Once, as she turned into Nelson Mandela Place, he saw her looking at her watch, hardly breaking her stride. He followed her right down Buchanan Street, the silvery-blue row of Christmas trees a dazzle of light, and stared at her retreating figure as she turned into Princes Square.

  Once inside, Vincent paused beside a kiosk selling expensive chocolates wrapped in beribboned boxes of gold and red, watching his employee descend on the escalator to the basement area where a huge Christmas tree dominated the entire centre of this glittering mall. He saw her march purposefully into the Everyman Cinema and disappear out of sight. So, that was all, he told himself. She had been hurrying to catch a movie. Perhaps meeting a friend inside. He looked around as a pair of well-dressed young women, their fur collars turned up against the cold, passed him by, chattering happily. His gaze lingered on them for a few moments, admiring their sleek blonde hair and the sort of clothes that only a lot of money could buy; much more his type of female, Vincent thought, dismissing the notion that dowdy Sylvie Maxwell could possibly be any threat to the business that he had built up. He was overly careful, that was all, he decided, taking another look at the goods on offer in the kiosk and wondering if any of them would be an appropriate gift for a particular lady friend. Ms Maxwell had been in the habit of clocking up overtime and Vincent had wanted to know why. Looking around him at the baubles and the glitter, Vincent saw his answer. It was Christmas soon, he reasoned, and she had probably been trying to make a bit of extra money, that was all. Still, he’d keep an eye on Sylvie Maxwell. It did not do to have too many strangers in their midst, no matter how good their office skills.

  She sat in the darkness watching the adverts on the big screen, aware of every movement around her. Mostly there were twin seats, couples snuggled up together, glasses of wine on their tray tables, but in the back row where she had chosen to sit as close to the exit as she could there were still some empty seats. She would sit through the featured film then return home, once she had taken time to be certain that Burns was no longer following her. And then? A phone call was in order tonight, reporting back to her own boss and maybe, just maybe, alerting her to the worry that Sylvie Maxwell might have to disappear for good.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was one of those winter mornings that were made for setting off out of the city and heading for the hills. The crisp air made Lorimer imagine snow-capped peaks an hour’s drive away, Ben More and Stob Binnein near Crianlarich. He saw them in his mind’s eye, their tops thrusting upwards against this bright blue sky, the clear air letting any climber see the panoramic view for miles around. Perhaps, if he found time once this case was wrapped up, there might be the chance of a few days’ leave, he thought with a sigh of longing. It was always dependent upon the weather, of course, and who knew what lay ahead now that December was upon them. And, with each passing day, he was more acutely aware of how time was against them, the threat from those terrorists becoming more vivid in his mind.

  Instead of standing on the top of one of Scotland’s Munros, Lorimer was out above the town of Paisley looking down from the roadside that was adjacent to the place where three young schoolboys had stumbled across a dead body.

  The scene of crime officers had completed all their work and samples were being analysed painstakingly back in the labs but for now Lorimer wanted to feel a sense of place, wondering who had dumped that corpse and what had made the killers choose this particular locus. They knew it would have taken more than one man to carry a dead weight and Lorimer tried to imagine what that must have been like. It was a dark time of year, the daylight hours rapidly waning towards midwinter, and up here on the Braes few vehicles cast their headlights along the winding road. It was, he admitted grudgingly, an ideal spot to dispose of a body, particularly in the gully that was unseen from the nearby road. Glennifer Braes was a country park whose hillsides swelled high above the town, a blaze of yellow gorse in summer and often snow-clad in the winter months. Wee boys liked an adventure up here, he knew, and, given the names of places near the reservoir like Fairy Fall and Witches Corner, who could blame them? As he had suspected, the lads had all touched the man’s corpse. Their prints would be eliminated from the case in time, of course, since no evidence had been found of them starting the blaze that had consumed the dead man’s body.

