It was the first thing Fallan had said since shortly after getting back into the Civic, when he had told her she might as well go back to her flat as to the hotel, on the grounds that the latter was no safer now. If McLeod could find them, he reasoned, then so could anyone else in the police.

What he hadn’t said was how he knew that it was cops who were stalking them, beyond the fact that their would-be killer back outside the map shop had been pretty tasty behind the wheel.

Jasmine wasn’t going to argue. Staying in the hotel was adding to this sense of her life being on hold, that she had been pulled away from everyday reality into some sort of limbo beyond which her future was unclear. She wanted to stand under her own shower, even though it alternated between just too hot and just too cold; wanted to wrap her hair and her body in her own towels, even though they never felt quite dry during the months when the radiators were off. She wanted to eat a microwave-baked potato and drink half-flat fizzy water from the two-litre value bottle sitting in her kitchen.

‘For what?’ she asked, turning off the engine and withdrawing the keys.

‘Well, not an apology: a clarification. It isn’t you they’ve been trying to kill. It’s me. Though I think you’re the bonus ball.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Same reason Jim had pulled out my file and was planning to come looking for me again. Whoever’s behind this knew my father, and both they and Jim believed I can connect them to this.’

‘Would “this” be one of those UXBs you talked about?’

‘A very big one, yes. Something I said to McLeod came back to me when I saw that guy pull his handbrake turn. I was being facetious at the time, as I tend to get a bit petulant around self-righteous polis, but I think that’s what this is actually about: the biggest gang in Glasgow.’

Fallan gathered up the heat-loss scrolls, the OS maps and the magnifiers and followed Jasmine into the close. As she put her key into the lock of her third-floor flat, she paused a moment to wonder just how badly the world had fallen out of kilter since the last time she crossed this threshold, that she was now purposely avoiding the police while inviting a self-confessed murderer into her home.

Fallan made straight for the kitchen and began unrolling photographs on the table, weighing down the corners with cutlery. Jasmine put on the kettle and was relieved to see that the one-third-full carton of milk in the fridge was still in date. It had only been three days, but it felt like she’d been gone a month.

‘My dad’s nickname was Nine-Bob,’ Fallan said. ‘Not among the polis: that’s what the villains called him.’

‘Nine-Bob?’