‘I wasn’t talking about the public’s faith. Us polis need to see results in the short term too. Even the medium term appears to be beyond Locust. You’ve come a long way in a short time, Dougie, so maybe you don’t realise how it looks to guys like Cairns and Fletcher, who have been doing the job on the street for decades. Fletch’s mother’s got senile dementia and he’s spent everything on her care. Bob Cairns put three kids through uni. There’s a lot of cops just like them. They’ve done their thirty, they’re approaching retirement and they’re skint despite working hard all their lives, yet every day they see these chancers driving about in their pimped four-by-fours, spending money like water. They need to put away a few “mid-level faces”, if that’s all they can get, in order for the job to make any bloody sense.’

Abercorn nodded sagely, a look of appeasing humility coming over his face. It might have been a precisely calculated look of appeasing humility, but it was an olive branch nonetheless.

‘I get that,’ he said, but Catherine wasn’t sure he really did, or ever would.

‘So who do you fancy for it?’ he asked. ‘McDiarmid, I mean.’

‘Well, as you said, we poked the nest and upset the balance. Fullerton, Callahan, Cassidy, McLennan: any of them could have decided the time was right to make a move, and equally someone could just have lashed out. Bill Raeside seemed to think Frankie Callahan was a good shout. His set-up is in better shape than most, and Gallowhaugh would be all the more lucrative for him if Paddy Steel’s hand was weakened.’

Abercorn screwed up his face, not impressed by what he had heard; or at least wishing to convey that he wasn’t impressed by what he had heard.

‘Callahan’s operation is in rude health, but that’s precisely why the idea of a turf war strikes me as rather one-dimensional logic.’

‘I did say it was Bill Raeside,’ Catherine conceded. ‘He’s not exactly renowned for thinking outside the box. But what’s inside the box makes sense to me. What’s wrong with it?’

‘This is not about territory, that’s what’s wrong with it. We’re not dealing with street gangs any more. It’s entirely about having product. You don’t need to control anywhere if you’ve got something the market wants. The product lets you control the territory, not the other way around. That’s why the myth grew up around Tony McGill back in the day that he was an old-school gangster with a code of honour who was using his clout to keep drugs out of Gallowhaugh.’

‘You mean until he got sent down for being in possession of enough smack to stone a herd of diplodocuses,’ Catherine responded, though she was impressed that Abercorn had researched his local history.