Nothing was what it appeared. Bob Cairns had been led to a suitcase full of dust. Frankie Callahan had not lost a shipment of heroin. He and Gary Fleeting had not been torturing Tommy Miller. There was a decades-dead assassin walking the streets. And most bizarrely of all, it could well be that Dougie Abercorn was actually trying to help.

Darken the Memory

Once again Catherine found herself gatecrashing someone else’s breakfast, though given the time since she’d blearily grabbed her own, it felt like it ought to be closer to lunch. She smelt freshly brewed, proper coffee, saw baskets of croissants and pastries, while waitresses skipped past bearing steaming plates of bacon, haggis, kippers, scrambled eggs. Diners mostly in business attire were enjoying leisurely chats, sitting with the morning paper if they were alone, or in the case of one quartet, conducting a breakfast meeting. It all looked terribly grownup and civilised.

Catherine had managed a slice of toast and half a cup of tea in between clearing spilt Ready Brek, wiping faces and mediating a protracted and passionate dispute over who was getting the free toy that would be so prized as to be lying forgotten under the fridge this time tomorrow, while her sole ally in all this was standing at the worktop on the other side of the kitchen, hastily grabbing mouthfuls of cornflakes as he cleaned yesterday’s mud from two junior-sized pairs of trainers.

It wasn’t always quite so fraught and frantic, especially not on a Saturday; normally the chaos level was a constant but the pace was more relaxed due to the greater flexibility of Drew’s working patterns. This morning, however, he had a flight to London to catch, which meant departing early enough to account for the M8 traffic, as well as leaving sufficient time to drop the boys at his parents’ en route. They generally tried to avoid both having work commitments on the same Saturday, but sometimes it was simply inescapable. At least there was no school pick-up to worry about later.

The atmosphere between her and Drew had been less tense last night. By the time they got the boys settled, they were both content to sit on the settee in front of the telly for a couple of hours. Cobra was on Sky Movies, an irresistibly awful piece of eighties trash, a subgenre they shared a passion for. Catherine found the moral simplicity and facile resolutions more of an escapist fantasy than any sci-fi movie, while Drew lapped up the cartoonishness and gratuitous violence because the games he worked on espoused the same guilty-pleasure ethos.