The Sunday Philosophy Club

She was unaware of his illness, though, and Isabel had debated whether or not to tell her. Eventually she had said nothing, and the woman had been dismayed when she subsequently found out what was wrong with her husband. She had borne it well, though, and they had moved to a house on the edge of Blairgowrie, where they led a quiet, protected life. She had never said that she regretted the marriage, but had Isabel told her, she could have 1 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h made a more informed choice. She might have said no to the marriage, and been happier by herself, although that would have deprived the man of that measure of contentment and security which the marriage provided.

She often thought about this, and had decided that noninter-vention was the right course of action in such a case. The problem was that one just did not know enough about what would happen afterwards, either if one did nothing or if one did something. The answer, then, was to keep one’s distance from those situations in which one is not directly involved. But this was surely wrong. Cat was no stranger to her, and surely a close relative was entitled to warn? What if Toby were not Toby at all, but some impostor, a life-sentence prisoner released on licence, who even now pondered some further crime? It would be absurd to say that she could not warn in such a case. Indeed she would have more than a right to speak, she would have a duty to do so.

As she sat in the morning room, the unsullied crossword before her, her mug of coffee steaming in the slightly cooler air of the glassed-in room, she wondered how she would put the matter to Cat. One thing was certain: she could not tell her that she had been following Toby, as that would, quite rightly, provoke accusa-tions of unwarranted interference in his, and Cat’s, affairs. So she would have to start the whole disclosure on the basis of a lie, or at best a half-truth.

“I happened to be in Nelson Street and happened to see . . .”

What would Cat say? She would be shocked at the outset, as anyone would be on the news of a betrayal of this nature. And then perhaps she would move to anger, which would be directed against Toby, and not against the other girl, whoever she was.

Isabel had read that women usually attack their partners on discovering infidelity, while men, in the same position, will direct T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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their hostility against the other man, the intruder. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine the scene: Toby, unsuspecting, facing an angry Cat, his self-confident expression crumbling before the onslaught; blushing as the truth was outed. And then, she hoped, Cat would storm out, and that would be the end of Toby. A few weeks later, with her wounds still raw, but not so raw as to require privacy, Jamie could visit Cat in the delicatessen and suggest a meal together. He would be sympathetic, but Isabel would have to advise him to maintain some distance and not to be too quick to try to fill the emotional void. Then they would see.

If Cat had any sense, she would realise that Jamie would never deceive her, and that men like Toby were best avoided. But there the fantasy ended; the likelihood was that Cat would make the same mistake again, and more than once, as people always did.

Unsuitable men were replaced by unsuitable men; it seemed inevitable. People repeated their mistakes because their choice of partner was dictated by factors beyond their control. Isabel had imbibed sufficient Freud—and more to the point, Klein—to know that the emotional die was cast at a very early age. It all went back to childhood, and to the psychodynamics of one’s relationship with one’s parents. These things were not a matter of intellectual assessment and rational calculation; they sprang from events in the nursery. Not that everybody had a nursery, of course, but they had an equivalent—a space, perhaps.

C H A P T E R E L E V E N

E

IT WAS THAT EVENING, after a day which she regarded as utterly wasted, that Isabel received a visit from Neil, the young man with whom she had had such an unrewarding conversation on her visit to Warrender Park Terrace. He arrived unannounced, although Isabel happened to be gazing out the window of her study when he walked up the path to the font door. She saw him look upwards, at the size of the house, and she thought she saw him hesitate slightly, but he went on to ring her bell and she made her way to the front door to let him in.

He was wearing a suit and tie, and she noticed his shoes, which were highly polished black Oxfords. Hen had said, quite irrelevantly, that he worked for a stuffy firm, and the outfit confirmed this.

“Miss Dalhousie?” he said superfluously as she opened the door. “I hope you remember me. You came round the other day . . .”

“Of course I do. Neil, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She ushered him into the hall and through the drawing-room door. He declined her offer of a drink, or tea, but she poured herself a small sherry and sat down opposite him.

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“Hen said you were a lawyer,” she began conversationally.

“Trainee lawyer,” he corrected. “Yes. That’s what I do.”

“Like every second person in Edinburgh,” said Isabel.

“Sometimes it seems like that. Yes.”

There was a momentary silence. Isabel noticed that Neil’s hands were clasped over his lap, and that his position, in general, was far from relaxed. He was tense and on edge, just as he had been when he had spoken to her last time. Perhaps that was how he was. Some people were naturally tense, coiled up like springs, suspicious of the world about them.

“I came to see you . . .” He trailed off.

“Yes,” said Isabel brightly. “So I see.”

Neil attempted a quick smile, but did not persist. “I came to see you about . . . about what we talked about the other day. I did not tell you the whole truth, I’m afraid. It’s been preying on my mind.”

Isabel watched him closely. The muscular tension in the face aged him, making lines about the corners of his mouth. The palms of his hands would be moist, she thought. She said nothing, but waited for him to continue.

“You asked me—you asked me quite specifically whether there was anything unusual in his life. Do you remember?”

Isabel nodded. She looked down at the sherry glass in her right hand and took a small sip. It was very dry; too dry, Toby had said when she had given him a glass. Too dry and it gets bitter, you know.

“And then I said that there was nothing,” Neil went on.

“Which was not true. There was.”

“Now you want to tell me about it?”

Neil nodded. “I felt very bad about misleading you. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I just felt annoyed that you had come round to talk to us. I felt that it was none of your business.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Which it isn’t, thought Isabel, but did not say it.

“You see,” said Neil, “Mark said to me that there was something happening. He was scared.”

Isabel felt her pulse race. Yes, she had been right. There had been something; Mark’s death was not what it had seemed to be.

It had a background.

Neil unclasped his hands. Now that he had started to speak, some of the tension appeared to dissipate, even if he still did not appear relaxed.

“You know that Mark worked for a firm of fund managers,” he said. “McDowell’s. They’re quite a large firm these days. They handle a lot of big pension funds, and one or two smaller people.

They’re a well-known firm.”

“I knew that,” said Isabel.

“Well, in that job you see a lot of money moving. You have to watch things pretty closely.”

“So I believe,” said Isabel.

“And you have to be particularly careful about how you behave,” Neil said. “There’s something called insider trading. Do you know about that?”

Isabel explained that she had heard of the term, but was not sure exactly what it meant. Was it something to do with buying shares on the basis of inside information?

Neil nodded. “That’s more or less what it is. You may get information in your job which allows you to predict the movement of share prices. If you know that a firm is going to be taken over, for example, that may send up the share price. If you buy in advance of the news getting out, then you make a profit. It’s simple.”

