‘As in note. As in “bent as”.’

‘I see.’

‘Except, well, there’s bent polis and there’s bent polis. It’s not an easy job, I’ll admit that. It can be a non-stop war, in fact, so you have to choose your battles. You fight the fights you can win, and you fight the fights that most need fighting. You can’t fight on every front, and what the more pragmatic cops soon grasp is that you don’t have to make every thief and fly-man your enemy. You need treaties. You need alliances.’

‘Some crimes being worse than others,’ Jasmine said.

‘They’d never admit it publicly, but they understand that if they’re cracking down on one thing, then that means a blind eye might need to get turned to something else. Of course, they’ll complain that the top brass keep changing their minds about the league table of badness. Back in the early eighties, drugs had just started to top the charts.

‘As I told you, I worked for a gangster in Gallowhaugh by the name of Tony McGill. The Gallowhaugh Godfather, the papers called him, and he loved that. He saw himself as old-school, liked to indulge in the notion that he had some kind of code of honour that the new breed didn’t observe. It was a tripartite code. One: don’t hurt non-combatants.’

He gave her an arch look, acknowledging that they’d covered the truth of this one.

‘Two: never grass to the polis; and three: don’t deal drugs. Tony made an ostentatious virtue of observing number three, but only out of necessity, because he couldn’t source a supplier. Those who could were a threat to his power base. Hence he tended to be flexible in his interpretation of number two. His golden rule was more along the lines of “don’t let anyone know you grass to the polis”.’

‘He informed for your dad?’

‘It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Above all, polis need results. They need numbers: arrests, seizures, convictions. Tony helped my dad and his colleagues keep their figures high. He gave him bodies, stashes and weapons that he could present to his superiors to show what a good job he was doing. But the benefit to Tony wasn’t just in my dad ensuring that the polis turned a blind eye to his own activities. It was in my dad’s interests to keep Tony top of the heap and his competitors at bay. I thought that just meant locking them up.’

Fallan stared down at the strips of images. His thoughts seemed far away, perhaps back in the time that was reflected there in infrared, a map upon which he might well see the sins of his own past picked out in tiny white lines.