‘These two incidents on Saturday were connected,’ she said. ‘I think we were supposed to get shot at and then a little later you were supposed to be too dead to offer an alibi. The intended conclusion was that you were trying to stop us looking into certain matters, only to be gunned down yourself, taking a number of awkward questions with you to the grave.’

‘What awkward questions? Like who killed those guys you were asking about?’

‘Among others.’

‘How did you survive?’ asked Laura. ‘See, at first I thought our guy was just a bad shot, but he’d actually need to be quite a good shot to fire off so many rounds without hitting either of us. Were you armed?’

‘Yes,’ Fallan said. He gave the three police officers time to formulate a question before adding: ‘With a mobile phone.’

‘He pretended it was a gun,’ explained Jasmine. ‘It scared the guy off.’

‘I think my reputation preceded me.’

‘Or your father’s,’ Catherine suggested.

Catherine felt Fallan’s reaction like a change in the weather inside the room. She had definitely just plucked the lyre of Orpheus, but the question was, what would emerge from Fallan’s personal underworld?

‘You know this was cops,’ he said flatly. ‘How?’

‘Among other things, you told me.’

‘The biggest gang in Glasgow,’ he confirmed.

‘Why would they want you dead? You haven’t poked your head out for twenty years and all of a sudden they’re shooting at you. What have you two been looking into?’

Jasmine began to answer, but Fallan laid a hand on her arm and spoke over her.

‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’

Abercorn gave her a look of assent. Catherine was planning to open up anyway, but it told her how high the stakes must be if even he thought it was time to lay his cards on the table. Either that or he had already calculated that Fallan and the girl had more to tell them than the other way around.

‘What do you remember about a policeman by the name of Bob Cairns?’ Catherine asked, conscious that she was being almost Abercorn-like in turning an apparent disclosure into a request for information. She hoped Fallan didn’t reciprocate or they could be here all night.

‘A good friend of my dad’s. Used to come round the house all the time, sit up drinking, telling stories. When I was wee, listening to them talk made me want to be a polisman when I grew up. I liked him.’

He gave a shrug, as if this was all he could say and he needed Catherine to offer more. Then his tone darkened.