As she sat in the taxi now, she could see that same reflection staring back at her from the glass screen. She barely recognised herself. A pale, plain face beneath a head of closecropped black hair with a few stray curls gelled back on top. There were penumbral shadows beneath her eyes from lack of sleep, and a puffiness still from all the crying. She was dressed, for her, very conservatively. Jeans, white tennis shoes, a plain white T-shirt beneath a long-sleeved dark jacket. There was not a tattoo in sight. Purple nail varnish had been removed from short nails that she had always had a tendency to bite, and she looked down at her hands and thought how small and ugly they were. Then remembered the tattoo artist laughing as he told her that men liked women with small hands, because it made their manhood seem bigger. She burned with shame at the recollection of things she had done in the name of rebellion.
Her taxi cruised through the underpass at the Gogar roundabout and, half a mile further on, took a left leading down to a smaller junction, before swinging left again and heading south. This was green, open country, transected by the Gogar Burn and punctuated by stands of dark trees. The road swooped over a rise in the land, and she saw the Gogarburn Golf Course off to their right, before the curve of the tarmac took them down in a wide sweep to a sprawling complex of steel and black glass that filled the hollow. It was built on two levels, and lay surrounded by mature trees that almost hid it from casual view. An enormous car park, very nearly filled to capacity, stood in grounds of manicured lawns. Her taxi swung into the turning circle at a concourse which led to revolving glass doors at the entrance to the main building, and Karen saw a long marble plinth set into the grass. It was engraved with the words The Geddes Institute for Scientific Research. This was where her father had worked for the two years before his death, and she had never once set foot in it.
A large, uniformed security guard standing at the door refused to let her in. ‘You need a pass, love.’ But he didn’t look at her as if she were his ‘love’.
‘I’m here to see my godfather.’
He cocked a sceptical eyebrow. ‘And who would that be?’
‘Professor Chris Connor.’
He hesitated.
‘My dad used to work here, too.’
‘Used to? Where is he now?’
‘He’s dead.’
Which tilted him slightly off balance, and she saw the first crack in his implacable veneer. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Karen Fleming.’
‘And your dad?’
‘Tom.’
He stabbed a finger at her. ‘You wait there.’ And he slipped inside and crossed the lobby to a reception desk. Beyond him, Karen could see through the glass, a long atrium rose up to a pitched glass roof that spilled light down on to what looked like the kind of shopping street you might find in a mall. There were coffee shops, restaurants, a bakery, a clothes store, a supermarket, even a bookshop. And the concourse was crisscrossed by people drifting from shop to shop, or riding the escalators up and down to a gallery running along either side of the first floor. Others stood in groups talking, and sipping skinny lattes from Starbucks cups.
The security guard returned to wave her through the revolving door and lead her across to the desk. A young woman wearing a headset with a microphone smiled at her. ‘Professor Connor will be down in a moment. I’ll need to make out a pass for you.’ She slipped a form across the counter for Karen to fill in with her name, address, telephone number, date, time and reason for visit. When it was done, she peeled away a second copy sheet for filing, and folded the top sheet to slip into a plastic visitor holder that she gave to Karen to clip on to her jacket. ‘Just sit over there.’
Karen crossed to sit uncomfortably in one of several leather armchairs grouped around a handful of coffee tables whose tops were marked by stains and rings.
Voices raised in idle chatter and laughter echoed all around the atrium and Karen wondered where it was that people worked here. And what it was they did. She had only ever had the vaguest notion of what it was her father worked at for a living. A research scientist employed by the university was all she had ever known. His field had been neuroscience, though she had no real idea exactly what that was.
In the centre of the lobby, the black bust of an impressive-looking young man with a thick head of hair and a full beard was raised to head height on a marble plinth. She saw the name Sir Patrick Geddes, and beneath it his birth and death dates. 1854–1932.
‘Hello, K-Karen.’ His voice broke into her reverie. She looked up and was as shocked by her godfather’s appearance as he seemed to be by hers. He was, perhaps, a little older than her father and had always been inclined to plumpness. But since she last saw him he had shed more weight than was good for him and looked gaunt and wan, his once luxuriant thatch of sandy hair now thin and scraped back to disguise advancing baldness.
She stood up and kissed him awkwardly on each cheek. His brown eyes, watery and bloodshot, darted here and there and seemed reluctant to meet hers directly. He nodded towards the bust of Patrick Geddes, a way of distracting them both from their unease.
‘Amazing chap,’ he said. ‘Botanist, sociologist. And probably one of the world’s first environmentalists. Taught zoology right here in Edinburgh for a while. Then founded the university of Bombay.’ He forced a smile. ‘Or Mumbai, as they call it now. Planned the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, too, and founded the Collège des Écossais at Montpellier in France. As if that wasn’t enough, he was pretty much known the world over as the father of urban planning. Not bad for a laddie from Aberdeenshire. And all of it achieved in seventy-eight short years.’
Seventy-eight seemed very old to Karen. ‘That would be two of my dad’s lifetimes, then.’
Connor became self-conscious again, and he glanced around as if looking to see who might be watching them. Though, as far as Karen could tell, no one was paying them the slightest attention. ‘Wh-what are you doing here, Karen?’
‘I came to see my godfather.’
Connor looked instantly guilty, and Karen noticed that he was turning his wedding ring constantly around the third finger of his left hand, without any apparent awareness of it. ‘I’m sorry, Karen. I should have kept in touch. I... I know your dad would have wanted me to. It’s just...’ He searched around for some excuse. ‘Things have been, you know, not so great at home.’ But he didn’t elucidate. ‘Y-you shouldn’t really have come here. It would have been better if you’d called.’ He took her by the arm, gripping her too hard, and she was sure that his fingers would leave bruises. ‘You’d better come up to the office.’
As they glided up to the first-floor gallery on the escalator, Karen looked down on to the concourse. ‘What is this place? It looks like a shopping mall.’
Connor smiled. ‘We’re a research institute attached to the university.’
‘What do you research? The shopping habits of employees?’
He shook his head, and for the first time his smile came quite naturally. ‘You sound like your dad.’ And for some reason that thought made tears well in her eyes. She blinked and looked away to avoid embarrassment. ‘There are five thousand employees and students based here, Karen, and we’re a long way out of town. I think Ergo took a leaf out of The Royal Bank of Scotland’s book. Their headquarters is just over the hill there, and they have a very similar arrangement. The place is like a small town. People do everything but actually live here. Shop, eat, work, socialise. It narrows our focus and keeps it concentrated on work.’