He glanced away towards the bar as they waited for Fleeting, not so much looking impatiently for his man to appear as further demonstrating that he had nothing more to say to his guests and it would be impolite to sit and stare at them.

Catherine felt less constrained by any need to feign propriety, and took the chance to study Callahan’s face, understanding that he would be entirely aware of this. Despite his status and notoriety, she realised she had never been this close to him. She had encountered him in the flesh only once before, at least ten years back and only momentarily, as he was being escorted through the teaming chaos of a police station on a Saturday night. Their paths were thereafter unlikely to cross, as she mostly dealt with murder and he mostly had other people deal with that on his behalf.

In the growing silence, Catherine was unsettled to catch herself contemplating whether she might, under other circumstances, have considered Callahan attractive.

He was early forties, looking good for his age, as opposed to young for it, the lines on his face etching evidence of his years but not speaking directly about how he had spent them, unlike so many of his counterparts, who might as well have had ‘gangster’ tattooed on their foreheads. If she didn’t know more about him, she’d have taken him for a successful tradesman, perhaps a man who had his own business but earned the better part of its profits from the sweat of his own brow and the skill of his hands. She wondered distantly if that was how he could have turned out, under other circumstances; whether the brutality in his spirit had been put there by his experiences, or whether that spirit had picked out his brutal path.

He was slim and suntanned, a light and authentic holiday bronze as opposed to sunbed orange, dressed in a short-sleeved lilac shirt that complemented his skin tone. His hair was a silvery mixture of grey and white, trimmed neatly at the back and sides, lightly gelled to keep it in place on top. He had downy blond hair on his arms that seemed jarringly incongruous, as she normally associated it with the softness and fragility of her sons’ skinny limbs. He was short too; shorter than her anyway. She preferred men shorter than herself, though at five-nine that didn’t narrow the field too much. Callahan couldn’t have been more than five-seven. Amazing how often, in Glasgow gangland, the big man was actually a wee man. Napoleon complex. Bantams and terriers.

His clothing was expensive but understated. Tasteful.

Not flash.