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The station was a teeming mass of people in different varieties of clothes, from top hat and tails to hairy tweed jackets and patched trousers. There were even – and Sherlock had to suppress a gasp at this – men wearing skirts.

Matty noticed Sherlock’s reaction. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘sorry – I probably should have mentioned that. Took me by surprise when I was here a few years back.’

‘Men with skirts? Well, maybe you thought I wouldn’t notice.’

‘They’re not skirts,’ Matty said firmly. ‘They’re kilts.’

‘Kilts.’ Sherlock sampled the unfamiliar word.

‘They’re a traditional piece of clothing worn by the Scottish clans.’ He sniffed. ‘A “clan” being a posh name for a family, as far as I can tell. Anyway, the clans used to be perpetually at war with each other until they all decided to get together and hate the English, and apparently the kilt makes it easier to fight. Or something. Anyway, they’re coloured in different ways depending on which family you come from.’

‘Presumably,’ Sherlock said, ‘so you can make sure that the man you’re fighting is from another clan and not your second cousin twice removed.’

‘Probably,’ Matty replied.

Sherlock filed the information away in his brain. Different coloured kilts for different families – that would bear some further investigation. You could look at a man in a street in London and not have any way of finding out his name short of asking him, but if you could look at a man in a street in Edinburgh and know straight away that his name was MacDonald, well, that was a useful thing to know.

‘Anything else I should know?’ he asked.

‘That purse-like thing that hangs down in front of the kilt is called a “sporran”, and it’s used to store things like money and such. Oh, and if a Scotsman’s wearing a kilt then there’s an odds-on chance that he’s got a small knife tucked into his sock. It’s called a “dirk”.’

‘Got it. Thanks.’ Sherlock continued to look around, and to listen. Many conversations were going on within earshot, but the words were accented, difficult to understand. Sherlock was used to local accents of course – people in Farnham talked differently from people in London, and the various Americans he’d met talked differently from anybody in England, but he hadn’t expected there to be an accent within a train ride of London that was so thick it was almost incomprehensible. He listened for a minute or so, analysing the passing conversations with Matty standing patiently by his side, until he had the basics sorted out. Once your ear was attuned to it, the accent seemed to fade into the background, letting the words come to the front.

‘Right,’ he said as the last passengers walked through the barrier and he stared along the empty platform, ‘I think I’ve acclimatized myself. Let’s go and find the hotel.’

They went outside and took the second cab they could find. The driver seemed to be in two minds whether he should risk taking two boys by themselves, but Sherlock showed him a handful of shillings from his pocket and the man nodded. As long as they could pay, he didn’t care what age they were.

Sherlock had already looked inside the envelope that Mycroft had given them, and he called out the hotel’s name to the driver.

The journey took about twenty minutes, passing terraces of tall buildings all made of the same grey stone blocks, and larger halls and mansions set back in acres of grass behind metal railings. Close up, Sherlock noticed that the grey stone contained hints of other colours – orange, yellow, blue, green – and that even the stone that was really grey often had ripples of darker hues running through.

The cab took them along the side of a park, and then jinked left and right into a wide thoroughfare lined with shops and hotels. It was the match of anything Sherlock had seen in London, New York or Moscow. Edinburgh, he could tell already, was an old and proud city.

The cab took a sudden right and drew to a stop. Sherlock and Matty got out just as the driver threw their bags down from where they had been stored behind him. He obviously felt that he shouldn’t dismount for