The Fanatic

‘This is probably a stupid question,’ said Jackie, when he told her his problem, ‘but why do you have to have a ghost anyway? Surely you can do the tour without one.’

‘Sure I can, Jackie, but a ghost tour without a ghost …? Come on. Look, in the main season we do three tours a day. The one in the afternoon doesn’t need a ghost, it’s broad daylight and it tends to be more, how can I put it, historical. Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox, Bonnie Prince Charlie, that kind of stuff. The six o’clock tour doesn’t need a ghost either: it’s still daylight, and it caters for the fat Yanks who are about to hurry back to their hotels for the usual haggis and bagpipes tartan extravaganza that’s laid on for them there. The tour is just an hors d’oeuvre. BPC features heavily again. But the nine o’ clock tour – that’s different. That’s the cream of ghost tours. It starts’ – his voice dropped and assumed an exaggerated tremor – ‘as the night draws in, and ends in darkness. The people who come on this tour expect a ghost. Some of them have been drinking all evening. They’re in high spirits. They’re Swedish inter-railers and rowdy English students and gobsmacked Australian backpackers. I charge extra for this tour. There are little tricks and hidden delights in store for the people who come on it. One of them is a ghost. I must have a ghost.’

‘You must have a ghost,’ Jackie repeated. She was looking past his shoulder towards the door. ‘How about him over there, then?’

Hugh half-turned to look. A tall, slightly stooping man had just come in. He reached the bar in three long strides that seemed almost liquid in their execution, or as if he were treading through shallow water and the splashes of each step were left for a moment in the space where his foot had just been. He was over six feet, skinny and gaunt, his face so white you’d think he’d just walked through a storm of flour. He was almost bald apart from a few wild bursts of hair above the ears. He ordered a pint and while it was being poured stared grimly into space, seeming to aim his gaze along the length of his nose. Hugh Hardie was transfixed.

‘He’s perfect. My God, he’s perfect. You’re absolutely right, Jackie.’

‘He’s not the ghost to solve your problems. He’s out of my past.’

‘You mean to say you actually know this person?’

‘Sure. Haven’t seen him for years, right enough. We were at the uni together.’

‘This is uncanny. Quick, call him over.’

‘Now just hold on a minute. Like I said, I’ve not seen him for ages. I’m not sure that I want to renew the acquaintance.’

‘Don’t be sulky, Jackie. Get him over and we’ll toast your alma mater. Why ever not?’

‘Well, to be honest, he’s a bit weird. He was a postgraduate when I was doing final year Honours. He sat in on a course I was doing – First World War or something. The guy running the course was supervising his PhD. But he dropped out – never finished it as far as I know.’

‘Shame,’ said Hugh. ‘Get him over, won’t you?’

‘Wait, I said. He was weird. Gave me the creeps.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re just writing him a great CV. He has got something, hasn’t he? To look at, I mean. That woman over there can’t stop checking him out. He’s disturbing her. Don’t you see?’

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ said Jackie. ‘All the women in the class felt the same. You tried to avoid his eye. Not that he actually ever did anything, you understand.’

‘Some people have that, don’t they? That amazing ability to upset other people just by being themselves. They don’t have to do anything.’

The old men, who had glanced at the man when he came in, had not paid him any attention since. Hugh, who made his living by exploiting how different people reacted to what they saw, noticed this and liked it. The old men were never going to be his customers. Jackie and the tourist were the ones who mattered, and they had the right responses. The barman, who probably saw the guy regularly, wasn’t bothered by him. The student seemed to have fallen asleep.

‘What’s his name?’ Hugh asked.

Jackie shook her head.

‘It’s all right, I won’t shout it out or anything. I won’t embarrass you.’

‘Carlin,’ she said. ‘Alan, I think. No, Andrew. Andrew Carlin.’

‘Andrew!’ shouted Hugh. The others in the bar stared at him, and the student woke with a jerk. ‘Andrew Carlin! Over here!’

‘You bastard,’ said Jackie.

