One of our benches is missing, but CSI Kirkgate is on the case - Susan Morrison

In the Kirkgate, Taggart's ghostly voice can be heard rasping that there’s been a murder.

The anonymous artwork is understood have appeared outside the Newkirkgate Shopping Centre in Leith overnight

Mind you, going by that outline, the victim looked a bit odd. More legs per corpse than Taggart and co usually deal with. Four, by the looks of things. And slats. You know, if I didn't know any better, I’d say that was a drawing of a bench. And sorry to break the murder mystery mood, but it's not actually a macabre street furniture slaying. It's more of a disappearance. And it wasn’t the police who strung that cordon along the traffic cones. CSI Kirkgate was brilliantly created by a talented Leither with a wicked sense of humour, a flair for set design and no funding from Creative Scotland.

The chalk and tape might be a whimsical fancy, but there is no denying, Leith’s benches are missing.

There’s always been benches down at the Foot o’ the Walk. They once huddled around the skirts of Queen Vic herself. Over the decades, they came to the attention of town planner types. The sort of folk I imagine wearing chinos while wittering about ‘through traffic footfall’, ‘ergonomic flow’ and ‘lived experience’.

These urban make-over professionals adore those artists' impressions of proposed improvements which tend to feature drawings of young mums with buggies and trendy looking couples walking arm-in-arm past planters of carefully tended council plants.

I imagine that whoever planned the re-siting of the benches into a solo position outside Boots the Chemist had a Powerpoint slide somewhere of just such elderly people, harried mums and busy working types taking a bench-based moment of rest to watch the trams slide past.

I doubt any artist would be impressed by the reality of the day-to-day lived experience of the Kirkgate benches. Those beautifully imagined tram-spotters would find a peaceful moment hard to find.

The benches quickly became party central for those lost, loud and really pretty sad souls who hug bottles of Buckie, cans of superstrength beer and shoplifted booze.

The other day the Yorkshire husband and I watched a determined dame hammer the security tag off a choried bottle of vodka. Fair play to her, she’d shunned own-brand. This was premium stuff.

They don’t pay much attention to the non-Buckfast world around them. They only really notice us if there’s an accidental collision, and then they hastily exhale apologies into our faces with breath that could bubble the paint on a Volvo at fifty paces. But they are pretty scary.

The boozy bonhomie slips into sudden brawls with alarming speed. More than once paramedics have heroically battled for some poor overdosed soul on the pavement itself. And they don’t fit with the image of Leith as the coolest neighbourhood in Scotland. So their benches had to go, re-sited to Taylor Gardens.

Mind you, Kirkgate’s party people are tougher than the bench boys had bargained for. They’re just sitting on the deck now, beers popped and a phone in Pringles can blaring out tunes. They’ll probably get piles, but I think that’s the least of their worries.