The Alcoves Beneath the Old Town

The wrist was the first thing. Not the face, not the clothes, not the fact that he had rung ahead twice before finally appearing. Which, for the record, is its own kind of tell. It was the wrist. The way it remained rigid as he began laying the notes on my desk, one after another, each placed with the same careful, repeated movement from the elbow.

Elbow moving forwards, hand coming down flat. Elbow moving forwards, hand coming down flat. As if the wrist had decided one day that it would no longer take part in the operation and the rest of the arm had quietly adapted around it. I watched for four notes before making myself stop.

You learn in this work not to stare at the thing that is wrong. You look once, file it away, move your eyes somewhere neutral and let the person keep talking. Graham Sutherland was talking about his son. He had been talking about his son since he sat down, in that patient, measured way some people have.

The sort of voice trained to project calm into a room, to slow everything down, to make you feel as though you are the one being a little too hasty. He had been a deputy head, he told me. Retired now, after twenty-nine years at a comprehensive school in Dunfermline.

That is the kind of detail people volunteer when they want you to know they are trustworthy. Which is also the kind of detail I have learnt to set aside and examine later. His name was Graham Sutherland. Sixty-seven, give or take.

Tall, but the kind of tall that had begun to fold inwards at the shoulders. White hair combed flat to one side. Pale grey eyes that did not roam around the room the way nervous eyes do. They stayed on me, steady and attentive.

Some people would have found that reassuring. I found it mildly exhausting.

My office, such as it is, sits above an ironmonger's on South Bridge. Two rooms, one window, a desk that came with the place and a chair I brought myself because the original desk chair was the sort of thing you would report to a health and safety inspector. I had been there since just after noon.

It was getting towards 4.00 pm when Graham arrived. He finished counting out twelve GBP50 notes, covering the GBP600 retainer I had quoted over the phone, and placed his hands flat on the desk with a kind of finality, like a man completing a transaction he had rehearsed.

"Callum," he said.

"My son. He's thirty-one."

I pulled a notepad towards me and searched for a pen. That was where the card came into it. I have a jacket I wear for client meetings, dark and a little worn at the cuffs, with deep pockets. I keep things in those pockets that I mean to move elsewhere and never do.

Receipts, an outdated Lothian Buses route map and a pen that had stopped working in October but which I kept putting back for reasons I could not have explained under oath. What I found first, while digging for something to write with, was a business card. Stiff, slightly bent at one corner. I pulled it out and looked at it without meaning to.

Police Scotland. DI Moira Lennox's name beneath that, followed by a direct mobile number and the address of the Police Scotland office at St Leonard's.

I knew the card. I had carried it for two years, since a surveillance job had become complicated in a way I had not anticipated. Moira had been the detective inspector who made it possible to close matters without anyone ending up in a room they had no wish to occupy.

We were not friends. It was not that sort of relationship. But she had dealt straight with me, and I had dealt straight with her. At the end of it, I had written something on the back of her card in the cramped shorthand I use when writing quickly, then kept it.

I turned the card over.

Do not call unless the case cannot be closed any other way.

I do not know exactly what I had been thinking when I wrote it. Something about keeping that particular door shut unless things became bad enough that it was the only door left. Moira Lennox had institutional weight I did not possess.

Institutional weight has a way of solving problems by flattening everything nearby, including things you did not want flattened. Contacting her could also expose professionally awkward conduct on my part, and perhaps on hers. So she was the last resort. That had been the idea.

I looked at the card for perhaps three seconds, slipped it into my inside pocket, found the broken pen beneath it and a working one behind that, then wrote down Graham's address on Buccleuch Street.

"Tell me when you last saw him," I said.

"Five weeks ago."

Callum had been living in a flat on Victoria Street with two flatmates. Five weeks earlier, he had stopped returning calls and answering the door, and the flatmates had eventually confirmed that he was not there. Graham had gone to Police Scotland. They had taken a missing-person report. Nothing had come of it.

He said all this with the same measured cadence. No catch in his voice. No moment when his composure slipped and the father showed through.

Some people grieve quietly. Some hold themselves together in front of strangers because falling apart in front of strangers is not something they are built to do. I have sat opposite enough of them to know the difference between held together and absent, and I was still trying to decide which this was.

"Any reason he might have left of his own accord?" I asked. "A disagreement, debt, relationship trouble?"

"None that I'm aware of."

"Friends he might have stayed with? Someone he'd mentioned?"

"Callum kept to himself. He was a private young man."

I wrote that down, not because it was useful, but because writing gives you a moment to look at the notepad instead of the person opposite you.

Sometimes you need that.

The wrist. I kept returning to the wrist. Its refusal to bend as he had placed those twelve notes, each movement driven from the elbow, mechanical and deliberate, following exactly the same arc. Now the right hand rested flat on the desk, the wrist held at an angle that did not quite suit the way Graham was sitting.

It looked placed. As though positioning it had required a small, separate act of attention. Joint deterioration, perhaps. An old injury.

Or something else. Something for which I did not yet have a name, and would not find one by sitting there staring.

I told him I would begin the following morning. The retainer covered three days of active work, and I would report at each stage.

He nodded in a way that suggested he had already known what I would say. That could mean he had done his research, or merely that he was very good at appearing to expect things. He stood, straightened his jacket with his left hand and walked out.

I listened to his footsteps descending the stairs. Even and unhurried. Then the street door opened and closed.

I remained at the desk for a minute with the notepad in front of me.

Callum Sutherland. Victoria Street. Five weeks missing. Father on Buccleuch Street. Retired deputy head. Twenty-nine years at a comprehensive school in Dunfermline.

A wrist that did not bend, forcing the same careful movement from the elbow every time.

I reached into my inside pocket and put Moira Lennox's card on the desk where I could see it. Not because I intended to use it. Only because I had written what I had written on the back, and wanted it somewhere visible while I thought.

The money remained on the desk, twelve GBP50 notes in a neat row. I stacked them, put them in the drawer and went to find something to eat before the light disappeared.

Victoria Street curves down through the Old Town in a sweep of painted shopfronts and rain-darkened setts, with closes and narrow stairways slipping away from it at odd angles. I arrived at about half nine the next morning. The low November light had reached the upper windows but not the pavement, leaving the street itself in shadow.

Edinburgh cold is not always a matter of temperature. Sometimes it is the cold haar and damp air drifting up from the Forth and settling into the stone. It gets through cloth and leather and seems to wait beneath them.