‘Sorry,’ said Hugh. ‘No gain without pain.’

Carlin sat with a quarter-pint in front of him, and said nothing. Hardie had jumped up to buy him a drink as soon as the one he had was less than half full. ‘Less than half full, rather than more than half empty, that’s the kind of guy I am,’ said Hardie jovially and without a trace of irony. ‘What is that, eighty shilling?’ Carlin looked at him without expression, and nodded once. When Hardie went to the bar, there was an awkward silence between the other two. Jackie had been badgered earlier by Hugh into reminiscing about the class she and Carlin had both attended. The responses from Carlin had been monosyllabic. Now she tried a different tack.

‘So what have you been up to since I saw you last? It must be, what, six years? I mind you gave up on the PhD. Can’t say I blame you, I was scunnered of History after one degree. Well, maybe not scunnered, just tired.’

‘Aye,’ said Carlin. He gazed at her. She wasn’t sure if he was merely acknowledging what she’d said or agreeing with it. She was aware again of the piercing stare that had been so oppressive in the class, and lowered her eyes. Even as she did so she felt she’d conceded a small victory to him. She made herself look back up, and found him off guard, and saw something she hadn’t expected. A woundedness? Damage? Fear? She couldn’t tell.

‘Six years, I’d say,’ said Carlin. ‘Mair or less. Whit I’ve been up tae: this and that.’

Jackie thought, Christ, is he on something? She wished Hugh would hurry up.

‘Are you working?’ she asked.

‘In whit sense?’

‘You know, in a working sense. In a job sense.’ She felt herself growing angry at him. She wasn’t a wee undergraduate any more, she ought not to be intimidated by his weirdness.

‘Na,’ he said, ‘no in that sense.’

Hardie returned. ‘There you go, mate, get that down you,’ he said chummily. Jackie cringed. Carlin shifted the new pint behind the unfinished one but otherwise said nothing.

‘Have you got a job at the moment, Andrew?’ Hardie asked.

‘She jist asked me that.’

‘Oh, has she been filling you in then?’

‘Has she been filling me in? I don’t think so.’

‘I’ve got a job for someone who needs a bit of extra cash,’ said Hardie. ‘The pay’s not great but the work’s steady and there’s not much to it. I think it would really suit you.’

More than you might bargain for, Jackie thought, you’ll end up with corpses all over the Old Town.

‘I run these ghost tours, okay? Three a day, seven days a week. The last one of the day, that’s a bit special. I charge the punters more for it and it always sells out. Well, it does in the summer anyway. It’s a bit of fun, but a bit scary too, right? Plus we do some special effects in the half-light. That’s where you come in. If you’re interested.’

Carlin inclined his head. He might have been encouraging Hugh Hardie to continue or he might have been falling asleep.

‘I need someone to play the part of a ghost. As soon as you came through that door, before Jackie even said she knew you, isn’t that right Jackie, I said you were perfect. You see, you look like someone. A guy called Major Weir, the Wizard of the West Bow. Have you heard of him?’

Carlin shook his head. When he spoke his voice was slow and toneless. ‘Is he like, real? A real person?’

‘Oh, definitely. Was real, yeah, for sure. Basically he and his sister Grizel, well, they were kind of Puritans, you know, the tall black hat brigade, Bible-thumping Calvinists.’

‘I ken whit Puritans are,’ said Carlin.

‘Good. Great. Well, anyway, one day they got found out. They were complete hypocrites. Satanists, I guess. They used to meet up with the Devil and stuff. And they were shagging each other. Grizel – isn’t that a brilliant name? – was kind of out of it, she was just a crazy old woman, but Major Weir, he was a baad guy. Not only did he shag his sister, he shagged cows and anything else that moved.’ Hardie broke off. ‘Of course, I’m paraphrasing. We don’t put it quite like this on the tour.’

