There’s a lot of cops just like them. They’ve done their thirty, they’re approaching retirement and they’re skint despite working hard all their lives, yet every day they see these chancers driving about in their pimped four-by-fours, spending money like water.

She felt like the walls of the room were expanding away from her, once again the world’s dimensions altering so that things around her no longer quite fitted the way they used to. Nothing was certain any more. Clark’s Law was in tatters, the good guys were very, very bad guys, and here she was on the same side as not only her bête noire from Locust, but one of the few people on this earth towards whom she harboured genuinely murderous feelings.

It seemed, under the circumstances, way past time that he showed her his.

‘You said someone tried to kill you on Wednesday, down south?’ she asked.

Jasmine nodded eagerly; Fallan just stared.

‘Bob Cairns threw one of the very few sickies of his entire police career on Wednesday. As you put it, Mr Fallan, I’m disinclined to believe these incidents are unrelated. This thing at Central station took planning. It took care, patience and above all, discretion. So with all that on his plate, on the day before the big operation, why would Bob Cairns be driving down to Northumberland in the hope of killing you?’

‘Because it’s no use having a share in a three-mill drug score if you’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.’

Fallan looked to the girl and gave her a gesture as though to say ‘the floor is yours’.

Catherine felt an anxious pang of anticipation, wondering whether this ceding of control meant he was coming through with the quid pro quo.

The girl said her piece.

Was he ever.

Sins of the Father

Ruaraidh Wilson stood with his back to them, staring out on to St Vincent Street through his office’s imposing triptych of towering windows. Catherine was reminded of his conduct in court, turning his back thus while he mentally composed a rebuttal in that most unusual of circumstances: a question or an answer he was not expecting.