“I can imagine,” said Isabel. “And I can imagine the temptation.”

“Yes,” agreed Neil. “It’s very tempting. I’ve even been in a position myself to do it. I assisted in drafting an offer which I T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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knew would have an effect on the value of the shares. It would have been simple for me to get somebody to buy some shares on my behalf. Dead simple. I could have made thousands.”

“But you didn’t?”

“You go to prison if you’re caught,” Neil said. “They take it very seriously. It’s because you’re getting an unfair advantage over the people who are selling the shares to you. You know something that they don’t. It undermines the market principle.”

“And you say that Mark had seen this happen?”

“Yes,” said Neil. “He told me one evening, when we were in the pub together. He said that he had discovered insider trading going on in the firm. He said that he was completely sure of his facts, and he had the means of proving it. But then he said something else.”

Isabel put down her sherry glass. It was obvious where this disclosure was going, and she felt uncomfortable.

“He said that he was worried that the people who were doing it knew that he had found out. He had been treated strangely, almost with suspicion, and he had been given a very strange little pep talk—a pep talk about confidentiality and duty to the firm—

which he had interpreted as a veiled warning.”

He looked up at Isabel, and she saw something in his eyes.

What was it saying? Was it a plea for help? Was it the expression of some private agony, a sadness that he was unable to articulate?

“Was that all?” she asked. “Did he tell you who gave him this talk, this warning?”

Neil shook his head. “No, he didn’t. He said that he couldn’t say very much about it. But I could tell that he was frightened.”

Isabel rose from her chair and crossed the room to close the curtains. As she did so, the movement of the material made a soft noise, like the breaking of a small wave on the beach. Neil watched her from where he was sitting. Then she returned to her chair.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“I don’t know what you want me to do with this,” she said.

“Have you thought of going to the police?”

Her question seemed to make him tense once again. “I can’t do that,” he said. “They have already spoken to me several times.

I told them nothing about this. I just told them what I told you the first time I spoke to you. If I went back now, it would look odd. I would effectively be saying that I had lied to them.”

“And they may not like that,” mused Isabel. “They could start thinking you had something to hide, couldn’t they?”

Neil stared at her. Again there was that strange expression in his eyes. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“Of course,” said Isabel quickly, although she knew that this was not true; that he was concealing something. “It’s just that once you don’t tell the truth, then people begin to think that there may be a reason.”

“There was no reason,” said Neil, his voice now slightly raised. “I didn’t talk about this because I knew very little about it.

I thought that it had nothing to do with . . . with what happened.

I didn’t want to spend hours with the police. I just wanted everything to be over. I thought it might be simpler just to keep my mouth shut.”

“Sometimes that is much simpler,” said Isabel. “Sometimes it isn’t.” She looked at him, and he lowered his eyes. She felt pity for him now. He was a very ordinary young man, not particularly sensitive, not particularly aware. And yet he had lost a friend, somebody with whom he actually lived, and he must be feeling that much more than she, who had only witnessed the accident.

She looked at him. He seemed vulnerable, and there was an air to him that made her think of something else, another possibility. Perhaps there had been a dimension to his relationship with Mark that was not immediately obvious to her. It was even T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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possible that he and Mark had been lovers; it was not all that unusual, she reflected, for people to be capable of sexual involvement with either sex, and although she had glimpsed him in Hen’s room, that need not mean that there had not previously been different permutations in that flat.

“You miss him, don’t you?” she said quietly, watching the effect on him of her words.

He looked away, as if studying one of the pictures on the wall.

For a few moments he said nothing, and then he answered, “I miss him a great deal. I miss him every day. I think of him all the time. All the time.”

He had answered her question, and answered her doubts.

“Don’t try to forget him,” she said. “People sometimes say that. They say that we should try to forget the people we lose. But we really shouldn’t, you know.”

He nodded and looked back at her briefly, before he looked away again, in misery, she thought.

“It was very good of you to come this evening,” she said gently. “It’s never easy to come and tell somebody that you were keeping something from them. Thank you, Neil.”

She had not intended this to be a signal for him to leave, but that was how he interpreted it. He rose to his feet and put out a hand to shake hands with her. She stood up and took the prof-fered hand, noting that it was trembling.

A F T E R N E I L H A D G O N E she sat in the drawing room, her empty sherry glass at her side, mulling over what her visitor had said. The unexpected meeting had disturbed her in more ways than one. Neil was more upset than she had imagined by what had happened to Mark and was unable to resolve his feelings.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h There was nothing that she could do about that, because he was clearly not prepared to speak about whatever it was that was troubling him. He would recover, of course, but time could provide the only solution for that. Much more disturbing had been the disclosures about insider trading at McDowell’s. She felt that she could not ignore this, now that she had been made aware of it, and although whether or not the firm engaged in that particular form of dishonesty (or was it greed?) had nothing directly to do with her, it became her concern if this had some bearing on Mark’s death. A bearing on Mark’s death: What precisely did this mean? Did it mean that he had been murdered? This was the first time that she had allowed herself to spell out the possibility that clearly. But the question could not be evaded now.

Had Mark been sent to his death because he had threatened to disclose damaging information about somebody in the firm? It seemed outrageous even to pose the question. This was the Scottish financial community, with all its reputation for uprightness and integrity. These people played golf; they frequented the New Club; they were elders—some of them—of the Church of Scotland. She thought of Paul Hogg. He was typical of the sort of people who worked in such firms. He was utterly straightforward; conventional by his own admission, a person one met at the private shows at galleries and who liked Elizabeth Blackadder. These people did not engage in the sort of practises which had been associated with some of those Italian banks or even with the more freewheeling end of the City of London. And they did not commit murder.

But if for a moment one assumed that anybody, even the most outwardly upright, is capable of acting greedily and bending the rules of the financial community (it was not theft, after all, that one was talking about, but the mere misuse of information), might such a person not, if he were faced with exposure, resort to T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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desperate means to protect his reputation? In different, less cen-sorious circles it would probably be less devastating to be exposed as a cheat, simply because there were so many other cheats and because almost everybody would be likely to have been engaged in cheating at some point themselves. There were parts of southern Italy, parts of Naples, for example, she had read, where cheating was the norm and to be honest was to be deviant. But here, in Edinburgh, the possibility of being sent to prison would be unthink-able; how much more attractive, then, would it be to take steps to avoid this, even if those steps involved removing a young man who was getting too close to the truth?

