'No Linley, don't come over the now. In a wee while, I'll let you know.'

As soon as I shut the door behind Solveig, I ran to phone Granny. If I'd really been missing a year, she must have been doing her nut. And now she was telling me not to come round?

'How not, Granny? What's going on?'

"Nothing pet. I'm awful glad to hear your voice and I'll give you a wee phone when I'm free, okay?'

The tension in her voice alerted me, and the tiny, barely audible, clink of metal I heard as she hung up confirmed my suspicions. Vaguely aware I was still wearing the blood splattered running gear I'd put on to go paddleboarding, apparently a year ago, I grabbed my keys and phone and sprinted for the station.

How was my phone still on if I'd been gone a year? There definitely hadn't been enough in my account to keep a direct debit running for a whole year. Either it had been paid some other way or - or this being gone for a year business was some bizarre practical joke the world was playing on me. I made a mental note to worry about it later.

If you've ever wondered if a Glasgow subway card works after year, I'm here to tell you that it does. I got off at West Street and found just enough change in my jacket pocket for a bus the rest of the way. The clouds were low and grey and there was that Glasgow sense of drizzle in the air even if it wasn't actually raining. But I noticed none of it as I sat on the bus willing it to go faster.

Rage coursed through my veins, propelled me at a flat out run from the bus stop to Granny's flat. I crossed the rec ground with the pond that had given me nightmares since a wee girl had been murdered there when I was at primary school. I hadn't known her, she was a couple of years younger than me, but for years I'd had nightmares of her rising out that pond to get me.

Granny's been on at the council to fill the pond in for donkey's years. It's rancid, filled with more rusting shopping trolleys than water and it's a miracle no other wee kids have fallen in it in the nearly two decades since. I could have told her why: it's because we were all terrified of the ghost of the wee girl. None of us would go near it.

But I had no time to lose going round the long way today.

'What's going on?' I demanded, shoving Granny's front door open. Sure enough, the scum of the earth, the McArthur boys were crowded round Granny's cosy wee living room. With typical Granny flair, she was pouring them tea into her good china and offering them shortbread as they hung about awkwardly, with hammers hanging from their belts.

That's what I'd heard. Though Granny and I stayed far out of any trouble round our bit, nobody grows up round there without knowing what the clink of a hammer against a belt buckle sounds like. When I said scum of the earth, I meant it.

'Stay oot o' this Linley,' Rab McArthur warned me. I'd gone to school with Rab. Long before that brutal scar that snaked across his face. Long before the stupid tattoos on his knuckles that was supposed to impress the world he was a murdering scumbag. Long before he lost half his teeth in a fight and acquired a dark, hard look in his eyes that made him look more than twice my age.

'Yer lookin' shite, Rab,' I growled, uncomfortably aware I was taking both my life and Granny's in my hands, but there was no option. With that crowd you brazen it out or you're dead in the water anyway. 'Still wet yer kecks when you watch a scary movie, do you?'

Once upon a time we'd all had a sleepover at Gillian Fullerton's house and someone had snuck in a pirated copy of The Silence of the Lambs. Rab's bladder hadn't survived the bit where Hannibal Lecter rips the face off that security guard. One of the lackeys, sitting on the sofa, snorted with laughter and was silenced with a smack across the face.

'Linley there's no need tae be like that tae yer old school pal,' Granny said tartly. 'Rab's just come round to see if I've got something he's lost. Now does anybody want a chocolate biscuit?'

'Aye Missus Ross, hauv ye goat any KitKats?' piped up a wee scunner in the corner. Skinny, he had an air of the runt of the litter about him, and I didn't recognise him. I kept an eye on him. It's rarely a good sign to see somebody new.

'Wi' a hammer, is it?' I said pointedly. 'She's ninety years old, Rab. You cannae staun' up tae a 90 year old lady without being armed wi' a hammer? Thought you were a hard man, Rab.'

'She's goat money my ma lost.'

'And where did you get that idea?'

'It's all just a wee misunderstanding, Linley,' said Granny bustling back in with a handful of KitKats which she started handing round. 'I got a taxi back from Morrisons because a wheel's come off my wee shopping trolley and I couldnae carry the bags mysel' all that way. Mrs McArthur had lost a wee bit o' cash in the taxi just before me, but as I've just been explaining to wee Rab here, I never even saw it.'

Wee bit o' cash indeed. It was probably drugs money, likely in the thousands. No wonder Rab was losing his nut.

'I'm no' leaving until I get my ma's money,' Rab insisted, his voice a whine despite all his lackeys and his pathetic hammer.

'Where's the taxi driver?'I asked.

'We don't know,' said the wee one I didn't know round a mouthful of KitKat. 'He never came home this morning after his shift.'

'So you've got two people who had access to that money in the taxi, one of them has disappeared and yous bloody geniuses have come round here to bother the other one?'

I could practically hear the creaky gears of their brains turning as looks were exchanged. Then the wee one pulled out an iPhone that looked weirdly gigantic to me and beckoned the others to follow him out. They all shuffled off, hammers clinking, thanking Granny for the tea and biscuits.

'Come again, boys,' she called cheerily, giving their retreating backs the finger.

But Rab remained. He stood in front of the wee fireplace with the fake stone cladding in which orange logs glowed merrily. On the mantelpiece stood two enormous brass candlesticks that had belonged to my Great-Gran and Granda, the only items of any value in the flat.

'What are you still here for, Rab?' I asked. 'Want to have a wee reminisce about Mrs Spencer's class, do you?'

'Don't fuckin' talk tae me like that in front of ma' boys again, Linley.'

'Ahh awa' back tae yer wet breeks, Rab.'

I'd pushed it too far. I saw it in his eyes in an instant and in the next my head exploded with pain as the hammer hit me between the eyes.