It’s a grade four, dammit. Maybe it should have been a three, but the dispatcher bumped it way down the greasy pole because it was phoned in as a one and the MOP who’d reported the offence had sounded either demented, or on drugs, or something—but definitely not one hundred per cent in touch with reality. So they’d dropped it from a three (“officers will be on scene of crime as soon as possible”) to a four (“someone will drop by to take a statement within four hours if we’ve got nothing better to do”), with a cryptic annotation (“MOP raving about Orcs and dragons. Off his meds? But MOP 2 agreed. Both off their meds?”).

But then some bright spark in the control room looked at the SOC location in CopSpace and twigged that they’d been phoning from a former nuclear bunker in Corstorphine that was flagged as a Place of Interest by someone or other in national security.

Which jangled Inspector McGregor’s bell and completely ruined your slow Thursday afternoon.

You’re four hours into your shift, decompressing from two weeks of working nights supervising clean-up after drunken fights on Lothian Road and domestics in Craiglockhart. Daylight work on the other side of the capital city comes as a big relief, bringing with it business of a different, and mostly less violent, sort.