He was almost unintelligible. Too long Bannerman’s eyes stayed on his mouth and when he finally broke off it was to nod, bewildered, and frown at his feet. He turned to the uniform. ‘Officer, were you the first here?’

The uniform nodded at Bannerman as if he was meeting a film star. He had a red farmer’s face and round body, not flattered by the double-breasted plastic police issue jacket buttoned tight across his belly.

‘Find anything? A passport or a home address? No letters with photo ID on the path up here?’

‘Nothing like that so far, sir, no, as far as I know, like.’ Same accent, voice quiet because he was intimidated by the specialist from the town, almost as hard to understand as the farmer.

Bannerman snorted, looking to Morrow to laugh along with him: a bonding moment between colleagues.

‘Have you actually done a search?’ she pointed towards the van.

‘Not yet, ma’am, no.’

‘How do you know then? Get that man out beyond the tape.’ She walked off into the field, leaving Bannerman to stand with the two men he had been ridiculing a moment ago.

Even she was starting to wonder if she was an arsehole.

‘I am not sitting down anywhere here.’ Pat crossed his arms and looked around the living room. There was not a surface on floor, walls or ceiling without a suspicious stain nearby.

Sitting in the least damp corner of the balding brown corduroy settee, Shugie looked up at him, tipping his head back to compensate for the puff on his eyes, and whispered, ‘OK then.’ His smoke-fucked voice was barely a rasp.

‘Because,’ Pat, leaned in to provoke him, ‘it’s fucking ginking.’

Shugie blinked, sanguine about the charge. ‘OK.’

Foiled, determined that Shugie would be as upset as he was, Pat looked around the floor, at the settee, through the door to the kitchen. ‘ You live like a dirty fucking animal.’

But Shugie was unperturbed, distracted, perhaps by the profundity of his hangover. He shut his rheumy eyes to sniff, the violent action disturbing the delicate balance of forces behind his eyes, and he cringed with pain. ‘Oooh.’

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Oh aye. OK.’ He kept his eyes shut, awaiting equilibrium. ‘You’re saying it’s dirty and that’s fair enough.’

‘Look at that.’

With supernatural effort Shugie peeled one swollen eye open and followed Pat’s finger to a distant meeting of floor and wall. He squinted at it: something small and brown had grown its own white fur coat.

‘Wit the fuck is that?’

Shugie shrugged at the distant object. ‘An orange?’

‘An orange?’

‘Or a tangerine?’

‘It’s a shit.’

Dropping his feet heavily on the stairs they heard Eddy coming downstairs from keeping guard outside the old man’s room.

‘There’s a fucking dog shit in your living room.’ Pat raised his voice, restating his case so that Eddy could hear.

‘Naw,’ Shugie sighed with the effort of talking, ‘there hasnae been a dug in here for three month, man.’

‘Then it’s been here for three month. Look at the bloom on it.’

Shugie did as instructed. ‘Nah,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘that’s just an old tangerine or something.’

Pat looked accusingly at Eddy but didn’t get the chance to speak.

‘Your watch,’ said Eddy, thumbing over his shoulder to the stairs.

‘This place…’ Pat found himself lost for words. He pointed at the furry white intruder by the wall.

Shugie threw his hands up and rasped an appeal to Eddy. ‘He’s going mad over an old orange or something.’

In a gesture of solidarity Eddy flopped onto the settee next to Shugie. He sat suddenly straight, his eyes widened. He jumped to his feet again, turning to look at the damp seat of his trousers, moving his hand to brush the urine off and then thought better of it, flapping his hand at it instead. ‘Oh, ya dirty fucking…’

Pat grabbed his arm and pulled him roughly into the kitchen. ‘Come in here.’

The kitchen looked even worse in the weak morning light. The window above the sink was broken, a triangle of glass missing from the bottom corner, the rest of it documenting every splash of dirty water that had ever hit it, a thick layer of grey dots emanating from behind the mixer tap. Beyond the lace of dirt the very tip of the Lexus’s silver bonnet shone in the sun.

