To be honest, Jackson was surprised that more people didn’t kill each other. Julia was definitely lying to him about something.

One face in the sea of faces across the other side of the ring caught his attention. It wasn’t just a cliché, it really was a sea of faces, he found it almost impossible to focus on one. He’d been under the impression that long sight was supposed to improve with age and short sight deteriorate (or was it the other way round?), but he seemed to be losing out on both of them. But if he concentrated, no, it was actually better if he didn’t concentrate, he could make out the girl. Her face was tilted upward, watching the trapeze artists, her expression serene, beatific. Her eyes only half-open, as if she were watching but thinking of something else. She was so like the dead girl it was impossible. His girl, curled up on the rocks, a mermaid dreaming, and he had disturbed her sleep. He squinted, trying to make out the features of the girl in the au-dience, but his focus slipped and she was gone, swimming off into the sea of faces.

He fell asleep while a human pyramid was being constructed out of acrobats, and when he woke he felt disoriented. The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn’t think what, and then he realized it was the roof-the vault of heaven-in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on a Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them.

Maybe Julia wasn’t lying exactly, just not telling the truth.

When Jackson exited the big top on the Meadows along with the rest of the audience, he was greeted by a pearly dusk. The gloaming. It was so much lighter up here, a transient Nordic light that spoke to his soul. He took a seat on a bench and turned his phone on. There was a text from Julia, “In the trav bar come and find us” (not even a “J” or a single “x” this time, he noticed, let alone “love” or punctuation). It sounded more like a challenge or a treasure hunt than an invitation to a drink. He guessed “the trav” was the Traverse, which was both good and bad, good because it was nearby and he was sure he knew how to get there, bad because he’d been there the first night with Julia and the cast, and it was a smoky underground place full of posers up from London. Maybe he could persuade her out of there, take her to one of the many Italian restaurants around this part of town. He seemed to remember a plan to cook for her tonight. The best laid plans of mice and men. They had studied that book at school, that is to say his fellow pupils had studied it at school, Jackson had looked out the window or played truant. He remembered the little plaque at the Scottish War Memorial. THE TUNNELLERS’ FRIENDS. He felt strangely bereft.

Although there were still plenty of people milling about, light was fading fast on the Meadows, and away from the streetlamps that bordered the paths there were now murky pools of darkness presenting opportunities for all kinds of transgression. Everything suddenly seemed darker, and Jackson realized that the lights on the big top had been switched off. Something seemed to drop inside him, a leaden weight, a memory of walking home from that circus forty-odd years ago, holding his mother’s hand-his mother was no more than a shadow of a memory now-walking away up a hill, it was a town built on hills, and looking back and seeing the big top, ablaze with lights, being abruptly plunged into darkness. It had disturbed him in a way that, as a small boy, he couldn’t put words to. Now he knew it was melancholy. Melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic-that was what Louise Monroe had called him yester-day. “You seem remarkably phlegmatic, Mr. Brodie.” What was the fourth? Sanguine. But melancholy, that was his own true humor. A miserable bastard, in other words.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” he thought. God, that was a wretched quotation. He had been reading a lot of military history lately, courtesy of Amazon. He thought of the Binyon poem again. “At the going down of the sun.” The rest of the verses were crap. Earl Grey was actually watching the streetlamps being lit, not put out, although, of course, some people thought it was an apocryphal quotation. God, would you look at him, a sad middle-aged loser sitting on a park bench at twilight thinking about an old war he never took part in. Jackson rarely thought about the wars he had taken part in. All he needed was a can of lager. When had he started thinking of himself as a loser? “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He wouldn’t blame Julia if she had grown bored with him.

And then, instantly, his self-pity was forgotten because there she was. It was her, it was his dead girl. He hadn’t imagined her in the big top, she had been there and now she was here, walking across the Meadows, in and out of the shadows cast by the trees, coming toward him.

She was wearing heels and a short summer skirt so that you couldn’t help but admire her perfect legs. He stood up abruptly and set off toward her, wondering what he should say-“Hey,you look just like a dead girl I know”? As opening conversational gambits went, it left something to be desired. He knew she wasn’t really his dead girl, unless the dead had begun to walk, which he was pretty sure they hadn’t. He couldn’t imagine the kind of chaos that would ensue if they did.

And then-and in Jackson’s opinion this was becoming just a wee bit tiresome-who should slip out of the shadows but his old enemy, Honda Man. Terence Smith creeping up behind the not-dead girl on tiptoe in a way that reminded Jackson of a cartoon character. The man was a juggernaut, juggernauts shouldn’t try to tiptoe. The girl might not be dead, but it looked as if Terence Smith were intending to make her that way, not with his trusty bat in his hand but a length of what looked like nylon rope. Dog, bat, rope-he was a one-man arsenal. “Hey!” Jackson yelled to get the girl’s attention. “Behind you!” Did he really say that? But it was no pantomime joke and no pantomime thuggee-Terence Smith already had the rope round her neck. Jackson’s warning cry had alerted her, however, and she had managed to get her hands on the rope, tugging on it for all she was worth to prevent Terence Smith from tightening it.

Jackson sprinted along the path toward the two of them. There were other people closer, but they seemed benignly unaware of a girl being strangled in front of their eyes. Before Jackson reached them, the girl managed to do something swift and admirably effective that seemed to involve the heel of her shoe and Honda Man’s groin, and poor old Terry collapsed onto the ground with an ugly noise. Unmanned, Jackson thought. The girl didn’t hang around, instead she kicked off her shoes and started running back the way she had come, in the direction of the circus, and by the time Jackson reached Terence Smith, now retching with shock, the girl was out of sight.

Honda Man’s moans attracted a couple of passersby who seemed to be of the opinion that he was the victim of an assault and that the perpetrator of the assault must be the man standing over him. Been here, done this, Jackson thought. His brain was lagging vital seconds behind, still trying to compute the convergence of himself, his old pal Terry, and a girl who looked like the dead girl in the Forth. He had seen the crucifixes in her ears as she struggled with her assailant. You say coincidence, he thought, I say connection. A baffling, impenetrably complex connection, but nonetheless a connection. Jackson was torn between wanting to interrogate Terence Smith, with the added bonus of then beating him to a pulp, or running after the dead girl look-alike.