Professor Robert Arnold is growing stem cells in his Glasgow laboratory at night, without a licence, for a wife who will not live long enough to get them any other way.
Somebody kills him for it. And one of the detectives on the case has been told to make sure the truth never comes out.
Arnold gave forty years to stem cell research, and spent the last months of his life breaking every rule it had - no ethics approval, no records, no right to be in that room at all. The licensing would have taken longer than his wife had.
Within weeks there is a man in Barlinnie waiting for trial. He wrote the professor angry letters, he has no alibi, and he did not do it.
DS Don Maciver, newly transferred from Oban, moved to Glasgow because it has the hospital his son is in. He is the only detective on the squad who thinks they have the wrong man - and one of the men working alongside him is making sure he never finds out why Arnold died.
Book 1 of the Specialist Crime Squad series.
He had left the lights off on purpose, and the dark made the work feel exactly as illicit as it was.
The fifth-floor windows, lit up, would throw out across the dead campus like a lighthouse - a lab burning on a Saturday night, a question someone might come and ask. So he worked by what leaked in: the corridor strip through the doorway, and the hard yellow of the flow hood, and the yellow made the wire of white at his temples look like something dug up. October rain came and went against the glass. Fourteen floors of the Frost Building across the courtyard were dark. One was not.
He was not supposed to be at a bench at all. Not anymore. He had not held a pipette in a decade before this spring. The first night back, standing alone in the dark, the skill returned before his head had caught up. Forty years of muscle memory, intact. He'd been surprised to find it still there, and then surprised to find himself weeping.
He thought about Mary. He always did, here, with the work under his hands and nothing to stop his mind going where it went.
He did not hear the figure that had been standing in the doorway for the last three minutes.
It had come in while the door stood open, while the sound had been his own. It had stood in the dark and watched him and considered its moment. The swinging door had been an error. It had nearly sent them home.
It did not send them home.
Euan was in the bed with the television on and the sound off, watching it the way he watched everything now, from a great and deliberate distance.
"There's a boy on the ward," Euan said. A long time later. "Came in last week. Younger than me. Diving."
"He keeps asking the physios when he'll be back to normal. They'll not tell him. Just - we'll see how you get on. And he keeps asking."
"I wanted to tell him to stop asking," Euan said. "It's easier when you stop asking."
Get a free Glasgow crime story
Join the reader list and I will send you "Tolerance," a Glasgow detective short story - plus news about the next Specialist Crime Squad novel.
The Holding Game
Glasgow’s most loved man is dead, nine days before the derby — and Scotland needs it not to mean what it looks like.
The second Specialist Crime Squad novel. Out 2 February 2027.
Pre-order on Kindle £2.99 · Delivered to your Kindle on publication day