She paused again on North Bridge, staring eastwards towards where the new parliament site showed no signs of progress. The Scotsman had moved its offices down to a shiny new building in Holyrood Road, just across from the parliament. She’d been there recently for a function, standing on the large balcony to the rear, staring out at the immensity of Salisbury Crags. Behind her now, the old Scotsman building was being gutted: another new hotel in the making. Further down North Bridge, where it connected with Princes Street, the old Post Office HQ sat dusty and empty, its future apparently still not decided – another hotel, the rumour went. She took a right into Waterloo Place, munching on her second apple and trying not to think of crisps and Kit-Kats. She knew where she was headed: Calton cemetery. As she entered through the wrought-iron gate, she was confronted by the obelisk known as the Martyrs’ Memorial, dedicated to the memory of five men, the ‘Friends of the People’, who had dared in the 1790s to advocate parliamentary reform. This at a time when fewer than forty people in the city had the power to vote in an election. The five were sentenced to transportation: a one-way ticket to Australia. Jean looked at the apple she was eating. She’d just peeled a little sticker from it, announcing its country of origin as New Zealand. She thought of the five convicts, the lives they must have led. But there was to be no counterpart to the French Revolution in Scotland, not in the 1790s.

She was reminded of some communist leader and thinker – was it Marx himself ? – who had predicted that the revolution in western Europe would have Scotland as its starting-point. Another dream …

Jean didn’t know much about David Hume, but stood in front of his monument while she attacked her carton of juice. Philosopher and essayist … a friend had once told her that Hume’s achievement had been in making the philosophy of John Locke comprehensible, but then she didn’t know anything much about Locke either.

There were other graves: Blackwood and Constable, publishers, and one of the leaders of ‘the Disruption’, which had led to the founding of the Free Church of Scotland. Just to the east, over the cemetery wall, was a small crenellated tower. This she knew was all that remained of the old Calton Prison. She’d seen drawings of it, taken from Calton Hill opposite: friends and family of the prisoners would gather there to shout messages and greetings. Closing her eyes, she could almost replace the traffic noises with yelps and whoops, the dialogue between loved ones echoing back along Waterloo Place …