Justin frowned. “Actually, I’m not sure you’d really understand it out of context. But I think Mr. McCredie definitely wants to take some to sell. They’re only ten pounds each, wholesale.”

“I think I’d have to ask him,” said Carmen.

“But you work here, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Carmen, then lied: “I’d definitely have to run it past him.”

Justin frowned, and Carmen was sure she saw him mouth “fish” to himself.

“You can leave one if you like,” she said, looking up happily as another customer entered, “so we could take a look at it . . .”

“To steal my idea? Not likely,” said Justin, grabbing his plastic bag and heading out again. “You’ll be sorry.”

Still, thought Carmen. It proved her “Christmas only” push was working if people were desperate to get their books into the shop. And he was irritatingly right about the decorations issue.

Carmen watched him go, stalking off down toward the Grassmarket, clutching his plastic bag close, and felt sorry for him.

Or she would have felt sorry for him if not for, over the course of the next four days, every time the old-fashioned black phone rang startling loudly, making her leap in the air, it would be somebody with a badly disguised Edinburgh accent asking if they had any books in about fish, as that was the kind of thing they liked to read at Christmas. And as Mr. McCredie had told her in the strictest terms that next time he came in she had to buy one and give Justin ten pounds from the petty cash, because that was the correct thing to do at Christmas, she found herself feeling rather told off.

AS WAS FAMILIAR to most people in Edinburgh, you weren’t just front-facing staff; you were tour guides and historians too, and Carmen was having trouble, not being a native, although she had figured out the answers to “Where’s the castle?” (“Up the steps on the left”), “OMG, what’s that noise?” (the daily one o’clock cannon, designed, Carmen was reasonably sure, simply to startle people into having heart attacks and thus cut down on tourist numbers), and “Where’s the café J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter?” (Carmen rotated her favorite coffee shops on this list, reasoning everybody deserved a shot).

So when the door tinged on a morning that had her staring longingly at the fireplace, wishing there weren’t rules against having an open fire in an old room filled to the brim with paper, and a rangy figure bounced in, looking exactly like a student, she steadied herself.

He had a battered backpack slung over his back, a burgundy hoodie over a Breton shirt over a long-sleeved shirt—i.e., he appeared to be wearing everything he owned, a common occurrence with people who had arrived quite recently.