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his Steps, till they can tell
    His Pedigree as weel’s himsell.

    Luckenbooths? Built around 1460, these ‘locked booths’ housed Edinburgh’s first permanent shops, sitting in a row of seven tenement buildings connected to the Old Tolbooth Prison and running parallel to St Giles Cathedral. Originally exclusive to goldsmiths and jewellers, they later housed ‘ane chymist and druggist’, a baker, milliner, hairdresser and even a toyshop.

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    With the great looming bulks of St Giles and the Tolbooth centrally dominating all proceedings, and the potential targets of many more side-by-side shops lining the route between the closes, this then was the condensed world of William Brodie. His life, his work, his home, his leisure and his loves – not to mention his crimes – were all concentrated around this mile-long encapsulation of human life and all its failings and foibles. The many layers of its deeply textured society provided an aptly confusing backdrop for the identity crisis from which he obviously suffered. For while he would often avail himself of a sedan chair as a member of the city elite, he also felt something acutely in common with the simple men who carried him there. The feeling was almost mutual, as the customer who was described in some accounts as ‘small and slender’ was easier to carry than most, as well as quite affable and able to show the common touch. But it wasn’t as simple as that, of course.
    He clearly enjoyed his gentleman status too. Obviously well educated – not far from home in James Mundell’s exclusive ‘humanities’ school in West Bow – and a man of considerable wit and charm as well as political influence, property and monetary wealth, with £10,000 (worth £850,000 today) left by his father he should have had no need to dabble in a life of crime and mix with ‘the lower orders’. But he clearly had a fancy to, and a simple need did eventually arise – a serious shortfall in income brought about by his big gambling losses and the costs of keeping two families – which played right into his psyche of considerable complexity. How? The clue was perhaps his love of theatre and the theatrical. In all his ‘below-the-line’ dealings, one major motive force seemed to be romance. Or drama. Or infamy. Or something that made him out of the ordinary, adventurous, even piratical. If he hadn’t needed money, lion-taming might have been up his street.
    This need for an exciting frisson of danger also ran through his recreation, business and love life. His enthusiasm for opera, which saw (or heard) him constantly singing operatic songs at work that irritated his colleagues and sisters, was perhaps the mildest of his passions. If we ignore for a moment the early signs of his crossing the crime line, there was the club life, the cards, the cockfights, the above-mentioned mistresses and their dependent families by him, all of which were expensive. This man of means gave a sharper meaning to the phrase ‘disposable income’: he simply did not seem capable of holding on to his, despite that impressive inheritance, his successful business and his ownership of considerable property other than the family complex in Brodie’s Close. There were at least three other tenements in his name, at the Nether Bow and in World’s End Close. Council records also show that in 1785, two years before he turned to crime in desperation, he was speculating in the building lots of the New Town (see chapter 3). And in 1789, after the game was up and he had swung for it, there was a house in Old Bank Close that was purchased from the trustee for his creditors by William Martin, bookseller and auctioneer in Edinburgh, who then sold it to the Bank of Scotland four years later.
    He could have used all that silver-spoon wealth in a slower enjoyment of the good life, but when it came to nightlife, he was attracted to the bad life like a moth to a candle, and in the same way managed to burn his own wings and