He stared at her in abject misery. He really didn’t want to tell his little sister that Martin Baxter had Polaroid shots – in bad light, from far off, but nevertheless unmistakably Peter Connor and Dave Todd – from an alley behind the Gaumont, catching the two of them in a desperately compromising act. Indecent. Illegal. Oh Christ Almighty, Alison couldn’t know. He held his hands to his face and bellowed in a kind of private pain, and Alison stepped away from him and started to cry too, she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t help it, because fear had her in its powerful clutches; she was cold with it, frozen. Outside in the street, a boy kicked a ball against a wall and the milkman shouted at him, ‘Watch them bottles! You break one, you’ll know about it.’ He swapped empties on the doorsteps for pints on the float, gold top, silver top; they clanked in their crates, and he whistled cheerfully, on this ordinary Saturday, at the end of July.

14

EDINBURGH,
2 DECEMBER 2012

Duncan was sleeping in Dan and Katelin’s spare bedroom, but Katelin couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. She told Dan to tell his friend that if Lindsay Miller set foot in the house, Duncan could sod off and sleep on the street, for all she cared.

‘I mean it, Dan,’ she said. ‘If I get so much as a whiff of her bloody cologne, he’s out.’

Dan didn’t say that Lindsay Miller wasn’t the cologne-wearing type; that instead she smelled of cigarettes and late nights at live gigs in dingy clubs. But he did tell Katelin she might try to be slightly less judgemental. He understood her feelings of loyalty to Rose-Ann; of course he did. But she’d known Duncan for a lot longer, he was a dear friend, and the guy was in turmoil. And this really was just a flash in the pan, he wasn’t with Lindsay at all, she’d just added him to her collection, and now his world had blown up.

‘Don’t make things worse for him than they already are,’ Dan said. ‘He’s suffering, but to her it’s a meaningless fling. Lindsay doesn’t need Duncan, and he’d probably be back home with Rose-Ann by now if everyone could just calm down.’

Katelin only shrugged at this. ‘He knows what to do then,’ she said.

‘What? Crawl back up to New Town in a hair shirt?’

‘Yes,’ Katelin said. ‘Why not? Those medieval Christians knew how to atone.’