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one and we passed it between us.
    ‘Shoot.’
    ‘He wants me to help him.’
    ‘Do some research?’
    ‘Prosecute. Out there.’
    ‘In Hamburg? At the war crimes trials? Are you serious?’ I was wide awake now and it wasn’t the nicotine. Memories were flooding back.
    ‘The first trial starts on the fifth of December. He’s run off his feet. He’s already asked for help from our chambers. I don’t know if he suggested me or they offered
me.’
    ‘Can you say no?’
    ‘Not really. You know my chambers have been nagging at me to go back to Edinburgh. I’ve had a rotten year and they want to bring me back under their wing.’
    ‘I thought you were all self-employed? Why do they care?’
    ‘If I’m not doing well, I don’t get new briefs. It’s a downward spiral. And they don’t like having low-earners on the team. Bad for the stable’s
reputation.’
    ‘How does that fit with Hamburg?’
    ‘It’s a solid slab of work with guaranteed fees from the government.’
    ‘Not a punishment?’
    ‘More a test. I’ll be on the other side.’
    ‘Prosecuting war crimes? God, I hope it’s not a growth business.’
    Long after she had fallen asleep, I lay trying
not
to remember my own post-war confrontation with madness and depravity. Interrogating murderers and seeing them tried. Samantha Campbell
was tough, but this might test her to the limits.

FIVE
    S he was up and away first thing so we didn’t discuss it further. I headed into work just in time to take a call from Duncan. He had the names
and addresses of three slippery entrepreneurs known to be actively passing parcels in central Glasgow. One was a major pawnbroker, and the second the proud owner of a pair of jewellery stores. It
meant that in both cases they could nicely combine the brokerage of hot goods with the retail. They made a turn buying and selling. The third fence tripled his chance of facing awkward questions at
the Pearly Gates by fronting the fencing with an illegal bookmaking business and arranging dog fights.
    Duncan explained about the third man: ‘Sanny Carmichael thinks there’s safety in numbers. That he’s running so many crooked scams the polis will get confused and give up.
He’s no’ far wrong. And he’s got a wee arrangement with the local station that gets him a phone call to warn him he’s being raided.’
    I knew Sanny. ‘It’s only polite, Duncan. Otherwise they’d get accused of being unfair to hard-working criminals.’
    I’d had a run-in with Carmichael before the war when we raided one of his unlicensed bookies. He was operating it from a pair of ground-floor tenements in the Calton. I decided to start
with him.
    The rain had stopped and the winds had died down by the time I set out from the
Gazette
. But the water was still puddling the streets and flushing the gutters. I’d checked with
the
Gazette
’s sports editor. There was a big meet at Ayr over the weekend. Carmichael would have set up shop in one of his known haunts around the Trongate.
    It didn’t take me long to pick out a couple of spotters, doing sentry duty on opposite corners of a busy street of tall tenements above shops. The spotters were the least casual
street-corner smokers I’d seen. They twitched and paced. Their heads were on swivels and their caps were pulled down. I could either be furtive myself and wait to see which shop or close was
being used and run the risk of kicking off a panic when I was spotted. Or I could go straight at them, hoping I looked less like a cop than I used to. I tucked the newspaper under my arm, racing
page on display, and nonchalantly approached the nearest. I could feel his eyes running up and down over me and then sweeping beyond me to see if I had back-up. Cops on a raid never arrived solo.
He took the fag from his mouth as I got close. I took out my own packet and walked up to him, waving a fag as I got close.
    ‘Got a light, pal?’
    ‘Aye, sure. Here you go.’ He held out his red-tipped