As it happened, Aidan Keane surfaced at seven o'clock that evening. His return was announced by the screams of a female pedestrian, on the iron footbridge across the Clyde, who happened to be looking over the side when he floated beneath her downstream, staring up at her with a terminally surprised look on his face.
I heard the news on the late-night edition of Reporting Scotland: they didn't name the victim at that stage, but I had a terrible suspicion, which was proved right inside half an hour when Arnott Buchan rang me.
"Are you sure?" was all I could say after he told me, although I was certain of it myself.
"I got it from a police source. Identification wasn't a problem. There was a photographic driving licence in his wallet."
"Did he drown?"
"If he did it was the four bullets in him that weighed him down."
"What's the betting?" I asked, as innocently as I could.
"My money's on Ravens deciding that he didn't need him on his payroll, or that the other two guys took cold feet and decided to take him off the pitch. If that's right, it could look good for you."
"How could it? Off the record, our suspicion is that these three guys are colluding to extort money from the company, but Keane was our only real chance of proving it."
"Hmph." Buchan gave a muffled grunt. "Is that all you suspect?" he asked. "You don't think this is linked to the takeover bid?"
"If I did, I wouldn't fucking tell you. Our counsel won't let us go public with what I just said to you."
"Sounds to me, then, as if you're as far up the creek as the boy Keane."
"Maybe that depends on how you guys report his murder."
"There'll be no mention of the Ravens link I told you about, you can be sure of that. It's no more than pub talk and no lawyer would let an editor run it. The story will be that Keane left the employment of the Gantry Group after Sir Graeme Fisher's investigation into the New Bearsden cock-up, and less than a week later, he's dead. To be brutally honest with you, if the coverage points the finger at anyone it'll be your wife. And, forgive me for saying this, given who her father is, there'll be a few people believe that."
"I may not forgive you," I retorted, coldly. "Any newspaper that does imply that will be sued out of business… yours included."
"Don't worry, Oz, it won't be me that does it. But I will be doing a piece for Sunday, so is there anything else you can tell me about Keane?"
I could have told him that the start of his last journey was witnessed by a detective in my employ, but I decided firmly to keep that to myself for as long as I could. If I spilled that, every one of our surveillance targets would be looking over his, and her, shoulder from that point on.
"I can tell you that it's time something effective was done to stamp out gun crime in this country, but apart from that you're on your own."
I rang Ricky as soon as Buchan had hung up. Alison Goodchild was with him, so I killed two birds with one call by telling her to call Phil Culshaw and agree a company statement about Keane's death.
Once she had gone to do that on her mobile, I spoke to Ross. He knew, but he hadn't picked up the news from the telly as I had. Avril had called him after a man and a woman she recognised as CID officers turned up at Keane's flat, and took his hysterical wife off shortly afterwards in their car. She had followed them all the way to the city mortuary.
"We may have her," I told Ricky.
"What the hell do you mean? Have who?"
"Natalie. I threw Keane's name at her on Monday night; I told her that he had been fingered as the inside man in the Three Bears plot. Two days later the guy's fished out of the drink. If that doesn't point in her direction, nothing does."
Ricky growled down the phone. "Hold your horses there, man. Natalie Morgan is not the sort of person from whom Mark Ravens, or Jock Perry or Kevin Cornwell, takes hit orders. You knew about Keane because that journalist told you. If his source was talking too much and Ravens, or the three of them, decided there was a danger of their being exposed prematurely, they wouldn't need telling to take him out."
"But she knew, Ricky. She knew and now he's dead. That trip she made to Glasgow yesterday: could it have been one of the Three Bears she saw?"
"I doubt that very much. Her visit was in the city centre, and as far as I know none of them live there. But I'll double check, if you like.
Maybe one of them has a fuck pit that his wife doesn't know about."
"You do that. As for the chat we had earlier, is everything in place?"
"Yup. I just hope you've got the cash to pay for it, after Morgan wipes out the family fortune next week."
"I thought we agreed this was on a contingency basis. No win, no fee?"
"Hey, wait a minute…" he began, then realised that I was pulling his chain.
"Don't worry," I assured him. "If the worst does happen, I'm going to make a right few quid on the Gantry shares that I've been buying for the last week or so."