‘I very much doubt it was “news” news. Unless I’ve badly misread him, Jim never struck me as the type to take advantage of someone as desperate and vulnerable as that, though there’s plenty would. They’d just keep stringing her along with titbits until the money ran out. I’d imagine he was planning to let her down gently. That’s what I would hope, anyway.’

‘But if he wanted me out of the way on Friday, why did he tell her he’d have news this week?’

‘Maybe that wasn’t why he wanted you out of the way on Friday,’ McDade suggested. ‘Either way, it’s a dead end. What was the other case?’

Jasmine cast a glance at the pile of folders.

‘Oh, that one I only noticed because Jim had the file out, but it’s not a live case per se. The last action on it was back in October. Missing person. Somebody called Glen Fallan.’

This time there was an unequivocal reaction from McDade, the genuine surprise of hearing something quite unexpected.

‘You recognise the name?’ Jasmine asked rhetorically. ‘Who is he?’

‘Bad news,’ McDade replied, that slight sourness returning to his expression, as though the words themselves were bitter in his mouth. ‘A mercilessly brutal man. Debt collector, enforcer, torturer, hit man. Ice-cold killer, and when I say that, I mean like the ice doesn’t feel anything when it freezes you to death.’

Jasmine could actually feel cold on her neck as he spoke, a moment of chill combined with that same exhilarated sense of connection she’d experienced the moment Anne Ramsay announced her name.

‘So he would definitely fit the bill, then,’ she suggested.

‘He might if he hadn’t been dead for twenty years.’

‘Twe … So why would someone be hiring Jim to look for him?’

‘First question I asked myself when you mentioned his name. A wee bit of the Elvis syndrome, I think. Somebody famous – or sufficiently infamous – shuffles off and some people cannae quite believe it. He was an extraordinarily dangerous individual: he lived by the sword and he almost certainly died by it. In this case, there was a basis for the ambiguity in that there was never a body to bury, but that was no surprise, either to us polis or to the folk in the circles he moved in.’

‘Why not?’

‘In his world, people disappear with depressing frequency, especially back then. It muddies the waters if their bodies are never found: no corpse, no crime. It also means no closure for their relatives, which is particularly cruel. No opportunity to mourn. Nobody would have been mourning Glen Fallan, though. Only heart disease has killed more men in this city, and if someone hadn’t ended him, he might well have overtaken it.’

‘But if Jim was looking for him, wouldn’t that expose him to, you know, dangerous elements?’