She looked at the telephone. She knew that she had only to call Jamie and he would come. He had said that before, on more than one occasion— You can give me a call anytime, anytime. I like coming round here. I really do.

She left her chair and crossed to the telephone table. Jamie lived in Stockbridge, in Saxe-Coburg Street, in a flat he shared with three others. She had been there once, when he and Cat had been together, and he had cooked a meal for the two of them.

It was a rambling flat, with high ceilings and a stone-flag floor in the hall and in the kitchen. Jamie was the owner, having been bought the flat by his parents when he was a student, and the flatmates were his tenants. As landlord he allowed himself two rooms: a bedroom and a music room, where he gave his music lessons. Jamie, who had graduated with a degree in music, earned his living from teaching bassoon. There was no shortage of pupils, and he supplemented his earnings by playing in a chamber ensemble and as an occasional bassoonist for Scottish Opera. It was, thought Isabel, an ideal existence; and one into which Cat would fit so comfortably. But Cat had not seen it that way, of course, and Isabel feared that she never would.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie was teaching when she called and promised to call her back in half an hour. While she waited for the call, she made herself a sandwich in the kitchen; she did not feel like eating a proper meal. Then, when that was finished, she returned to the drawing room and awaited his call.

Yes, he was free. His last pupil, a talented boy of fifteen whom he was preparing for an examination, had played brilliantly. Now, with the boy sent off home after the lesson, a walk across town to Isabel’s house was just what he wanted. Yes, it would be good to have a drink with Isabel and perhaps some singing afterwards.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t feel in the mood. I want to talk to you.”

He had picked up her anxiety and the plan to walk was dropped in favour of a quicker bus ride.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “But I really need to discuss something with you. I’ll tell you when you come.”

The buses, so maligned by Grace, were on time. Within twenty minutes, Jamie was at the house and was sitting with Isabel in the kitchen, where she had started to prepare him an omelette. She had taken a bottle of wine from the cellar and had poured a glass for him and for herself. Then she started to explain about the visit to the flat and her meeting with Hen and Neil. He listened gravely, and when she began to recount the conversation she had had with Neil earlier that evening, his eyes were wide with concern.

“Isabel,” he said as she stopped speaking. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

“That I should keep out of things that don’t concern me?”

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“Yes, absolutely.” He paused. “But I know from past experience that you never do. So I won’t say it, perhaps.”

“Good.”

“Even if I think it.”

“Fair enough.”

Jamie grimaced. “So what do we do?”

“That’s why I asked you to come round,” said Isabel, refilling his glass of wine. “I had to talk the whole thing through with somebody.”

She had been speaking while she prepared the omelette.

Now it was ready and she slid it onto a plate that had been warming on the side of the stove.

“Chanterelle mushrooms,” she said. “They transform an omelette.”

Jamie looked down gratefully at the generous omelette and its surrounding of salad.

“You’re always cooking for me,” he said. “And I never cook for you. Never.”

“You’re a man,” said Isabel in a matter-of-fact way. “The thought doesn’t enter your head.”

She realised, the moment she had spoken, that this was an unkind and inappropriate thing to say. She might have said it to Toby, and with justification, as she doubted whether he would ever cook for anybody, but it was not the right thing to say to Jamie.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That just came out. I didn’t mean that.”

Jamie had put his knife and fork down beside his plate. He was staring at the omelette. And he had started to cry.

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

E

OH MY GOODNESS, Jamie. I’m so sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. I had no idea that you would . . .”

Jamie shook his head vigorously. He was not crying loudly, but there were tears. “No,” he said, wiping at his eyes with his handkerchief. “It’s not that at all. It’s not what you said. It’s nothing to do with it.”

Isabel sighed with relief. She had not offended him, then, but what could have provoked this rather extraordinary outburst of emotion on his part?

Jamie picked up his knife and fork and started to cut into his omelette, but put them down again.

“It’s the salad,” he said. “You’ve put in raw onion. My eyes are really sensitive to that. I can’t go anywhere near raw onion.”

Isabel let out a peal of laughter. “Thank God. I thought that those were real tears and that I’d said a dreadful, insensitive thing to you. I thought that it was my fault.” She reached forward and took the plate away from the place in front of him. Then she scraped off the salad, and gave it back to him. “Just an omelette.

As nature intended. Nothing else.”

“That’s perfect,” he said. “I’m sorry about that. It’s genetic, I T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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think. My mother had exactly the same problem, and a cousin of hers too. We’re allergic to raw onion.”

“And I thought for a moment that it had something to do with Cat . . . and with the time you cooked dinner for the two of us in Saxe-Coburg Street.”

Jamie, who had been smiling, now looked pensive. “I remember,” he said.

Isabel had not intended to mention Cat, but now she had, and she knew what the next question would be. He always asked it, whenever she saw him.

“What is Cat up to?” he asked. “What is she doing?”

Isabel reached for her glass and poured herself some wine.

She had not intended to drink anything more after her sherry with Neil, but there in the intimacy of the kitchen, with the yeasty smell of mushrooms assailing her nostrils, she decided otherwise; akrasia, weakness of the will, again. It would feel safe sitting there with Jamie, talking to him and sipping at a glass of wine. She knew that it would make her feel better.

“Cat,” she said, “is doing what she always does. She’s quite busy in the shop. She’s getting on with life.” She trailed off weakly. It was such a trite reply, but what more was there to say?

To ask such a question, anyway, was the equivalent of asking

“How are you?” on meeting a friend. One expects only one answer, an anodyne assurance that all is well, later qualified, perhaps, by some remark about the real situation, if the real situation is quite different. Stoicism first, and then the truth, might be the way in which this could be expressed.

“And that man she’s seeing,” said Jamie quietly. “Toby. What about him? Does she bring him round here?”

“The other day,” said Isabel. “I saw him the other day. But not here.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Jamie reached for his glass. He was frowning, as if struggling to find precisely the right words. “Where, then?”

“In town,” Isabel replied quickly. She hoped that this would be the end of this line of questioning, but it was not.

“Was he . . . was he with Cat? With her?”

“No,” said Isabel. “He was by himself.” She thought: That is, he was by himself to begin with.

Jamie stared at her. “What was he doing?”

Isabel smiled. “You seem very interested in him,” she said.

“And he’s not really very interesting at all, I’m afraid.” She hoped that this aside would reassure him as to whose side she was on, and that the conversation might move on. But it had the opposite effect. Jamie appeared to interpret it as paving the way for further discussion.

“What was he doing, then?”

