One of the mothers approached him, a bright, polite smile stuck on her face, and said, 'Can I help you?' when what she really meant was 'If you're planning on harming one of these children I will beat you to a pulp with my bare hands.'

'Sorry,' he said, turning on the charm. He surprised even himself sometimes with the charm. 'I'm a bit lost.' Women could never believe it when a guy admitted to being lost, they immediately warmed to you. (,Twenty-five million sperm needed to fertilize an egg,' his wife used to say, 'because only one will stop to ask directions.')

He shrugged helplessly. 'I'm looking for the waterfall?'

'It's that way,' the woman said, pointing behind him.

'Ah,' he said, 'I think I've been reading the map back to front. Well, thanks,' he added and strode off down the lane towards the waterfall before she could say anything else. He'd have to give it a good ten minutes. It would look too suspicious ifhe went straight back to the Discovery.

*

It was pretty at the waterfall. The limestone and the moss. The trees were black and skeletal and the water, brown and peaty, looked as if it was in spate, but maybe it always looked like that. They called the waterfall a 'force' around here, which was a good word for it. An unstoppable force. Water always found a way, it beat everything in the end. Paper, scissors, rock, water. May the force be with you. He checked his expensive watch again. He wished he still smoked. He wouldn't mind a drink. If you didn't smoke and you didn't drink then standing by a waterfall for ten minutes with nothing to do was something that could really get to you because all you were left with were your thoughts.

He searched in his pocket for the plastic bag he'd brought with him. Carefully, he dropped the hair into it and closed it with a plastic clip and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket. He had been clutching the thin black filament in his hand ever since he plucked it from the boy's head. Job done.

Ten minutes up. He walked quickly back to the mud-caked Discovery. If he didn't hit any problems he'd be in Northallerton in an hour and back on the train to London. He jettisoned the OS map, left it on a bench, an unlooked-for gift for someone who thought walking was the way to go. Then Jackson Brodie climbed back in his vehicle and started the engine. There was only one place he wanted to be. Home. He was out of here. neurotic would that make you? Especially in a time before firelighters.

They had done an unseen translation together of some of Pliny's letters. 'Pliny the Younger,' Ms MacDonald always emphasized as if it was of crucial importance that you got your Plinys right, when in fact there was probably hardly anyone left on earth who gave a monkey's about which was the elder and which was the younger. Who gave a monkey's about them, period.

Still, it was good to think that Billy was willing to do things for her even if they were nearly always illegal things. She had accepted the ID card because it was a handy kind of thing to have when no one believed you were sixteen but she had never taken up the offer of the bus passYou never knew, it might be the first step on a slippery slope that would eventually lead to something much bigger. Billy had started with pinching sweets from Mr Hussain's shop, and look at him now, pretty much a career criminal.

'Have you had much experience with children, Reggie?' Dr Hunter had asked at her so-called interview.

'Och, loads. Really. Loads and loads,' Reggie replied, smiling and nodding encouragingly at Dr Hunter, who didn't seem very good at the whole interviewing thing. 'Loads, sweartogod.'

Reggie wouldn't have employed herself. Sixteen and no experience of children, even though she had great character references from Mr Hussain and Ms MacDonald and a letter from Mum's friend Trish saying how good she was with children, based on the fact that in exchange for her tea she had spent a whole year of Monday evenings with Grant, Trish's eldest muppet of a son, trying to coax him through his Maths Standard Grade exam (a hopeless case if ever there was one).

Reggie had never actually had a close encounter with a one-yearold child before, or indeed any small children, but what was there to know? They were small, they were helpless, they were confused and Reggie could easily identify with all of that. And it wasn't that long since she had been a child herself although she had an 'old soul', a fortune teller had told her. Body of a child, mind of an old woman.

Old before her time. Not that she believed in fortune tellers. The one who told her about her old soul lived in a new brick house with a view of the Pentlands and was called Sandra. Reggie had encountered her on a hen night for one of Mum's friends who was about to embark on another disastrous marriage and Reggie had tagged along as usual, like a mascot. That was what happened when you had no friends of your own, your social life consisted of outings to fortune tellers, bingo halls, Daniel O'Donnell concerts ('Pass the Revels along to Reggie'). No wonder she had an old soul. Even now that Mum was gone, her friends still phoned her up and said, 'We're going over to Glasgow for a shopping trip, Reggie, want to come with us?' or 'Fancy seeing Blood Brothers at the Playhouse?' No and no. Our revels now are ended. Ha.

There had been nothing unearthly about fortune-telling Sandra. A plump legal secretary in her fifties, she wore a rose-pink cardigan with a shawl collar pinned by a coral cameo brooch. In her bathroom all the toiletries were Crabtree and Evelyn's Gardenia, lined up a precise inch from the edge of the shelves as if they were still on display in the shop.

'Your life is about to change,' Sandra said to Mum. She wasn't wrong. Even now, Reggie thought that she could sometimes catch the sickly sweet smell of gardenias.

Dr Hunter was English but had trained to be a doctor in Edinburgh and had never gone back south of the border. She was a GP in a practice in Liberton and had a morning surgery at half past eight so Mr Hunter did 'the early shift' with the baby. Reggie took over from him at ten 0'clock and stayed until Dr Hunter came home at two (although it was usually nearer to three, 'Part-time but it feels like full-time,' Dr Hunter sighed) and then Reggie stayed on until five o'clock, which was the time of the day that she liked best because then she got to be with Dr Hunter herself.

The Hunters had a 40-inch HD television on which she watched Balamory DVDs with the baby, although he always fell asleep as soon as the theme tune began, snuggled into Reggie on the sofa, like a little monkey. She was surprised Dr Hunter let the baby watch television but Dr Hunter said, 'Oh, heavens, why not? Now and again, what's the harm?' Reggie thought that there was nothing nicer than having a baby fall asleep on you, except perhaps a puppy or a kitten. She'd had a puppy once but her brother threw it out of the window. 'I don't think he meant to,' Mum said but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you did accidentally and Mum knew that. And Reggie knew that Mum knew that. Mum used to say, 'Billy may be trouble, but he's our trouble. Blood's thicker than water.' It was a lot stickier too. The day the puppy went flying through the window was the second worst day of Reggie's life so far. Hearing about Mum was the worst. Obviously.

Dr and Mr Hunter lived on the really nice side ofEdinburgh, with a view of Blackford Hill, quite a distance in every way from the third-floor shoebox in Gorgie where Reggie lived on her own now that Mum was gone. Two bus journeys away in fact, but Reggie didn't mind. She always sat on the top deck and looked into other people's houses and wondered what it was like to live in them. There was the added bonus now of spotting the first Christmas trees in windows. (Dr Hunter always said that simple pleasures were the best and she was right.) She could get quite a lot ofschool work done as well. She wasn't at school any more but she was still following the curriculum. English Literature, Ancient Greek, Ancient History, Latin. Anything that was dead really. Sometimes she imagined Mum speaking Latin (Salve, Regina), which was unlikely, to say the least.