The building rose three storeys above the ground floor. Pale yellow paint had gone grey at the corners. Beside the door was a panel of buzzers with handwritten names on strips of paper behind scratched plastic. I found the flat number Graham had given me and pressed the button.

I waited, then pressed it again.

A woman's voice came through the intercom, asking who was there. I gave my name and said I was looking into Callum Sutherland's whereabouts on behalf of his family.

That is the language I use. On behalf of his family opens more doors than I am a private investigator, which makes people picture something they have seen on television and become careful. I was not lying. Graham was family.

The lock buzzed.

The flat was on the second floor. The woman who answered was Eilidh Fraser. She gave me her name before I asked, which I noted. People who lead with their name are usually people with nothing to hide, or people who want you to believe that.

She read clearly as the first kind. Small, dark-haired, still wearing the sort of clothes you put on before deciding what to do with your day. She opened the door wide, which also meant something.

Jamie Kerr came out of the kitchen a minute later, drying his hands on a tea towel. The two of them together made the small sitting room feel crowded.

I repeated what I had said over the intercom. I was looking into Callum's whereabouts.

"His father was concerned," Eilidh said. "We've been concerned too."

Jamie nodded and folded the tea towel over the back of a chair.

I asked them to take me through the last time they had seen him. This is always where you learn what sort of witnesses you are dealing with. Some give you a wall of detail, most of it irrelevant, and you have to sift through it. Others give almost nothing, and you have to pull.

These two fell somewhere between. They were cooperative and clear enough, but the timeline had softened at the edges, as timelines do after five weeks. They had also had time to discuss it with each other. That meant they had agreed on what they remembered, which is not necessarily the same as what happened, but it is what you get.

Five weeks earlier, on a Tuesday, Eilidh thought, though possibly a Wednesday, Callum had been at home in the morning. He had eaten breakfast. Nothing had seemed unusual. Then, during the afternoon, a man had come to the door.

"Dark green waxed coat," she said. "Older. Perhaps fifty or sixty. I'm not sure."

"There was something about the way he moved," Jamie said. "I noticed it, but I can't quite describe it. Stiff, maybe."

"Not exactly stiff," Eilidh said. "More deliberate."

They went back and forth for a moment, as people do when they have witnessed the same thing and are trying together to find the right word for it.

I wrote deliberate walk and dark green waxed coat, and kept my expression neutral.

Callum had gone to the door and spoken to the man for several minutes. Then he had come back inside and said he had to go out for a while.

That was all. No argument, no agitation, nothing that had seemed wrong at the time. Callum had taken his jacket and left with the man in the waxed coat. Neither Eilidh nor Jamie had seen him since.

There had been no message and no call. His mobile had gone to voicemail, then eventually stopped connecting altogether. Eilidh said that had happened at about the two-week mark.

"Did you contact the police?" I asked.

Eilidh said she had, roughly three weeks after he disappeared. Police Scotland had taken a missing-person report. Nothing had come of it as far as she knew.

That made sense. A thirty-one-year-old man had apparently left voluntarily with someone he seemed to know. There had been no obvious distress and no crime scene. The file would be thin, sitting in a queue with a hundred others like it.

I asked whether Callum had seemed different in the days before he left. It is a question I always ask and rarely receive a useful answer to, but sometimes you do.

Eilidh looked at Jamie.

Jamie looked at the tea towel on the chair.

"He'd been quieter," Eilidh said. "Not upset. Just quieter. As if he was thinking about something."

"He was sleeping a lot," Jamie said.

I wrote that down too, though I did not yet know what to do with it.

Then Eilidh said she had a photograph, if that would help, and went to fetch it. She returned with a print, the sort you have developed, which you do not see so often now. She handed it to me and said one of Jamie's friends had taken it at a dinner two days before Callum disappeared.

I looked at it.

The stamp read 18 September 2025.

Callum stood slightly left of centre, with a table behind him and other people caught at the edges of the frame. Slender, dark-haired, wearing a half-smile as if somebody had just said something that almost landed. The photograph was clear and well lit.

His right eyebrow and eye sat visibly lower than the left. Not by a little. Enough that, once noticed, the imbalance could not be unseen. It was the kind of thing that should have been immediately obvious to everybody in the room.

I kept my eyes moving across the full image, the way you do when you do not want someone to see what has caught your attention. The table, the background, the other faces, then back to Callum.

It was not the angle. I know what a camera angle does to a face. I have spent enough time examining surveillance shots, identification photographs and images taken from social media, printed and spread across my desk, to know the difference between lens distortion and something that is simply where it is.

The eyebrow and eye were where they were. The geometry of the rest of his face agreed with them. It was not the angle.

"Is that helpful?" Eilidh asked.

"It's useful. Can I hold on to it?"

She said I could.

Before I put it away, she looked at the photograph as one looks at something seen before but never properly examined.

"It's a bit odd, isn't it?" she said. "The way his eye looks."

"I thought it might be the camera," Jamie said.

"Yes," Eilidh said. "Probably just the angle."

I slipped the photograph into my inside jacket pocket and asked several more questions. Neither of them knew the man in the waxed coat. Callum had not mentioned anyone new in his life. They knew of no reason why he would leave Edinburgh suddenly.

Every answer came back empty or vague. They were trying. There simply was not anything more.

I thanked them and left.

Outside on Victoria Street, I stood for a moment and allowed the cold to settle around me again. I took out the photograph and examined it in the daylight.

The lowered eyebrow and eye. The half-smile. A face that was almost, but not quite, the face it should have been.

I thought about Graham's rigid wrist and the careful, repeated movement from his elbow. Then I put the photograph away.

The flatmates had given me two things: a description of a man in a dark green waxed coat with a deliberate walk, and a photograph containing a detail neither of them had thought to question.

That was all Victoria Street had to offer. The trail did not run through Eilidh or Jamie. They had told me everything they knew, and it was already in my pocket.

Wherever the man in the waxed coat had taken Callum five weeks earlier, finding him was the only way forwards. It would take time, and there was no shortcut through it.

I started down towards the adjoining closes.

Three evenings of nothing is not unusual in this work.

You show a description around. You get shrugs. You meet people who half remember someone who turns out to be somebody else entirely. You meet publicans who look at you as though you are the problem for asking.

I have had weeks of nothing. Three evenings are sometimes merely the price of entry.

On the first, I began around Victoria Street and worked outwards through the Old Town closes. That is what you do. You start where the person was last seen and move in the direction they went.

