‘Oh, she’s bonny enough to get a catch like him, I’ll give you that. But keeping him – well, that’s a horse of a different colour. She’s messy, that girl. Chaotic. She’ll do something to muck all this up, you mark my words, Donald Bain.’

‘I think you’re too hard on the lass, Eileen, but we’ll agree to leave it there, eh.’

They puffed in silence for a second.

‘So. Alec didn’t fancy the trip today?’

‘Alec doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t approve.’

‘Of you going to your own daughter’s wedding?’

‘Aye. And he’s got his reasons that I don’t need to go into with you, thank you.’

‘You don’t, that’s true.’

‘I almost didn’t come myself.’

‘But you did, though.’

‘I did.’

He watched her huff her tiny bulk up the Royal Mile, a bright pink streak against the workaday suits, and wondered whether that would be the last time he’d see her.

MALCOLM

Edinburgh, 2003

She wasn’t coming.

Eight minutes past.

Twelve minutes past.

She wasn’t coming.

He’d spent the journey down reading. He’d bought three newspapers from a pile in the supermarket in Inverness, but he realized he didn’t know how to fold the damn things, and one of them was full of tits. But he persevered, scared of the places his head could go on a long bus trip – on this long bus trip – with only the scenery for company. The tiny lettering was making him feel a bit sick, so he ended up poring over the one large-print, stapled TV guide that had come with one of them, reading every listing in depth, his lips moving, challenging himself to memorize them.

Sitting here, now, in the restaurant, having thrown a bundle of paper in the bin at the bus station, he was finding it much harder to block those thoughts out.

The waiter refilled his water again – deliberately, he thought, to make him feel uncomfortable – and he scratched at his beard under the neck of Donald’s one good shirt, that Morna had pinned on him. The music was too damn loud in here, too damn loud and shouty, twanging cockney accents yelling nothing. He’d wanted to just take her to that pub, one of the ones he knew and where people might know him, where musicians gathered, had even dared a stupid dream that the two of them might jam together. Donald had talked him out of that, suggested somewhere more neutral first, somewhere they might not be interrupted.

So here he was, in this place upstairs from the bus station, the closest one Morna had been able to find in her guidebook. He’d already checked in to the room she’d booked him, in a hotel next door. A fine trip to Edinburgh indeed, when all he was going to see was three buildings on the one street.