It had a button for pushing warm water through coffee grinds and a nozzle for frothing milk. Crystyl pressed buttons, trying to decipher the symbols. Getting nervous she opened a small door in the machine and took out the water tub, yellowed because it had never been used. ‘Do the beans go in here?’

As Alex watched Crystyl a burst of compassion for the silly woman came from nowhere. ‘Look, never mind coffee, I’ll have a cup of tea if you’re having one.’

‘But I’m not.’ Crystyl looked up, over Alex’s shoulder and her face brightened. ‘Hi, darlin’.’

Alex hadn’t heard Danny coming in. He had his jacket on already and was pointedly twirling his car keys around his index finger. The jacket was down-quilted for warmth and bulked him up, made him look as if he’d spent a two stretch lifting weights in prison. His shaved head and the long scar on his cheek didn’t contradict the impression.

‘What you doing here?’ he said, trying not to smile.

‘Visiting,’ she replied, chewing her cheek so that she didn’t either.

‘At seven thirty in the morning?’

‘I’m on nights, on my way home. Wanted to see you before ye set off for the day.’

He pursed his mouth. ‘Easy to miss each other.’

‘It is.’ They nodded away from each other, both wishing in their separate ways that this was easier.

‘Baby?’ he asked.

‘Not recently,’ she answered quickly, making a joke to deflect the question. She reminded herself to breathe in. They smiled away from each other. ‘Nah, he’s fine. Good. Brought ye this.’

She set the bottle of single malt on the kitchen counter and he sniggered at it, touching the lid lightly with a finger. ‘Thoughtful.’

Confused, Crystyl looked from one to the other. Danny didn’t drink.

Alex smiled away from him. ‘I’m always that. Happy birthday, Danny.’

‘I missed yours.’

‘Don’t care,’ she said honestly.

Crystyl gasped and brushed past Alex to Danny’s side, wrapping her arms around his middle and pressing her tits into his side. She gave him a weak mock punch. ‘Your wee sister’s birthday! What a bastard – pardon my French – you’re a bad bastard, Danny.’ She smiled. ‘Total.’

Danny straightened his face. ‘Right, doll,’ he said, wrapping a hand around Crystyl’s tiny waist and giving her a squeeze. ‘I’m off then, I’ll get Alex here downstairs,’ and to Alex, ‘did ye park on the street?’

‘Aye.’

He understood why and it hurt him a little, she could tell.

Crystyl trotted out to the lift door on her tiptoes, ponytail swishing ahead as they followed her. She stopped in the same place she had been in when Alex had arrived, and let them pass her. She must think she was well lit there, that whoever was looking out from the lift would get the best view of her from this angle and would perhaps remember her fondly while he was shutting a car door on someone’s fingers during the day.

‘Bye, da’lin’.’ She blew a kiss.

Seeming rather tired Danny raised his hand to catch it in his fist. The doors shut.

Mirrors on all four walls threw their reflections back at them: both tall, blonde, both thirty-four, both with their father’s baby dimpled cheeks. They looked sweet on both of them now, babyish, but they knew from their father that ageing dimples sagged into gashes. Their father looked as if he’d been in a fight with a knifeman plagued by a need for symmetry. Apart from that they didn’t look alike: Alex took after her mother’s side for eyes and chin, and Danny had his own mother’s mouth, tight, mean.

Three months between them. Their father was a charmer in his day, and had all of his many families concurrently. Alex’s mother was naive and loved him with a passion that congealed when the baby arrived. Danny’s mother was younger but already inured to disappointment. Danny didn’t grow up with shame and anger, just in a household governed by a series of bad men and drink.

Alex and Danny met on their first day at school. They looked like twins, everyone said so, it was an innocent joke. They were sweethearts for their first term of school but it all ended abruptly when their mothers met at the gates. The most vivid memory of Alex’s early life was walking home through a park, blood dripping from her sobbing mother’s mouth onto the grey path. She’d ripped her blouse in the fight and everyone could see her bra strap.

People didn’t move schools in those days. Danny and Alex went all the way through primary school together, and secondary. And all the time there was the ever present threat of their mothers fighting, of the other boot falling.

She was glad when Danny’s mum died of the drink in second year and no doubt he was glad when they were sixteen and hers died, but she never knew: he was long gone from school by then.

She was lucky never to have had the McGrath name, she realised later. Her mother always wanted it for her but her father wouldn’t admit she was his. Somehow that mattered then. If she’d had his name the police admissions board might have worked out where she was from, who she belonged to and not let her into the force.

Neither spoke until they were three floors down.

‘I came to ask ye about someone,’ said Alex, taking out her mobile. She flicked through the pictures until she reached the photo she had taken in the road the night before. Standing behind police tape was Omar Anwar, as clear as she could get him, smoking and looking sorry. She showed it to Danny, ‘Know him?’

Danny narrowed his eyes. ‘Nut,’ and handed her back the phone. ‘Seen anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Lan Gallagher go’ married last month.’

Morrow smiled. ‘Who in the name of God’d marry her?’

‘Well, ye know,’ he shrugged, ‘for every ugly there’s a bugly.’

She smiled. Charm that sagged into gashes. That’s how the McGrath men got you.

Before the doors were open properly Danny nipped through them, stepped quickly across the lobby and through a side door marked ‘car park’. Alex went after him.

The door led into a bare concrete corridor radiating damp with cold, brutal strip lights. She turned the corner and found Danny standing still, waiting for her. He was pressed up tight into a corner at a turn in the corridor. ‘We’ve put up hundreds of cameras.’ He circled his finger to the ceiling. ‘Trouble in the halls. I know where they are so… never say nothing…’

Disappointed at having to acknowledge who Danny really was, Alex slumped her shoulders, but Danny ignored the reproach and reached for her, pinching the elbow of her coat and pulling her into the corner with him. He took the phone from her hand, called up the photo of Omar and examined it.

Alex found it strange, standing so close together but not touching. She could feel Danny’s breath on her neck. It was like being young together again, like when he tried to teach her how to smoke hash in a cupboard in Bosco Walker’s bedroom during a party and she vomited on his new trainers. She remembered being glad about it because the trainers had been nicked. Bosco and Lan and all of them inhabited a place in her life that was long ago, a network of memories she never accessed so that when she did it all seemed so crisp and immediate that it was more real than the grey now.

Danny held up her phone and handed it back. ‘This boy’s a southsider.’

‘I know. Is he… you know…’ To another policeman she’d say ‘dirty’ but she could hardly say that to Danny.

He helped her out. ‘Into anything?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nut, good family, Daddy runs a twenty-four-hour shop. Two boys went to St Als, both done degrees I think.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘The young one did law.’

‘Right?’

Watching him make a mental note, she wished she hadn’t been so specific. Danny could retain information for decades before he used it. ‘How do you know him?’

‘Used tae run with the Young Shields when he was a wee guy. Got out of it, haven’t seen him about for years.’