Any way up, she wasn’t going to let him derail her. For what else was that Glen Fallan nonsense all about, other than an attempt to send her on a wild goose chase?

Clark’s Law still stood. The lab report on Cairns’ heroin haul posed some very odd questions, but it didn’t change the dramatis personae. It was still about Gary Fleeting and Jai McDiarmid, Frankie Callahan and Paddy Steel, Liam Whitaker and Tommy Miller.

She was walking slowly through the car park, taking her time in order to clear her head with some air, when her mobile rang, heralding a call from Cal O’Shea.

‘I’ve some rather disturbing news with regard to our special fried gangsters,’ he said, his typically arch elocution failing to conceal a note of concern.

Jesus, what now? Catherine wondered.

‘They’re still dead, I take it,’ she said, figuring if she set the bizarre-bar that high, she could handle anything below.

‘Most certainly, yes,’ he confirmed. ‘But that is just about the only aspect that remains what it appears. The fire broke out at around two in the morning, isn’t that right?’

‘The fire brigade logged the call reporting the fire at Top Table at around two forty-five. Why?’

‘All three of these men had been dead for several hours before that. Callahan and Fleeting were killed yesterday evening, around eight; Miller at least two hours earlier than that. Furthermore, they all received most of their wounds post-mortem. The lack of internal bleeding indicates that Callahan and Fleeting were shot in the back several hours after being shot in the head; similarly the stab and slash wounds to Miller, who was long dead before he was tied to the chair.’

‘You’re saying it was staged?’

‘It’s quite possible none of them were alive when they were brought to the warehouse. The place was supposed to burn, but the perpetrator or perpetrators were better hit men than they were arsonists.’

‘Why stage something if you’re planning to burn it down?’

‘To prevent me discovering what I just have. You were supposed to find a fire-gutted warehouse containing three charred bodies from which it could nonetheless be deduced that two had been taken by surprise and shot in the back in the act of torturing the third. And had whoever did it not made a grave miscalculation regarding the flammability of table linen, we’d have been none the wiser.’

Catherine hung up and stood perfectly still next to her car. It was one of those times when she imagined she could sense the planet spinning beneath her feet. She felt just a tiny bit less connected to the world, her stature a little shorter, the surrounding buildings a little taller.