With that thought her reverie evaporated. Flash Frankie. That was what they used to call him, but not because he was ostentatious in his appearance. It was a name conferred by his criminal peers due to the fact that one minute you were just talking to him and then in a flash he had opened your face.

This was why his calmness made him a far more intimidating presence than Paddy Steel. Steel gave off so much energy that it was easy to detect changes in the atmosphere. By contrast Callahan, as many had found to their considerable cost, was impossible to read.

He relaxed a little in his chair, Catherine’s first indicator that Gary Fleeting was about to enter the private dining room. Callahan wasn’t quite getting up and leaving them to it, but there was a further air of detachment about him now that his lieutenant had arrived.

Where Frankie was calm and unemotive, Fleeting was rangy and bristling, with a restless physicality about the way he composed himself, or rather didn’t compose himself: not for more than three seconds at a time anyway. Catherine knew instantly both why Lisa Bagan had been trysting with Jai McDiarmid and why she had been anxious to keep it a secret. Fleeting struck her instantly as the kind of guy who would ‘rather fight than fuck’ if both options were on offer; someone who quite possibly got more of a thrill from learning that another bloke was shagging his girlfriend than he got from actually shagging her himself.

‘Gary, these ladies are from CID.’

Catherine was aware that Callahan hadn’t had the chance to prep him, having spoken only very briefly to the waitress who had been sent upstairs. She waited for him to further contextualise their visit in order to provide a heads-up: even just a terse ‘They’re here about Jai McDiarmid’, heavy with hidden emphasis and discreet import.

Callahan, however, added nothing. Was he confident that Fleeting had had no involvement in McDiarmid’s murder, or merely confident that Fleeting would know exactly why she and Laura were here?

‘It’s about James McDiarmid,’ Catherine said. ‘I believe you had a mutual acquaintance.’

‘What aboot him? Any news, or is he still deid?’

Aye, he knew fine why they were here. He was aiming for feigned lack of interest, but didn’t have his boss’s emotionless intensity. Plus, he couldn’t resist acting the big man. Put him in a room with polis and he would come over all cocky no matter the circumstances. It was bred in the bone. She’d have said it was in his mother’s milk, but the chances of finding a breastfeeder in Fleeting’s infant-years postcode would have been roughly the same as finding a virgin in his school’s fourth-year netball team.

‘Where were you on Sunday, Gary? Between around half-eleven in the morning and midnight?’