The train was gone, and the two men bounded up the steps to Waverley Bridge, and it crossed Dan’s mind to talk to his friend, as he knew he should, about his lost and found love in Adelaide. But in all honesty, he really didn’t want to, and anyway it was easy enough to postpone that conversation, since Duncan was talking nineteen to the dozen about the artists he had in mind for the industry-dominating music-promotion company he believed he and Dan were founding together. Dan was right off the idea – he was too busy, Duncan was too idealistic, and the market was already too tightly sewn up – but he hadn’t told Duncan yet, because his friend was so full of energy and verve that he hadn’t the heart. Duncan had a list of three contenders: the Anstruther fisherman Willie Dundas; a band called Truth Bites Back, a solid enough outfit comprising four guys from Leith who owed everything – the look, lyrics, riffs, rhythms – to Aztec Camera; and an interesting pair of twin sisters from Largs, Katriona and Jeanie McBride, who sang in eerie harmony about drugs, sex and urban decay, with a palpably disdainful attitude that made them oddly compelling. They were far and away the most bankable proposition on Duncan’s notional books, Dan had known that the night he first heard them, dragged along by his pal to a small, underpopulated room at the Paisley Union. They had a thin, wasted look, big eyes in pale faces, scruffy plaits, studs in their noses, eyebrows, lips – anywhere but the earlobes. Both wore their guitars slung low so they had to hunch their skinny shoulders to play. Katriona yawned into the mic at one point, but the yawn melted into the words of the song, so it might have been intentional. They were languid, laconic and clever and in the right hands the McBrides could be everywhere. They called themselves Jeanie and the Kat, another little stroke of genius.