‘I should think not,’ said Jackie. ‘Is this the man you want Andrew to impersonate? I take it he doesn’t have to be too realistic’ She didn’t understand herself: one minute she was disturbed by Carlin, the next she felt he needed protecting. She noticed how he sat: hunched, or coiled. When Hugh’s expansive gestures got too close, he seemed to shrink back. And yet this was less like a timid reaction than like, say, the natural movement of a reed in the wind.

‘No,’ Hugh said, ‘for the purposes of the tour, our ghost just does a bit of straightforward spookery. Appears suddenly at the ends of closes, that kind of thing. The Major got burnt for witchcraft and for years after that people were supposed to see him in the Old Town, round where Victoria Street now is and down the Cowgate, so that’s what we’ve got him doing – revisiting his old haunts, ha ha! I supply all the props – cloak, staff and wig. Oh, and a rat, but I’ll tell you about that later. If you’re interested I’ll walk you through the part. On location, as it were. So, waddya think?’

‘Every night?’ said Carlin.

‘Yeah, but if you can’t manage the occasional night that’s okay, as long as I know in advance. It’s only an hour and a half. How about it?’

‘Whit’s the pay?’

‘Fiver a night. I know it’s not much, but for an hour or so, hey, that’s not a bad rate these days. Well above the minimum wage, if there was one. Oh, and nothing to come off it either. Cash in hand, thirty-five quid every week, no questions asked. Are you on benefit? Forget I said that. Waddya think?’

Carlin finally drained his first pint and started on the second. ‘It’s a commitment,’ he said after a while. ‘Every night, like.’

‘Well, as I said, if you can’t make it sometimes, we can negotiate. Get a stand-in. But I need someone to start straight away, and believe me, you’d be great for the part. Look, I’ll tell you what. Here’s an incentive: if you do it seven nights a week without missing one, I’ll round the cash up to forty quid. If you miss a night, you only get paid for the nights you work. That’s pretty fair, isn’t it?’

Jackie snorted and Hugh Hardie gave her what she assumed was supposed to be a withering glance. Some long and complicated process seemed to be going on in Carlin’s brain. Eventually he said, ‘I’m no sure.’

‘What aren’t you sure about? Talk to me, Andrew.’

‘The haill idea. It’s no the money. It’s the idea.’

Hardie made a shrugging gesture. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

‘Well, that’s whit I’m no sure aboot. This guy Major Weir. You jist packaged him up in ten seconds and haund it him ower. Life’s no like that. I mean, d’ye ken whit ye’re daein wi him?’

‘He’s just a character, that’s all.’

‘You said he was real.’

‘Well, yeah, but he’s been dead three hundred years. Now he’s just a character. A “real character”, you might say.’ Hardie laughed a little nervously. ‘Anyway, we take the people round the places he lived in, tell them about the past. Not just him, Burke and Hare, Deacon Brodie, all that stuff. I’ll take you on the route and you can see for yourself what we do with him, as you put it.’

‘That’d be guid,’ said Carlin. ‘I would need tae know, ken.’

‘Look,’ said Hugh, ‘I haven’t got time to show you the ropes if you’re not going to take the job. I need you to start this week. Tonight if possible. Tomorrow definitely. So, come on, how about it? Meet at the Heart of Midlothian at, say, eleven tomorrow morning and take it from there, eh?’

Carlin drank more of his pint. ‘And I’m like him, am I?’ he said.

‘The spitting image,’ said Hugh Hardie.

‘Show me the ropes then,’ Carlin said. ‘When I’m sure, I might no dae it. But I’ll dae it while I’m no sure aboot it.’

Although this was delivered in the same flat monotone, Hardie interpreted it as a joke of some sort and laughed loudly. Maybe it was relief. ‘Brilliant!’ he said, raising his glass. ‘Slàinte.’

Carlin didn’t respond. Jackie Halkit, raising her own drink instinctively, noticed that his glass, which only a couple of minutes ago had been almost full, was now down to the dregs. She hadn’t been aware of him drinking in the interim.

‘So what about the book, Jackie?’ Hardie turned and asked. ‘Is it a project?’

