He sat his bags on the damp ground next to a young man in a blanket who wasn’t particularly impressed he’d trespassed on his patch. The boy’s mood softened when he placed ten pounds in his cup and wished him a Merry Christmas. Cormac turned his collar to the biting wind and relentless drizzle. He could hear Shane McGowan and Kirsty McColl drifting in the strong breeze as it whistled past him along with the huge throng of Christmas shoppers. He raised his gaze and studied the castle which stood proudly on its rock and had defied this weather and more over the previous centuries. It was lit up like a Christmas tree in the darkness of this December afternoon. Through the crowds swimming past his face, he could make out the German market stalls across the street. He studied the little open-air bar, where weary shoppers sat buttoning their coats to keep the chill off their bodies whilst at the same time poured pints of freezing liquid down their throats to warm their spirits.

At the far end of the tiny counter, he saw the big man engaged in warm conversation with a group of twenty-something men all dressed as superheroes. Harry Crossan had never changed in all this time, and Cormac hoped he never would. He felt a pang of regret he hadn’t spent more time with him over the years. The past few months made up for it in some small way. The two old friends met in Edinburgh on four or five occasions on the premise of visiting Annie and Claire, but in reality, it was a way of spending some time together. There’d been other occasions as well. After the resignation, when the newspaper headlines were at their most lurid and hurtful, they’d retreated to Harry’s place in Nice. Cormac enjoyed the blissful anonymity so much, he’d seriously considered Harry’s offer to move there on a permanent basis. Everything had changed, though. Everything utterly changed over the course of one very drunken conversation.

Harry told him she was no longer with the English professor. He returned less than a month after they left for America. The move was the last desperate attempt to save a marriage already beyond repair. He knew what he had to do in the instant Harry told him. His stomach turned a full circle and back again and his fingers and toes had buzzed like they’d been plugged in to the mains. He decided in his drunken stupor he would go to her and tell her how he felt about her. He would make her see it was not too late to start over again. They were young and still had a lifetime to live. Why couldn’t they share it with each other? Harry was a reluctant detective for him. He was not on great speaking terms with Roisin and Marcus, who spent most of their time and a lot of Harry’s money on travelling between the apartment in New York and the villa in Bermuda. Harry eventually established she was working as a writer in a theatre somewhere on Broadway, or just off it. He could not find out, no matter how hard he tried, where she was living.