stood up from behind the tripod, rising to his full height and taking off the peaked cap so that Bain could finally see his face properly. And that face had transformed. It was the same man, but there was a cruel, glowering darkness to his expression that rendered Jasmine retrospectively terrified to have spent the past couple of days in his proximity.

The effect on Bain was even more dramatic. He spluttered, his breathing gone awry, and his legs seemed to buckle, causing him to slump back down into his chair.

‘You,’ he croaked, his mouth flapping like a landed fish. ‘You’re supposed to be deid.’

‘I got better. And I reckon twenty years ago you’d have shat it from me, same as you’re shiting it now. Street-fighting was never really your forte, any more than was helping oot the polis through your “sense of duty”. Credit fraud, sure. Bit of reset. Moving smuggled fags by the vanload. But coming forward as a witness? Come on, Wullie, you never did anything without a back end for yourself.’

‘That’s all behind me,’ he pleaded. ‘Has been for twelve year, since I finished my last stretch. I work at B and Q. I’m straight noo.’

‘But you weren’t straight then. That poor wee lassie you said you were just doing your bit for, she’s spent her whole life thinking her family abandoned her. Twenty-seven years asking herself why they would do that, torturing herself because of what you told the polis. You were never at Bothwell services that day, were you?’