In the freezing early morning rain Alex Morrow stood by a raw grave, holding the tasseled end of a golden rope.

The fiction of it bothered her. They weren’t lowering him eight feet down with these curtain ties, the real work was being done by the motorized straps under the coffin. But the funeral director had ordered them in hushed tones to take an end of rope each: herself and Danny, a grizzled man who was her dad’s cellmate for years, two cousins, a childhood friend, and one of the funeral directors. They stood around the hole they were putting her father into and went through the charade, while the other funeral guy operated the machine that actually lowered the box into the ground.

When the box reached the bosom of the earth they all looked up for guidance. The funeral director at the graveside dropped his rope into the hole sadly, waiting as the rope snaked away and dropped with a dull thunk onto the coffin below. He nodded into the hole, solemnly, as if he had finally come to terms with the death of a man he didn’t know existed until he got the job of burying him. He looked at the other bearers, saw them wondering what the hell to do and swept his hand to the hole, telling them to follow his lead.

One of the cousins straightened his arm and dropped his tassel straight in, not touching the sides. He watched it fall, his mouth open in a slight smile, enjoying the drop. The cellmate chucked his in dutifully, turning away before it hit the wood. Danny flicked his wrist, as if he was chucking away a sweetie wrapper, knew littering was wrong but didn’t give a shit. Morrow just opened her fingers and let it fall into the hole, trying to give the gesture no meaning, fully aware that her studied carelessness was an eloquent summary of her feelings for her father.

Behind her, Crystyl whimpered loudly. She was wearing a gigantic black hat with black silk roses sewn all around the rim, staggering occasionally when her stilettos sank into the muddy ground. Danny was embarrassed by her. She’d never met the dead man.

Morrow turned to walk away but found herself kettled in by the long mound of loose earth covered over with vibrant green AstroTurf.

It was a small turnout, pathetic, but more than he deserved. They weren’t there for him—most of them were men and most of them were there out of loyalty to Danny. She despised the lackeys. They dressed like Danny, did their hair like his, supported his team. It was a loyalty born from mutual greed and self-serving ambition. The enmity was mutual: they knew she was a cop.

Danny caught up with her as she walked carefully through the mud to the path.

“Thanks for coming,” he said formally, falling into step with her though she was striding fast and brisk away to the path.

Morrow pulled her coat closed against him. “He was my dad too.”

“I know, but just—thanks.”

“Well, you know, thanks for organizing it.”

“Aye, no bother.” He was shoulder to shoulder with her, walking up the steep hill to her car as if they were together, hurrying over a path deep with black granite chips that demanded a slow gait. Danny wanted something.

“What?”

He gave her the look, the heavy lidded watch-your-fucking-step-with-me look. “Brian didn’t come?”

Danny had never met Brian and she never wanted him to either. “Couldn’t get the time off work.”

Danny nodded, smiled at the ground. She sensed that he knew Brian still wasn’t working. She had asked Brian not to come. She did it because he was a good person, not fit to resist the snaky charms of Danny. Two minutes in his company and Brian would be doing him a favor, getting sucked in. That was how Danny roped people in: ask a small favor, give a small favor, lend a bit of money to a needy cousin and then, before they knew what was happening, a perfectly good-living person was driving a car packed with heroin from Fraserburgh. Safe contact was no contact. They arrived at her car, a tired old Honda Brian had bought in a moment of romantic nostalgia for their past, and Morrow fumbled for her keys in her bag.

Behind them, down the hill at the graveside, Crystyl struggled loudly with her grief, and a henchman of Danny’s, dressed in a funereal tracksuit, stood an arm’s length away and handed her a packet of Handy Andies.

“Crystyl’s taking it hard,” said Morrow, allowing herself a dig as she pulled her keys out.

She could see his jaw flex out of the corner of her eye.

“Alex, a woman’s going to phone you. A psychologist. About John.”

Morrow stopped and looked at him. John, not Johnny, not JJ, not Wee John. Sunday name. Serious. “You gave someone my name in connection with John?”

Danny sucked his teeth and looked hard at the granite chips around his feet. John was the son Danny had at fourteen. The mother was eighteen, a sex symbol on the South Side, a trophy for a young thug. Alex remembered hearing about it when she was at school and feeling strangely proud of Danny. She was fourteen herself and someone her age having a baby seemed ludicrously sophisticated. But John’s life had not been a credit to teen parenthood. He grew up fast and brutal.

“Is he having a hard time inside?” she said, trying to care.

“Hmm.” Danny was grinding his jaw so hard he was having trouble speaking.

He looked away and managed to open his mouth. “That thing…with that woman—”

“Fifteen isn’t a woman, Danny.”

He looked straight at her and she saw the hate in his eyes. His breathing was short, fast, as if he’d hit her if he could. “You never fucking stop, do ye?”

She looked at her car key.

“He’s my fucking son. Isn’t that why we both hated him”—he pointed back to the dirty hole in the wet ground—“because he never gave a shit about us? John’s my son and I’m fucking trying.”

The back of his neck flushed pink and Morrow looked away, begging him not to cry. Danny cleared his throat and whispered, “I’m trying.”

Trying to care about a rapist son who carved open the milk-white thighs of a fifteen-year-old girl with a Stanley knife. At a party. That was the part of the story that the newspapers couldn’t get over: that a party was going on outside the door while he did that to her in the parent’s en suite bathroom. A middle-class girl at a private school. A clever girl who drank too much and let bad boys in. They had run the gamut of social panics: teen drinking, gangs, knife crime, teen sex. It felt as if the story would never run out of juice, until John was arrested and all the coverage became prejudicial to his trial.

