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uniforms brief them on the witnesses’ statements. Bannerman was nodding as if he already knew what had happened and was just there to check up on everybody. Next to him MacKechnie watched his prodigy approvingly, a little echo of the nod on his neck.
    Bannerman. His sun-bleached hair was too long, hung slightly over his eyes, muscular, suntanned. She thought he aspired to look like a surfer but he looked like a careerist to her, a boy whose dad was in the force and introduced him to senior officers. That’s how he got the promotion to DS while still in CID. Morrow had to leave, go back into uniform, do the exams that way, and then transfer back. Friendless, without a sponsor, she’d done it through merit. No one retired and few got promoted out of CID; it was a destination and the jobs were few and far. To make DS within CID an officer had to suck up to senior officers, go to the football with them, play golf and let them win.
    Morrow and Bannerman had been sharing an office for a month but it wasn’t going well. However many coffees he made her, however many KitKats he brought her from the machine, she could see in his eyes that he joked about her behind her back, couldn’t take to her, feared her moods. He had already been settled in their office for two months before she arrived, seemed easygoing, was four years younger than her. And she was hard work, she knew that. If Morrow worked with herself she’d try and sit a few desks away.
    Bannerman saw her now, walking towards him, and his smile lingered too long, going stale on his lips.
    “Sir.” She tipped a nod at MacKechnie but couldn’t bring herself to look at Bannerman. “Grant.”
    Grant Bannerman nodded back. “All right, Morrow? What’s happening?”
    She could feel the blood draining from her face. “Hello” wouldn’t do for Grant. “Good evening” wouldn’t do. It had to be some cheesy greeting, a bit of a song, a line from Elvis or some fucking thing. He strove to be different because he wasn’t. Her ambition was to fit in and she couldn’t. Jealousy made her focus on him, notice small vulnerabilities like the occasional sunbed flush to his skin, how he often implied credit to himself for other people’s work, and although superficially confident, how lost he sometimes looked in the company of other men.
    Heat rose in her cheeks and she knew she had to cover up quickly. “There’s evidence getting wet around there,” she said. “Two cigarette butts need bagging up.”
    Bannerman was wrong and knew it. “We’re waiting for the photographer.”
    “No point proving they came from here if the traces have been washed off, is there?”
    MacKechnie blinked indulgently. “Best to go and get them bagged.”
    Bannerman nodded at one of the cops, briefing them to go and do it.
    The Firearms Unit were coming out of the house. They crowded out of the front door, looking terrifying. Four big men in black body armor blocking the light of the hallway. They each held intimidatingly large pistols, holding them with two hands as if they were likely to go off of their own volition and blow a hole in something vital.
    They were laughing at something as they came down the path towards them, the relief marked in their shoulders and faces. Whenever a gun was used Firearms had to come to either disarm or ensure that no gun-toting nutters were hanging around in cupboards waiting to leap out when the police got there. It was a high-stress, short-life job. They were recruiting all the time, month on month getting more and more calls. A flood of redundant weapons was coming to Glasgow from Ireland, selling for buttons.
    As the unit came past they assumed MacKechnie was the senior and gave him the lowdown: no one in there, no guns in the house, one bullet in the wall, and a lot of blood. One resident still in the house, a bedridden new mother.
    “Bedridden?” asked Morrow.
    As if they were seeing her for the first time, all of the men looked at her.
    “Well,”