  But someone had. And whoever that was must have thought that their deed would lie undiscovered much longer than this. Had they expected the depredations of hungry creatures like foxes to finish off their grisly work? Lorimer cast a glance at a crow wheeling past, its ragged wingtips stretched out as it balanced against a sudden gust of icy wind. He shivered, any notion of hill climbing for pleasure vanishing as a dark line of clouds rolled in from the east. It was time to go, he thought, his boots crunching on the frosty grass as he walked towards his waiting car. There were other minds than his that might make more sense of the choice of where this body had been laid. Lorimer’s mouth curved in a smile as he thought of one in particular whose expertise he was about to seek.

  Professor Solomon Brightman had left the city of London several years ago, Glasgow becoming much more to him than a place of work. His academic career in psychology had not only taken him into the world of criminal profiling; it had also rewarded him with a wife and family. Solly had encountered the petite blonde pathologist during a case where he had been called to assist DCI William Lorimer, now superintendent and head of the Major Incident Team. The unlikely friendship between the bearded psychologist who paled at the sight of blood and a woman who cut up dead bodies for a living had blossomed into a lasting romance. Now Rosie was head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Solly’s own office just a few hundred yards away.

  The tap on his door made Solly rise from his seat next to the large bay window where he had been reading an essay by one of his first-year students. He laid the script aside with a sigh and headed across the room.

  ‘Lorimer!’ Solly beamed at the tall man standing there. ‘What a surprise. Come in, come in.’

  ‘Hope I’m not disturbing you, Solly,’ the detective apologised, heading towards the pair of comfortable armchairs that were angled towards the window, a place where they often sat together.

  ‘Some tea?’ Solly offered, adding hastily, ‘I do have some ordinary stuff one of my postgrad girls brought me. Builder’s tea, she called it, but it says something quite different on the packet.’ Solly frowned, already searching in a cupboard beneath an enormous bookcase that stretched to the ceiling. ‘Ah, here we are. No, it says Yorkshire … ’ He broke off, studying the label.

  ‘Grand,’ Lorimer replied, smiling at his friend. ‘You have your healthy option, Solly. Cat’s piss on a gooseberry bush or whatever it is,’ he joked. ‘Give me a cup of strong tea any day. The sort that builders like.’ He glanced at the bearded psychologist who was now switching on the kettle and peering at an array of mismatched mugs to find a couple of clean ones.

  ‘Biscuits,’ Solly said, scratching his curly dark hair. ‘I’m sure we had biscuits this morning during a seminar … ’ His eyes fell on an old-fashioned wicker waste basket, its contents revealing a crumpled wrapper. ‘Ah, sorry. Those hungry young folk must have polished them off.’ He shrugged and popped the teabags into a couple of mugs. ‘Nearly lunchtime anyway. Do you want to go out for a bite to eat?’

  ‘Not me,’ Lorimer replied. ‘Actually, I was hoping to talk to you about something. If you can spare the time.’

  The two men sat sipping their respective brews, a companionable silence falling between them. Lorimer had outlined the story about the find out on the Glennifer Braes and how he had wondered about the location of the body.

  ‘The wee lads came from Ferguslie Park, but that isn’t exactly nearby,’ he explained at last. ‘There’s a mix of housing much closer, like Glenburn,’ he added helpfully.

  ‘Ah.’ Solly nodded. ‘One of our professors lives in a very large property near there. A beautiful house in Thornly Park. Rosie and I attended a Christmas party a couple of years back. Huge garden. Gorgeous interior. All the original cornicing and fireplaces. Mmm, yes. A desirable area, one might say,’ he mused.

  ‘I’m looking for someone who might know the Braes well. Someone who could have been a long-time resident in the area, perhaps, or who was used to walking up there with a dog.’

  Solly gave him a tired smile. ‘You want me to map a murderer?’ he asked quietly. ‘But how can I do that when there has only been one fatality?’

  Lorimer sighed. It was true that the psychologist had taken places on a map in the past and examined them for a common point from where a killer might begin. It was something he had thought about, standing up on the cold windy hill this very morning. ‘It’s the only homicide we’ve had in the whole month of November,’ he agreed, setting down his empty mug on the carpet. ‘But there’s a curious pattern beginning to emerge in a completely different sphere of interest.’