“He was walking along the street. That’s all. Walking along the street . . . in those crushed-strawberry corduroys that he likes to wear.” The last part of her answer was unnecessary; it was sarcastic, and Isabel immediately regretted it. That was two unpleasant things she had said tonight, she thought. The first was that gratuitous remark about men not cooking; the second was an unworthy remark about Toby’s trousers. It was easy, terribly easy, to become with time a middle-aged spinster with a sharp tongue.

She would have to guard against this. So she added, “They’re not too bad, crushed-strawberry corduroys. Presumably Cat likes them. She must . . .”

Again she stopped herself. She had been about to say that Cat must have found crushed-strawberry corduroys attractive, but that would have been tactless. It implied, did it not, that Jamie, and his trousers did not measure up. She allowed herself a furtive glance at Jamie’s trousers. She had never noticed them T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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before, largely because her interest in Jamie lay not in his trousers, but in his face, and his voice. In fact, it lay in the whole person; and that, surely, was the difference between Toby and Jamie. You could not like Toby as a person (unless you yourself were the wrong sort of person); you could only like him for his physique. Yes, she thought, that’s all. Toby was a sex object in crushed-strawberry corduroys, that’s all he was. And Jamie, by contrast, was . . . well, Jamie was just beautiful, with those high cheekbones of his and his skin and his voice which must surely melt the heart. And she wondered, too, what they were like as lovers. Toby would be all vigour while Jamie would be quiet, and gentle, and caressing, like a woman really. Which might be a problem, perhaps, but not one that she could realistically do very much about. For a few moments, a few completely impermissible moments, she thought: I could teach him. And then she stopped.

Such thoughts were as unacceptable as imagining people being crushed by avalanches. Avalanches. The roar. The sudden confusion of crushed strawberry. The tidal wave of snow, and then the preternatural quiet.

“Did you speak to him?” asked Jamie.

Isabel returned from her thoughts. “Speak to whom?”

“To . . . Toby.” It clearly involved some effort for him to bring himself to pronounce the name.

Isabel shook her head. “No,” she said. “I just saw him.” This, of course, was a half-truth. There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. Isabel had herself written a short article on the matter, following the publication of Sissela Bok’s philosophical monograph Lying. She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent 1 2 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h thought she had revised her position. Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.

“You’re blushing,” said Jamie. “You’re not telling me something.”

So that, thought Isabel, was that. The whole edifice of philosophical debate on the fine nuances of truth telling is ultimately undermined by a simple biological process. Tell a fib and you go red in the face. It sounded so much less dignified than it did in the pages of Sissela Bok, but it was absolutely true. All the great issues were reducible to the simple facts of everyday human life and the trite metaphors, the axiomata, by which people lived. The international economic system and its underlying assumptions: Finders keepers, losers weepers. The uncertainty of life: Step on a crack and the bears will get you (which she had believed in so vividly as a child, walking up Morningside Road with Fersie McPherson, her nurse, carefully avoiding the cracks in the pavement).

“If I’m blushing,” she said, “it’s because I’m not telling you the whole truth. For which I apologise. I didn’t tell you what I did because I feel embarrassed about it, and for . . .” She hesitated.

There was another reason for not revealing what had happened, but now she had embarked on the road of disclosure; she would have to tell Jamie everything. He would sense it if she did not, and she did not want him to feel that she did not trust him. Did she trust him? Yes, she did. Of course she did. A young man like that, with his en brosse hair and his voice, could only be trustwor-thy. Jamies can be trusted; Tobys cannot.

Jamie watched her as she spoke. Now she continued: “. . . for T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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the reason that there is something that I did not want you to know. Not because I don’t trust you, which I do, but because I think that it has nothing to do with us. I saw something that we cannot do anything about. So I thought that there was no reason to tell you.”

“What is it?” he asked. “You have to tell me now. You can’t leave it at that.”

Isabel nodded. He was right. She could not leave the matter like this. “When I saw Toby in town,” she began, “he was walking down Dundas Street. I was on a bus and I saw him. I decided to follow him—please don’t ask me why, because I don’t know if I can give an adequate explanation for that. Sometimes one just does things—ridiculous things—that one can’t explain. So I decided to follow him.

“He walked down Northumberland Street. Then, when we got to Nelson Street, he crossed the road and rang the bell on a ground-floor flat. There was a girl who came to the door. He embraced her, pretty passionately I think, and then the door closed, and that was that.”

Jamie looked at her. For a moment he said nothing, then, very slowly, he lifted his glass and took a sip of his wine. Isabel noticed the fine hands and, for a moment, in his eyes, the reflected light from the wineglass.

“His sister,” he said quietly. “He has a sister who lives in Nelson Street. I’ve actually met her. She’s a friend of a friend.”

Isabel sat quite still. She had not expected this. “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh.”

C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N

E

YES,” SAID JAMIE. “Toby has a sister in Nelson Street. She works in the same property company as my friend does. They’re both surveyors—not the sort who go out with theodolites, but val-uers.” He laughed. “And you thought that the result of your gumshoe activities was that you had discovered Toby being unfaithful. Ha! I wish you had, Isabel, but you haven’t. That’ll teach you to follow people.”

Isabel had now recovered sufficient composure to laugh at herself. “I more or less hid behind a parked van,” she said. “You should have seen me.”

Jamie smiled. “It must have been exciting stuff. Pity about the result, but there we are.”

“Well,” said Isabel. “I enjoyed myself anyway. And it teaches me a lesson about having a nasty, suspicious mind.”

“Which you don’t have,” said Jamie. “You are not suspicious.

You are absolutely straight down the middle.”

“You’re very kind,” said Isabel. “But I have bags of failings.

Same as anybody else. Bags.”

Jamie lifted up his glass again. “She’s quite a nice girl, his sister,” he said. “I met her at a party which Roderick—that’s my sur-T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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veyor friend—gave a few months ago. It was a rather different crowd of people from my own crowd, but it was good fun. And I thought that she was rather nice. Very attractive. Very tall, with blonde hair. A model type.”

Isabel said nothing. Then she closed her eyes, and imagined herself for a moment on the corner of Nelson Street, half hidden by the van, seeing Toby at the door, and the door opening. She could picture it quite clearly, as she had always been able to recall visual details with accuracy. Now the picture was clear. The door opened and the girl appeared. She was not tall, for Toby had stooped to embrace her, and she did not have blonde hair. Her hair, quite unmistakeably, was dark. Black or brown. Not blonde.

She opened her eyes. “It was not his sister,” she said. “It was somebody else.”

