Croft glanced back before reaching the corner, just a casual look but potentially suspicious. Jasmine not only got her head down but checked her pace and stepped out of sight behind a gangling art student toting a big black portfolio. She was already envying him his aspirations, the fact that he still had them.

The traffic on Great Western Road bustled left and right across her path directly ahead. Another corner, another pang of anxiety about what was around it, the dread possibilities of which had just been given a whole new depth of scope back on Cresswell Street. Everything was simpler now, though: she only had one thing left to lose. Around this corner, as long as she saw Croft, then she could live with that.

Unless, of course, it was his face she saw, coming straight towards her.

Shit.

He had performed a reciprocal, doubled back: always a sure sign that the subject suspects he’s being tailed. He was looking right at her too; an unqualified funny, which she promptly escalated into direct eye contact: as in can’t-look-away, rabbit-in-the-headlights eye contact.

She was burned liked a vampire on a sunlounger. At noon. In the desert.

Verbal challenge coming too, by the looks of it. Oh God, what if he got violent? Jim was miles away by now.

As he opened his mouth to speak, Jasmine got in ahead of him.

‘You’re a plasterer, aren’t you?’ she blurted in her panic: the only thing she could think to say.

It set him on the back foot for a moment, but only in a manner sufficient to prompt the obvious question.

‘How do you know?’ he demanded.

Jesus, why not tell him it’s because she’s working for a private investigator hired by Dorothy Muldoon’s lawyers: she’d already given him everything else. How would she know?

Then inspiration struck.

‘You did my auntie’s kitchen. Don’t know if you remember? It was on the south side, a wee semi. Used to be Artex on the ceiling and you smoothed it away.’

His brow wrinkled in concentration, searching his memory as she sold him a tale from her own. She didn’t leave him to search long.

‘I’m not stalking you or anything,’ she added with a nervous laugh. ‘It’s just, when I saw you back there, it took me a minute to place you and then you were away. The thing is, I’ve moved into this flat with my boyfriend, up in Hyndland, and there was this damp problem, but thank God that’s all sorted, fingers crossed.’

Suspicion was replaced on his face by confusion as she babbled away.

‘Anyway, the living room’s a state, so’s the bedroom, they both need a whole new … I don’t know what you call it.’

‘A skim,’ he prompted.