“Well, in the City, you work with different people from all over the world, and sometimes they don’t speak very good English, so you have to make yourself understood as best you can. That means knocking out the accent a bit.”

“Do I have an accent, Mummy?”

“I’m not sure,” Katie replied. “Maybe you should ask Dan if you do.”

“Do I, Dan?”

“Well, yes, I can tell that you’re from Scotland. Your accent’s not nearly as strong as Murdoch’s, though.”

“Pleeease don’t talk about Murdoch,” Sooty moaned. “He makes me feel ill!”

Dan shot a grimace at Katie who returned a similar expression. “Murdoch’s father is a gamekeeper on one of the estates here,” Katie said. “The whole family’s a bit . . . well, how can I put it? A bit undisciplined.”

Dan nodded. “That would seem to figure.”

Katie stuck the car into third gear and edged out into the centre of the road to see if it was safe to overtake a large articulated lorry with foreign number plates and a logo of a fish on its tailgate. “So you work in the City, then?” she asked, accelerating past the lorry.

“I did, yes, for twenty years.”

“Doing what?”

“For most of the time, investment banking.”

“And now?”

“Nothing . . . at present. Just waiting for the right opportunity to come along.”

Katie let out a sigh. “And you thought that Vagabonds might have fit the bill.”

“It might have done.”

“God, I feel so awful about that.”

“Well, you don’t have to. It was just a misunderstanding on both our parts.”

“Mummy,” Sooty piped up from the back of the car, “can you put on the tape?”

“No, angel, Dan and I are talking.”

“But it’s so boring! You can talk when you get home.”

“Sooty!”

“I don’t mind,” Dan cut in, feeling that he too would like an excuse not to hear any more of Katie’s heartfelt apologies.

“You haven’t heard the tape yet,” Katie murmured out of the side of her mouth.

She pressed the button on the stereo, and immediately the car was filled with the nasal tones of a man who sang in a Scottish accent far exceeding the bounds of wee Murdoch’s humble offering.

There was a little girl who had one little goldfish,
one little goldfish, one little goldfish,
There was a little girl who had one little goldfish,
and the goldfish’s name was Doris.

There was a little boy who had two little goldfish,
two little goldfish, two little goldfish,

There was a little boy who had two little goldfish,
and the goldfishes’ names were Doris . . . and Horace.

The road meandered gently as it ran eastwards alongside a single-track railway line that followed the rocky shoreline of a dark-watered loch. As the little girl in the song acquired another goldfish called Clovis, Katie pointed a finger in front of Dan’s chest.