Jamie was silent. Isabel imagined the conflict within him: dis-pleasure, or even anger, at the fact that Cat was being deceived, and satisfaction that there was now a chance that Toby could be exposed. He would be thinking, too, it occurred to her, that he might be able to take Toby’s place, which is what she herself had thought. But she at least knew that it would not be that simple; Jamie was unlikely to know that. He would be optimistic.

Isabel decided to take the initiative. “You can’t tell her,” she said. “If you went and told her, she would be angry with you.

Even if she believes it—which she may not—she would feel like shooting the messenger. I guarantee that you would regret it.”

“But she should know,” protested Jamie. “It’s . . . it’s outrageous that he should be carrying on with somebody else. She should be told. We owe it to her.”

“There are some things one has to find out oneself,” said Isabel. “You have to let people make some mistakes themselves.”

“Well, I for one don’t accept that,” Jamie retorted. “This is 1 3 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a simple case. He’s a dog. We know it; she doesn’t. We have to tell her.”

“But the whole point is that if we do that, we’re only going to anger her. Don’t you see? Even if she went and found out that what we said was true, she would still be angry with us for telling her. I don’t want her to . . . to write you off. But she will if you do that.”

Jamie thought about what she had said. So she wanted him to get back with Cat. She had never actually said as much, but now it was in the open. And it was just as he had hoped it would be.

“Thanks,” he said. “I see what you mean.” He paused. “But why do you think he’s two-timing her? If he likes this other girl—

she’s presumably his sister’s flatmate—then why doesn’t he just go off with her? Why use Cat like this?”

“Don’t you see?” said Isabel.

“No, I don’t. Maybe I just don’t get it.”

“Cat is wealthy,” said Isabel. “Cat owns a business, and quite a bit else—a lot else actually, as you may or may not know. If you were somebody who was interested in money, and Toby is, I should think, then you may want to get your hands on some of it.”

Jamie’s astonishment was obvious. “He’s after her money?”

Isabel nodded. “I’ve known quite a few cases like that. I’ve seen people marry for money and then think that they can behave as they like. They get the security of the money and carry on behind their wife’s or husband’s back. It’s not all that unusual. Think of all those young women who marry wealthy older men. Do you think they behave like nuns?”

“I suppose not,” said Jamie.

“Well, there you are. Of course, this is only one explanation.

The other is that he simply wants to play the field. It’s possible T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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that he really likes Cat, but that he likes other women too. That’s perfectly possible.”

Isabel refilled Jamie’s glass. They were getting through the bottle quite quickly, but it was turning into an emotional evening and the wine was helping. There was another bottle in the fridge if needed, and they could broach that later. As long as I keep control, thought Isabel. As long as I maintain enough of a level head so that I don’t tell Jamie that if the truth be told, I’m half in love with him myself, and that there is nothing I would like more than to kiss that brow and run my fingers over that hair and hold him against me.

T H E F O L L OW I N G M O R N I N G Grace, who arrived early, said to herself: two glasses, an empty bottle. Crossing to the fridge, she saw the half-full corked bottle, and added, And a half. She opened the dishwasher and saw the omelette plate and the knife and fork, which told her that the visitor was Jamie: Isabel always cooked an omelette when he stayed for dinner. Grace was glad that Isabel had that young man in. She liked him, and she knew the background with Cat. She suspected, too, what Isabel was planning; that she would be plotting to get the two of them together again. She could forget that. People rarely went back that way. Once you were off somebody, then you tended to stay off them. That, at least, was Grace’s experience. She had rarely found that she rehabilitated somebody once she had taken the decision to write them off.

She prepared the coffee. Isabel would be down soon, and she liked to have the coffee ready for her when she came into the kitchen. The Scotsman had arrived and Grace had brought it 1 3 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h through from the front hall, where it was lying on the mosaic floor beneath the letter box. Now it was on the table, front page up, and Grace glanced at it while she ladled the coffee into the percolator. A resignation had been called for from a Glasgow politician suspected of fraud. (No surprise, thought Grace; none at all.) And there beneath it, a picture of that person of whom Isabel did not approve, the popinjay, as she called him. He had been crossing Princes Street and had collapsed, to be rushed off to the Infirmary. Grace read on: it had been a suspected heart attack, but no—and this was truly astonishing—he was found to have suffered a large split in his side, fortunately dealt with by quick and competent surgical stitching. He had made a full recovery, but then the diagnosis had been revealed: he had burst with self-importance.

Grace put down the coffee spoon. Surely not. Impossible.

She picked up the newspaper to examine it further, and saw the date. The first of April. She smiled. The Scotsman’s little joke—

how funny; but how apt.

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

E

IN SPITE OF THE FACT that he had drunk three glasses of wine and Isabel was towards the end of her second, Jamie had at first been doubtful about Isabel’s proposition, but she had won him over, wheedling him, persuading him that they should at least give it a try.

To do what? To go to see Paul Hogg, of course, as the first step in finding out what it was that Mark Fraser had discovered, and about whom he had discovered it. Sitting at the kitchen table, the chanterelle omelette consumed, Jamie had listened intently as she explained to him about the conversation with Neil, and about how she felt that she could not ignore what he had revealed. She wanted to take the matter further, but she did not want to do it by herself. It would be safer, she said, with two, although the nature of the danger, if any, was not expanded upon.

At last Jamie had agreed. “If you insist,” he said. “If you really insist, I’m prepared to go with you. But it’s only because I don’t want you charging off into this by yourself. It’s not because I think it’s a good idea.”

As Isabel saw Jamie out of the house later that evening, they had agreed that she would telephone him at some point in the 1 3 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h next few days, to discuss how they were to proceed with Paul Hogg. At least she had an acquaintanceship with him, which would enable them to seek him out. But exactly how this would be done, and on what pretext, remained to be worked out.

