He was entirely the wrong side of Edinburgh here, and it was already half past eleven, but there was something about this city that compelled him to walk through it, not take a bus or flag down a cab. He considered it the great architectural love of his life, austere and stately, but increasingly hip. It felt ancient and modern at one and the same time. Compared to Sheffield – the Sheffield he’d left behind in the early eighties, anyway – it was fucking Xanadu. Admittedly, Katelin had been the lure at the time, and without her the city might have seemed considerably less appealing, but still … Dan had recognised home when he saw it, and home it had remained.

He was crossing George IV Bridge now, head down, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, earphones in, iPod on shuffle, so he nearly died of shock when Duncan Lomax grabbed him by the shoulder, forcefully, like a policeman with an arrest warrant.

‘Jesus, Duncan!’ Dan said. He pulled the buds out of his ears. ‘Are you trying to bloody kill me?’

Duncan laughed and punched Dan between the shoulder blades. ‘Been following you for half a mile, man, catching you up. You running away from somebody?’

‘Getting home sharpish, that’s my only goal.’

‘You been at Bonny Billy?’

‘Yeah, you too?’

‘Aye, last-minute freebie. Jesus, he can be a miserable bastard, can’t he?’

‘Can’t we all?’

‘Aye, right enough. Look …’ Duncan shucked his army-issue rucksack off his shoulder and delved inside, pulling out a CD, no cover, no image, just a plastic case and a handwritten track list. Dan smiled.

‘What you got there?’ he said. ‘The next big thing? Again?’

‘Willie Dundas, an East Neuk fisherman, for Christ’s sake, plays the guitar like Rory Gallagher, sings like John Martyn.’

‘C’mon!’

‘Not a word of a lie. Have a listen.’

He handed Dan the CD. Duncan had a finely tuned ear for quirky, original, mind-expanding talent, and he encountered a lot of it in his failing record shop in Jeffrey Street: music nerds, too introverted to sing their own praises, writing lyrics and scores in their bedrooms at home, destined never to be heard were it not for Duncan. He was forever buttonholing Dan like this, not that Dan minded, because what was life if not a search for the one perfect album that was missing from their collections, recorded by the one genius nobody else had discovered? They dropped into step, Dan adopting Duncan’s more leisurely pace, walking alongside each other through the pleasant, mid-week, late-night quiet of Edinburgh’s Old Town.

‘Fancy a single malt?’ Duncan said.

‘You seen the time?’

‘Ah, don’t be like that, you know fine well there’s no such thing as after hours when you’re with Duncan Lomax.’ Dan laughed. Duncan nudged him. ‘A wee dram,’ he said, hamming up his solid-gold Edinburgh burr. ‘Och, where’s the harm?’