The man in the waxed coat had walked Callum away from that building five weeks before. He must have gone somewhere. He must have passed through streets. Someone might have noticed.

Most people do not notice, but some do.

I visited seven pubs, cafes and late-opening shops that evening. Four people did not recognise the description at all. Two remembered a similar coat but not the walk. A woman running a small newsagent on Candlemaker Row thought she knew whom I meant, then described an entirely different man.

I wrote it all down anyway. You record even the useless things because sometimes a pattern only appears when everything is placed together.

On the second evening I pushed farther down towards the Cowgate and its adjoining closes. The streets narrowed and dipped between high buildings that seemed to lean towards one another, conducting a conversation to which I had not been invited.

A woman in a small restaurant said she thought she had seen a man in a dark green waxed coat whose walk she remembered. He had not been limping. It was more as though he placed each foot with deliberate care, considering the ground before committing his weight to it.

She had not seen him recently. Weeks ago, perhaps longer. She could not be certain.

I went back to my rented room above the basement folk pub on the Cowgate and lay on the bed while the music rose through the floorboards, as it did every night. That evening someone sang a slow Scots lament without accompaniment. The voice reached me through timber and plaster, stripped of words but not of rhythm.

I thought about the deliberate walk. Careful. Considered. Someone moving as though movement required decisions instead of happening naturally.

I had seen people walk that way before, and it usually meant one of two things: pain being managed, or attention being paid.

I did not yet know which this was.

On the third evening of enquiries, I returned to the Cowgate and worked it more carefully. That was when I found Alastair Boyd.

His traditional pub stood midway along the street, nothing remarkable from outside. A plain frontage, its name faded on the sign, with two small tables on the pavement that nobody was using in the November cold.

Inside, it smelt like the end of a long shift: damp wood and something frying in the back. Alastair was behind the bar, wiping the counter with the automatic efficiency of somebody who had done it long enough to stop thinking about it.

I ordered a mug of tea and let him bring it before asking anything.

That is another thing about this work. You do not lead with a question. You allow the transaction to happen first. People are more willing to speak to someone who has bought something than someone who has arrived only to take.

I gave him the description. Dark green waxed coat. Unusual, deliberate walk. A man who came through the area regularly.

Alastair did not hesitate.

"Aye," he said. "I know who you mean."

Just like that. After three evenings of partial recognition and near misses, just like that.

He said the man came in twice a week, sometimes three times if the week ran long. He always ordered soda water with lime and never touched it.

Alastair had noticed because you notice the people who do not drink what they order. A full glass sitting untouched in front of someone looks wrong from behind a bar.

The man always chose the same table near the rear wall, angled towards the door and closer than any other to the back of the building.

"He just sits there," Alastair said. "Doesn't talk to anybody. Doesn't look at his mobile. Just sits and listens."

"Listens to what?"

Alastair gestured towards the wall behind him.

"There's a folk venue along the way. Basement place. When the wind's right and their door's open, you can hear it in here. Not clearly, but you can hear it."

I sat with that for a moment.

A man ordered soda water with lime and never touched it, then sat at the back of a pub twice a week to listen to music filtering through the wall from a venue he could have reached in two minutes.

I thanked Alastair, paid for the tea and left him a decent tip. He had given me three evenings' worth of work in five minutes, and that has value whether the person providing it knows so or not.

Then I settled down to watch the pub.

Watching a pub from outside is tedious in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone who has not done it. You choose a position that gives you a clear view without placing you directly in sight of the entrance, and then you remain there.

The cold works through your jacket. You think about other things, then remind yourself not to think about other things. The street continues its ordinary business around you: people going home, couples arguing quietly, buses labouring through the wet and the distant rattle of a tram.

You become part of the background. That is the whole trick.

The first night, nothing.

On the second night, he came.

I saw him from half a street away. The walk was exactly as the woman near the Cowgate had described it: deliberate and considered, each foot placed with a small pause before the weight transferred, like a man crossing ice he did not trust.

The dark green waxed coat was long and slightly too formal for the area. He was of average height, perhaps a little under. I could not make out his face at that distance and in that light, but I did not need to. The walk was enough.

He entered Alastair's pub. I waited.

Thirty-five minutes, perhaps forty. He emerged and turned left, moving back the way he had come, then cut right into a narrower close I had not been watching.

I followed.

The close ran behind a row of buildings and opened into a service passage I did not know by name at the time. I looked it up later. It was connected to Edinburgh's buried waterworks, one of those forgotten routes that technically appears on old plans but which you would never find unless you were searching for it or following somebody who already knew where it was.

The man moved through without slowing or checking behind him. He knew where he was going.

I kept my distance and my footsteps quiet. The setts were uneven and damp, and I had to watch my footing. That divided my attention between the ground and the man's back, which was not ideal, but I did not lose him.

He emerged into a service close off Guthrie Street. Set into the wall on the left was a heavy institutional door. The man passed without looking at it.

I looked.

A small metal plate beside the door bore lettering I could not read while moving. The man continued down the close and then crouched in the roadway itself.

He slipped his fingers beneath an iron access cover and lifted. Metal scraped against stone. He lowered himself through the opening with the same deliberate care he gave every movement, and then he was gone.

The close stood empty.

I waited where I was. After nearly an hour, he climbed out again, replaced the iron cover and walked away. I let him go. Following him farther would only risk the trail I had already found.

Then I returned to the institutional door, took out my mobile and photographed it. The metal plate identified it as a secured University of Edinburgh estates and research-services entrance. I photographed the door, the plate, the surrounding wall and its position in relation to the service close.

I sent the images to Graham with a brief message.

"Institutional door on the route. Possible point of interest."

His response arrived too quickly for a worried father waiting blindly for news. It was a voice message rather than a text.

"That's not the right entrance," Graham said in the same measured, unhurried voice he had used while counting my fee. "Keep looking."

I stood in the empty close with my mobile in my hand and played the message again. Not because I had missed anything, but because I wanted to hear the certainty once more.

"That's not the right entrance."

Not "I don't think that's it" or "It could be something else".

The right entrance. A specific one.

He already knew a buried site existed. What he did not know, I began to understand, was which entrance remained usable now. The institutional door was merely a landmark to eliminate. The iron cover was what he needed independently identified.

He could not simply follow the man himself without risking surveillance, institutional scrutiny or some other trail connecting him to the place. An investigator gave him distance. Plausible deniability. A witness who did not yet know what he was witnessing.

