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filth daftie looking stupid!’
    Angela raised both her hands to her mouth, then quickly put them to her ears, turned away from the screen. ‘Off. Off. Off.’
    Henderson scoffed, ‘What?’
    ‘Turn it off.’ Angela moved towards the mattress on the floor, threw herself down and began to sob. ‘Turn it off. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see that place.’
    ‘What is it?’ Henderson walked round to her side, pointed the remote control at the television, ‘Right there you go, it’s off. What the fuck’s up with you?’
    She sat up, screamed at him. ‘Why did you have to come back? … Why? … Why did you have to bring that in here?’
    ‘It’s just a telly!’
    She rose on her knees and started to lash out with her fists, ‘You brought that here … That place.’
    She was still lashing out, screaming hysterically as Henderson brought an open palm across her face. She fell sideways onto the mattress and was quiet.

Chapter 6
    DI ROB BRENNAN walked into the café on Shandwick Place, nodded to the woman behind the counter and produced a low-voltage smile. She already had the dazed, tired look of someone who was ill-at-ease with their lot; it was barely lunchtime. In Edinburgh, Brennan expected no less; working at a till could hardly afford you enough to cover the bus fares.
    ‘Coffee please, black,’ he said.
    She nodded, retreated to the machine on the counter behind her and started to batter ten bells out of it. Brennan eased himself to the side of the queue of people; the place was filling up.
    He had been home, caught a few hours’ sleep, but his mind never really relaxed. He could still see the image of the bloodless girl, dead in a field on the outskirts of the city. He knew it would never leave him. There were cases that he had worked when he was still in uniform, still buddied to a proper officer, that haunted him to this day. Death was always with him.
    Brennan looked around the café; most people were dead anyway, he thought. Couples of varying ages stared out into the bright, over-lit, open-plan area. Few of the assembled made eye contact. Or even attempted conversation. Their mouths opened and closed like fish as they gnawed on shortbread biscuits and supped beverages that they didn’t really want anyway.
    They were dead. If any were alive once, they didn’t know it, or, had forgotten it. What did life mean to a fool? What did it mean to him? Brennan’s days had been full of death; brutal, sometimes barbaric death – as he looked around this slim section of the public, he questioned the worth of his occupation. Would any of these drones miss what they had if it was suddenly wrung out of them? If their precious life was snuffed out – what difference would it make to the world to lose one more of these lifeless cabbages?
    Brennan shook himself. It was a pathetic indulgence that he had allowed himself: weighing the value of a life. Who was he, God? He knew it meant nothing – no more than the flip remark that death comes to us all. It was a stupid indulgence and he understood that, regretted it at once.
    The victim was only one half of the equation – the perpetrator was the other. Any notion that the victim had to be of an exalted value to the human race missed the point. It was the act, not the consequence Brennan knew he had to concern himself with now. It was the cold cruelty. The malevolence. The evil. That’s what fired him. No matter how indifferent he was to the mass of men and their lives of quiet desperation, he could not conceive of killing anyone himself; it took another type of man to do that – the type he had sworn to protect all others from.
    ‘Black coffee,’ the woman on the counter shouted out.
    ‘Yeah, mine. Thanks.’
    Brennan took it, held it steady as he returned to the car. He opened the door, stepped in behind the wheel. A little coffee escaped from the brim of the Styrofoam cup, slid down the side and scalded his fingers.
    ‘Shit.’
    He quickly