The funeral whiteboard was the busier of the two at the moment. Four names were written in black marker under ‘FD’ – Gina O’Donnell, John Duggan, Arthur Ford and Ursula Bonetti – all in Dorothy’s neat hand. Beneath the names were various details for each. Where the body was to be picked up and whether it had been done yet, so one said RIE for the hospital at Little France, another read Marie Curie for the hospice in Frogston, the third was the city mortuary. The mortuary meant the police were involved and a post mortem had been done. Jenny was surprised that she remembered all this, despite never being involved in the business and not having lived here for twenty-five years.

Under each body’s pick-up information were the time, date and venue for the funeral, a spread of churches, cemeteries and crematoriums across the city. Warriston Crematorium for one, Morningside Cemetery for another. There were other shorthand acronyms for each service, how many cars were needed, who the celebrant was, what type of service. On the wall next to the whiteboard was a large map of Edinburgh covered in different coloured pins. A map of the dead of the city. Jenny imagined the pattern that would emerge if you joined all the dots together.

In comparison the PI board was pretty empty. It was less regimented too, a bit like those boards in police dramas but without the pictures of mutilated women with red lines to serial killers or terrorist suspects. Instead there was a name at the top, Jacob 7Glassman, with another name, Susan Raymond, written underneath. Then some scribbles in Jim’s handwriting that Jenny couldn’t decipher. She stared at the writing, a thread connecting her dad to a world that was trundling on without him. Outside the window, school kids were kicking a football around, an old woman walked her sausage dog, two cyclists in Lycra zipped along the path to the Meadows, none of them aware of the man crumbling to ashes in the garden downstairs. The only dad she would ever have.

‘I can’t believe Grandpa’s dead,’ Hannah said. She held her tumbler to her chest. Not much of a drinker, something Jenny was happy about. Such a different attitude to alcohol now in Scotland. As a teenager, Jenny was sneaking half-bottles out onto the Links to drink with her mates, Dorothy and Jim oblivious. It had left her with a legacy of drink in her veins. Not a problem, she wouldn’t call it that, but alcohol was background radiation in her life, a trace of it in everything.

She finished her Highland Park and poured another for her and Dorothy.

‘I know,’ she said.

Dorothy breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, a considered movement from decades of yoga.

‘He had a good life,’ she said, a hint of her Californian accent still there after all these years.