‘The MO does have a certain ring of familiarity,’ he said, and she instinctively knew a barb was coming: a sting in the tail or a flat-out lie, but undeniably some kind of fuck-you. ‘We’d be talking a bigger gang than Stevie’s, though. We’d be talking the biggest gang in Glasgow.’

‘And who is that then, according to a man who claims to be twenty years out of touch?’

‘Better ask somebody older, hen.’

Naming the Sins

They sat in silence for a long time after the policewoman left. It was one of those silences that you know is going to define your relationship for ever after: depending on what broke it; depending on the next thing Ingrams finally said. And it had to be something he said, had to be him that broke it. It was his choice now whether he wanted to close the door on what had just been discussed, whether he thought she had any right to know.

They were starting to clear tables. Breakfast finished at ten, and it was five to. There was still tea in both their cups, barely lukewarm now, undrinkable.

‘I didn’t recognise her,’ he said. ‘McLeod. The cop. I didn’t recognise her.’

‘Should you have?’

‘She recognised me.’

‘Well, she knew all about you, probably has a file.’

‘No. I saw it: the moment she recognised me. She wasn’t expecting to, and then flash, there it was. I couldn’t miss it. Pure hate, a lifetime of hate.’

‘Why? Because she’s a cop?’

‘More personal than that. More specific. But I don’t know what, and that’s the thing. I hurt so many people. Far more than I can remember; and far more than I could even notice.’

It took all of Jasmine’s courage to ask, but she knew she couldn’t not know.

‘You hurt … women?’

He looked her in the eye.

‘Yes,’ he said, not flinching from her gaze. ‘Not directly. But I hurt them, women and children, without a doubt. McLeod could have been somebody hiding behind her crying mother while I threatened her father. One of the countless witnesses you don’t even see because they’re never going to tell anybody.’

Jasmine swallowed. This was the hardest conversation of her life, asking questions she didn’t want to ask, of a man who didn’t want to answer, but both of them understood that the chalice couldn’t pass either of their lips.

‘And the other things she said …’ Jasmine began, but she could not put a name to those things. Could not ask him: ‘Did you kill people?’

And yet she knew that in her stumbled few words, she had.