wonder, what's the fucking point.' He caught himself and smiled sheepishly. 'Sorry. Bad habit.'
Reynolds dismissed his apology with a flourish of his hand. 'So, you feel it's hopeless. Hopeless in that you feel there's only five, or six, or whatever, ineffectual people facing down the hordes of hell. And hopeless because the girl you love is locked away in some dismal place with no chance of a rescue.'
'I never said I loved her!' Veitch said indignantly.
Reynolds waved him away again. 'Of course you do! It's obvious!'
Veitch coloured and shook his head. 'And I'm not saying it's hopeless. I mean, I'm going in there to get her, you know. I'm giving it my best bleedin' shot.'
'But you don't hold out much hope of getting out again.'
'Ah, who knows?'
Reynolds sat back in his chair and thought for a moment, sipped at his whisky, then thought again. Veitch watched him with growing impatience. Eventually, tweaking his moustache, Reynolds said, 'Are you in the mood for a story, my boy?'
'A story?'
'Yes. A true-life story. Like they have in the women's magazines. It's about a young man of style and elegance, dashing and debonair, not really one for books, but a whizz with the girls-' He laughed richly. 'Now I can't fool you, can I? Yes, it's my story. Still interested?'
Veitch nodded. He had warmed to Reynolds; his old prejudices had been forgotten for the moment.
'Let me tell you then. I was twenty-four, from a very good family with a little money in my pocket and a lot of confidence. A dangerous combination. My mother and father had always considered me for a career in the law. Edinburgh is the lawyers' city, after all. But, you know, that thing with the books…' He shook his head. 'No, not for me. I wanted something a little more colourful. Why should I consign myself to a prison of dusty old books when I could run off to sea or enlist in some war in an exotic clime? And that's just what I did. I set off on foot for Leith with a head full of Robert Louis Stevenson and dreams of hiring aboard some tramp steamer to the Orient.'
'Nothing wrong with that,' Veitch mused. 'Better than getting stuck in a rut at home.'
'Exactly! But then the strangest thing happened to me. As I walked towards Leith with the sun climbing in the sky, I came across a vision of such beauty it made me stop in my tracks. Now this wasn't film star beauty, do you understand? But she was beautiful to me.' Veitch nodded. 'Even to this day I don't know why I did it. Perhaps it was because I was filled with the kind of joy you can only experience when you embark on something new, or perhaps it was the quality of light, or the fresh tang on the wind, or all those things aligned in an unrepeatable harmonious conjunction. But that moment was so special it felt like my skin was singing.'
He caressed the ornately styled head of his cane for a long moment, so deep in thought he appeared oblivious to the people around him. But when he spoke again, his voice was so infused with happiness Veitch felt warmed simply to hear it. 'Her name was Maureen. She had red hair that fell in gorgeous ringlets and skin so pale it made her eyes seem uncommonly dark. She was walking into town on the other side of the street. What did I do? Why, I threw all my plans in the air and ran across the road to talk to her.'
'You're an old romantic, Gordon.'
'Oh, indeed,' he chuckled. 'I thought perhaps I'd pick up my plans later in the day, or the next day, or the next week. But as we walked and talked, and as she laughed, and as we recognised, in our looks and our gentle touches, that we were carved from the same clay, I realised I would never set sail from Leith. It takes someone very, very special for you to give up all your dreams in a single moment. But it was there, love at first sight, like all the poets say. Do you believe in that?'
Witch sat back in his chair and looked up into the dark sky through the window. 'I'm not sure, Gordon. I think I'd like to, but it's not the kind of thing you get to think about too much in Greenwich, know what I mean?'
'I think you're not being very honest with yourself,' Reynolds said with a knowing smile. 'Maureen and I quickly became inseparable. On the surface we had very little in common. She came from a good, upstanding family, but they had little money, little of any material possessions. She had been forced to leave school at thirteen to help earn the family's keep. But those things don't matter, do they?'
'S'pose not.'
He pressed his fist against his heart. 'These are where the real bonds are made.' Then he touched his temple. 'Not here. But there was one difference even we could not overcome.' He paused; the muscles around his mouth grew taut with an old anger. 'I was a Protestant and Maureen was a Catholic, you see. That means nothing to you, I can see, and that's good. You're a modern manyou're not burdened with centuries of stupidity. Everybody thinks of that kind of prejudice as the Irish problem, but it's always been here in Scotland, even to this day. You told me you'd heard the stories in the city about Mary King's Close, the street boarded up to let the Black Death sufferers die.'
Veitch flinched at the coincidence. He nodded.
'The people of Mary King's Close were Catholics. Demonised, made less than human. Mothers of the time would frighten their children by saying the terrible people of Mary King's Close would get them if they weren't good. Would the horrors inflicted on them have happened if they were Protestants in this most Protestant of cities? I think not.'
'But Protestants might have got it in a Catholic city.'
'Of course, and I've damned them both to hell many times.'
Veitch tried to read his face. There was a seam of ancient emotion fossilised just beneath the surface. But he kept smiling, his eyes kept sparkling. 'What happened to her?' Veitch asked.
'Ah, you see which way the story is going. We kept our romance a secret from my family and friends for as long as we could, but in a city as watchful and atrociously gossipy as Edinburgh it was bound to come out sooner or later. To say it was a scandal would be to overstate the case. In the wider sense, no one cared about a thing like that, and that is to the general population's merit. The people of Edinburgh are good people. But in my own particular circle…' He sighed.
'You got a hard time from the folks,' Veitch said with understanding.
'My father was apoplectic. My mother took to her bed for days. The rest of my family treated me as if I'd developed some severe, debilitating mental illness. My close friends, who came from the same social circle, were acidic in their comments, but they directed most of their vitriol towards Maureen, who must, quite obviously, have led me astray.'
'And there was trouble.' Veitch took a long swig of his lager, trying to delay what he knew was coming.
Reynolds's face crumpled, but only for an instant before he brought the smile back; in that tiny window Veitch saw something that made him flinch. 'There was blood. They found her with her head stoved in on the edge of Holyrood Park. She'd been raped, several times, they said, not just murdered, but humiliated. Taught a lesson, in the good old-fashioned way.' His words were bitter, but his tone was as gentle and measured as ever.
'God Almighty!' Veitch went to take another drink, then had to put his glass down. He was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of injustice against a man he was sure, in the short time he had known him, was better than most. He felt a surge of anger, a desire to rush out and gain retribution in the most violent way possible, forgetting the crime had happened decades earlier. 'Who did it? Who fucking did it?'
'Oh, no one was caught. Understandably. The rich and well-to-do are always protected by the law. There was an outcry in the city, but it blew over when the next scandal came along, as these things do. Who did it?' He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. 'One of my friends, several of my friends, all of them, my family. I would suppose they are the prime suspects. They were all guilty, whatever the detail.'
'Didn't you try to find out who it was? Didn't you try to get them?' Veitch felt the heat rising up his neck to his face.
Reynolds shook his head dismissively. 'No, of course not. It didn't matter, you see. Nothing mattered. Maureen was gone. My life was over.'
The baldness of the statement made Veitch bring himself up sharp.
'I loved her, you see. I loved her in all the cliched ways-more than life itself, more than myself. We'd devoted ourselves to each other in a way that, I think, people find hard to understand these days. The night before her death we'd spent six hours talking about our life, about what we meant to each other, about the here and now and the sweet hereafter. In all the world she was the only person that mattered. And a few hours later I was more alone than anyone could be.'
There was a long silence which Veitch couldn't bear to fill. After a while the emotions between them became