I pocketed the mobile and looked at the iron access cover.

Whatever Graham was not telling me, the man in the dark green waxed coat had descended through that iron square in the setts and later emerged from it. That was what I had.

That was what I intended to stay with.

The following night, the third and final night of surveillance, he returned to the street and descended again.

I had occupied a recessed doorway near the service close since 9.00 pm. By midnight, cold had settled into my sinuses and showed no intention of leaving. The setts were wet, though it was not raining. Cold haar and damp air from the Forth had laid a sheen over everything. My shoes were soaked through by ten.

He came around the corner at half past midnight.

The same walk. The same dark green coat. The same unhurried rhythm that should not have looked wrong, but did.

I waited until he passed my position, then left the doorway and followed, keeping approximately twenty yards behind him. That was closer than I would normally have risked, but the service close was empty enough that greater distance would itself have been conspicuous.

He went straight to the iron access cover. No hesitation. No glance along the street.

He crouched, slipped his fingers beneath the lip and lifted it as easily as something he had lifted a hundred times before. He set it aside on the wet stones and went down feet first, the waxed coat folding after him.

Then he was gone.

I gave him thirty seconds. I counted them, not because thirty seconds possesses any magic, but because I needed to be certain he was not about to reappear.

Then I crossed the close and looked into the opening.

Iron rungs had been set into the stone wall. Below them was darkness.

I could hear water. Not still water, as I first thought, but water carrying an almost imperceptible current. The sort of movement that creates its own hush when the surrounding space is large enough.

I went down.

The rungs were slick. I descended slowly, one hand braced against the wall. When my foot reached the bottom, I stood still and allowed my eyes to adjust.

There was not much to adjust to. Whatever light existed below came from a source I could not yet see, faint and ambient, the kind that forms shapes out of nothing and then withdraws them.

The ceiling was vaulted. That was the first thing I could properly make out: an arch of stone fitted against stone, old in a way the word old does not cover.

I later learnt that it formed part of a medieval stone cistern and vaulted reservoir beneath the Old Town. Standing there, I knew only that it was older than anything under which I had a right to be standing.

The air smelt of wet limestone and something else beneath it. Something for which I had no name then.

Not decay. Not exactly. More like something that had remained undisturbed for a very long time.

The cistern extended into darkness in both directions. Channels cut into the floor held about two inches of black water, moving with a current so slight that its surface appeared still until my torch caught it at the correct angle.

My footsteps did not echo so much as disappear. The stone absorbed sound like heavy cloth.

I followed the direction the man in the waxed coat had taken, or the direction I believed he had taken, keeping my torch pointed low towards the floor.

Approximately fifty yards in, the passage opened into a wider chamber. I swept the light upwards and around.

Nobody was there.

Only stone, black water and the vaulted ceiling rising beyond the reach of the beam.

I stood in the centre of the chamber and listened.

Nothing.

The man was gone. There were passages ahead and to either side that I had not yet seen, and he had taken one of them. I was not going to find him that night. That much was clear.

What was not clear was what I could see along the far wall.

Alcoves.

Eight of them, cut into the stone at regular intervals. Each was roughly the width of a person and deep enough that I could not see its back from where I stood.

I crossed the chamber slowly, stopping about ten feet away. Then I switched off the torch and remained in the darkness, because something about the way the shadows occupied those alcoves made me unwilling to announce myself.

That was when I heard it.

Low. Very low.

A sound at the bottom of hearing, the sort of frequency felt in the chest before the mind accepts it as sound. One continuous tone produced by eight voices together.

It took me a moment to understand what I was hearing because it did not sound like voices. It sounded like the structure itself vibrating. Like the stone was making it.

I crouched against the opposite wall and waited.

Forty minutes. I know because I checked my watch when I crouched and again when I finally moved.

I was not counting. I was simply remaining still, listening, watching the alcoves and making certain that what I thought I saw was what I was actually seeing.

They were breathing.

All eight of them.

Once my eyes had adjusted, I could see the shallow rise and fall. At first each breathed at an individual rate, their chests lifting and settling without relation to the others. As the drone continued, those separate rhythms began gradually to align.

I switched on the torch and moved its beam.

Every one of them followed it.

Eight pairs of eyes tracked the light as I moved it left, then right, then back again. They were conscious. Every one of them awake and watching me from within those carved stone alcoves.

I should explain what I mean when I say their bodies were wrong, because wrong is doing too much work in that sentence and still does not cover it.

You know how a face in a photograph can appear strangely asymmetrical if the light is poor or the angle is unkind. You assume the camera is responsible because no face is perfectly symmetrical, and a lens can catch someone at the wrong instant and exaggerate what is already there.

That was what I had first thought about Callum's photograph.

Camera angle. Bad light.

What I saw in those alcoves was not a camera angle.

An older, grey-haired man sat with his back against the stone. His nose occupied the wrong place on his face.

Not wrong as in broken. Not swollen. Merely positioned slightly off-centre, perhaps a centimetre towards his left cheek.

Like furniture someone had moved and not quite returned to its proper place.

A woman in the fourth alcove had a jaw that sat lower on the right than on the left. The asymmetry was too even and consistent to be structural, too ordered to be something with which she had been born.

The third alcove was sunk more deeply in shadow. A slender figure sat inside it, head angled away from the torch. I saw dark hair and the pale slope of a cheek, but not enough of the face to identify the person within.

Their features were moving.

That is the only way I can describe it accurately. Moving slowly, the way sediment moves through water when the water is almost still. Redistributing.

Not violently. Not painfully, or at least nothing in their expressions suggested pain.

Only shifting. Incrementally. Over time.

The low tone continued throughout the forty minutes I remained crouched against the wall. It sat at the lower edge of my hearing.

Somewhere around the half-hour mark, I placed it.

Its cadence matched the slow, unaccompanied Scots lament that had risen through my floorboards. Not the same song. Not the same performance. The same underlying pulse, the same spacing between its rises and falls.

I had lain above the folk pub listening to that cadence and thinking about the man in the waxed coat who sat at the back of Alastair's pub to hear music filtering through a wall.

Here it was again, far beneath the Old Town, coming from eight people who might no longer have been entirely people in the way I understood the word.

I did not know what that meant.

I still do not. Not entirely.

I filed it away and kept filing.

I did not take photographs.

