There had been a dark blue Ford Transit seen entering the lane where Jai McDiarmid was abducted, and a similar vehicle seen exiting the same place around twelve hours later when his body was dumped. Paddy Steel’s people had been looking for a black one, but it was hardly a stretch to imagine they would eventually make that small chromatic leap.

Catherine was starting to hear Moira Clark’s voice in her head.

‘The press talk about gang wars, drug wars and turf wars,’ Moira once told her. ‘And gangs, drugs and territory are factors in these incidents, but they’re never the primary cause. Round here, folk don’t plan very far ahead when it comes to violence. They don’t go in for campaigns and strategies. Vendettas, aye. Feuds, absolutely. Tit-for-tat. Grudges. Vengeance. Always remember: this is Glesca.’

As if she needed any further confirmation of this hypothesis, her phone began to ring, its screen identifying the incoming caller as Detective Superintendent Dougie Abercorn.

Lost in the Swamp

‘I’m not trying to piss in your chips here,’ said Abercorn. ‘I realise you think you’re close to a result on this, a big result, but I’m getting a very strong vibe that something about this may not be quite what it appears. I’d advise you not to rush into anything.’

But then he would say that, wouldn’t he, given the way developments had left him floundering. Something not what it appeared? More like something wasn’t in Abercorn’s script, and he wanted to stall her while he got back on to the right page.

He told her they needed to talk, urgently, and dangled the intrigue carrot by requesting that they do so at his office, ‘for reasons of discretion’. If she hadn’t been to the High Court the other day, she’d have told him to stick it, but given what she now knew about Abercorn pulling strings for Callahan, she decided to play along, reckoning that for once she might get more out of the exchange than he would.

She would confess to a guilty satisfaction at seeing that his office was smaller than hers, but then she realised this was probably an optical illusion arising from the fact that it was so claustrophobically cluttered.

She was almost disappointed in him. She had this image of Abercorn as being such a sleek operator that his office would be pristine beyond the point of anal: not a paperclip out of place, not a single stray sheet on his desk, just a state-of-the-art laptop and a framed photo of a wife and kids that weren’t actually his, just there for show to make him look more human.