Barely had Jamie left the house than a thought occurred to Isabel. It almost sent her running after him to tell him about it, but she desisted. It was not all that late, and several neighbours walked their dogs along the street at that hour. She did not wish to be seen running after young men, in the street at least (though the metaphorical context would be as bad). That was not a situation in which anybody would wish to be seen, in much the same way as Dorothy Parker had pronounced that she would not wish to be caught, stuck at the hips, while climbing through anybody else’s window. She smiled at the thought. What was so funny about this? It was difficult to explain, but it just was. Perhaps it was the fact that somebody who would never climb through a window nonetheless expressed a view on the possibility of climbing through a window. But why was that amusing? Perhaps there was no explanation, just as there was no rationale for the intense humour of the remark she had once heard at a lecture given by Domenica Legge, a great authority on Anglo-Norman history. Professor Legge had said: “We must remember that the nobles of the time did not blow their noses in quite the way in which we blow our own noses: they had no handkerchiefs. ” This had been greeted with peals of laughter, and she still found it painfully amusing. But there was really nothing funny about it at all. It was a serious business, no doubt, having no handkerchiefs; mundane, certainly, but serious nonetheless. (What did the nobles do, then? The answer was, apparently, straw. How awful. How scratchy. And if the nobles were reduced to using straw, then what did those beneath them in the social order use? The answer was, of course, vivid: they blew T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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their nose on their fingers, as many people still did. She had seen it herself once or twice, though not in Edinburgh, of course.) It was not of handkerchiefs, or the lack of handkerchiefs, that she thought, but of Elizabeth Blackadder. Paul Hogg had bought the Blackadder which she had wanted. The exhibition at which he had bought it was a short one, and those who had bought paintings would by now have been allowed to remove them. This meant that anybody who wanted a further look at the painting would have to do so in Paul Hogg’s flat in Great King Street. She could be just such a person. She could telephone Paul Hogg and ask to see the painting again, as she was thinking of asking Elizabeth Blackadder, who still had her studio in the Grange, to paint a similar picture for her. This was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. An artist might not wish to make a mere copy of an existing work, but might be quite willing to do something similar.

A lie, she thought, but only a lie at this stage of the plan’s conception; lies can become truths. She had indeed planned to buy a Blackadder and there was no reason why she should not commission one. In fact, she would do exactly that, which meant that she could see Paul Hogg on these grounds with a perfectly good conscience. Not even Sissela Bok, author of Lying, could object. Then, having examined the Blackadder again, which he would be proudly displaying on his wall, she would delicately raise the possibility that Mark Fraser might have found out something awkward in the course of his work at McDowell’s. Would Paul Hogg have any idea of what that might be? And if he did not, then she might be more specific and say to him that if he was attached to the young man—and he clearly had been fond of him, judging from his emotional reaction to what she had said in the Vincent Bar—then might he not be prepared to make some enquiries so as to prove or disprove the worrying hypothesis that 1 3 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h all of this seemed to be pointing towards? It would have to be handled delicately, but it could be done. He might agree. And all the time, just to give her confidence, Jamie would be sitting beside her on Paul Hogg’s chintzy sofa. We think, she could say; we wonder. That sounded much more reasonable than the same thing expressed in the singular.

She telephoned Jamie the next morning at the earliest decent hour; nine o’clock, in her view. Isabel observed an etiquette of the telephone: a call before eight in the morning was an emergency; between eight and nine it was an intrusion; thereafter calls could be made until ten in the evening, although anything after nine-thirty required an apology for the disturbance. After ten one was into emergency time again. On answering the telephone one should, if at all possible, give one’s name, but only after saying good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. None of these conventions, she conceded, was observed to any great extent by others, and not, she noted, by Jamie himself, who answered her call that morning with an abrupt “Yes.”

“You don’t sound very welcoming,” said Isabel disapprovingly.

“And how do I know who you are? ‘Yes’ is not enough. And if you had been too busy to take the call, would you simply have said ‘No’?”

“Isabel?” he said.

“Had you told me who you were, then I would have reciprocated the courtesy. Your last question would then have been otiose.”

Jamie laughed. “How long is this going to take?” he asked. “I have to get a train to Glasgow at ten. We’re rehearsing for Parsifal. ”

“Poor you,” said Isabel. “Poor singers. What an endurance test.”

“Yes,” Jamie agreed. “Wagner makes my head sore. But I really must get ready.”

Isabel quickly explained her idea to him and then waited for his reaction.

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“If you insist,” Jamie said. “I suppose it sounds feasible enough.

I’ll come along if you insist. Really insist.”

He could have been more accommodating, thought Isabel after she had rung off, but at least he had agreed. Now she would have to telephone Paul Hogg at McDowell’s and ask him if and when it would be convenient to visit him. She was confident that he would welcome her suggestion. They had got on well together, and apart from the moment when she had inadvertently triggered in him a painful memory, the evening they had spent together had been a success. He had suggested, had he not, that she meet his fiancée, whose name she had forgotten but who could be referred to for the time being simply as “fiancée.”

She telephoned at 10:45, a time when she believed there was the greatest chance that anybody who worked in an office would be having their morning coffee, and in fact he was, when she asked him.

“Yes. I’m sitting here with the FT on my desk. I should be reading it, but I’m not. I’m looking out the window and drinking my coffee.”

“But I’m sure that you’re about to take important decisions,”

she said. “And one of them will be whether you would allow me to look at your Blackadder again. I want to ask her to do one for me, and I thought that it might be helpful to look at yours again.”

“Of course,” he said. “Anybody can look at it. It’s still in the exhibition. It has another week to run.”

Isabel was momentarily taken by surprise. Of course she should have telephoned the gallery to find out whether the show was still on, and if it was, she should have waited until he had collected his painting.

“But it would be very nice to see you anyway,” Paul Hogg went on helpfully. “I have another Blackadder you might like to see.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h They made the arrangement. Isabel would come the following evening, at six, for drinks. Paul Hogg was perfectly happy for her to bring somebody with her too, a young man who was very interested in art and whom she would like him to meet. Of course that would be perfectly convenient, and nice too.

It was so easy, thought Isabel. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered, as Paul Hogg was. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about. They were intended to avoid friction between people, and they did this by regulating the contours of an encounter. If each party knew what the other should do, then conflict would be unlikely. And this worked at every level, from the most minor transaction between two people to dealings between nations. International law, after all, was simply a system of manners writ large.

Jamie had good manners. Paul Hogg had good manners. Her mechanic, the proprietor of the small backstreet garage where she took her rarely used car for servicing, had perfect manners.

Toby, by contrast, had bad manners; not on the surface, where he thought, quite wrongly, that it counted, but underneath, in his attitude to others. Good manners depended on paying moral attention to others; it required one to treat them with complete moral seriousness, to understand their feelings and their needs.

Some people, the selfish, had no inclination to do this, and it always showed. They were impatient with those whom they thought did not count: the old, the inarticulate, the disadvantaged. The person with good manners, however, would always listen to such people and treat them with respect.

How utterly shortsighted we had been to listen to those who thought that manners were a bourgeois affectation, an irrelevance, which need no longer be valued. A moral disaster had ensued, T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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because manners were the basic building block of civil society.

They were the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. In this way an entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others; a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm.

