When he started looking for a parking space in Marchmont, however, he was reminded of another reason for moving out. In the end, he left the Saab on a yellow line, and went into the nearest shop for an evening paper, milk, rolls and bacon. He’d called into the station, asked if he was needed: he wasn’t. Back in his flat, he took a can of beer from the fridge and settled into his chair by the living-room window. The kitchen was more of a mess than usual: some of the hall stuff was in there while the rewiring went on. He didn’t know when the electrics had last been done. He didn’t think they’d been touched since he bought the place. After the rewiring, he had a painter booked to slap on some magnolia, freshen the place up. He’d been told not to make too many renovations: whoever bought the place would probably just do it all over again anyway. Rewiring and decorating: he’d stop at that. The Property Centre had said it was impossible to tell how much he’d get for the place. In Edinburgh, you put your home on the market for ‘offers over’, but that premium could reach thirty or forty per cent. A conservative estimate valued his Arden Street shell at £125,000 to £140,000. There was no mortgage outstanding. It was cash in the bank.

‘You could retire on that,’ Siobhan had told him. Well, maybe. He’d have to split it with his ex-wife, he supposed, even though he’d written her a cheque for her share of the place soon after they’d split up. And he could slip some money to Sammy, his daughter. Sammy was another reason for selling, or so he told himself. After her accident, she was finally out of the wheelchair but still used a pair of sticks. Two flights of tenement stairs were beyond her … not that she’d been a regular visitor even before the hit-and-run.

He didn’t have many visitors, was not a good host. When his ex, Rhona, had moved out, he’d never got round to filling the gaps she’d left. Someone had once described the flat as ‘a cave’, and there was some truth in this. It provided a form of shelter for him, and that was about all he asked of it. The students next door were playing something semi-raucous. It sounded like bad Hawkwind from twenty years before, which probably meant it was by some fashionable new band. He looked through his own collection, came up with the tape Siobhan had made, and put it on. The Mutton Birds: three songs from one of their albums. They came from New Zealand, somewhere like that, and one of the instruments had been recorded here in Edinburgh. That was about as much as she could tell him about them. The second song was ‘The Falls’.