Cal liked to remark that Catherine ‘creeped him out’ with certain of her deductions, and tended to sound like he was only half-joking when he did so. He wasn’t referring to Holmesian leaps of logic or an ability to observe what others had missed, but the insights she often gleaned merely from imagining the view from inside the killer’s head. Catherine had subsequently made a point of playing up to this, endeavouring to turn a half-joke into a full joke. It seemed the best way of covering up the fact that she was a little uncomfortable about Cal alluding to her having such a facility. A guy who spent all day around dead people finding you creepy was wisest written off as a joke. The other implications were best not dwelt upon.

‘Hardly,’ she replied. ‘You don’t light a guy up on a dry summer’s night around the back of a shopping parade that houses two takeaways and a late-night supermarket. Somebody’s bound to notice something, even in Gallowhaugh.’

‘And yet by the same token, even abandoning the body here exposes the perpetrator to a measure of risk. Are we to ascertain that there was some benefit or significance accruing from the choice of location?’ Cal was speaking rhetorically, familiarly hamming up the professorial patter as though to patronise the daft polis.

‘He owns the tanning salon next door to the Chinese,’ said Raeside. ‘He was dumped next to his own bin.’

‘Ah, so the deceased was in the health and leisure industry?’

‘Tangentially,’ Raeside replied. ‘More the pharmaceutical end. The salon was a money-laundering front. Punters pay cash, you inflate the number of punters, suddenly your drug takings are legit.’

‘You’re right, of course, Cal,’ said Catherine. ‘They could have dumped him anywhere. Burnt him, buried him, made sure he was never found. Instead they left him round the back of his own premises, like rubbish for the borough men to lift.’

‘You know,’ Cal observed, ‘there are a select few semiologists who might be able to decode some kind of message in that.’

This is Glesca, Catherine thought. We don’t do subtle.

‘Aye,’ said Raeside. ‘Somebody’s telling Paddy Steel his tea’s oot.’

‘Begging the question, Bill, given that a blind man could see this is gang-related, when you sent this up the chain, why didn’t you take it to Locust?’

Raeside wrinkled his nose, a sour look instantly coming over his face.

‘Abercorn,’ he said with a scornful hint of laughter and a slight shake of the head, simultaneously an answer to her question and an indication that he found the very notion absurd.