When Danny tumbled from his chair, Xavier’s surrender was complete. There were some forces you couldn’t withstand. Danny was a born warrior, had never given in for a second of his glorious trail-blazing life. Xavier wasn’t the same. Somehow, letting fate take its course seemed a less terrifying prospect than engaging in conflict.

Danny was dead before he hit the ground. It was no place to die, the back of a sports centre on a bed of asphalt and a pillow of cigarette butts. Not fit for the hero his friend had been, his legs gone in an explosion, his passion for life only enhanced by having so nearly perished.

In the few steps it took the man to reach him, Xavier mourned. Death hadn’t wanted Danny that night. The appearance of the knife had been a cursory means of dispatching a nuisance, no more. He wished his friend had stayed in the bar for one more pint before exiting and attempting the rescue. He wished he’d skipped basketball that night rather than persuade himself that the exercise and company would be good for him in spite of his tiredness. He wished he could cheat death for one more day, write letters to the people he loved, and put his affairs in order.

Then the black bag was in front of his face – no surprise this time. Xavier bowed his head and allowed it to be slipped on. He neither wanted to see what was coming, nor what he was leaving behind. A car boot opened. He was lifted out of his chair and deposited, quite gently, into the space. Then the rumble of an engine, the rolling movement of the vehicle, and the end of a life he had not loved a fraction as well as he should have. Xavier mourned.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Edinburgh city’s architecture was picture-postcard perfect through Connie’s monochromatic gaze. The arched windows above doorways, bold brickwork, floor upon floor of precisely measured glazing lining the broad streets and imbuing the most casual stroll with grandiosity. It seemed to her to be a place in conflict with itself. The same visitors who were its lifeblood were damming the thoroughfares, overworking the centuries-old streets and disturbing the peace night and day. In black and white, facing the right direction, avoiding shops, billboards and buses, Connie might have stepped through time.

Gazing across the city in the direction of the castle, the hustle and commerce of Princes Street at her back, she wondered what she was missing. Her frantic information grab had yielded nothing more. Angela had regularly taken her children to various green spaces, Inch Park included. It had been Meggy’s regular haunt too, but the land area covered was vast, and the psychology involved in shifting one’s focus from adult females to a prepubescent female was immense. Sexual predators had fixed fantasies. They could change the place, the name, the finer points of a face, but rarely the race or age band of their victim.