‘Raeside owns an Alsatian dog. He was also the one who relayed the message that Cairns had information and wanted to meet. I saw his photo in there, but Whitaker didn’t look twice. Anyone else?’

‘Yes,’ said Abercorn, looking weighed down by a burden that was about to be doubled rather than shared. ‘A young DC by the name of Graeme Sunderland.’

Names on a Page

The registry office was on Martha Street, just around the corner from the Strathclyde University student union. Jasmine must have passed the place twenty times without paying attention to what it was; in fact, she remembered getting off with a guy up against its locked doors late one night/early one morning, before heading down to George Square for the night bus home. She’d been at the union with friends to see Twin Atlantic. She had got talking and dancing with him, before having a very enjoyable snog in which he had acquitted himself well by way of keeping his hands respectably in place around her shoulders.

Scott, she thought his name was, or possibly Sam. She later learned that he was sixteen and still at school: a fifth-year at Glasgow Academy. Never mind looking like a student, he had looked older than her. The kids that went to the private schools always did, right enough. Better clothes, or maybe just better breeding: going back several generations without anybody ever missing a meal. That was a year and a half ago, and Jasmine still got carded now. She’d taken his number and meant to call him, but it was just before Mum got sick; or rather, just before they got the diagnosis.

Seeing the spot where they’d kissed and the sight of the union building looming above John Street, she realised she had spent so long worrying about the future that she seldom gave much thought to the world she had lost. It wasn’t just Mum that had been taken from her. Saturday nights, boys, friends, gigs, the student years, the dreaming years, they had all gone too. She could have some of those things again, though, couldn’t she? If she got through this. If people stopped shooting at her.

Fallan explained what they were looking for, and the man on the desk was friendly and helpful, almost to the point where Jasmine was starting to become suspicious. Then she realised that she had simply recalibrated her expectations of such things after several days of dealing with people being awkward, evasive, confrontational, and occasionally murderous.