She felt oddly self-conscious about ringing the doorbell in the near-certain knowledge that nobody was going to answer it, but felt she had to go through the motions anyway, like some vestigial religious rite the origin of which even its believers had forgotten. It sounded disproportionately loud, perhaps because she was imagining the emptiness of the flat causing it to echo, though the absence of the normal ambient noises of an occupant probably did amplify it. Truth was, when you rang a doorbell, you could tell when nobody was home, perceive the emptiness behind the door. Croft had, she bet. He hadn’t phoned her because he thought she might have been in the shower or not heard him for the radio. He knew the place was empty.

Jasmine pushed open the letter box, confidently unafraid of what she might discover. The sight that greeted her wasn’t comforting. She saw a scattering of mail and a couple of newspapers. Her angle of view only showed what had fallen a foot or so away from the door, so she retrieved a compact mirror from her bag and held it through the slot. There was a third copy of the Evening Times resting near-vertically against the inside of the door. Subtracting Sunday, when it didn’t print, that meant three deliveries since Jim was last home. She didn’t know if his paper-boy had been yet today. If he had, then at the absolute latest, the last time Jim was home was some time before his Times got delivered on Friday; and if Monday’s paper wasn’t one of the ones on the floor, he’d been missing for four days.

Lies Over Breakfast

They found Paddy Steel where their information had indicated: jogging around Strathclyde Park in the morning sunshine, his pace being dictated by the two burly minders accompanying him every step, neither of whom could be said to have a runner’s build.

Catherine and Laura watched the troika from the Bothwell end of the loch, their car parked a few spaces from Steel’s Hummer.

‘He likes to keep himself fit,’ Catherine remarked. ‘He’s here most days, hits the gym too for his weight work. Guys like that, it’s the alpha male thing writ large: they need to know they could take a guy half their age, theoretically anyway. In practice, the challenger wouldn’t get near them. Most other mammals don’t have security personnel.’

‘Or MAMILs,’ Laura observed. ‘Middle-aged men in Lycra. He’s not exactly cut down in his grief, eh? Either he doesn’t know about Jai McDiarmid yet, or he’s dealing with his sorrow through the re-assurance of the familiar.’

Catherine let out a dry chuckle.