If you asked cat thomas on ten separate occasions why she moved to Edinburgh she would have been able to give you a different answer each time. A yearning for a different climate, after spending most of her life in Florida. A cooling of UK house prices, owing partly to Britain’s decision to leave the EU. The strength of the US dollar against the pound sterling. A sudden influx of inheritance money, on top of the savings she had been accruing for nearly twenty years. Family tensions and a legacy of failed relationships. A certain dismay at the intellectual and political climate in her home country. And, on a very practical level, her ability to gain UK residency thanks to her late mother’s birth in Inverness.
But three reasons stood out. The first related to her job at a Miami bank and a routine fraud investigation that had evolved into something much larger and more sinister. When her life was repeatedly threatened by an organised crime syndicate – dead animals on her doorstep, spray-painted warnings on her car – Cat had defied the advice of senior management and resolved to remain in Florida until court proceedings were complete. But then, once the guilty parties were sentenced (some with serious jail time), she opted to relocate for her own safety to another country.
The second reason related to her overheated brain and the need to retreat and reassemble in a fresh environment. The chaos of the previous three years – coordinating the investigation, her subsequent legal obligations and the care of her ailing father – cried out for new scenery, new horizons, new minutiae, and the overwhelming distraction of setting herself up a new home.
The third reason – and the one Cat was most willing to share, particularly with Scots themselves – sprang from her long-time fascination with all things Scottish and her particular passion for its capital city. She’d first been taken to Edinburgh, where her mother’s uncle was a prestigious civil engineer, at the impressionable age of eight. Already advanced for her tender years, with a field of vision that was unusually discriminating, she instantly fell in love with the sooty sandstone, the crowstepped gables, the cobblestones (actually setts, her uncle explained grandly), the elegant crescents and sloping streets of the New Town, the maze of lanes and bridges in the Old Town, and the general air of perpetual twilight that pervaded at the time of her visit (early December). She boldly declared, to the amusement of all present, that she was going to purchase a home there one day – preferably a Georgian terrace-house like that of her uncle, in some fashionable street like Inverleith Row (where her uncle lived), with a conservatory out back where she could read the morning paper over freshly brewed tea (as her uncle did), before taking a dog (a Border Terrier, like her uncle’s) on a bracing walk down one of the tree-flanked bicycle paths that crisscrossed the north of the city (just as her uncle liked to do on his morning constitutionals).
Management in Miami made noises about wanting to retain her in the US, in any city of her choice, but having reached the age of thirty-five Cat was determined to fulfil her dreams while she had a chance. So the bank, ‘sad to lose such a fine operator’, had duly arranged her transfer-in-principle to its sister institution, the venerable Alba Banking Company, or ABC, headquartered in Edinburgh.
For three months Cat studied the real estate websites, collated a list of properties that suited her dreams and her means (as it happened, terrace houses in Inverleith Row were at least one zero outside her budget), and commissioned a relocation agent in Edinburgh to check out these places in person and compile a list of her own recommendations. Then she flew into Scotland, in glorious blossom-infused April, to make her all-important decision.
Everything went remarkably smoothly. As soon as she stepped out of the airport Cat was greeted by the relocation agent, a bubbly mother of three called Janine, who over the next two days whisked her around Edinburgh in a battered silver Vauxhall. They visited ten properties altogether, including a spacious duplex apartment in a converted schoolhouse in Danderhall (superb and under budget, though Cat feared it might be prohibitively expensive to heat); three top-floor flats in the New Town (each with its own charms and deficiencies); a tiny pied-à-terre in the Old Town (there wasn’t enough room to swing a kitten, let alone a cat); a well-appointed second-floor place, owned by a widowed surveyor, in the charming riverside suburb of Colinton (the relocation agent warned that it was a little far from the nearest supermarket); a sliver-thin terrace house in the eclectic area of Leith (Cat was alarmed by the sight of beer bottles spilling over the top of a neighbour’s wheelie-bin); and an eccentric old residence, formerly a potter’s studio, that had everything going for it except for openable windows and a functioning bathroom (it was also disturbingly close to a traffic-clogged arterial road).
In the end it came down to two choices. Cat’s favourite was a two-bedroom flat in an incredible keep-like building in so-called Dean Village, a sleepy enclave set in a picturesque gorge half a mile from the city centre. Built in the late 1700s as a sort of office block for the various millers, skinners and tanners that once operated in the area, the building’s sandstone walls were three feet thick. The ivy-covered façade was abutted by a spiral stairway, fully enclosed, that was like something out of a Robin Hood movie. Both bedrooms – large and small – faced onto a leafy quadrangle where traffic was minimal. There was a burbling little river, the Water of Leith, just eighty metres away. A private garden across the road. Even a designated parking space directly outside the front door.
The second property was a basement flat, under a dental surgery, in an elegant Georgian tenement in Dundas Street. Cat enjoyed the idea of living huddled away and out of sight. She especially liked the idea that the dental surgery would (presumably) be unoccupied overnight. And since the owner’s asking price was considered ‘a real steal’ by the relocation agent, Cat was getting ready to pounce when the owner of the flat in Dean Village suddenly announced that she was willing to lower her own price to something not dissimilar – an incredible bargain by any measure.
Scarcely believing her luck, Cat instructed her Scottish solicitor, an easy-going fellow called Stuart, to accept the fresh price immediately.
The sale, however, proved unbearably suspenseful. Stuart put in an offer that was ten thousand pounds lower than the already reduced price. Cat’s misgivings – she was a virgin to Scottish real estate protocols but thought it never wise to look a gift horse in the mouth – were only exacerbated when there came news that an eagle-eyed ‘other party’ had sprung out of the woodwork with a last-minute competing offer. Cat reminded Stuart that she was perfectly willing to pay the full price but the solicitor was adamant: ‘Don’t worry, this place has been on the market for a year. It’s just a ploy, trust me – the “other party” doesn’t exist.’
Cat wasn’t so sure. She had no patience for financial games. And she hated the prospect of missing out. But, as a stranger in a strange land, she figured it was best to shut up. So she spent three torturous days pacing restlessly around the city, trying to ‘keep calm and carry on’. A score of times, just to assure herself it wasn’t some sort of Brigadoon-like mirage, she negotiated the steep inclines down into Dean Village, dreading the prospect of finding the FOR SALE – UNIT 5 sign removed from the railings outside ‘her’ building.
But then, on the afternoon of her fifth day in Edinburgh, while standing pensively atop the Salisbury Crags, she received a call from Stuart: ‘Congratulations! You now own a tiny piece of Scotland.’
Cat was incredulous. ‘They accepted the offer?’
‘I got another three thousand off in the end.’
‘Really? It was as easy as that?’
‘I told you the other buyer didn’t exist. Go get yourself a whisky.’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘An Appletiser, then.’
Poised on the clifftop, with her coat flapping about her, Cat pocketed her phone and stared over the rooftops of the sunlit city, trying to exult, like Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, from the precipice of a momentous and thrilling future. But at just that moment a cloud curtained the sun, Edinburgh fell into deep shadow, and she was lanced by a brief but disorientating feeling of portent.
It was Friday, 28 April.