DRIVING IN LONDON, however, he was not remotely prepared for. Cormac had been driving on his mates’ farms since he was fifteen years old, like most Kirrinfief boys, and he could drive a tractor and had had a go on a baler. And once he hit the open road, particularly for work, it was hills of empty long roads, single-track lanes up to visit farms, vistas of dappled mountain shadows so stunning that sometimes he would simply stop in a lay-by, push open the door of the little car, breathe in the sweet and bracing air, and eat his cheese and pickle sandwiches staring out at the unpeopled view, feeling very pleased with his lot.

None of this was the least preparation for crazed London traffic, with furious cabbies and delivery vans on insane schedules and huge SUVs doing the school run and red buses swaying everywhere; with tourists stepping straight out into the middle of the road while keeping their eyes fast on the opposite way, expecting the traffic to come from the right; with cyclists zipping through every gap in the road like darting birds. The exhaust fumes, the confusing lane system, the vast roundabouts, the endless honking, the stop-starting.

It was terrifying. And there was nowhere to stop, no quiet lay-bys; red markings on the roadside meant you couldn’t stop at all, just try to rotate your head 360 degrees at all times to try to clock who was coming at you and where from.

Eventually Cormac pulled into a large supermarket car park and took a deep breath. This was going to have to be gotten used to. These roads were insane. He took another deep breath and checked his GPS. Okay. There was a housing development not far from here called Rosebud, and all the names of the buildings were flowers. He needed to be on floor 19, Daffodil House.

DAFFODIL HOUSE WAS the least likely thing to be named after daffodils he could imagine. It was a massively high tower block, one of seven in the development cutting great bruised scars across the sky. As a child he’d wondered what it would be like to live up high, rather than in their little terraced house. It sounded very exciting and glamorous.

Daffodil House was not like that at all.

There was deprivation in the Highlands, of course. Cormac had known houses without indoor plumbing. There were places that relied entirely on foraged wood to keep warm. And then there were the usual ravages of all economies: drink, of course; horse racing; family breakdown.