Western took a left onto Gloucester Street, revelling in the unusual lack of traffic. Even the rain had stopped for his well-deserved pre-memorial service fuckathon, aided by a hefty dose of Viagra that was handed out like sweeties by the expat community doctors. He’d be banging like an angry teenager on his first drum kit in no time at all.

Gathering pace down the narrow hill, he squeezed the brakes gently. There was a hollow thud as the pedal hit the floor, but no mechanical response from the brake pads. Lifting his right foot, he tried again, seeing the cyclist who came hurtling out from India Place just in time to swerve and avoid him. Western pumped the brakes again. He was up to forty-five miles an hour now, the gradient steep enough to be propelling him at an increasing speed.

Grabbing for the handbrake and losing his grip on the steering wheel, he veered left and hit the pavement. The car spun. He abandoned the handbrake to turn into the skid, straightening up, seeing traffic approaching at the Kerr Street intersection below. Fifty-five miles per hour. Bloody hire car. Why the hell did he bother coming back to Edinburgh? Sixty-five miles per hour and there was a woman with a pram crossing Kerr Street to his left where he needed to turn. Why fucking now? He grappled with the handbrake again, but his palms were slick with sweat and the car was moving erratically.

Kerr Street went downwards to his left and uphill to the right. Aiming for the right to kill the acceleration and avoid the pram, Western flew over a corner of pavement, lifting the driver’s side wheels off the ground. Another car clipped the end of his as it tried to brake, creating a seventy-mile-an-hour spin that threw the world into a slow-motion, anti-gravity cartwheel.

There was screaming. It sounded female but seemed to be coming from his own throat. Then he was falling. The whoosh-whomp of the airbag sounded simultaneously with an impact that was hard enough to leave his jowls struggling to keep up with his bone structure as his face rushed forwards.

When the back end of the car caught up with the front, there was a tipping movement normally reserved for roller coasters, and from Western’s left came the sound of ripping metal and exploding glass. He’d hit a building. He saw, from his vantage point of the airbag, that had his neck turned ninety degrees. The rest of the car concertinaed, attempting to bend his back in half, the wrong way.

The driver’s door was nowhere to be seen as arrows of glass aimed their fury at him. As they struck his vulnerable face, neck, arm and leg, the surprise was how hot they felt entering his flesh. For some reason he’d expected them to be cold. Then came the stench – overwhelming, pungent, sickly. Cheese. Why on earth would his car smell of cheese?