‘What about dead ex-cops?’ Jasmine asked. ‘Jim Sharp put in the time and the hours you did, lost his marriage and missed out on half his kids’ lives because he was so dedicated. Where’s his slice of this heroin deal?’

McDade brought the van to a very gentle halt. Jasmine could see sheer walls of stone in the headlights fifty or sixty yards ahead. There were trees and bushes dotted about the fringes where twenty-seven years ago there must only have been earth and weeds. She wondered what buried sins their roots had tangled around for anchorage.

‘Jim dredged it all up again,’ McDade said, bitterness overwhelming his regret. ‘Just when we were ready to secure our futures, he had to go and exhume the past. We’d done our penance, served our time. We spent a quarter of a century paying for what happened to the Ramsays.’

‘Let’s go and ask them if they forgive you,’ said Fallan.

McDade got out of the car slowly, opening the driver’s-side door with exaggerated care to the point of reluctance, Fallan keeping an eye on him as he exited. Then, once he was on his feet, McDade just disappeared, lunging to his right so that he was out of sight behind the metal walls of the van.

At the same time, the van’s rear door was hauled open and Jasmine was confronted with the sight of a man pointing a single-barrelled pump-action shotgun at her. He looked wide-eyed and jumpy, which made her twice as scared and all the more compliant when he ordered her out. Raeside, she estimated: never a trigger man, according to Fallan, but because of that, even more dangerous under these circumstances than somebody who was comfortable with such a weapon in his hands.

She edged her way out, Raeside stepping backwards away from the rear to give her space to walk into, his eyes always on hers. The moon was full and the clouds few, the van’s headlights bouncing off the horseshoe walls for further illumination.

Once she took a couple of paces on the dusty earth, she could see Fallan. He had a gun to his head, held by a middle-aged man who’d look tall next to anybody else. Cairns. He must have appeared at the passenger-side window while Fallan was watching McDade get out.

She could see a car now, tucked away behind some trees. They’d got here first and lain in wait, knowing this was the destination. She now understood a further reason why McDade had been driving so slowly into the quarry: it was to give his colleagues time to get into position.

‘We’ve been polis three decades,’ said Cairns, answering her unspoken question. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re not the worst actress we’ve ever come across, but do you think we don’t recognise a trap when we see one?’