Kirkcaldy boasted a railway station, a football club, a museum and art gallery, and a college named after Adam Smith. There were streets of solid, prosperous-looking Victorian villas, some of which had been turned into offices and businesses. Further out were housing schemes, some of them so recent there were still plots waiting to be sold. A couple of parks, at least two high schools, and some 1960s high-rises. The dialect was not impenetrable, and shoppers stopped to talk to each other outside the bakeries and newsagents.

‘I’m nodding off here,’ Tony Kaye commented at one point. He was in his own car’s passenger seat, Joe Naysmith driving and Fox in the back. Lunch had comprised filled rolls and packets of crisps. Fox had called their boss in Edinburgh to make an initial report. The call had lasted no more than three minutes.

‘So?’ Kaye asked, turning in his seat to make eye contact with Fox.

‘I like it,’ Fox answered, staring at the passing scene.

‘Shall I tell you what I see, Foxy? I see people who should be at work this time of day. Scroungers and the walking wounded, coffin-dodgers, jakeys and ASBOs.’

Joe Naysmith had started humming the tune to ‘What a Wonderful World’.

‘Every car we’ve passed,’ Kaye went on, undeterred, ‘the driver’s either a drug dealer or he’s hot-wired it. The pavements need hosing down and so do half the kids. It tells you all you need to know about a place when the biggest shop seems to be called Rejects.’ He paused for effect. ‘And you’re telling me you like it?’

‘You’re seeing what you want to see, Tony, and then letting your imagination run riot.’

Kaye turned to Naysmith. ‘And as for you, you weren’t even born when that song came out, so you can shut it.’