‘This is all sounding very past tense. If he was so good, what happened to him?’

‘Poetically enough, one day he was the one who just disappeared. It was twenty-one years ago, summer of 1989. He was rumoured to have been murdered in his home, out in rural Lanarkshire. According to gangland lore, it was Stevie Fullerton and his people who did it, in revenge for Fallan killing Stevie’s cousin over a girl. Classic criminal infighting.’

Catherine couldn’t see where this was going. Fullerton was a pretty big player these days, but she had found nothing to suggest he was at war with Frankie Callahan, or even Paddy Steel.

‘So how does this colourful wee snippet of local history relate to my investigation?’

‘Because I’ve got it from very strong sources that Glen Fallan is looking in pretty good nick for a dead guy. He showed up yesterday at the house of an ex-con and occasional tout by the name of William Bain.’

‘An occasional tout? Couldn’t he just be fishing for a few quid?’

‘My source says Bain was terrified. Claimed Fallan made no secret of who he was, though Bain wouldn’t say what he wanted. Fallan was with a young girl, late teens/early twenties, driving a red Honda Civic. He wrote down the plate. We traced it to a Jasmine Sharp, who it transpires showed up at Partick police station on Monday to report a missing person: her uncle, Jim Sharp, private investigator and ex-cop.’

The state of clarity and purpose in which Catherine had entered Abercorn’s office was a mere memory by the time she left it again. She felt confused and frustrated, and not a little angry. She wasn’t sure quite what had gone on in there, but had the suspicion that whatever it was, she had come off worse. That was classic Abercorn. Even though he had ostensibly been giving her something, she still felt like she’d had her pocket picked. She should have known, though, and that was what made it worse.

Head games: that was all this was. Abercorn had been blindsided by Callahan’s murder and he was trying to run interference in order to buy himself time to catch up.

The major dealer he was monitoring – not to mention pulling serious strings to keep him in play – had been gunned down under his nose, leaving him with nothing else to follow. Was Abercorn worried his jacket was on a shaky nail? If she wrapped up these murders, and the McDiarmid one that had precipitated them, was he afraid that the brass might think they had been mistaken to prefer him over her for the Locust job? Was he that paranoid? That petty? Or, in true Abercorn style, was he concealing some other agenda that she was oblivious of?