“Edinburgh architects must just have been drunk off their arses the entire time,” said Carmen.

“I think building vertically in a vertical city makes perfect sense,” said Mr. McCredie. “Look at Amsterdam.”

At the top of the staircase, Carmen gasped as the door opened into a huge drawing room.

It was aboveground—absurdly, an entire story aboveground; nothing made sense—and it looked out onto the other side of the block onto the Royal Mile itself. Two windows faced the front and two the back, but they weren’t in grand proportion like Sofia’s house; instead they were small and higgledy-piggledy. The room itself, however, was large, with high ceilings and a vast fireplace against the left-hand wall. There was a grand piano in the corner covered in a pink fringed cloth, with pictures in silver frames lining it. The rug, with an old design of pink roses, was faded and covered the wooden floor. Old sofas of elegant design, with curled wooden arms, were put out tidily. A candelabra swung from the ceiling, and old paintings lined the walls. It was a beautiful room, although it felt like it belonged to an earlier age. Mind you, so did this city, Carmen was beginning to learn. It was beautiful, but somehow strange, out of time, like those houses people leave behind or board up that remain untouched for sixty years.

There was nothing new in the room at all. There was a radio but no television; there were books of course but no magazines; a clock but no computer or even a charger. Nothing that looked like the normal detritus of modern life. Even the photographs were all terribly old: black and white and in dusty frames. Nothing from Mr. McCredie’s own life. He was there as a child; he was not there after that.

“Wow,” said Carmen, looking for something to say. “Well. This is lovely. And you have a secret tunnel to the office. That is pretty cool.”

“Is it?” said Mr. McCredie, looking around. “It was my parents’ home, really. I never quite . . . found a way to move on.”

Once again, Carmen got the sense of sadness coming from him, chiming completely with the room, full of unwound clocks. Not anger, like you found in some men, not bitterness. Just sadness, like a child who has had a treat taken away and doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.

“Good house for parties,” said Carmen, meaning it. Through another door to the side was a small kitchen and another set of stairs, but here was big enough for a ball.

“Oh, there used to be . . . yes. There used to be parties in here,” said Mr. McCredie, his eyes growing misty. “My mother loved a party. We’d have a band; there’d be music and dancing . . .”

“An amazing place to grow up.”

“You’d think,” he said shortly. “Oh yes . . . I had everything, I suppose.”