‘If you make it one,’ she said. She was aware of Carlin swivelling on his stool, standing up. Maybe he’s going to buy a round, she thought, and laughed into herself. She dragged her mind back to answering Hugh’s question. ‘As far as I’m concerned, at this point in space and time, no, it isn’t,’ she said.

‘Great,’ said Hardie. ‘It’s inspiring to work with you too.’ For a moment she thought he was angry at her, but then he gave her that winning smile. She had a sudden image of herself, seated in a pub late one afternoon, her consciousness being worked over by two men, both of whom intrigued her though she found them, for different reasons, slightly repellent. She felt she needed to get out in the sunlight.

‘Hey,’ Hugh said, ‘maybe I could get him to write it. Being a historian and everything.’

She brought herself back. ‘Where is he?’ she asked Hugh. Carlin had disappeared.

‘Gone for a slash, I assume,’ said Hugh. But at the end of five minutes, and after Hugh had been on a scouting expedition to the toilet, it became clear that Carlin had left the pub.

‘Fucking marvellous!’ said Hugh. ‘I mean, what’s that all about? Is he going to do it? Did we make arrangements? I don’t even know where the guy lives. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Jackie.’

‘Perfect for the part, I think you said. Don’t expect any sympathy from me, you rat. I did try to warn you.’

‘But he is perfect. I really want him scaring the shit out of my tourists. Do you not know where he lives?’

‘No. And I don’t want to either. But you did make arrangements, even if they didn’t seem very definite to you. That’s one of the things I mind about him, you only needed to say something once and it lodged, it stuck there in his head and he never forgot it.

‘One time when I was a student, someone sort of half-suggested we all go for a drink after the last class before we went home for Christmas, in Sandy Bell’s it was supposed to be, but it never came to anything, people just sloped off in different directions muttering cheerios. But then a couple of the girls caught up with me and said, Come on, let’s get pissed, so we did, just the three of us, we hit the Royal Mile and had a right laugh.

‘We all stayed in different flats over in Marchmont, so we were heading that way at the end of the evening and one of them says, Right, in here quick, one for the road before we get raped across the Meadows, and it was Sandy Bell’s, and would you believe it, the bastard was in there, cool as you like, propping up the bar listening to the folkies, and he turns to us and says. Well, I thought yous were never going to show. And we had a round but the fun had gone out of us like balloons, we just all stood around in a circle watching each other drink, him with his eyes on us all the time, and then he walked with us home across the Meadows cause he stayed up in Bruntsfield somewhere. I tell you, we were all that freaked we had to lie we all stayed in the same street cause none of us wanted to be the last one alone with him.’

‘Now that’s scary,’ said Hugh Hardie. ‘Creeps that hang around all night on the basis of a throwaway suggestion. I hate that kind of no-hoper stuff. But you can’t get away from it, he’s an ideal match for Major Weir. They might have been made for each other. So, Heart of Midlothian at eleven, was that what we agreed? Do you think he’ll show?’

‘Unless he’s changed in six years,’ said Jackie. ‘Which I don’t think. Seems to me he just got weirder than he was already. You turn up there on time, I’ll bet he’s waiting on you.’

Their glasses were empty. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got stuff to do tonight.’

‘What stuff?’

‘Lassies’ stuff. You know, cleaning the bath, reducing the ironing pile, that kind of everyday homely stuff.’

‘God. Glad I’m not a lassie. Sure you don’t want another?’

‘No thanks, Hugh. But – and I know this is going to sound pathetically girlie too – what I would appreciate is if you’d just get me down the street a wee bit. I’ve got this feeling about Andrew Carlin. I don’t want him following me home or anything.’

‘Come on,’ said Hardie, looking at his watch. ‘Six o’ clock. It’s kind of early for stalking.’ Then he saw that she wasn’t joking. ‘Yeah, sure, no problem. Where do you stay again?’

‘New Town,’ she said. ‘Just chum me a block or two, if you don’t mind.’

