He's dead. So says his own newspaper, the Glasgow Gazette: Douglas Brodie, 25 January 1912-20 July 1947.

Just four weeks before, a senior banker was kidnapped. Brodie delivered the ransom money on the instructions of the abducted man's wife, but the drop went disastrously wrong. Brodie was coshed in the kidnappers' den. He woke with a gun in his hand next to a very dead banker with a bullet in his head.

The case against Brodie is watertight: the bullet comes from his own revolver, the banker's wife denies knowing him, and his pockets are stuffed with ransom notes. In an apparent act of desperation, Brodie cheats justice by committing suicide in his prison cell. Could this be the sordid end for a distinguished ex-copper, decorated soldier and man of parts?