Barely had Big Lou served Matthew with his coffee when Angus Lordie and Cyril arrived. They had walked in a leisurely way from Drummond Place, stopping here and there for Cyril to investigate some intriguing scent either on the ground or in the air. His nose told him that a lot had been happening in Abercromby Place, where a farmer, having driven in from Kelso earlier that morning to consult his lawyer, had walked from his parked Land Rover – a cornucopia of scents for a dog – along the north side of the street, leaving Cyril a trace of sheep, fried bacon (the farmer’s breakfast), cattle dip, and old copies of the Scottish Farmer. The farmer, attired in the suit that he kept for visits to Edinburgh, might have imagined that he smelled of good-quality Borders tweed, topped up with the sandalwood aftershave lotion that his daughter had given him for his birthday the previous week; but to Cyril, who picked those up too – although he had difficulty with the sandalwood – the story was far more complex than that. For him a smell was a biography: it told the story of what somebody did, and thus of who they were. Angus was a painter and, in Cyril’s nose, he was redolent of paint, varnish, the dust that accumulated in his studio, carpet, whisky and, occasionally, kippers; a motley collection of scents, but to Cyril it was the smell of God, as powerful an evocation of sanctity as incense is in Rome.

Other interesting things had happened in Abercromby Place that morning. Two police horses had been ridden down the road, quite recently, and Cyril looked up, half expecting to see them still there. But that was the problem with scents; they faded, they were overlaid by other, more recent clues, as a palimpsest will be built up of added layers; they became part of the background noise, like static on shortwave radio. Every so often a station comes through loud and clear, and then fades away in a noise that sounds like rain, or sausages frying, or wire wool being scratched across a surface.

Just outside the Open Eye Gallery, Cyril picked up the scent of a cat. This made him stop, stubbornly sitting down on the pavement in an indication to Angus that this was a matter that required to be investigated and could not be cut short by a sharp tug on the collar. Angus understood: he knew that Cyril had no choice but to attend to these scents; it was part of what he was; it was his duty as a dog. And it would only take a minute or two of sniffing around the pavement and the steps of the gallery to deal with the evidence.