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the door swung shut behind Chib Calloway.

    ‘Now I really have seen everything,’ he muttered to himself, reaching into his coat for his phone. Ransome was a detective inspector with Lothian and Borders Police. His colleague, Detective Sergeant Ben Brewster, was in an unmarked car, parked somewhere between the Mound and George Street. Brewster picked up straight away.

    ‘He’s gone into the National Gallery,’ Ransome explained.

    ‘Meeting someone?’ Brewster’s voice was tinny; it sounded like he was being beamed down from a space station somewhere.

    ‘Dunno, Ben. Looked to me like he was considering the Playfair Steps, but then thought better of it.’

    ‘Know which I’d choose.’ Brewster was chuckling.

    ‘Can’t say I was looking forward to hauling myself up them,’ Ransom agreed.

    ‘Reckon he’s spotted you?’

    ‘Not a chance. Where are you?’

    ‘Double-parked on Hanover Street and not making many friends. Are you going to follow him inside?’

    ‘I don’t know. More chance of him clocking me indoors than out.’

    ‘Well, he knows some one’s watching him - so why ditch the two stooges?’

    ‘That’s a good question, Ben.’ Ransome was checking his watch. Not that he needed to - a blast to his right was followed by a puff of smoke from the Castle’s ramparts: the one o’clock gun. He peered down into the Gardens. There was an exit from the gallery down there . . . no way he could cover both doors. ‘Stay put,’ he said into his phone. ‘I’m going to give it five or ten minutes.’

    ‘Your call,’ Brewster said.

    ‘My call,’ Ransome agreed. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and gripped the railings with both hands. It all looked so orderly down in the Gardens. A train was rumbling along the railway track, making for Waverley Station. Again, all very calm and orderly - Edinburgh was that kind of city. You could live your whole life and never get any inkling of what else was going on, even when it was living next door to you. He turned his attention towards the Castle. It appeared to him sometimes like a stern parent, frowning on any impropriety below. If you looked at a map of the city, you were struck by the contrast between the New Town to the north and the Old Town to the south. The first was planned and geometric and rational, the second higgledy-piggledy and seemingly chaotic, buildings erected wherever space permitted. Story was, back in the old days they kept adding floors to the tenements until they started collapsing in on themselves. Ransome liked the feel of the Old Town even today, but he had always dreamed of living in one of the New Town’s elegant Georgian terraces. That was why he took a weekly lottery ticket - only chance he was ever going to get on a CID salary.

    Chib Calloway, on the other hand, could easily afford the New Town life, but chose instead to live on a ticky-tack estate on the western outskirts of the city, only a couple of miles from where he’d grown up. There was, it seemed to Ransome, no accounting for taste.

    The detective didn’t think Chib would linger in the gallery - to someone like him, surely art had to act like kryptonite. He would emerge either from the main door, or from the one in the Gardens. Ransome knew he had to make a decision. But then again . . . how much did it matter in the great scheme of things? The meetings Chib had arranged - the ones Ransome knew about - were no longer going to happen. No evidence would be gathered; several more hours of Ransome’s life wasted as a result. Ransome was in his early thirties, ambitious and alive to possibilities. Chib Calloway would be a trophy, no doubt about that. Not, perhaps, as much of a trophy as four or five years ago, but back then Ransome had been a lowly detective constable and unable to direct (or even suggest to his superiors) a long-term surveillance operation. Now, though, he had inside info, and that could mean the difference between failure and