She stopped herself. This was a train of thought which, though clearly correct, made her feel old; as old as Cicero declaim-ing, O tempora! O mores! And this fact, in itself, demonstrated the subtle, corrosive power of relativism. The relativists had suc-ceeded in so getting under our moral skins that their attitudes had become internalised, and Isabel Dalhousie, with all her interest in moral philosophy and distaste for the relativist position, actually felt embarrassed to be thinking such thoughts.

She must stop this musing on moral imagination, she thought, and concentrate on things of more immediate importance, such as checking the morning’s mail for the review and finding out why that poor boy Mark Fraser fell to his death from the gods. But she knew she would never abandon these broader issues; it was her lot. She may as well accept it. She was tuned in to a different sta-tion from most people and the tuning dial was broken.

She telephoned Jamie, forgetting that he would already have caught his train to Glasgow and would be, more or less at that moment, drawing into Queen Street Station. She waited for his answering machine to complete its speech, and then she left a message.

Jamie, yes I’ve phoned him, Paul Hogg. He was happy for us to call to see him tomorrow at six. I’ll meet you half an hour before that, in the Vincent Bar. And Jamie, thanks for everything. I really appreciate your help on this. Thanks so much.

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

E

SHE WAS ANXIOUS in the pub, waiting for Jamie. It was a masculine place, at least at that hour, and she felt ill at ease.

Women could go to pubs by themselves, of course, but she nonetheless felt out of place. The bartender, who served her a glass of bitter lemon with ice, smiled at her in a friendly way and commented on the fine evening. The clocks had just been put forward, and the sun was not setting now until after seven.

Isabel agreed, but could think of nothing useful to add, so she said: “It’s spring, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” said the barman. “But you never know.”

Isabel had returned to her table. You never know. Of course you never know. Anything could happen in this life. Here she was, the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, about to go off in search of . . . of a murderer is what it amounted to. And in this task she was to be assisted, although somewhat reluctantly, by a beautiful young man with whom she was half in love but who was himself in love with her niece, who in turn appeared besotted with somebody else, who was having a simultaneous affair with his sister’s flatmate. No, the barman certainly did not know, and if she told him he would scarcely believe it.

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Jamie was ten minutes late. He had been practising, he said, and he had only looked at the clock just before five-thirty.

“But you’re here,” said Isabel. “And that’s the important thing.” She glanced at her watch. “We have about twenty minutes. I thought I might just go over with you how I plan to approach this.”

Jamie listened, eyeing her from time to time over the edge of his beer glass. He remained uneasy about the whole project, but he had to agree that she was well rehearsed. She would raise the issue gently, particularly bearing in mind the apparent rawness of Paul Hogg’s feelings on the matter. She would explain that she was not seeking to interfere, and the last thing that she was interested in was causing any embarrassment for McDowell’s. But they owed it to Mark, and to Neil, who had brought the matter to her attention, to at least take the issue a little bit further. She herself, of course, was convinced that there was nothing in it, but at least they could lay the matter to rest with a good conscience if they had investigated it fully.

“Good script,” Jamie commented after she had finished.

“Covers it all.”

“I can’t see that he would be offended by any of that,” said Isabel.

“No,” said Jamie. “That’s unless it’s him.”

“What’s him?”

“Unless he did it himself. He might be the insider trader.”

Isabel stared at her companion. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, why not? He’s the person that Mark must have been working with most closely. He was the head of his section or whatever. If Mark knew anything, it must have been about the stuff that he was working on.”

Isabel considered this. It was possible, she supposed, but she 1 4 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h thought it unlikely. There had been no doubting the genuineness of the emotion he had shown on the occasion of their first meeting, when Mark’s name had come up. He was devastated by what had happened; that was perfectly obvious. And if that were so, then he could not have been the person who arranged to dispose of Mark, which meant that he could not be the person fearing exposure.

“Do you see that?” she said to Jamie.

Jamie did, but he thought it wise to keep an open mind.

“We could be mistaken,” he said. “Murderers feel guilt. They mourn their victims sometimes. Paul Hogg may be like that.”

“He’s not,” said Isabel. “You haven’t met him yet. He’s not like that. It’s somebody else we’re looking for.”

Jamie shrugged. “It might be. It might not. At least keep an open mind.”

PAU L H O G G L I V E D on the first floor of a Georgian town house in Great King Street. It was one of the most handsome streets in the New Town, and from his side, the south side, there was a view, from the top floors at least, of the Firth of Forth, a blue strip of sea just beyond Leith, and, beyond that, of the hills of Fife.

The first floor had other reasons to commend it, though, even if the view was only of the other side of the street. In some streets at least, these flats were called the drawing-room flats, as they had been the main drawing rooms of the old, full houses. Their walls, therefore, were higher and their windows went from ceiling to floor, great expanses of glass which flooded the rooms with light.

They walked up the common stairway, a generous sweep of stone stairs, about which there lingered a slight smell of cat, and found the door with hogg on a square brass plate. Isabel glanced T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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at Jamie, who winked at her. His scepticism had been replaced by a growing interest in what they were doing, and it was she, now, who felt doubtful.

Paul Hogg answered the door quickly and took their coats.

Isabel introduced Jamie, and the two shook hands.

“I’ve seen you somewhere,” said Paul Hogg. “I don’t know where.”

“Edinburgh,” said Jamie, and they laughed.

He led them through to the drawing room, which was a large, elegantly furnished room, dominated by an impressive white mantelpiece. Isabel noticed the invitations—at least four of them—

propped up on the mantelpiece, and when Paul Hogg went out of the room to fetch their drinks, and they had not yet sat down, she sidled over and read them quickly.

Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Holmes, At Home, Thursday 16th (Isabel had been invited too). Then, George Maxtone requests the pleasure of the company of Ms. Minty Auchterlonie at a Reception at the Lothian Gallery, at 6 p.m., Tuesday, 18th May; and Minty: Peter and Jeremy, Drinks in the Garden (weather permitting, probably not), Friday, 21st May, 6:30 p.m. And finally, Paul and Minty: Please come to our wedding reception at Prestonfield House on Saturday, 15th May. Ceilidh, 8 p.m. Angus and Tatti. Dress: Evening/

Highland.

Isabel smiled, although Jamie was looking at her disapprovingly, as if she were reading something private. Jamie came over to join her and squinted briefly at the invitations. “You shouldn’t read other people’s things,” he whispered. “It’s rude.”