I considered it. My mobile was in my pocket and the torch in my hand. I could have documented every face in those alcoves, every detail, and sent the images somewhere before climbing out.

Something stopped me. Not fear, exactly.

It was more the sense that photographing them would itself be an act against them, a decision about what they were and what should happen next. I was not ready to make that decision in the dark beneath Edinburgh with only forty minutes of observation and no understanding of what I had found.

So I left them where they were.

I retraced my route with the torch held low, climbed the slick iron rungs and emerged through the access cover onto the wet setts of the service close off Guthrie Street.

The night air struck me. I stood there for a moment, breathing it in. Cold haar, damp stone and the air drifting up from the Forth.

I had a client.

I had a report to make.

Whatever I had just seen, Graham Sutherland had hired me to find something, and I had found something. The next step was straightforward enough. I turned up my collar and started walking towards Buccleuch Street. It took perhaps twenty minutes.

Long enough for me to think about what I was going to say, which is usually a bad sign. When you need to rehearse the report, it means the report is complicated. Complicated reports come from complicated cases, and I had taken this one because I thought it was straightforward.

I had not been thinking clearly. That is my way of saying I had let the money think for me. The street was quiet when I arrived, late enough for the restaurants to have closed and early enough for the pubs not to have emptied.

There was a gap in the noise. Just my shoes on the rain-darkened setts and, somewhere above me, an open window with a television playing behind it. I found the building, found the door, rang the bell and waited. I rang again. The intercom crackled, but no voice came through.

The front door was unlocked. That should have told me something. I climbed one flight to the first floor and knocked on the flat door. Nothing.

I knocked again with the side of my fist, and the door shifted. It did not open, exactly. The latch had not fully caught. I pushed it and stepped inside, then stood in the dark with one hand on the frame.

Empty. Not empty in the way a room is empty when someone has gone out. Empty in the way a room is empty when someone has gone. There is a difference, and in this work you learn to feel it quickly.

It is in the air, somehow. The absence of accumulated smells. The way sound fails to soften when there is no furniture, no clothing and none of the general debris of living to absorb it. My footsteps came back at me from the walls. I found the switch, and the overhead bulb confirmed what I already knew.

Nothing. No furniture. No rug on the bare floorboards. No curtains at the windows, only bare poles.

I walked through to the kitchen. The worktops were clean, and the cupboards stood open and empty. The fridge was unplugged, its door propped open against the wall beside it. The way you leave a fridge when you are not coming back. I stood there and tried to work out the timing.

He had hired me a little over a week earlier. Long enough for the flat to have been stripped, but not merely cleared in haste. It had been properly stripped.

The sort of clearance that required planning. Which meant that when Graham sat opposite me and placed twelve GBP50 notes on my desk, each with the same rigid movement from his elbow because his wrist would not bend, he had already known he was leaving. He had known throughout. The warning on the back of Moira's card came back to me.

My own handwriting. I had not called her yet. I still did not know whether this was the sort of case that could not be closed any other way, or whether I was simply standing in an empty flat feeling like an idiot. Those were not the same thing. I checked the other rooms.

A bedroom with marks on the floor where a bed frame had stood. A smaller second room with nothing in it at all. A bathroom. I nearly missed it.

I was making a final pass, being thorough in the way you are when you already know there is nothing left to find, when I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror and noticed that it sat slightly proud of the wall. Not by much. A few millimetres on the left, while the right side remained flush. As though something had been pushed behind it and the mirror had not settled back into place.

I pulled it open. It was a mirrored cabinet, hinged on the right, with shelves inside for razors, aspirin and whatever else a man keeps behind his own reflection. The shelves were bare, but a photograph had been taped to the inner face of the door. I peeled it away carefully.

The tape was old, or had at least been there long enough to leave a faint residue on the glass. The photograph showed Graham Sutherland standing in the cistern. I recognised the alcoves at once: the curve of the vaulted stone, the particular colour of the walls, that dark reddish brown which is not quite the colour of anything else.

He stood beside one of the alcoves. Inside it was a figure whose face had partially collapsed inwards, not violently, but as if its centre had softened and drawn towards itself. The nose and the flesh around the mouth had pulled back like fruit left too long in a bowl. Graham was looking at the figure.

His expression... I keep returning to it because it matters. It was attentive. That is the only word that fits. He was not horrified or grieving. Nor was he detached in the way someone might become detached after seeing too much and learning to close himself off.

He was looking at the figure as a man looks at a process he is managing. The way you look at something for which you are responsible, monitoring it for progress. A date was printed in the corner: 18 September 2025.

I sat on the bathroom floor. That tells you something about the state I was in, because bathroom floors are not where you choose to sit when there are alternatives. I held the photograph and allowed the thought I had been resisting since I noticed Graham's rigid wrist to finish forming.

He had not needed anyone to find Callum. He had needed someone with no previous connection to the cistern, no knowledge of the alcoves and no reason to attract institutional attention. He could not follow the man in the dark green waxed coat himself without risking surveillance, recognition or some record linking him to the buried site. An independent private investigator gave him distance and plausible deniability.

He had needed someone to follow that deliberate walk through the Cowgate and its adjoining closes, then confirm that the iron access cover in the service close off Guthrie Street was a viable entrance. That had been the whole job. Not finding Callum. Confirming the way in.

And I had sent him the evidence he needed.

The secured University of Edinburgh estates and research-services entrance nearby had been the landmark. Graham's voicemail had said it was not the right entrance, and that process of elimination had told him that the iron cover was. More than that, the photograph I sent had automatically included a precise location pin.

Because my photographs always included location data. Habit. It prevented confusion. Graham had already known that a buried site existed. What he had lacked was an independently identified entrance which was accessible now. By establishing that the institutional door was wrong, I had confirmed that the iron cover nearby was right and handed him its exact position.

Days of work. That was what it had taken me to confirm something for a man who already knew what he was seeking and needed an outsider to discover it independently, without a trail leading back to him. I had been used. Not deceived, exactly.

He had not lied about Callum. Callum was down there. But the case I believed I was working was not the case for which he had hired me. There is a kind of lie in that, even when every individual fact is true.

I rose from the bathroom floor. My knees were stiff from the cistern and from spending forty minutes crouched on cold stone, and the floor had not helped. I went back to the kitchen. A mobile lay on the worktop.

I had passed it twice without registering it because I had been looking for absence, not presence, and it was the only thing in the flat which had not been removed. A plain handset, its screen dark. The battery was probably low. I picked it up, turned it over and put it in my jacket pocket.

