Fin felt Marsaili’s eyes on him. Without meeting them he said, “When Padraig MacBean took me out to An Sgeir on his old trawler, he told me the story of how he’d lost his father’s brand-new boat in the Minch. Barely escaped with his life.” He turned to see her eyes fixed upon him, wide with curiosity. “Even though there is nothing to mark the spot where she went down, Padraig said he feels it every time he sails over it.”

“Your son was killed in Magdala Crescent?”

“In a street off it.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

He gazed past the driver, through the windscreen and the traffic stretching ahead of them along West Maitland Street. Finally he said, “No. I don’t think I do.”

The taxi turned into Palmerston Place, past smoke-blackened bay-windowed tenements, a park in early spring leaf, the Gothic grandeur of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, and down the hill to where the red-sandstone church on the corner had been converted to a youth hostel with pillar-box red doors.

It swung up the hill, then, on Belford Road, to drop them in the forecourt of a Travelodge hotel opposite a stone gateway beneath a blue-and-white banner fluttering in the breeze.

“Dean Gallery,” Marsaili read when they stepped out of the cab. Fin paid the driver and turned to face her confusion. “The Dean is an art gallery?”

Fin nodded. “It is now.” He took her arm and they ran across the road between cars. Through a black, wrought-iron gate they followed a narrow cobbled path up the hill between a high privet hedge and a stone wall. The path opened up then, and curved its way through parkland shaded by tall chestnuts, where bronze statues stood on stone plinths planted on manicured lawns. “In the days before the welfare state,” he said, “there was something in Scotland called the Poor Law. It was a kind of social security for the poorest in society, pretty much paid for by the Church. And where there were gaps, sometimes private charities stepped in. The Orphan Hospital of Edinburgh was set up in the early 1700s by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge to fill one of those gaps.”

“This is what you were looking up on the internet last night?”

“Yes.” They passed a tarnished sculpture of the Madonna and Child called The Virgin of Alsace. “In 1833 the hospital moved into a new building, here on the Dean Estate, and it became known as the Dean Orphanage.” An Edinburgh lady of indeterminate age with bob-cut silver hair and navy-blue skirts hurried by with a whiff of floral scent that reminded Fin briefly of Marsaili’s mother.