‘Who’s the lucky winner?’

Raeside stopped next to a roller-shuttered rear doorway and turned to face Catherine.

‘One James McDiarmid, esquire.’

‘As in James McDiarmid, first officer of the Fallside Fleet?’

‘If Gallowhaugh’s own Patrick Steel is the admiral, aye.’

‘You absolutely positive?’ Catherine asked, requiring confirmation before she let her mind begin to race.

‘I’ve been lifting him since he was in short trousers, and he was a bam even then. He’s not looking like his passport photie, I’ll grant you, but it’s him, no question whatsoever: James Allan McDiarmid. Aka Jyzer, aka Jai.’

‘Nobody in Glasgow gets called Jimmy any more, eh?’ Laura asked.

‘It doesn’t appear to be on-trend these days,’ Catherine replied. ‘Our apologies. It’s a scunner when a place doesn’t live up to all the things you’ve heard about it. I’ll never forget how crestfallen I was the first time I went to Edinburgh and I never got to meet Harry Lauder.’

‘He used to be known as Jammy when he was younger,’ Raeside added, resuming progress along the lane. ‘Wasnae very jammy tonight, by the nick of him.’

Catherine was only a few yards from seeing for herself. The floods were trained on a concrete enclosure for housing the parade’s bins, a sour scent of rotting vegetables wafting on the warm air. She was grateful for the brightness of the lights, which always gave an artificially clinical appearance to a corpse, like she was already seeing it on a slab. The true horror was always in the context: death where there should be life, the puddle of blood on the living-room carpet, the body in the long grass next to the swing park. Lit up harshly, a murder scene looked like a murder scene, a place of work for Catherine, the start of a new journey.

Her view of the locus was obscured by two Forensics personnel in white oversuits. One of them alerted the other to her approach with a slight nod and the second turned around, giving her a drily ironic grin, the closest thing to a formal greeting she could expect under the circumstances. It was, of course, Cal O’Shea, accompanied by Aileen Bruce, and Cal was, of course, chewing.

There was once a time when Catherine would have considered it unthinkable for anybody to eat in the presence of a corpse, in or out of a pathology lab, but she had become used to the sight of Cal munching his way through snacks and sandwiches as he updated her on his findings. He was shorter than her by a good three inches and built like a whippet, yet he always seemed to be hungry. Must be the permanent motion, she reasoned. He was never still, a mercurial, restless energy about him that presumably burned up a lot of fuel. Either that or he had a whole colony of tapeworms.