The wall of bin bags blocking the passage to the back door were not just leaking sticky mess onto the floor, the ones on the bottom were stuck in a pool of white.

‘I can’t stay here,’ said Pat.

Eddy was standing too close to him, chewing his bottom lip.

‘It’s not…’ Pat looked around the floor, ‘healthy.’

‘Pat-’

Pat pointed into the living room. ‘There’s a shit with mould on it in there.’

Eddy pinched his nose, paused, and shut his eyes. When he spoke it was with forced patience. ‘The trouble I had to find this place-’

‘Trouble?’ shouted Pat. ‘The cunt drinks in your fucking local. All ye did was buy a pint and turn around.’

Eddy’s eyes were still shut. ‘I looked at a number of places as possible-’

‘Oh, “A pint o’eighty”,’ shouted Pat, flailing his hands about indignantly, ‘“Aye, you, you seem to smell of pish, have ye a house? Can I hold a hostage there? Would that have a shit in the corner?”’

Pat looked up for a response and found the barrel of Eddy’s gun pointing at his eye. Eddy spoke quietly to the tip of his gun. ‘Patrick,’ he told it, ‘I’ve went to a lot of trouble and you’re not really appreciating that.’

Pat was hypnotised by the circle of deep blackness.

‘I have tried reasoning with you,’ whispered Eddy, a tremor in his voice as the enormity of what he was doing sunk in. He was looking at Pat’s mouth, quite close, as if afraid to look at the eye he was about to shoot. They were wet again, the eyes, the bastard fucking eyes brimming with panic.

‘I’ve tried so fucking hard…’

‘Edward.’

‘I’ve really fucking tried.’

‘Get the gun away from my face or I will kill you.’

‘Oh, you’ll kill me,’ and Eddy waggled the end of the barrel in Pat’s face, afraid to drop it now, in case Pat did kill him. ‘I’ve got a gun on you and you’re threatening to kill me, is it? You’re threatening me? Who are you tae fucking threaten me?’

They both knew who Pat was. Pat was a Tait, and he didn’t need to threaten Eddy. Being a Tait, even an estranged Tait, meant that he was a walking threat. The barrel was pointing at Pat’s ear now. ‘Point the gun at the floor,’ he said carefully.

Eddy didn’t know what else to do. He lowered the barrel, spluttering a sob of relief.

Calmly, Pat reached over and, hand over hand, took the pistol from him. He held it away from Eddy and flicked the safety on, took a deep breath and spoke: ‘This is a fuck-up from start to finish. We both know it.’

‘Aye,’ whispered Eddy urgently, tears rolling down his face. ‘Aye, I know it’s a fucking mess, I don’t know what to… I just sat in that old cunt’s pish.’ He rubbed his eyes with the ball of his palm, smearing tears into his hairline.

Pat reached out and touched Eddy’s back with his fingertips and Eddy covered his face like a girl and cried, high pitched, helpless. Beyond the kitchen door Shugie crossed his legs and Pat saw that he was wearing trainers with the wrong laces, brown laces from brogues. I don’t belong here, he said to himself, knowing that he really meant that he didn’t want to belong here.

‘If she hadn’t taken the fucking kids, man,’ squeaked Eddy. ‘If she’d only let me see my fucking weans…’

It wasn’t the wife stopping him from seeing the kids. This lie had developed slowly, like a lot of other lies in Eddy’s life. Pat went along with it but now, abruptly, he looked at Eddy and saw a man refused access to his children by the courts because he was an unreliable moody arsehole, a man who brought Shugie in so that people in their local would know he was up to something big, a man who, over the course of today, would misremember last night, rewrite events so that Pat was the nervous one who fucked up. He looked at Eddy, self-pity seeping out of him. Eddy wasn’t capable of being honest. I do belong here, Pat admitted, I do belong, but I don’t want to.