I did not yet have a reason. That is the honest version. I simply was not going to leave it there. Whatever it held - communications, contacts, instructions - it connected to something which had already connected itself to me, whether I wanted that or not.

Leaving it felt like leaving something of mine behind. That was not logical. I knew it even then. I took it anyway.

I stood in the empty kitchen for another minute, the photograph in one hand as the shape of the whole thing settled over me. Graham Sutherland was gone. He had gone before I knocked. The flat had been a prop, a registered address, a place in which to hand over cash and present a story.

Now the story was finished. He had walked out of it and left me standing in the set.

I slipped the photograph into my inside breast pocket behind my notebook. I turned off the kitchen light, went downstairs and stepped back on to Buccleuch Street. The street was still quiet. The television was still playing in the window above.

I stood there for a moment on the wet pavement, thinking about eight people in stone alcoves beneath the Old Town and a man with a careful, attentive expression who had already moved on to whatever came next.

I did not return to the service close until the following night. The iron access cover was where I had left it. That sounds obvious, but it mattered. I had half expected it to be sealed, removed or altered, some sign that Graham had already swept the board clean.

It remained among the setts in the narrow close off Guthrie Street, a square of dark iron with a recessed lip. I crouched over it and listened to the street before hooking my fingers beneath the edge and pulling.

I descended more slowly than I had the night before. Not carefully, exactly. I simply was not eager to arrive.

The smell reached me first. The same mineral cold, wet stone and standing water, with something beneath it for which I still have no word.

Something biological, but not rotten. More like the smell of a place where something is growing rather than decaying. The ladder rungs were slick. I kept my weight back until my feet found the floor, then stood in the darkness for a moment before switching on my torch.

There was no tactical reason for the delay. I simply needed a second.

Then I clicked it on and swept the beam low across the floor, as I had before, keeping the light away from the alcoves until I was ready. The carved channels still carried their almost imperceptible current, about two inches of black water sliding through grooves in the stone.

The vaulted ceiling vanished above the edge of the beam. Everything was exactly as I had left it. That was the nature of the place.

Nothing there changed unless something made it change. Whatever was making it change operated on a timescale I could not see.

I moved to the far wall and began at the left-hand end. Eight alcoves.

I photographed them in order, left to right, working methodically because method was the only thing I had to offer. I held the torch steady and gave each captive enough light for the image to be clear. I did not linger. I tried not to look for too long.

The first was a middle-aged woman, I thought, though what was happening to her face made age difficult to judge. Her jaw seemed to have shifted farther since the previous night. Or perhaps the angle was different. Perhaps I was merely seeing it more clearly because I now knew what to look for.

She did not react to the light. Her eyes remained open and tracking, but the rest of her did not move. She held whatever position she had been placed in. Her breathing was so slow that I had to watch her chest for ten seconds before I was certain it rose at all.

I moved to the second alcove. An older man. His nose had migrated towards his left cheek in the way I had noticed before. His eyes followed the torch when I moved it.

That was the detail which kept catching me. All of them remained inside, behind whatever was happening to the exterior. Watching.

I moved to the third alcove from the left.

I recognised Callum Sutherland from the photograph Eilidh Fraser had given me, though it took a moment. The photograph had been taken two days before he disappeared, and five weeks had passed since then. His hair was the same, dark, and his build remained slender, but his face had progressed farther than any of the others. The right eyebrow and eye which had already sat visibly lower in Eilidh's picture had sunk farther. His features had acquired a quality of redistribution, as though someone had pressed gently upon the centre of his face and everything was moving slowly towards the edges.

His skin looked waxy and hung with a slackness skin should not have on someone of thirty-one. I raised the camera.

He turned his head. Not quickly. The movement took three or four seconds, which is a long time for a head to turn, and it did not move as though the neck were doing the work.

The impulse seemed to come from somewhere deeper, from an internal mechanism I could not name. It was like watching a compass needle find north: slow, deliberate, drawn by something other than muscle.

He turned until he was looking directly into the torch, directly at me. Then he shook his head with the same measured deliberation, once to the left, once to the right, then back to centre. He held my gaze throughout, or what remained of his gaze, those dark eyes still tracking while everything around them shifted.

I lowered the camera.

I stood looking at him for what felt like a long time. The low note produced by all eight captives was present in my chest more than in my ears, a frequency below ordinary hearing which registered as pressure. Through the floorboards of my rented room above the folk pub on the Cowgate, I had heard that drone follow the pulse of a slow unaccompanied Scots lament without understanding what it was. Standing inside it was different. It was more immediate, like standing inside the instrument rather than outside it.

Callum kept his eyes on me. The refusal seemed clear. I understood that, or believed I did. Whatever was happening in the alcoves had progressed far enough for Callum to know what he was doing.

He knew I was holding a camera. He knew what I intended to do with the image, if not precisely to whom I meant to send it. He had made his position plain in the only way still available to him. That was not a small thing.

That was agency, even now. Even in whatever state he occupied. It deserved to be taken seriously.

But I had already allowed another man's certainty to guide my hands once that week. It had ended with me in a stripped flat, holding a photograph which proved I had been used by someone three steps ahead of me.

To walk away now, acting on incomplete information because Callum had shaken his head, would mean assuming I understood what the gesture meant. Refusal, yes. But refusal of the photograph? Refusal of rescue? Acceptance of what was happening? A warning? Something for which I had no framework at all?

Treating my interpretation as certainty would only be another kind of manipulation, this time by my own ignorance rather than Graham's planning. The result would remain the same: eight people sealed in stone alcoves beneath a city, known only to a man who had already disappeared.

I raised the camera again and photographed Callum.

He did not turn away. He did not shake his head a second time. He merely held that slow, steady gaze while the shutter clicked.

I knew I might be betraying the clearest wish he could still express. I took the photograph anyway. That knowledge has never left me.

I moved to the fourth alcove and continued.

I worked through all eight. Then I stood in the centre of the cistern with the camera in my hand and looked back along the row. Eight pairs of eyes open. Eight chests which had begun by rising at their own sparse intervals, their breathing gradually drawing into alignment with the drone until they moved in one slow rhythm. Eight bodies contributing to the pressure in my sternum which was not quite sound.

I thought about what DI Moira Lennox would do when she came down there. I wondered whether her framework - incident logs, evidence procedures, chain of custody, the procurator fiscal, everything Police Scotland could bring to bear - would be adequate for what she was going to find. I genuinely did not know. I still do not.

