‘Yes,’ said Irene as firmly as she could. And yet there was a wavering in her voice. ‘Mistakes are made in the laboratory. Every day.’

‘And elsewhere,’ said the doctor quietly. ‘Every …’ He wanted to say night, but decided that it was unprofessional.

15. Edinburgh People

Like St Augustine of Hippo, who had exchanged a life of casual venality for one of monastic virtue and moral self-examination, Bruce Anderson had undergone a significant change. Bruce was no saint yet – or at least not one in the same class as St Augustine; nor was he contemplating writing any Confessions to rival the saint’s. But he was certainly a better man than he used to be, if the progressively marked absence in his life of any of the great vices was to be taken as the measure of improvement.

Bruce’s abiding vice – at least until his apparent reform – had been vanity. He was undoubtedly extremely handsome – so good-looking, in fact, that female heads regularly turned when he entered the room or walked along the street. The reason for the turning of heads was obvious enough: any woman seeing Bruce felt an immediate, puzzling, and sometimes frankly alarming desire to stroke him. Few acted on this, even if on occasion one or two more temporarily disinhibited women got close to doing so, reaching out before being brought to their senses and controlling themselves. Had they carried through with their impulse, Bruce would not have minded; in fact, he regarded such attentions as no more than his due. ‘I suppose I’m just destined to give women pleasure,’ he had once remarked to a male friend while they had been sitting over a drink in the Canny Man’s. ‘See her,’ he went on, nodding in the direction of a woman sitting on the opposite side of the room. ‘I reckon she fancies me.’ The friend had glanced across the room and saw, with dismay, that the young woman in question was throwing Bruce a look of only lightly disguised longing. Notice me, the look said.

The friend had gritted his teeth, and at that moment had decided that he hated Bruce. And yet they would remain friends, in the way in which people do with those whom they find themselves allocated by chance. Everybody has friends they dislike; people they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.

But that was the old Bruce; the Bruce before the moment of insight in Leith changed him so profoundly. Now he could look back on his old life, at its various stages, and it seemed to him that he was looking at the history of another person altogether.