By the third pint, shop talk had made way for football. The two civvies had excused themselves and left sensing that his suggestion of “a quick pint” was heading towards an epic session. The mood changed when first politics, then the recent Scottish independence referendum cropped up. What really surprised him was not Neil Conroy’s fervent nationalism but his rousing, if cliché-riddled, rhetoric. All that was missing was the swirl of a piper providing a soundtrack to go with his predictable jingoism. Conroy, the office quiet man had morphed into a tub-thumping separatist. His arguments for Scotland to revisit the ballot over a break with the United Kingdom were roundly applauded by DC Reece, the pub’s landlord and an old bar-fly who was already blootered when Dunbar arrived. Conroy alone was taken in by the drunken man’s harrumphing, as he pounded out his approbation on the bar top. Only when the old drunk tapped the DS for a wee dram, “for a fellow patriot”, did his true motives become apparent.