‘I’d chum you all the way,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to have to do some haunting tonight, I guess, so I’d better go home too, get myself organised. The traffic’ll have died down a bit by now, though, I’ll flag you a taxi.’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. It’s just – seeing him again.’

Out on the street they had to negotiate past a drunk man coming towards them. He lurched at Hugh, who put a hand out defensively to prevent him falling into his arms. The raincoat slid greasily under his palm.

‘Dae I no ken ye fae somewhere?’ said the drunk man. He looked old; his jaw bristled with sharp white hairs and was shiny wet with slavers.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hardie, easing him back. He sidestepped to the left but the drunk man miraculously matched his footwork with a neat shuffle and blocked his path again.

‘Let me pit it anither wey. Dae you no ken me fae somewhere?’

Jackie burst out laughing.

‘Whit’s she findin sae bluidy funny?’

‘Nothing,’ said Hugh. ‘Look, I definitely don’t know you.’ The man looked intently up into his face. ‘Why do you think I would know you?’

‘Christ, I don’t know,’ said the drunk man. ‘Thought I’d seen ye before. Thing is, I was kinna hopin ye’d ken me. Cause I don’t have a fuckin clue whae I am.’

This time he moved first, gliding around Hardie’s static figure like a winger of the old school of Scottish football, a wee ugly knot of accidental perfection. He hauled off into the gathering evening, swearing profusely.

Jackie was still smiling when they reached Nicolson Street. ‘It’s okay,’ she told Hugh, ‘I don’t know what got into me. I’ll be fine from here. But thanks anyway’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well, see you around. Come on the tour some time.’

I’ll do that,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’ Then she was away, across at the lights, still wondering if he’d expect her to pay for a ticket.

Andrew Carlin was the kind of man that might slip between worlds, if such a thing were possible. He inhabited his days like a man in a dream, or like a man in other people’s dreams.

There were three mirrors in Carlin’s place: one in the bathroom, one on the door of an old wardrobe that stood against the wall of the lobby, and one over the fireplace in the front room, which doubled as his bedroom. This was an old, ornately gilt-framed mirror, mottled at the edges, and with a buckle in it that produced a slightly distorting wave in the glass. It was like a mirror that hadn’t had the courage to go the whole bit and join a travelling show, where it could turn those who looked in it into fully-fledged grotesques.

This was the mirror Carlin talked with, mostly. It had once been his mother’s. It was flanked by two heavy brass candlesticks, which he had also inherited from her. In his parents’ house the mirror and the candlesticks had been crammed onto a shelf among the bric-a-brac and debris that his mother couldn’t stop snapping up in charity shops. She would come home laden with bargains and they’d have to eat beans for the rest of the week. When his father died it got worse. From the age of fourteen Carlin missed the dogged, watchful presence that had balanced the magpie frenzy of his mother. The only time he benefited from her obsession was when he first got the flat in Edinburgh, a tiny conversion on the top floor of a tenement in a street that was too near the canal to be really Bruntsfield. It was cheap enough to rent on his own, but came with a minimum of furnishings. She sorted out a few items for him – dishes and jugs and ornamental vases, most of which he sold on to junk shops or returned to charity. His mother never came to see him, so would never miss what he got rid of.

The mirror was one of the things he liked and held onto. When she died some years later and he cleared the house, he put most of what remained to the cowp. The candlesticks, however, he brought back with him and set on either side of the mirror. The three objects seemed to feed off each other, acquiring a new dignity of their own. Now Carlin felt that where they were was where they had always belonged.

He lit the gas fire, warmed his legs against it for a few minutes, then turned the fire down and faced the mirror. He thought of Hardie saying he was like this Major Weir. How the fuck did he know that? He looked and looked to see Weir in the mirror, but he didn’t know what he expected to see. And he thought of Jackie Halkit.

Edinburgh was a village, if you walked around it you saw the same faces all the time. He’d seen her once or twice in the last year, and each time it had been by chance. He’d recognised her, but he’d never made an attempt to speak to her. You didn’t do that. You didn’t go up to folk. If something was going to happen, they would come to you. That was how it worked.