But Moira had institutional authority, investigative resources and a legal mandate. I had eight original photographs on my own mobile, a precise location pin and a card in my jacket pocket which I had carried for two years without knowing I would need it.

I took out the card. My handwriting on the back read: Do not call unless the case cannot be closed any other way.

The card had softened at the corners from two years in my pocket. Moira's direct numbers were printed on the front, office and mobile, and I had used neither since the case which put the card in my possession. That case had been resolved in the ordinary way. This one could not be.

I held the card and looked at the eight alcoves. I thought of Callum's slow refusal and Graham's attentive expression in the hidden photograph. The process underway in those stone chambers had been running for at least fourteen months, as the photograph dated 18 September 2025 proved, and probably much longer. Graham had already taken steps to preserve it while removing himself from view.

The card remained in my hand. I entered Moira's mobile number into Graham's handset, not mine.

That is the detail I return to when I think about how I handled the next few minutes. I was standing in darkness at the bottom of a medieval cistern, sending photographs of eight people whose faces were slowly redistributing themselves across their skulls, and I was using a mobile which belonged to the man who had arranged or managed the process.

There is something almost funny in that, if you are the sort of person who finds such things funny. I am not, particularly, but I noticed it.

The signal was weak. One bar, sometimes none. Earlier, I had walked around the chamber holding the phone up and trying different angles, as people do in places with poor reception. It is foolish and rarely helps, but people do it anyway.

Near the secondary passage at the far end of the cistern, the signal held at two bars. It was not good, but it was workable. I returned to that spot with the phone and Moira's card in my hands, the torch clamped beneath my arm and pointing at the ceiling, and began to send.

Eight photographs, one face in each. I sent them separately because I did not trust the connection to survive a group message.

I watched every image upload, the progress bar advancing with a slow, grinding reluctance which felt longer than it should have and probably was. The chamber held no sounds but the near-still current and the low tone the captives continued to produce.

I tried not to think about how clearly I could feel it from where I stood, that continuous cadence on the threshold where sound becomes something heard through the ribs rather than the ears.

After the photographs, I sent the location pin. Nothing else. No explanation before or after.

I stared at the empty message field and tried to find words which might help Moira understand what she was approaching.

Nothing I could write would do that without also doing things I did not want done. It would connect my name to the site and explain how I had come to stand there. It would give her a trail through Graham, the empty flat on Buccleuch Street, three nights watching Alastair Boyd's pub on the Cowgate, and the photograph of a missing man whose right eyebrow and eye had already begun to sink.

All of that was mine to carry, not hers. Or that was what I told myself.

I sent the location pin and watched the status change to delivered. I waited several seconds to make certain it did not fail.

Then I crouched by the water channel at the base of the wall. I pushed Graham's handset beneath the shallow black water and wedged it under a loose stone. The screen lit once below the surface, a pale rectangle in the darkness, then went black.

I watched the spot for a moment. The water was only about two inches deep, and the current was so slight that the phone would remain where I had put it unless someone found it.

Moira's people might recover it if they searched carefully, and they might retrieve fragments of whatever it contained. But immersion and delay could destroy Graham's communications, contacts and instructions. They could erase his voicemail to me: "That is not the right entrance. Keep looking."

That was the point, and it was also the cost. I knew both when I forced it beneath the stone.

I want to be clear about that. I was not confused about what I was trading away. The handset was the one physical object which placed Graham in direct contact with the case. It might also have helped Moira understand what sort of man she was looking for, whom he had spoken to and what he had been doing for at least fourteen months.

I damaged it anyway because protecting him from scrutiny also protected me. Alerting the police while destroying potentially useful evidence was not principled. It was fear dressed as evidence handling, and I knew it.

The alternative was to hand Moira a thread which ran directly back to me, and I was not ready to stand at the end of it. Not then. Perhaps not ever.

That is not a clean thing to admit about yourself.

I found the secondary passage more by touch than sight, crouching low and moving along the far wall until the stone opened into a narrower channel which climbed gently towards the surface. It was barely four feet high. I had noticed it on my earlier entry and filed it away, the way you do in an unfamiliar place when you want to know your exits.

An old habit. The kind which becomes automatic after enough years spent entering places where you are not meant to be and sometimes needing to leave them faster than you arrived.

The passage was so tight that I had to remove my jacket and carry it, dragging myself forwards on my forearms. I held the torch between my teeth.

The stone smelled of old water and something beneath that. Mineral, cold, the smell of things sealed away from air for so long that they have not entirely adjusted to being opened again. It was not unpleasant. Merely old. The sort of old which makes you feel like a very recent development.

After approximately fifty yards, the passage opened on to worn stone steps. They rose to a service grille near George IV Bridge. I pushed the grille outwards and climbed into the city before dawn.

The air struck me first, cold and moving, carrying damp and a trace of haar drifting up from the Forth. Edinburgh at that hour smelled of old stone, distant bread and rain, with something faintly electrical beneath it which I have never been able to identify.

I stood on the wet setts, pulled my jacket on and looked towards George IV Bridge, the Royal Mile beyond it and the dark shape of Edinburgh Castle against the paling sky. For a moment I did not move.

I was not returning to the rented room above the folk pub on the Cowgate.

The thought had been with me since Buccleuch Street, since I stood in Graham's empty bathroom holding the photograph from behind the mirror and understood what the case had really been. My private investigator's licence was registered to that room. Graham had known the address since the first night. I had given it to him myself.

The way you give a client your contact details. The way you do without thinking because, at that point, he is only a retired deputy head with a rigid wrist, a missing son and twelve GBP50 notes.

He had possessed the address for days. He had had time to do whatever he wished with it.

And Moira might trace the anonymous report. Not inevitably, and perhaps not quickly, but CCTV, location data, phone records, licensing records or her recognition of my methods could eventually lead her back to me. She was good at her job. That was one reason I had chosen her.

It was also why I could not be at the registered address if she arrived.

The licence was gone. The room was gone.

Both things had been true from the moment I pushed Graham's handset under the water. Perhaps earlier. Perhaps from the moment I followed the man in the dark green waxed coat through the iron access cover and saw what occupied the alcoves.

Some decisions close doors behind them without making a sound.

I chose a direction and began to walk. Not towards anything in particular. Simply away from the service grille and George IV Bridge.

