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Jackie; he doesn’t have that same flighty charm. But more dependable than his father.
    He has more heart. Or maybe less camouflage around it.
    She saw the Cherokee back out of the drive. The lights blinked on and off a couple of times, Eddie’s goodbye signal. Then the vehicle swung out of sight.
    He’s going to Glasgow to bury Jackie, she thought. I’ll never see Glasgow again. Bellahouston Park. The Botanic Gardens. A saunter down Buchanan Street, a left turn along busy Argyle Street. She wondered if there was still that awful smelly zoo in Oswald Street where they kept a couple of mangy lions caged.
    It was all lost to her.
    She went inside the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She removed a bottle of Absolut from the freezer. The glass was cold and adhered to her hand. She poured a little, drank it down quickly, filled the glass again. What is happening to you, lady? Two small shots at dawn. Strolling down Stumblebum Street. You shouldn’t be doing this.
    The radio was playing ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’.
    Oh aye. Oh yes. A little moonlight. Jackie’s dead and there’s a sharp stick in my heart and I remember what a little moonlight can do.
    The honeymoon in Largs, the hotel room with the sea view, the big brass bed. Jackie was an energetic lover. He exhausted her. She loved that fatigue and the deep ache of it all. She recalled how it rained all week, but it didn’t matter, because they never left their room. Jackie took the bedsheets and hung them between chairs, making them into a kind of tent, just for laughs. I’m the sheikh , he said. Come inside my desert hideaway, Flower . He often called her ‘Flower’. Flora my flower, he used to say.
    She picked up her glass and entered the greenhouse. She was a little out of breath: age, she thought, the system on the blink. She loved this glass room at dawn. The tranquillity, the quiet force of greenery, the subtle modifications of colour.
    Flora my flower. What had replaced her? Senga my sunshine? Senga –
    She remembered The Raid suddenly, the day she’d come home to the house in Onslow Drive from shopping and found it crowded with policemen, some uniformed, others in suits, and they’d yanked floorboards up, hauled drawers open, strewn clothing all over the place, dragged books from shelves and tossed them around, ripped open cushions and pillows – a mad intrusion, a crazy nightmare of vandalism.
    This was when she’d first met a young policeman called Caskie. He had an easy manner. He’d taken her to one side and said, ‘We have a warrant, Mrs Mallon,’ and he flashed paper in front of her, but she pushed his hand away and raced from room to room, shouting at the policemen, throwing punches, and then Caskie had tried to calm her down, leading her gently into the back yard where he lit a cigarette for her and opened an umbrella to keep her dry from rain that had just begun to fall. She wanted to scratch Caskie’s eyes out of his head.
    But it wasn’t Caskie’s fault. He had a bloody warrant. He was doing his job.
    Jackie was the cause of this. It was something Jackie had done.
    She’d been expecting the sky to collapse ever since he’d come out of jail for possession of three 19th-century statues stolen from a country house in Ayrshire. He swore he’d bought them in all innocence from a dealer. She’d been dragging a sense of impending catastrophe around for more than a year.
    And now this. Whatever this was.
    She listened to the wreckage inside the house. Nails pulled out of wood, screeching. A closet ripped apart. ‘What in God’s name do you expect to find?’ And she was shaking with rage, sucking smoke as deeply into her lungs as she could.
    Caskie said, ‘Read the warrant, Mrs Mallon.’
    â€˜Fuck the warrant,’ she said. ‘Just tell me.’
    â€˜We believe there are certain items in the house