‘Oh, he’ll know. Just check the nick of the minders. Do they look like they jog every morning? Paddy might not be on a war footing yet, but he’s moved to DEFCON Three. He’ll be loving the fact that the minders cannae hack it, though. Lets them know he’s not the boss just because he’s got good connections and has made a few bob.’

‘He won’t tell us anything, will he?’

‘Course not. It’s the Glasgow Omerta: the silence of the bams. But sometimes you can work out that there’s something specific they’re not telling you. Besides, that’s only part of the game here. Mainly I want him to know we’re watching him, so that he thinks twice about launching reprisals.’

Laura made to get out of the car as the trio ambled towards the car park, the sweaty minders now at walking pace with the end of their ordeal only yards away.

‘Hang fire,’ Catherine told her. ‘He’ll be going into the restaurant for his power breakfast. We’ll let him order, then I’ll undo a couple of buttons and bat my lashes and ask if we can join his table.’

‘Power breakfast?’ Laura asked, confused and betraying the years between them. Catherine just hoped the DI realised she was joking about undoing a couple of buttons too.

‘Paddy Steel was a skint up-and-comer during the eighties,’ she explained. ‘His aspirations got jammed back in adolescence. Now that he’s got the money, he thinks he’s in Miami Vice.’

They found him at a big corner booth with a dual-aspect view through floor-to-ceiling windows, no doubt his regular spot, given that it was unquestionably the best table in the house. Catherine hadn’t doorstepped him here before, but she wondered whether he wasn’t sitting a little further in from the glass than normal.

He was smaller than she’d expected. She hadn’t seen him up close in maybe a year or so, but her impression was always revised the same way. He grew in the mind over the intervening period so that the real thing always literally came up short. It wasn’t just a proportion thing, given his muscular build; he really was two or three inches smaller than Catherine. You don’t have to be big to be the big man, however. His presence was still a powerful one, with a brute fortitude and strength of will crackling off him like you were standing under a pylon.

He looked up neutrally as they approached, maintaining the same expression to hide his recognition and whatever else he felt and deduced regarding the arrival of two polis. He was tucking into an omelette, polka-dotted with red, green and yellow peppers, a pint glass of fresh orange juice next to his plate. His minders clearly felt they had earned the right to a more traditional indulgence, each tackling a fry-up of quite heroic proportions.