Danny might be trying to help John but he was the problem too: everyone in the city knew John was guilty because Danny was his father. If Danny had a speck of doubt about John’s guilt then the boys who had named him to the police would be missing. The guilty verdict had been a foregone conclusion.

“Is he going to get help in prison?”

Danny shrugged.

“Why did you tell them to contact me? I’m not going to lie about him, Danny. His previous’ll be listed in the trial papers anyway.”

“It’s not because you’re polis, it’s because you’re family. They want a history, it’s just facts they’re after.”

Morrow tutted as she fitted her key in the driver’s door. “Danny, we’re hardly a family.”

He nodded at that. “But you’re all I’ve got.”

“Can they not talk to his mum?”

Danny shook his head. “Hospital. Nuts.”

“What about his granny? She’s alive, isn’t she?”

“She’s…not keen.”

“Hmm.” Morrow didn’t say it out loud either: JJ had kicked his granny about and been charged with it. The granny would have even worse things to say about him than Morrow did.

Together they looked down at Crystyl again, still crying as she was led away from the graveside. The smattering of men standing around looked away, embarrassed, thinking perhaps that even dead psychopaths deserved more decorum.

“If I speak to her,” said Danny, “it’s going to end up being all about me. I’m trying to stay away from it all, create a distance, or else he’ll get killed in prison by some wee prick making his bones. It’s too messy. The woman just wants a bit of background.”

“What does she want to talk about?”

“Background about John’s life. Information about his life. Where he lived and who with and that.” Danny swiveled on his heel, facing away from her, his breathing short and hesitant. “I’m not dodging it, Alex. I’m trying to do the right thing. It’s harder for me to ask you for a favor.”

She’d slag Danny off. That was what he wanted, it would help John. But most of the information she could offer would be on his young offenders’ record anyway. They must have done social reports when he was charged with assaulting his gran. She looked down at her hand. The key was in the door, her hand was on the key, all she had to do was turn it, get into the car and leave. “I don’t know all that much about his background—”

“It’s not about treatment, it’s for sentencing—how likely he is to do this again to another lassie. We don’t want him getting out if…”

Morrow paused for a long deep breath. Danny really knew how to work her: save the girls, don’t kill JJ, be better than our dad. He knew where her buttons were and how many times to press them. For a moment it occurred to her that maybe this time their interests were the same, that it was the reasonable thing to do. She considered it until the exotic sense of filial warmth set off an alarm. She hadn’t come out of all of that chaos and joined the police by being reasonable. She hadn’t stayed out of it or married a man as nice as Brian by doing what Danny thought would be best.

She turned the key, opened the door to her own world and put one foot into the car.

“No. I won’t. And Danny, after this…” She opened her hand, repeating the gesture she had at the graveside, letting the golden tassel fall. She dropped into the driving seat and shut the door.

Danny looked at her through the windscreen, for just a moment. Heavy set, shaved head and square shoulders, his style was intended to intimidate. And now he stood there with his small teeth bared in a tight slit of a mouth, his chin down, glaring at her.

She’d never seen that expression on his face before and felt a pang of fear run through her, through the twins in her belly, through her nice old car. Danny broke jaws and slammed car doors on hands. Danny stabbed a man in the face with a bottle. Danny did those things when he felt he was owed or when he wanted something. Alex felt strongly that this was the last time they would speak kindly to one another, and she was aware that the choice to move away had been hers.

Keeping her breathing steady, she started the engine, and drove past him, carefully taking the high path down the far side of the cemetery, glad when the funeral party disappeared from her rearview mirror.

She made it to the gates before her work phone jingled a vulgar cheery tune. It was Bannerman. She pressed a button on the hands-free and his voice crackled into the car:

“Where are you now?”

No hello, no preliminaries, just a bark. She hadn’t spoken to him yet and he already sounded pissed off at her. “Leaving the cemetery.”

“Good.”

“Sir, you need to ask me how it was.”

“Do I?” It wasn’t a challenge, it was a genuine inquiry. Bannerman had been promoted above her and, though the move wasn’t unexpected, it had a surprising effect on him. They had shared an office for months and Morrow knew he was insecure, she’d guessed that from the phony persona he seemed determined to act out, the tousled hair, the sun-kissed cheeks, from his aching need to be popular and appealing. What she hadn’t expected was for the opinion of those beneath him to mean so little so suddenly. He shed all that, was acting for a different audience now. Now he was angry all the time, was heavy handed, harsh and haranguing. The men on their crew loathed him, a fact which he bore with a degree of pride. Even more bizarrely she had suddenly become very popular with the men, possibly on the basis that her surliness was at least sincere.

“Why do I have to ask you?”

“Because it’s good manners to pretend to care about a family funeral.”

“OK: how was your auntie’s funeral?”

“Fine.”

“How old was she?”

“Um, quite old. Eighties, I think.”

“Fair enough, then…,” said Bannerman.

“Yeah.” She glanced in the mirror and saw an old lag, hands deep in his pockets, limping up the path behind her. “Suppose so.”

“Well…” He stalled, as if stale platitudes about death were hard to come by. “Great. Anyway, we’ve got a murder in Thorntonhall, if you’re finished there.”

She looked in her rearview mirror and smiled. “I am finished here, sir.”