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out of place in a sudden onset of deafness, Jonah indicated his companion. ‘My guest,’ he said. ‘He wanted to meet you. He’s a fan of your books.’
    ‘An admirer,’ the man said. He was sturdily built with a thick fleshy neck and cheeks that shone as if they had been barber shaven. ‘I wouldn’t claim to be a great reader. I’m an accountant; numbers are more my thing.’
    Hale said with the slight edge of a writer listening to someone else being praised, ‘Every man to his trade. You won’t have any strong feelings about Owens and Sassoon then?’
    ‘I’m not with you,’ the man said.
    ‘A forgotten writer who was fond of foxhunting and a minor poet who died in the first world war. This place has named two of its new halls after them.’
    Jonah waved a hand in protest. ‘Come on, I think Owens was better than that.’
    ‘Because you read him at school,’ Hale said. ‘People get exposed to him before their critical faculties are properly developed. A university named after Napier of Merchiston who was a great man; you’d think they could have done better. I expect it’s because there was a film about the two of them, holding hands in the hospital to avoid going back to the trenches.’
    This produced a pause. If Jonah had an answer, he didn’t volunteer it. The man with him said at last, ‘Was it a good film?’
    ‘It was a bloody awful film,’ Hale said, ‘and I haven’t even seen it.’
    Jonah looked after him as he went off, swinging meaty hips as if stamping the conquered underfoot.
    ‘Would you believe that man is our Scottish Barbara Cartland?’ he wondered. ‘Maybe that’s what makes him so aggressive. All that sugar.’
    Curle nodded no more than a vague appreciation of the joke for he was studying the stranger trying to place why his face seemed familiar.
    Catching his look, the man said with a smile, ‘You don’t remember me?’
    ‘Should I?’ And then it came to him, ‘The other day in the Atrium… You wanted to say hello. Is that right?’
    ‘And before that?’ the man asked.
    Before? Curle looked from the red-headed stranger to Jonah and shook his head.
    ‘I don’t seem to have made as much of an impression as you suggested the other day then?’
    And some shade in the voice, something about the way as he smiled he sucked in the lower lip as if to bite on it; it was like the wipe of a hand across a steamed mirror to show a face. A face from a lifetime ago.
    ‘Yes,’ Barclay Curle said, drawing the word out slowly, surprised by the steadiness of his voice, ‘we were at school together. Isn’t that right, Jonah? All three of us.’

Chapter Seven
    I’m a believer that facing our fears is good for us, Jonah had told him, as justification. But he’d told him bollocks to that. Idle curiosity, like poking animals with a stick, would be nearer the mark. Without even a hint to warn him of what was coming. It was unforgivable. If I’d told you, Jonah had pointed out, you might not have come.
    There was a thought.
    Facing fears wasn’t his style.
    Until he had physically turned to his left stepping off Princes Street and into the doorway, he was in doubt as to whether or not he would keep the appointment.
    In the event, he’d misunderstood for it wasn’t a meeting between the two of them: there must have been forty people in the room. He’d asked for Brian Todd at reception and been directed into the lift and up to this room on the third floor of the Club. Not seeing Todd and not knowing what else to do, he wandered through the groups around the leather couches until he arrived at the windows looking down on to the busy night street and the floodlit outline of the Castle on the hill opposite blurred in the falling rain.
    ‘Sir?’
    At the voice, he turned to find a waiter holding out a tray of glasses. He picked a glass of red wine and went back to staring out of the window. Listening to the murmuringvoices at his back, the little spikes of fat chuckling laughter, he