‘Well, this guy was a tough nut to crack. Too hard and too stubborn and too stupid to give it up. It went too far.’

McDade swallowed, genuinely troubled by the memory of a moment when everything had changed and could never go back to how it was.

‘We’re left there with a deid guy in the van. What could we do? I knew this place, though. A quarry up the Campsies, only recently closed down. Lot of loose earth, broken stone, and completely enclosed, nobody to see you. We buried him up there.’

‘What was his name?’

‘McGeoch,’ he said softly. ‘Scotty McGeoch.’

‘He wasn’t mourned much, I take it?’

‘He was reported missing, but the folk missing him had a big list of suspects for who might have got rid of him, and we werenae on it.’

‘Result,’ said Jasmine drily.

‘It was a nightmare,’ McDade retorted.

‘But a recurring one,’ suggested Fallan.

McDade nodded regretfully.

‘Not long afterwards there was this bastard, and I mean utter bastard, Vinny McLellan. You remember the name?’

‘I knew the family.’

‘Well, he was literally getting away with murder because everybody was too scared to testify against him. Raped a lassie who had been a witness, just to give her a taste. He was an animal and we put him down. Justice was done. Nobody would have blamed us, though that didnae stop me blaming myself, for a long time. You stop worrying about being caught, but it’s not an easy thing to live with. You tell yourself you have to, though, that it’s your burden to carry.’

‘I know you never get away with murder,’ Fallan reflected.

‘Trouble is, it gets easier. You must know that as well. Especially when it’s scumbags you’re dealing with.’

‘What about schoolteachers and chemical statisticians?’ Jasmine demanded.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ McDade said again. ‘There was a guy called Jai Kerrigan, did a lot of work for Tony. Became one of his inner circle. You remember the name?’

‘I remember he disappeared one day and was never seen again.’

‘It’s not true that we got rid of people for Tony McGill. Just a rumour he allowed to fester. But this was different. It was in a lot of people’s interests. Jai had gone behind Tony’s back and was trying to stitch up a deal with the Cassidy family to distribute heroin in Gallowhaugh. The ramifications were huge, and the fallout would have been very bloody: we’d have been up to our knees in corpses. It was a surgical strike, you could say.’

‘A rational transaction?’ Fallan suggested.