Inferred orbital periods and companion masses for the 1088 RGB stars with excess RV and astrometric scatter and companion mass estimates above 3 M_⊙. The top panel shows the final cleaned catalogue of 389 RGB+BH candidates (see Sect. 4.4), obtained after applying a series of quality cuts. The lower panels display the subsets of sources removed as likely contaminants by these cuts. The stars excluded because of spurious RV scatter (red) are concentrated at short inferred periods and high companion masses. Those with unreliable, underestimated parallaxes (pink) are typically found at long inferred periods. Eclipsing binaries and stars with photometric variability in excess of that expected from ellipsoidal modulation (purple) are scattered across both short and long periods. Systems excluded due to existing NSS orbital solutions (blue) occupy a broadly similar parameter space to the final candidates.