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enquiry report for a stalker. In the section about the offender’s use of time, the report had read: ‘Mr Jones enjoys surfing the net and wanking his dog in the park.’
    ‘Sheriff Ross hates social workers. So he hauls me into the court,’ Danny said, ‘and threatens me with contempt.’
    ‘It was obviously a typo,’ Danny had explained to the Sheriff. ‘The report should read “walking”.’
    ‘Stop here,’ said Danny to the taxi driver, somehow knowing that we’d reached our destination. ‘Just drop us at the corner, that’ll be fine.’
    As Danny got out of the cab, extended his stick and retrieved money from his wallet, the taxi driver noticed he was blind.
    ‘So do you just listen to music, then?’ the driver asked Danny as he counted out the change.
    ‘Aye, I just listen to music and that, you know,’ Dannyreplied, entering into a conversation about Glasgow bands to make the driver feel at ease.
    Later he told me about a catalogue of similar incidents involving people’s bizarre reactions to his disability.
    One evening, he’d been walking home from the Sheriff Court, where he’d given evidence about a drug dealer he’d supervised. He said he could smell the shit-caked clothes of the two drunks a mile away. They were lying under the bridge, clutching their quarter bottles of fortified wine with all their might, when Danny passed by with his stick.
    ‘And we think we’ve got it bad,’ said Jakey 1.
    ‘There but for the grace of God,’ said his friend.
    I was no better. In the pub that night, I was wondering how much the general opinion of me depended on my looks, which were, I had to admit, rather good.
    ‘Do you want to touch my face?’ I asked Danny when Robert went to the bathroom.
    ‘What?’
    ‘You can touch my face if you like,’ I said.
    If he touched my face, I supposed, he would understand that my wit and intelligence were accompanied by the kind of symmetrical features that babies and jurors like.
    ‘Do I have to?’ he asked, and then, when Robert returned to the bar:
    ‘You’ll never guess what … she wants me to touch her face!’
    ‘Can I?’ asked Robert, doing it anyway, and all was raucous for several Krissie-is-a-dick-filled minutes.
    Idiot.
    Changing the subject, I told them all about my triumphant detective work with the sex offender, and then about Jeremy. ‘He seems sad … and nice,’ I said.
    ‘That’s the murder one, yeah?’ said Danny. ‘Doesn’t seem too nice to me.’
    ‘He’s not guilty yet,’ I asserted. ‘Anyway, I think it’s important to get to know a client before looking at what other people say about them, or accuse them of.’
    ‘Noble,’ said Robert.
    ‘Impossible,’ added Danny.
    They didn’t seem overly interested in Jeremy’s childhood story. ‘But have you ever heard anything as sad as that?’ I asked.
    ‘Aye!’ Robert said, and went on to top my story with one involving an old bloke with dementia and his three-legged terrier. He and Danny then played sad-story poker, bidding one tale of woe after the other.
    Danny had supervised the shoplifting daughter of a notorious serial killer. She’d blamed herself for years for failing to alert the authorities to her father’s activities, before turning to heroin.
    Robert was supervising a guy who got into an argument with the neighbours, lashed out with a hammer, and accidentally killed a young girl who just happened to be walking up the close.
    One of Danny’s lifers was a prostitute who had failed in her plan to kill herself, but had managed to take out her kids.
    And so it went on. I realised that Jeremy’s was just one of many, many sad stories of prisoners’ lives.
    ‘After a week or so you’ll stop talking about your cases,’ said Danny. ‘You’ll get home and be like – yeah, yeah, work was fine. You’ll get used to it.’
    ‘If you don’t, you’ll get constant migraines, like Hilary,’ added Robert.
    ‘Or be on long-term sick, like a third of us,’