That was how it had worked till now. He’d broken in on her. He tried to imagine her with himself live in her head again. What would she be thinking? But he couldn’t touch how she might be, just couldn’t feel it.

He saw himself standing outside Dawson’s in the late afternoon. It had been light outside and lighter still in there, because the place was full of bright electric bulbs at the bar and over the tables. Carlin preferred the gloom. He liked candlelight and shadows. Between the street and the inside of the pub there hadn’t been much to choose.

Then suddenly, as he stood there, he had been invaded by a sensation so strong that he had had to put out his hand and steady himself with the tips of his fingers on the varnished wooden beading of the pub door. Just a touch to get his balance back. It was as if he had been right on the edge of something. It was like the other feeling he sometimes got, an overwhelming sense of being elsewhere, or that he could reach out and touch things that were long gone.

The past. He could stretch his fingers and feel it, the shape of it. It was like having second sight in reverse. It was like holding an invisible object, both fascinating and disturbing. Or like feeling your way in the dark.

He’d read that seers didn’t like their gift of seeing the future because there was nothing they could do about it. They had visions of horrible accidents, injuries, deaths, and they couldn’t stop them. There was a guy up north, the Black Isle or somewhere, who took the money from people who came to see him and then was rude and abrupt with them. He had no wish to see their future trials and losses, their rotten endings and stupid tragedies. But he could not turn them away. People came to his door every day, desperate to be warned of things that could not be avoided.

The past was like that for Carlin: a hole at the back of his mind through which anything might come.

‘I’ve a bit o work if I want it,’ he said to the mirror.

‘Guid. Aboot fuckin time. Get ye aff yer fuckin erse.’

‘Dinna start.’

‘Dinna talk tae me then. Think I care aboot yer fuckin work?’

‘It’s no a job but. It’s jist play-actin. Part-time.’

‘Aw ye’re bluidy fit for. Gaun tae tell us aboot it?’

Carlin stared until the mirror had the gen. Sometimes that was enough.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I want tae check this guy oot.’

‘Who, Hardie? Forget it. A right wanker.’

‘No, Weir. Somethin aboot him. Mebbe he had a bad press.’

‘Aye. On ye go, son. Bleed yer sapsy liberal hert dry, why don’t ye. Listen, if ye find oot he was a nice Christian buddy eftir aw, keep yer geggie shut or ye’ll be oot o work again.’

‘I’m no sayin he wasna an evil bastart. But it seems everybody has him marked doon as a hypocrite. Jist because ye lead a double life disna make ye a hypocrite.’

‘Well, you would ken, wouldn’t ye? Sounds tae me like ye might be buildin yer argument on shiftin sand though, friend. I mean, pillar o society by day, shagger o sheep by night – how much mair hypofuckincritical can ye get?’

‘Aye, aye. I jist don’t like pigeon-holin folk. Ken, an early version o Jekyll and Hyde, earlier than Deacon Brodie even – it’s too pat.’

‘Well, jist brush him under the carpet then. Lea him alane. The last thing we need’s anither split fuckin personality. We’ve got mair than enough o them. Fuckin Scottish history and Scottish fuckin literature, that’s all there fuckin is, split fuckin personalities. We don’t need mair doubles, oor haill fuckin culture’s littered wi them. If it’s no guid versus evil it’s kirk elders versus longhairs, heid versus hert, Hieland and Lowland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, drunk men and auld wifies, Protestants and Catholics, engineers and cavaliers, hard men and panto dames, Holy Willies and holy terrors, you name it Scotland’s fuckin had it. I mean how long is this gaun tae go on, for God’s sake? Are we never gaun tae fuckin sort oorsels oot? I am talkin tae you, by the way.’

‘I ken. Hardie would say that’s fine. He would say it’s guid for business. Gies us somethin tae sell tae the tourists.’