  ‘More burned bodies?’ Solly’s bushy eyebrows rose in astonishment.

  Lorimer shook his head. ‘Nothing like that,’ he replied. ‘It concerns something that you will not have heard about. Though you may have caught a bit about them in the papers.’

  ‘Oh?’ Solly laid down his tea, gazing at his friend with renewed curiosity.

  ‘It’s about the undercover officers whose stories were leaked to the press by an unknown source,’ Lorimer told him. ‘Do you remember that?’

  Solly nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘There are three so far whose identities have been made known and who have had to be taken off those particular sorts of duties for what remains of their careers.’ His face twisted in an expression of disgust. ‘Two are desk-bound now for the most part and the third quit, though they’ll all likely want to seek early retirement and gainful employment outside the force.’

  ‘And this is a pattern … ?’

  Lorimer shook his head. ‘It’s to do with the body on the Braes. And where some of those officers live.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Solly said, looking at him intently. ‘They are all a stone’s throw from Glennifer Braes, am I right?’

  Lorimer nodded. ‘It could just be a coincidence, of course … ’

  ‘But you’re the man who doesn’t believe in coincidences,’ Solly finished for him.

  ‘And there’s more. We have an undercover officer currently placed in the city,’ he sighed. ‘And, yes, she lives in Paisley. I can’t say where, of course, but it’s not so very far from the Braes.’

  ‘And like the others, within a short drive to where you found that body,’ Solly finished.

  ‘Yes. Now, there is a very discreet internal inquiry going on that I’m part of,’ Lorimer explained, his voice lowering instinctively as if to keep his words from being overheard. ‘Someone from within our own force is suspected of selling out these officers, either to the press, or – and here’s where I must insist that you keep this strictly to yourself, Solly – we suspect that they are being paid by criminal enterprises, particularly the people-trafficking side of them.’

  Solly let out a soft whistle. Lorimer had put other gangsters away in prison before, but as soon as one outfit was broken, others seemed to arrive from elsewhere.

  ‘We’re pretty certain that money from an unknown source is being used to fund organised crime on a very big scale indeed,’ Lorimer explained.

  ‘You think someone is being paid to blow the whistle on these officers,’ Solly said slowly.

  ‘And not just that,’ Lorimer added, lowering his voice. ‘This is in the strictest confidence, Solly. We have intelligence that a great deal of money is being poured into a terrorist cell. These officers were tasked with infiltrating it before their cover was made public.’

  ‘And now you find a body … Unable to identify it, I assume?’

  Lorimer nodded. ‘The post-mortem shows that death occurred long before the man was set alight, thank goodness, though I did wonder when I first saw it … ’ He shuddered.

  ‘You think this murder may have something to do with one of your former undercover officers?’

  Lorimer sighed. ‘I don’t know. It’s odd, though, that they are all within easy distance of the Braes. One of them lives over in Barrhead, close to Cross Stobs Inn. Do you know it?’

  Solly shook his head. Being neither a drinker nor holding a driving licence, he was not used to frequenting village pubs.

  ‘He could walk up to the Braes from his bungalow,’ Lorimer said. ‘No bother at all. And,’ he smiled ruefully, ‘he does have a dog so it would be natural for him to know his way about these parts. However, it is a very long walk from that part of the hills to where the body was found.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘One of them is married to a schoolteacher and they live in Stanely Avenue, a nice residential part of Paisley and much closer to where we found the corpse. Maybe a ten, fifteen-minute walk to Potterhill. She’s the one that left the force. All the publicity sickened her and she’s working in a care home. Such a waste of talent.’

  ‘Perhaps those she’s caring for won’t think so,’ Solly mused. ‘That is a worthwhile job in anybody’s reckoning.’

  ‘Well, the other two are still serving officers, though as I said, tied to desk jobs meantime. They’ll never revert to being undercover, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Didn’t one of your officers used to be undercover? The tall blonde lady?’

  ‘Molly Newton? Yes, she was. Almost came to grief in a case.’ Lorimer raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Think she’s much better suited to her job with us in the Major Incident Team, frankly.’

