‘Police thanks … this is Mary Shields of 20 Mansion House Square.’ Mary hadn’t really dialled, she was speaking to herself. But it did the job. Jimmy backed off and hobbled out of the gate.

When she opened the back door to enter the close, Nora from 1/1 was waiting, steely faced. ‘This is out of order, Mary. We’re having a meeting tomorrow. It can’t go on.’

‘What time?’ She was running up the stairs; didn’t have time for this crap.

‘You’re not invited,’ said Nora. ‘It’s ABOUT YOU.’

She was out of breath as she grabbed her River Island boot from the drawer under the bed. How could she have forgotten? She had to ring Minnie at the OMU, tell her what she’d found. Where was her work-issue Blackberry? Not in her bag, not on the kitchen table, not in her coat pocket. It was in the living room, on the chair, and if she hadn’t been standing in front of the flipchart when she dialled Minnie’s number, she may not have had an epiphany.

What is important to a man like Derek McLaverty?

She stared at the flipchart as Detective Sergeant Minnie Johnstone’s phone rang out.

How do you bring a man like him down?

One of his blog comments was echoing in her brain: ‘Even her cuck husband and beta son hate her guts #getthebitch #getthebitch, #getthebitch, #getthebitch.’

Mary hung up and shook her River Island boot. She knew how.

The pen drive.

PART THREE

THE PAEDOPHILE

22

At 4.00 a.m. Mary donned one of the wigs she sometimes wore for Roddie, turned on her ‘Riot Grrrl’ playlist, and walked over to Shawlands. As always, she waved as she passed the street she grew up on. When she was a kid, her red-sandstone terrace had seemed an eternity away from the tenements and mansions of her current multicultural hood. It was, in fact, one hundred metres. Liam Macdowall’s flat was another hundred, and she was walking it alone, reading what happened here a few hours earlier: in chips and curry sauce, in overflowing outdoor ashtrays, and in an abandoned shopping trolley filled with loose red apples. Mary, like most Glaswegians, had tried living in sunny places, then returned to Glasgow because it was better than everywhere else.

It was pissing down.

Her dad had pushed her on the swings across the way. She changed the playlist to ‘Happy’ and turned it down a notch. Thirty years later she’d done the same for Jack, who always looked miserable mid-flight. It shocked her when he yelled ‘Higher!’ because his chubby face was saying, I am about to die. He had many, many fears, and at the age of five had already resolved to conquer them all.