He’d touched down at Edinburgh Airport the previous evening, had driven home to Moray Place, and was now just half an hour away from the warm, wet bliss of oral sex. His lover was expecting him and would hopefully be wearing some of the outrageously expensive lingerie he’d purchased for her during his last visit. He wasn’t due to be back in Scotland for long, having only returned when he’d been notified that his old business partner, Bruce Jenson, was dead.

They’d had limited contact for the last decade, but Bruce had apparently harboured some affection for him, having named him in his will. Western had been more than a little surprised. They’d sold Edinburgh Bespoke for a good price to a company that had filled half their factory with machines that could make furniture in a fraction of the time and at half the cost. Then they’d made some serious money letting their remaining industrial units go to developers who’d demolished and replaced them with luxury flats.

It was annoying that Bruce Jenson had opted for one of those horribly old-fashioned will readings with all the family gathered, mainly because it meant Western couldn’t reasonably avoid attending the memorial service later that day. The email from the solicitors had been vague about the cause of death, but Western was well aware that his former partner’s health had been failing for several years. To be brutally honest, the signs of dementia had been there long before the diagnosis. His memory had gone first. You had to have every conversation with him three times, and Jenson had never been good with names and faces.

The memorial service had been billed as a celebration of Jenson’s life and Western was grateful that there was no suggestion he should attend a burial or cremation. It was bad enough reaching the stage of life when every headache rang with the possibility of a brain tumour and the slightest bowel problem made him question the sense of having skipped his standard colonoscopy. The last thing he wanted was to watch yet another of his peers hitting the dirt. Recognising your own mortality was no fun at all.

He sat in his hire car and checked his watch. His lover didn’t like him to appear early. She’d made it clear on previous occasions that she considered it rude. He knew why but pretended he didn’t. She had more than just one ‘gentleman caller’, as they were laughingly labelled in the old days. Good for her. Gilroy Western wasn’t a happily-ever-after kind of man. His primary fantasy on the plane over had been that the diamond earrings he’d purchased as a gift for her might be just enough to persuade her to swallow for once.