Just Last Night(71)

“What made you want to go into it?”

“I had some therapy myself,” Fin says, and I feel like his background plus his Statesideness meant I should’ve anticipated this. “It was really interesting to me, unraveling why we behave the way we do. I wanted to help people in the same way. Not to sound too Miss Universe.”

“Susie never knew this thing about being ‘doctor to the stars’? You really wouldn’t tell her?”

“I tried to tell my family as little as possible,” Fin says, and the shutters visibly come down, in his tight expression.

I push my luck with Finlay, but I can feel the danger well enough to not joke or poke anymore.

“Can I ask something?” he says, putting the spoon in the cup. “What was the Twin Peaks music about at the end of Susie’s service?”

“You didn’t like that?”

“I didn’t dislike it, I thought it was a curious choice, that’s all.”

“Why? She loved the show and its atmosphere fitted somehow, I guess. She liked to say she was Laura Palmer.”

The Laura Palmer they couldn’t kill. That has aged badly.

“A series about a blonde homecoming queen with a demonic side who died tragically young?” Fin says. “Her life a seething mass of sex, drugs, and dysfunction behind the apple pie, charity bake sale surface? It honestly didn’t occur it might look like some sort of . . . comment?”

I open my mouth and for once I’m lost for words.

“For it to be a comment, any of that would have to resemble Susie?” I say.

Fin sits back and contemplates me.

“Ready to head off?” he says, eventually, with a nod at my glass, and I say yes and neck my drink.

What on earth . . . ? Did he know about Susie’s few grams of coke, or what?

“I NEVER THOUGHT of Edinburgh as having a seaside,” I say on the fifteen-minute drive, adding, “Despite it being a port, obviously,” in case Finlay thinks I’m full airhead.

Fin ordered an Uber to take us to Portobello, saying he doesn’t fancy city-center motoring on what feels like the “wrong side of the road,” for the time being, which seems fair enough to me.

“Apparently, Sean Connery worked as a lifeguard at swimming baths out here,” Fin says, as we emerge from the car into the freezing gray of a wintertime promenade.

“You’d want to be covered in whale grease to do that in Scotland, wouldn’t you?” I say, shoving my balled hands deeper in my parka pockets.

“I’m an idiot, aren’t I,” Finlay says, as we wander down the street, past the railings and the band of pale deserted sand that must be thronged in high summer. There aren’t many people out and about, the odd rollerblader whizzing past us, a pleasant tang of fish and chips in the air, the occasional gull cawing.

“Why are you an idiot?” Uncharacteristic of Finlay to self-criticize.

“As you said. I’ve come to a city of half a million people on the basis I’m going to bump into one confused man who himself is following no real rhyme or reason. Someone who won’t even know who I am if he sees me. I don’t think this makes much more sense than the penguin enclosure.”

“Hah. It must be so incredibly hard to have a parent treat you like a stranger,” I say, thinking about it for the first time. “Like . . . abandonment. Even though it’s not, it’s an illness, obviously.”

Finlay looks at me and, I feel, is really focusing on me. He pauses a few seconds before replying.

“. . . I didn’t expect Susie to have someone like you as a friend,” he says. “I’m glad she did.”

“Thank you,” I say, while feeling there are dots to connect that I haven’t connected, in why these two things followed on from each other. Maybe they didn’t, maybe it was a way of not discussing his dad’s dementia.

“There were women at the wake who seemed more what I expected,” Fin says, hesitantly. “Vampy kind of clothes?”

“Oh . . . the Teacup Girls!” I exclaim. “That’s what Justin called . . . never mind, another time. Yeah, they’re quite different to us. That speaks well of Susie, really, though. She had different friends from different parts of her life, but she wasn’t snobby. Susie was socially mobile. But not a climber.”

We walk on.

Fin seems to have changed his opinion of me from “dreadful” to “acceptable,” much to my quiet astonishment.

“Don’t lose faith,” I say, distracting myself. “If these are places your dad might go, we stand some sort of chance. It’s a huge place, but the likely locations we are searching are not huge.”

“He’s not staying at The Waldorf, though, clearly,” Fin says. “Strike one for my being able to anticipate his movements.”

“Like the IRA, you only need to be lucky once,” I say, and Finlay bursts into laughter.

“They wouldn’t quite know how to deal with you in New York, you know,” he says. “I can see this from having been away and come back again—you’re a very British kind of bad taste.”

“Bad taste!” I mock huff.

“Bad taste, but amusing,” Fin says. Under my artificial fibers, I glow. Even if these compliments are a device. Tools, to do a job. “Unserious outerwear.”