At the word of kindness he could feel the tension release from the old man’s arm, felt the give in his footsteps. Touched, Pat led him gently over to the side of the bed and turned him by the shoulders so that his back was to it. ‘There’s a bed right behind you. Sit down on it, put your feet on it and I want ye to stay there, OK?’

‘But, I have shoes on.’

Pat looked at the stained yellow sheet, at the creases on the linen. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that too much, faither.’

Blind, the old man reached his hands behind for the bed and lowered himself slowly. Pat helped him. ‘There ye are. Swing your feet up, that’s it. Shuffle over into the middle.’ The old man did as he was ordered. ‘That’s it,’ said Pat. ‘Now listen, don’t move from there.’

‘What if I need to… use a bathroom?’ The pillowcase’s face looked up at him from the bed, like a child afraid to sleep.

‘Um.’ Pat wanted to say just do it in here, because Shugie had probably pissed the bed often enough but he liked the association with order, wanted to distance himself from the mess of the place. ‘Bang your shoe on the floor and I’ll come and take ye.’

‘OK.’ The pillowcase crossed his hands in his lap. ‘OK.’

Pat stepped away, out the hallway and shut the door on the neat white figure sitting upright in the filthy bed.

He stopped outside the door, reluctant to go downstairs. If he wanted to go anywhere in the house it was back into the bedroom with the neat little man.

Outwardly his composure was still intact: Aamir sat still, his hands carefully crossed in his lap as orderly alone as he had been in the full glare of his captors. He wasn’t moving because he couldn’t move, his muscles were frozen, his throat felt as if it had been punched, as if a scream was strangling his Adam’s apple. He didn’t actually know if he would be able to move without being ordered to.

Testing his motor skills, he tapped a finger and found that he was shaking slightly but could move. He took a breath and opened his eyes. Through the pillowcase he could see a slight light from the left, perhaps a window, at waist height. They had been driving for two hours, perhaps one and a half, allowing for his fear, which made time go slower. In two hours they could have gone from Glasgow to Dundee, to Edinburgh and anywhere over in the east, to Perth perhaps, Stirling certainly.

Aamir had an acute sense of time, from working the shop for so long.

He tapped his finger again and suddenly saw Aleesha’s hand come apart, fingers hit the wall behind her, the newly bought Madinah clock, and the violent red spill down her forearm. And then he saw himself begging them, wobbling his head like a TV Asian, talking in broken English when he was fluent: please sir, me be good boy, let me go by, let me go by, British passport, sorry, sorry.

The red dust of the Kampala road was choking his throat. He saw again that arrogant swagger of the soldiers, their rifles slung across their peasant shoulders, their grins, their black features lost in the glare of their white teeth. And beyond them, his mother. She staggered out from behind the army van, not even crying, not even looking at where she was going, just falling forward and catching her weight on one foot then the other, her eyes were glazed, her mouth slack. She was clutching the hem of her yellow sari, holding it up so that the mud and dust didn’t mark it. On her seat, from her backside, wet, scarlet blood soaked into the material, blooming into a giant verdant flower as Aamir watched through the dirty glass of the taxi window. Aamir and his mother had British passports. It was a licence for the soldiers to do whatever they wanted to them.

Aamir survived. That was his skill. He took a breath. At the cost of his mother’s dignity, they escaped, and she never mentioned it again. For the rest of her life, in Scotland, Aamir had pitied and despised her for letting them, for buying his freedom with her dignity. Now it was his turn.

She knew he could never touch her again after that. In the dark, he reached across the hot plastic of the taxi’s back seat and took his long dead mother’s hand. In the filthy bedroom, on the piss-stained bed, he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers.

Pat stepped into the living room and found Eddy gone. Shugie was snoring, frowning an unconscious protest at the piss prickling into his skin. From the kitchen came the tiny tones of a phone number being tapped into a key pad.

Eddy was standing in the dark, next to the sink, his phone blue-lighting one side of his face. He flared his nostrils at Pat, showing that he was disappointed at the mess as well. The phone was answered at the other end by an ominous silence.

‘Um, hello,’ said Eddy, nervous but hopeful. ‘Eh, it’s me.’

The house was so quiet Pat could hear the answer: ‘Say it’s done.’ The strangulated Belfast accent was crystal clear in the stillness of the kitchen.

‘It’s done,’ said Eddy, trying to copy his professional manner. ‘Got one guy. Old guy.’

A pause. ‘Old?’

‘Not actually the target. But another one, an old guy.’

Another pause. Not friendly. ‘Why not the target?’

‘Eh, he wasn’t there.’

‘Not there?’

Eddy was sweating now, looking to Pat for backup. ‘Eh, well no. But we got an old guy.’

‘How old?’

‘Um, sixties?’

An angry sigh fluttered into the receiver. ‘You said you were fit for this.’

‘We did, we got… Um… this old guy.’

‘I told you twenties.’

‘Well, he wasn’t there so… we got an old one.’

‘Not twenties?’

Eddy’s face tightened. ‘Um, we’ve got the old man.’

‘Any shots fired off?’

‘One. Pat. A hand injury. Nothing much.’

A sound from the other end, a groan or a huff or something, a muffled exclamation.

‘Sorry? I didn’t catch-’

‘ Yees are fucking amateurs.’

Eddy found himself listening to a dead tone. He sucked his teeth, flipped the phone shut and looked to Pat for comfort.

Pat pointed at the festering bin bags. ‘I am not fucking staying here.’

London Road Police Station was down the road from Bridgeton Cross. Bridgeton was pretty, near the vast expanse of Glasgow Green, had a couple of listed buildings and a museum. For years it had been mooted as an up and coming area but Bridgeton stubbornly neither upped nor came. Drunken fights were vicious and hourly, streets were graffiti-declared Free States, and the children’s language would have made a porn star blush.

The station itself was relatively new. From outside it looked like a cross between a three-storey office building and a fortress. Built of shit-brown bricks, the front was shored up with supporting pillars, the windows sunk defensively into the facade. It was set back from the main road by overgrown bushes in massive concrete pots that served as bollards to stop nutters driving into the reception area.

The door was always open to the public, welcoming them into an empty lobby with free-standing poster displays of friendly policemen and women chortling happily. For safety reasons the front bar wasn’t manned. The duty sergeant could see the lobby through a one-way mirror and CCTV. He came out in his shirt sleeves if the member of the public didn’t look tooled up or mad with the drink, but if they had as much as an air of melancholy about them he brought his deputy and a night stick.

Morrow’s driver took a street up the side and a sharp right into the police yard. A high wall topped with broken glass was arranged around a windowless block of cells. He cruised around to the back side of the cell block and found a space next to the police vans.

‘You better lock up,’ said Morrow as they got out.

Most officers didn’t bother locking their vehicles but the yard gate had been broken for a fortnight and spite-theft from a police station wasn’t much deterred by cameras.