Probably forgotten about you already, Mike told himself. He knew that he would remember the encounter in the restaurant. In the next few weeks and months there’d be flashbacks, and he would consider alternative scenarios that would leave him the last man standing, the drunks sprawled at his feet. Aged thirteen, he’d got into a fight with a kid in his class and come off second best. For the rest of his school career, he had plotted elaborate revenge scenarios – without ever carrying them out.

The worlds he moved in these days, there was no need to watch your back. The people were polite and civilised; they had manners and breeding. For all Allan’s bravado at the Shining Star, Mike doubted the banker had been in a punch-up in his whole adult life. Walking in the direction of Murrayfield, he thought about student days. He’d found himself in a few bar brawls. Another time, he’d tangled with a potential suitor over a girlfriend… Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name! Then there was the night he’d been walking back to his digs with friends and some drunks had lobbed a metal rubbish bin at them. He’d never forget the fight afterwards. It had travelled from the street into an adjacent tenement and out of the back door into a garden, until a woman had screamed from her window that she was calling the police. Mike had emerged with bruised knuckles and a black eye. His opponent had gone down and stayed down.

He wondered how Chib Calloway would have reacted to the situation in the restaurant. But then Calloway travelled with back-up – the two men in the bar with him weren’t just there for the conversation. One of Mike’s colleagues had joked once that he should maybe think about a bodyguard, ‘now that you’re so publicly rich’. He’d meant the publication the previous Sunday of a newspaper list placing him in the top five Most Eligible Men in Scotland.

‘Nobody needs a bodyguard in Edinburgh,’ Mike had answered.