The Bone Yard Read online

  I turned to look at her. “Yes, I suppose you are.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me once on the lips.

  “It’s not you, Katharine,” I said. “It’s Edinburgh. Deep down inside I love this city. But it’s the kind of love that makes you suffer and I don’t know if I can take it any more.”

  “So come back to the farm with me,” she said, touching the back of my hand with her fingertips. “There are none of the city’s problems there. Just hard work and home-grown food.”

  “It’s an idea,” I said, nodding. Then I looked back out over the lights of Princes Street. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t conjure up fields of potatoes and kale. I kept thinking about the chief boyscout and the noble lie he’d quoted from Plato; that people’s natures are predetermined and that their rulers have the right to lie in the interests of the state. It’s a myth but like all myths there’s some truth in it. In which case the next Council would be just as dangerous as the last one. There was one difference though. I wasn’t going to get fooled again.

  “Why are you smiling?” Katharine asked.

  “I may just have rediscovered my vocation,” I replied, turning to face the blackened Gothic façade behind us.

  She looked at me, a smile gradually fading from her own lips like the winter sun’s last glow over an icy lake. Fire and water, I thought.

  Davie ran down the steps and came towards us, his arm raised.

  Katharine squeezed my hand once then walked slowly away, her long coat flapping in the wind. At the corner of the lane she stopped and looked back at me for a second before pulling up her hood and disappearing into the night.