Standing still served no purpose, and in the silence of that hour movement felt like the only honest response. The setts were slick with haar and rain. My shoes were wet through before I reached the Cowgate.

I did not have much with me. My jacket. The eight original photographs on my own mobile. Moira Lennox's card, which I had kept through some reflex I cannot explain. And the photograph from behind Graham's bathroom mirror, still in my inside pocket and slightly bent where I had folded it badly in the dark.

I walked.

The city was beginning to make its first noises. A shutter being raised somewhere. A motorbike two streets away. A bird high above the roofs which had decided the darkness was close enough to finished.

I had no destination. That was acceptable. A destination was a problem for a few hours later, and those hours were distant enough that I did not yet have to face them.

The steps beside Greyfriars Kirk were cold through my trousers. They were not smooth. Centuries of feet had worn them into shallow, irregular hollows which fitted no particular human body. I found a place near the bottom where the stone projected far enough to sit without sliding, lowered myself on to it and watched the Old Town wake.

That is the honest version. I sat because my legs were finished and I had nowhere else to be.

A woman in a yellow coat crossed the road carrying a shopping bag and looking at nothing. A cyclist cut past at an angle and vanished towards the Royal Mile. The light was that particular early-morning grey which is not quite dawn but has ceased to be night. It made everything look provisional, as if the city were still deciding what shape to take.

I had been underground long enough for the open sky to feel wrong. There was too much of it. I kept noticing it above the roofline, then looking away.

The first visitors appeared when the light began to warm. A couple in matching jackets, carrying a camera expensive enough to make wandering through Edinburgh before dawn seem unwise.

They photographed Greyfriars Kirk. Then the kirkyard gate. Then each other in front of the gate. One photographed the other photographing the church, and I watched for longer than I should have because there was something in it I could not quite name.

Not irony. Not stupidity. Just that particular human need to document the fact of having been somewhere. To prove that it happened.

I thought about Callum shaking his head.

It was not the first time. I had thought about it ever since climbing out through the service grille near George IV Bridge, and I had reached no new conclusion.

The movement had been slow, like everything he did now. His neck had turned under the influence of whatever internal mechanism had begun to replace the ordinary work of muscle and nerve. But the intention behind it had seemed clear. That was the part I kept returning to. Not the movement itself, but its clarity.

He had looked at the torch. He had understood what I was and what I represented. Then he had said no, deliberately and without visible distress.

That might mean he understood exactly what was happening and had made peace with it. Or it might mean he understood and believed that whatever came next was preferable to what Police Scotland would do when they arrived. It might have meant something else entirely.

I could not tell. I am still uncertain whether the distinction matters, or whether it is a distinction I was ever qualified to make.

More visitors arrived. Four younger people with their mobiles out before they had stopped walking. One crouched to photograph the rain-darkened setts from a low angle, which I understood. The setts around Greyfriars and the kirkyard gate are worth photographing.

I had noticed them during my first week in Edinburgh, before they became merely the surface beneath my feet.

My investigator's licence was registered to the room above the folk pub. Past tense, in every practical sense, even if the paperwork had not caught up. Moira might trace the anonymous images to that address through Graham's handset, street cameras, the pub's records or simply her knowledge of how I worked. She was methodical. She always had been.

The room was already lost. I had known that when I chose not to return. What I had not worked out was what came after it.

I had my jacket, the photographs on my mobile, Moira's card and the image from behind Graham Sutherland's bathroom mirror. The last remained in my inside pocket, slightly bent. I had not looked at it since the cistern. I did not take it out then.

Graham had disappeared before I found the empty flat. He had obtained everything he needed from me: confirmation of the iron access cover, the location pin and the photograph of the secured university entrance which established it as the wrong route and revealed that the street-level approach was observable.

Then he had moved on to whatever came next.

I had been a tool created for one purpose, and that purpose was complete. Ignorance did not alter what I had done. I had spent days locating a current entrance to a place where eight people were confined in circumstances for which I had no language, and I had handed that information to the man managing their confinement.

The couple in matching jackets moved away. A family took their place: two adults and a child who immediately began climbing the steps. The parents allowed this until the child reached the third step, then changed their minds. The child sat on that step in protest.

I recognised the logic of it.

The warning on Moira's card - "Do not call unless the case cannot be closed any other way" - had been written to protect her, not me. Two years earlier, the case which introduced us had ended in a way that made further contact professionally awkward for her. The note was my acknowledgement of that, a reminder not to drag her into matters which were not hers.

During the night I had used it to justify dragging her into something which was very much not hers. I had done so without an explanation, without context and without the information which might have helped her understand what she was walking towards.

Whether that was right was another question without a clean answer.

The case was closed in the only sense in which I could close it. I had found Callum. I had found the other seven. I had reported their location to the only authority available to me.

Graham had hired me to confirm an entrance, and I had confirmed it. Then I had turned that confirmation into another kind of report and sent it somewhere he could not intercept.

Whether one act balanced the other was not a calculation I could make objectively, and I knew it. I sat on the cold stone and tried anyway.

The light had turned fully golden, the sort of morning light which makes old stone appear to generate warmth from within. The streets were filling steadily: more visitors, locals passing with the purposeful stride of people who had somewhere to be, and a man setting up a small table near the kirkyard gate with what looked like postcards.

The city was doing what cities do. It continued regardless.

Somewhere beneath the streets, in stone chambers older than the lives moving above them, eight people were breathing. Moira had the images and the location pin. She would understand what she found or she would not, and either way she would do what her office and the law required.

Whatever happened next was no longer something I could influence.

Callum had shaken his head. I had photographed him anyway.

I remained on the steps after that thought, not because sitting there was useful, but because getting up required a decision about where to go. I was not ready to make one.

The child had been retrieved by its parents and was being carried towards a cafe whose staff had begun putting out chairs. The postcard seller was doing slow business. A pigeon landed two steps below me, regarded me with the complete indifference pigeons have developed over centuries of coexisting with people who have nowhere to be, then departed.

The question of whether I had done right by Callum, or by the other seven, remained open.

I did not expect it to close. Some questions are like that. They do not resolve. They simply become part of the furniture.

Something you carry with you for the rest of your life without ever finding anywhere it makes sense to put it.

Eventually, I stood and straightened my jacket. The photograph I had found behind the bathroom mirror shifted in my inside pocket, its bent corner catching on the lining.

The city was already busy enough for me to walk in any direction and disappear into it. That was what I needed, and that was what I did.