“A fresh start, I suppose. Putting a whole world between you and your childhood. Erasing the past.” Every word he uttered had such resonance for Fin that he found himself almost too choked to speak. It was, after all, only what he had done himself. He felt Marsaili’s hand on his arm. The merest touch that said more than anything she could have put into words. “Anyway, there was one of them still living here in Edinburgh. A man called Tommy Jack. He might well have been at The Dean around the same time as your dad. There was an email address. I wrote to him.” He shrugged. “I very nearly didn’t. It was a real afterthought.”

“That was him replying?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He sent his address and said he would be happy to talk to us this evening at his home.”

Thirty-one

Thirty-one

Afternoon sunlight leaked in all around drawn curtains that breathed in and out in the breeze from the open window beyond them. The noise of passing traffic came with it, distant and unreal, along with the sound of falling water from the weir in the Water of Leith below.

Their room was up in the roof, with views across the river and the Dean Village. But Fin had drawn the curtain on it as soon as they entered the room. They needed the dark to find themselves.

There had been no discussion, no plan. The hotel was directly across the road from the gallery, and they required a place for the night. Fin was not quite sure why neither of them had corrected the receptionist’s mistaken notion that they were a couple looking for a double room. There had been ample opportunity.

They had ascended to the top floor in a tiny elevator without a word passing between them, Fin’s stomach alive with butterflies in collision. Neither had met the other’s eye.

It had been easier, somehow, to undress in the dark, although there was a time when they had known each other’s bodies intimately. Every curve, every surface, every softness.

And now, with the cool of the sheets on their skin, they rediscovered that intimacy. How bizarrely comfortable it was suddenly, and familiar, as if no time had passed at all since the last time. Fin found the same passion deep inside as she had aroused in him that very first time. Fierce, trembling, all-consuming desire. He found her face with his hands, all its well-known contours. Her neck, her shoulders, the gentle swell of her breasts, the curve of her buttocks.

Their lips were like old friends rediscovering each other after so many years, searching, exploring, as if not quite believing that nothing had really changed.