They regarded each other solemnly for a while, then Duncan said, ‘How the fuck would I know?’ and they both laughed, although a little grimly.

Dan shook his head. ‘Ah, Duncan.’

Duncan nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know.’

He’d been here before, standing stage right in the rubble and ruin of a relationship, with a new woman waiting stage left. Rose-Ann had once been the new woman, a wealthy American – a lawyer turned venture capitalist from Santa Monica with Scottish lineage, a house in New Town and a weakness for men such as Duncan, as unlike her as it was possible to be: engagingly down at heel, unmaterialistic, driven by hopelessly impecunious artistic ambitions. She got him because he didn’t mind being adored, but she perhaps should’ve been told that Duncan hadn’t been without a woman since he was twenty, and in the past fifteen years alone he’d left Alice for Rose-Ann, Sharon for Alice and Monica for Sharon. For a guy who by any conventional criteria was no catch, Duncan seemed to be irresistible. Lindsay, though, she was your archetypal rolling stone; there’d be no pinning her down.

‘So,’ Dan said, ‘has she asked you to move in?’

‘No! What, into the flat in Laurieston?’

‘Yeah, obviously.’

‘Och, well, it’s only a temporary thing, rent-free just now, but it’s all a bit vague. A tenement flat with, like, six or seven other people.’

‘Right, a squat?’

‘Och, well,’ he said again, wincing a bit. ‘She’s always on the move anyway, touring, y’know?’

‘Right.’

‘They do better on the continent than they do here, that’s where the work is.’

‘Yep, right.’ The picture was crystal clear to Dan, and there was nothing more revealing than Duncan’s evasiveness. He thought about Rose-Ann’s beautiful, comfortable Georgian house, and no, granted, you couldn’t stick with someone just because they had a great house … but on the other hand, a woman would have to be pretty sodding special to justify following her to a squat in the Gorbals.

Dan sighed. ‘You need to come back to Edinburgh, mate.’

‘A-ha, I know, I know that.’ Duncan nodded sadly.

‘You’ve a business to run, and, I mean, sorry to be brutal, but it was only Rose-Ann’s money that stopped that shop going under a long time ago. Come back, mate. This Lindsay thing, it’s a pipe dream. She’d do your head in, in the end.’