  ‘And the third officer? You mentioned the dog owner in Barrhead and the lady in Stanely Green, plus the one who is still undercover. But who is the last one?’

  ‘Ah.’ Lorimer nodded. ‘She’s the one that interests me most. You see, she lives in Glenburn itself, Hillcrest Avenue, right beside the road up to the Braes.’

  Lorimer reached down and drew out a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. ‘Here,’ he said, handing them to Solly. ‘It’s all there, the stories about them in the press. They didn’t submit to having their photos taken so the journos had to make do with ones taken at a distance. They’re a bit grainy but you can see them better here.’ He swooped down once more and took out a plastic folder. ‘That’s their official police photos, though they are kept separate from the normal database of officers’ pictures for obvious reasons. And I’ve copied out details of their home addresses and other factors.’

  ‘Are you allowed to do things like that nowadays? To former officers, I mean? Isn’t there some sort of code to protect their privacy?’

  Lorimer looked at him, his eyes narrowing. ‘That is exactly what I am trying to do, Solly,’ he said, a bitter note creeping into his tone. ‘Someone took these details and sold them to the press. And we think that same someone may well be receiving generous payments from a criminal source. Whoever it is, their intention was to stop that undercover work. And we must find them. It’s not only our own officers that are in danger, Solly. These people mean to create something devastating in Glasgow.’

  Solly threw him an anxious look. ‘That’s dreadful,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘I should be inured to the atrocities human beings can perpetrate on one another, but the capacity for things like this never fails to shock me.’

  He looked up at Lorimer as though a new thought had come to mind.

  ‘You think this body may be a police officer?’

  ‘No. There’s no missing person amongst our own, thank goodness. But I do think whoever killed him wanted to make completely sure that he was never going to be identified. And that,’ he added sourly, ‘is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from a gang like this.’

  Solly sat back in his chair, tapping the files on his knee but not yet ready to open them. ‘It’s all a bit tenuous, though, isn’t it? These undercover officers were not working together, were they?’

  Lorimer nodded. ‘Well, they were involved in the same operation but in different locations. They know one another, all right, and now thanks to our newspapers, some of them are only too well known to the general public.’

  It was not until the children were both in bed and Rosie and he were alone at last that the professor managed to slip into his study and take the police files from his own ancient leather briefcase. He sat facing the window, the frosty darkness outside suiting his mood, reading the notes that Lorimer had given him earlier that day. It was, as his friend had said, a terrible waste of resources to have three undercover officers exposed in this way. The schoolteacher’s wife, Mandy Richardson, was now working in a nearby home for the elderly, a caring profession that, however laudable in itself, had surely resulted in a huge drop in her income. Teachers were not as highly paid as they deserved, though Solly did note that Phillip Richardson was a principal teacher of guidance, a promoted post that would at least offset what might be a hefty mortgage. Property in Stanely Green didn’t come cheap. Their two children were both at the local primary school so perhaps Mrs Richardson was glad of her more sociable working hours, something that Lorimer might not have appreciated. Lorimer and his wife Maggie were godparents to Solly and Rosie’s two children, a role that was special to them both since they were a childless couple. Sometimes it took knowing about family life to truly understand its pressures, Solly thought.

  Turning the pages over, he came to the officer who lived in Barrhead, Douglas Hutton. This chap was older than the rest and so it might make sense for him to try to work out his thirty years’ service to obtain a full police pension. Hutton was currently employed in Mill Street HQ as one of the back-room boys whose job it was to supply information to a team on an active case. Not a bad job at all and still well paid. Hutton, Solly noted, was a widower with no family, the post-war bungalow owned outright. So, he mused, no need to worry overmuch about money. Why had that come to mind? Was he imagining that one of those officers had actually shopped their fellow officers? Solly frowned. It was hard to believe, though Lorimer felt that it was someone from within the force who had wrecked three careers. Now he was concerned about a possible involvement with that corpse found high on the hills above Glenburn. Still, the psychologist had to take every factor into account and money, he knew, often played an important part in motivating a human being to carry out the ultimate crime.