‘Don’t come the bag wi that fuckin shite. Since when was that pricktugger a fuckin culture expert? And onywey, whit kinna basis is that for an economy? Whit gets sellt tae the tourists is an unreal picture o an unreal country that’s never gaun tae get tae fuckin grips wi itsel until it runs its ain affairs.’

‘Independence? The likes o Hardie would run a mile. We’d be like Switzerland. Dead borin, only withoot the money.’

‘Noo I ken ye’re playin the Devil’s advocate. Don’t fuckin mock the Swiss. You’ve been there. It’s a clean country, everybody’s got jobs, everybody uses the trains and they don’t fuckin go tae war wi onybody. The Swiss fuckin ken where it’s at, if ye ask me.’

Carlin turned the backs of his legs to the fire again. ‘Your language,’ he said. ‘Away and wash yer mooth oot wi soap.’

Carlin twitched the nylon fishing-line to make sure that the rat was free to run. He knew it would be but he couldn’t stop himself. He felt the weight of the rat shift slightly at the far end of the line, just a fraction of an inch, and let his fingers go slack again. Then he waited for the people to come.

He was huckered against a wall halfway down a steep close between Victoria Street and the Cowgatehead. There was a dog-leg at this point, so that anyone descending could not see him until they turned the corner, and could not see the second half of the close until they turned again at the place where he was standing.

He was wearing a long black cloak, fastened at the neck, over his ordinary clothes. When he walked the cloak billowed and swirled around him, but now, as he stood still, it hung limp and heavy like a shroud. Leaning next to him against the wall was a black wooden staff, as tall as himself, and surmounted by a misshapen knucklebone head. A straggly wig of wispy auld man’s grey hair fell about his neck, framing the ghastly whiteness of his face. The previous ghost, Hugh Hardie had said on the run-through that morning, had used clown make-up, but he didn’t think Carlin needed it.

The close was little frequented by locals. It was not on an obvious route to a pub or other destination, and its length and dinginess gave it an unhealthy reputation. It was used by drunks and destitutes as a urinal more than as a throughway. Tourists were seen in it only if they had got lost. Or were on a ghost tour.

The nylon line ran from his hand along the ground to a hole in the wall a few yards up the close, just before the dog-leg was reached. When the tour party reached this spot, the guide would bring everybody to a halt, and describe the living conditions of this part of Edinburgh in the seventeenth century. Hardie had rehearsed this with Carlin earlier. The guide would talk about the lack of sanitation and ask his listeners to step carefully. ‘This close was once called the Stinking Close,’ he’d say, ‘and it still in some respects is deserving of the name.’ ‘That,’ said Hardie, ‘is your cue, your amber light.’

Carlin’s first task was to pull the large rubber rat, which was secured to the fishing-line through a hole in its mouth, across the ground and round the corner, causing alarms and excursions among the tourists as it skited over their feet.

As soon as he’d reeled in the rat, he had to move on. The guide would usher the people on round the dog-leg. They were supposed to get a glimpse of swirling cloak and a shadowy figure carrying a long staff disappearing down the lower part of the close. ‘At the entrance onto the Cowgatehead,’ Hardie stressed, ‘stop and wait for a few seconds. You’ll be silhouetted in the archway. Turn and glare back up at them. It’ll look brilliant.’

Meanwhile the guide would tell them the tale of Major Weir, pointing out that he had lodged just off this very close with his sister Grizel. He would describe how he had confessed his terrible crimes before a shocked assemblage of fellow Puritans; how he had been tried and convicted of incest, bestiality and witchcraft, and burnt at the stake on the road to Leith; and how poor, mad Grizel had tried to take off all her clothes on the Grassmarket scaffold before she was hanged, just a few yards from where they were now standing. Ever after, the Major and she would be collected at night in a black coach drawn by six flame-eyed black horses, and driven out of the town to Dalkeith, there to meet with their master the Devil. At other times the Major’s stick, with the satyr-heads carved on it which seemed to change shape and expression, would float through the dark wynds and closes, going like a servant before him and rapping on the doors of the terrified inhabitants.