"I'm not sure we have yet," said Lynn.

They sat in silence until Lynn had finished eating. She paid the bill. "Come on," she said, standing Maureen up and slipping her arm through hers. "Let's go back to mine and fix your hair."

Lynn was living in a big flat on Argyle Street, across the road from a twenty-four-hour grocer's. The house must have been very grand once: it had five large bedrooms and a massive communal kitchen with a walk-in larder. The ceilings were thirteen foot high with ornate cornicing. One of her flatmates kept a gang of giant, love-bombing cats. The minute they got through the door the cats started rubbing against their legs, and when Maureen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs three of them scratched and hissed at one another for the right to sit on her lap. "If you sit on that wee settee," said Lynn, pointing over to a green two-seater by the TV, "they can all love you at the one time."

Maureen sat on it and her knees were immediately covered with a carpet of purring animals. Lynn stood behind her, spraying her hair with a pump-action aerosol full of water. She combed Maureen's hair this way and that, snipping at the bottom with a pair of sharp hair scissors. "Oh, Maureen," she said. "You've hurt your neck."

"Yeah."

"It looks like scratches or something."

Maureen didn't answer. The cats writhed on her lap, purring and digging their claws into her legs, nesting her as if she were a blanket.

"It looks a wee bit raw," said Lynn carefully. "Will I put some Germolene onto it?"

"Please."

She went out of the kitchen and came back with a huge jar. "Nicked it from the work," she said, when she saw Maureen looking. She rubbed the smelly cream gently, gently, onto the ripped skin on the back of Maureen's neck. "How's it feel now?"

"Itchy."

"You should put some foundation on that, doll, or wear a scarf or something. It looks a bit frightening." She screwed the lid back on the tub, washed her hands in the sink, lifted the scissors and carried on trimming. "Now," she said, "tell us why ye phoned."

"I need a favor," said Maureen.

"Big one? Wee one?"

"It's just a question. I don't know if you'd know anyway. I want to find something out from someone's medical records."

"Is it a patient at my surgery?"

"Naw. Lynn, don't tell Liam or anyone else this, right?"

"Okay."

"I think Benny's been in my house."

"Benny? Of course Benny's been in your house."

"But I think he's been in my house recently, when the police wouldn't let me in. I think he's talking to the police or something, I dunno. I can't put it together."

She would have told Lynn about the migrating CD but she knew she looked a bit mad and Lynn would think that she gave it back and then just forgot.

"I think he might have known Douglas. The police told me he'd been arrested in Inverness a few years ago. They didn't bring the case to court, he was sent for psychiatric treatment instead."

Lynn stopped cutting. "I never heard about that," she said.

"Me neither."

"Did he get treatment in Inverness?"

"No," said Maureen. "It must have been in Glasgow. He's never been away for any length of time."

"Maureen, Benny might be a bit mental sometimes but I don't think he'd talk about you to the police."

"I don't know what to think about anything now."

Lynn started snipping at her hair again. "So what do you want me to do?"

"I need to know how to get access to his medical record. I want to find out who his psychiatrist was. I think it might have been Douglas."

"Maureen, you can't get to see someone else's record without their consent. It's illegal. You can't hardly get to see your own."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man."

She finished cutting and handed Maureen a mirror, holding another behind her so that she could see what she had done. "There," she said, "that's a nice haircut."

Maureen looked at herself. It was the shortest she'd had her hair in a long time. It made her look younger. Lynn danced around her, pretending to be a hairdresser, showing her the reflection from both sides, holding it at an angle so that Maureen couldn't see the cuts on her neck.

"It's not bad, is it?"

"I think it's lovely," said Lynn.

"Do you know a guy called Paulsa?"

"Bad Acid Paulsa?"

"That guy who came forward for Liam."

"Yeah, I know him. We went up to his house once."

"Where does he stay?"

"You know that big Unionist pub off the Saltmarket? Next close."

"Oh, aye."

Maureen suddenly realized she had been talking about herself since they met and she'd barely asked Lynn how she was. She grinned unsteadily. "Did you and Liam get it together again, then?"

Lynn looked embarrassed. "Yeah, a wee bit. What's this Maggie character like?"

"She's all right. Not much crack, though. Are ye going out together again?"

"Naw," said Lynn, picking lumps of hair off the back of the settee. "I don't think we will be either."

"How come?"

Lynn displayed a polite reticence and then told her, "Uch, you know, Mauri, I used to look at him and all I could see was sunshine. It's not like that now. He's a bit too angry for me."

"Yeah," conceded Maureen. "He's angry enough."

Lynn punched her gently on the chin. "Like all the rest of the fucking family."

Maureen pulled her coat on. "It was good of you to come and meet me there," she said. "I think I lost the place for a wee minute."

"Happens to the best of us," said Lynn. "You stay in touch anyway, eh?"

"I will, Lynn, I will."

She walked down through the town, feeling her father's breath on her neck all the way to the shelter.

Leslie met her in the hallway. She led Maureen out of the house quickly and spoke to her on the doorstep. She couldn't come home, she said. Her shift didn't finish for another three hours. "The police came to see me again, they asked me about the night we went to that pizza place. I just told them the right times, is that okay?"

"Yeah."

"Can I pick you up at Benny's?"

"No, no," said Maureen. "I'll come back."

Leslie could see that something was wrong with Maureen: she was pale and her eyes were unfocused. "Where are you going?"

"I'll just wander about for a bit."

Leslie rubbed her arm. "Look," she said, trying to make eye contact, "urn, go to the pictures or something, all right? Don't just wander off somewhere."

"Naw, I'm all right," Maureen murmured, and toppled off the outside step, wandering away with her hands deep in the pockets of her overcoat.

They had been there for a picnic once. Benny took Maureen and Liam down there – he had played there when he was a wee boy. It was a track of waste ground by the river, looking over to Govan and the shipyards, surrounded by run-down warehouses. It was probably a dangerous place to come at night, the motorway cut it off from the town and it was dark, but Maureen was tired of caring and she had her stabbing comb in her pocket. She lifted the chicken wire, crouched down and scrambled under it. She climbed to the top of a ten-foot-high concrete wedge sticking out of the river wall and sat down. Across the water she could see into the shipyards through an open slide door. Sparks from the welders' tongs flew in slow, red arcs. She pulled her coat tight against the mean river wind and lit a fag.

It was much darker now. The tide was coming in and the river flowed backward, slapping against the wall far below her feet. She thought about the ships passing down the river many years ago, taking emigrants to America, whole families of Scots lost to their own people forever. Lost to drizzling rain and a fifty-year recession, to endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men shouting about football.