But then Lenny had dropped dead on the eleventh fairway at Muirfield, and Chib had made his move. He’d been thinking about it for a while anyway, and Lenny’s men hadn’t made any complaint – not to his face, at any rate.

‘A smooth succession is always best for business,’ one of the club owners had commented.

Smooth for the first few years, anyway…

Trouble had been brewing for a while. Not his own fault, not entirely: the cops getting lucky with a shipment of coke and eccies, just after the money had changed hands, meaning a double whammy with Chib on its receiving end. This was unfortunate, as he already owed on a shipment of grass that had come into the country by way of a Norwegian trawler. The suppliers, a Hell’s Angels chapter from a town with an unpronounceable name, had given him ninety days to settle.

That was a hundred and twenty days ago.

And counting.

He could have gone to Glasgow, secured a loan from one of the heavyweights there, but that would have meant word getting around. It would involve loss of face. Any sign of weakness, there’d be vultures hovering… and worse.

He’d demolished those two cups of Italian coffee without tasting them, but knew from his heartbeat that they’d been extra-strength. Johnno and Glenn had accompanied him, all three of them squeezed into a booth by the window, while good-looking women took the other tables, not giving them the time of day. Stuck-up bitches. He knew the type: shopping at Harvey Nicks; cocktails at the Shining Star later on; and a lettuce leaf to sustain them between times. Their husbands and boyfriends would work in banking or as lawyers – bloodsuckers, in other words. Big houses in the Grange, skiing holidays, dinner parties. It was an Edinburgh he’d hardly been aware of while growing up. As a young man, his Saturdays had been about football (if Hearts were at home and a rumble with the away fans seemed probable), or the pub.