At the Ship Bank, half an hour after he had seen the mail coach come down the Trongate through morning air and morning dust, he went up the stairs to see Drummond. Drummond wasn’t there. Lacroix sat on a bench outside the door, its wood polished almost to blackness by the backsides of those who had waited before him. He watched the coming and going of the boys, the youngest of them children dressed as men, wrists and necks raw from the rub of their clothes. In Spain the child soldiers died alongside veterans, boys of ten or eleven with men who wore their hair in a grey queue. Bury one, bury the other. Harder of course to ride past a boy who is crying for help. He hoped he had not done that. He could not remember. He hoped he had not. Had he?

Drummond arrived. He saw Lacroix and waved him into the office.

“It was with us yesterday,” he said, “but not with me or you should have had it then. There is a progression. So many hands, so many eyes. We are entirely at the mercy of the floor below. Their systems are not ours. But there it is. We are an animal made up of its various parts. A horse with the trunk of an elephant, the feet of . . . ”

It seemed he could not think what the feet might be. “A sort of Sphinx,” said Lacroix.

“Aye,” said the man. He was looking along a slotted wall of docket boxes. He plucked out a folded sheet, examined it at arm’s length and passed it to Lacroix. “Captain John Lacroix,” he said. “From your bankers in Bath.”

“I thank you.”

“There has been a murder there,” said Drummond.

“A what?”

“A murder.”

“In Bath?”

“There or somewhere in the county. Or it was an assault perhaps. Someone’s cook. Our Mr. Montcrieff spoke of it. I believe he saw it in the Bristol paper at the coffee house across the way.”

“I will look,” said Lacroix, checking the document in his hand, immensely cheered to have it, delighted almost to the point of laughter.

“It is what you were expecting, I hope,” said Drummond.

“It is. Exactly.”

From the thoroughfare below came the beat and clatter of horses. Both men stepped to the window, gazed down. Uniforms, the morning sun on helmets and spurs.

“Now what are they?” asked the banker. “Dragoons?”

“I believe they are artillery men,” said Lacroix.

“Are they? They look like dragoons. Same hats. But you would know of course.”

Downstairs, at the high counter, the document was turned into money. Notes with blue lettering and the engraving of a ship, also blue, a picture that reminded Lacroix of the flyer at the hotel in Oban, the emigration ship. He folded his money and left the bank, determined to guard it better than the last, to keep not a single note in his boots.