“Pah!” hissed Isabel. “That’s why these things are up here. To be read. I’ve seen invitations on mantelpieces three years out of date. Invitations to the garden party at Holyroodhouse, for instance. Years old, but still displayed.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She led him away from the mantelpiece to stand before a large watercolour of poppies in a garden. “That’s her,” she said.

“Elizabeth Blackadder. Poppies. Garden walls with cats on them.

But terribly well done in spite of the subject matter.” And she thought: I have no pictures of poppies in my house; I have never been stuck at the hips going through somebody else’s window.

This was where Paul Hogg, returning with two glasses in his hands, found them.

“There you are,” he said cheerfully. “What you came to see.”

“It’s a very good one,” said Isabel. “Poppies again. So important.”

“Yes,” said Paul. “I like poppies. It’s such a pity that they fall to bits when you pick them.”

“A clever defence mechanism,” said Isabel, glancing at Jamie.

“Roses should catch on to that. Thorns are obviously not enough.

Perfect beauty should be left exactly as it is.”

Jamie returned her look. “Oh,” he said, and then was silent.

Paul Hogg looked at him, and then looked at Isabel. Isabel, noticing this, thought: He’s wondering what the relationship is. Toy boy, probably; or so he thinks. But even if that were the case, why should he be surprised? It was common enough these days.

Paul Hogg left the room briefly to fetch his own drink, and Isabel smiled at Jamie, raising a finger to her lip in a quick con-spiratorial gesture.

“But I haven’t said anything yet,” said Jamie. “All I said was ‘Oh.’ ”

“Quite enough,” said Isabel. “An eloquent monosyllable.”

Jamie shook his head. “I don’t know why I agreed to come with you,” he whispered. “You’re half crazy.”

“Thank you, Jamie,” she said quietly. “But here’s our host.”

Paul Hogg returned and they raised their glasses to one another.

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“I bought that painting at auction a couple of years ago,” he said. “It was with my first bonus from the company. I bought it to celebrate.”

“A good thing to do,” said Isabel. “One reads about brokers, financial people, celebrating with those awful lunches that set them back ten thousand pounds for the wine. That doesn’t happen in Edinburgh, I hope.”

“Certainly not,” said Paul Hogg. “New York and London maybe. Places like that.”

Isabel turned towards the fireplace. A large gilt-framed picture was hung above it, and she had recognised it immediately.

“That’s a fine Peploe,” she said. “Marvellous.”

“Yes,” said Paul Hogg. “It’s very nice. West coast of Mull, I think.”

“Or Iona?” asked Isabel.

“Could be,” said Paul Hogg vaguely. “Somewhere there.”

Isabel took a few steps towards the painting and looked up at it. “That business with all those forgeries some years back,” she said. “You weren’t worried about that? Did you check?”

Paul Hogg looked surprised. “There were forgeries?”

“So it was said,” said Isabel. “Peploes, Cadells. Quite a few.

There was a trial. It caused some anxiety. I knew somebody who had one on his hands—a lovely painting, but it had been painted the week before, more or less. Very skilled—as these people often are.”

Paul Hogg shrugged. “That’s always a danger, I suppose.”

Isabel looked up at the painting again. “When did Peploe paint this?” she asked.

Paul Hogg made a gesture of ignorance. “No idea. When he was over on Mull, perhaps.”

Isabel watched him. It was an answer of staggering lameness, but at least it fitted with an impression that she was rapidly form-1 4 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h ing. Paul Hogg knew very little about art, and, moreover, was not particularly interested. How otherwise could one have a Peploe like that—and she was sure that it was genuine—how could one have a Peploe and not know the basic facts about it?

There were at least ten other pictures in the room, all of them interesting even if none was as dramatic as the Peploe. There was a Gillies landscape, for example, a very small McTaggart, and there, at the end of the room, a characteristic Bellamy. Whoever had collected these either knew a great deal about Scottish art or had stumbled upon a perfectly representative ready-made collection.

Isabel moved over to another picture. He had invited her to view his Blackadder and so it was quite acceptable to be nosy, about paintings at least.

“This is a Cowie, isn’t it?” she asked.

Paul Hogg looked at the picture. “I think so.”

It was not. It was a Crosbie, as anybody could have told.

These paintings did not belong to Paul Hogg, which meant that they were the property of Minty Auchterlonie, who was, she presumed, his fiancée, and who had been named separatim on two of the invitations. And those two invitations, significantly, were both from gallery owners. George Maxtone owned the Lothian Gallery and was just the sort of person to whom one would go if one wanted to buy a painting by a major Scottish painter of the early twentieth century. Peter Thom and Jeremy Lambert ran a small gallery in a village outside Edinburgh but were also frequently commissioned by people who were looking for particular paintings. They had an uncanny knack of locating people who were prepared to sell paintings but who wished to do so discreetly. The two functions would probably be a mixture of friends and clients, or of people who were both.

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“Minty—” Isabel began, meaning to ask Paul Hogg about his fiancée, but she was interrupted.

“My fiancée,” he said. “Yes, she’s coming any moment. She was working a bit late, though not late by her standards. Sometimes she’s not back until eleven or twelve.”

“Oh,” said Isabel. “Let me guess. She’s a . . . a surgeon, yes, that’s what she is. She’s a surgeon or a . . . a fireman?”

Paul Hogg laughed. “Very unlikely. She probably lights more fires than she puts out.”

“What a nice thing to say about one’s fiancée!” said Isabel.

“How passionate! I hope that you’d say that about your fiancée, Jamie.”

Paul Hogg shot a glance at Jamie, who scowled at Isabel, and then, as if reminded of duty, changed the scowl to a smile.

“Hah!” he said.

Isabel turned to Paul Hogg. “What does she do, then, that keeps her out so late at night?” She knew the answer to the question even as she asked it.

“Corporate finance,” said Paul Hogg. Isabel detected a note of resignation, almost a sigh, and she concluded that there was tension here. Minty Auchterlonie, whom they were shortly to meet, would not be a clinging-vine fiancée. She would not be a comfortable homemaker. She would be tough, and hard. She was the one with the money, who was busy buying these expensive paintings. And what is more, Isabel was convinced that these paintings were not being acquired for the love of art; they were a strategy.

They were standing near one of the two large front windows, next to the Cowie that was a Crosbie. Paul looked out and tapped the glass gently. “That’s her,” he said, pointing out into the street.

“That’s Minty arriving now.” There was pride in his voice.

1 5 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Isabel and Jamie looked out the window. Below them, directly outside the entrance to the flat, a small, raffish sports car was being manoeuvred into a parking space. It was painted in British racing green and had a distinctive chrome front grille. But it was not a make which Isabel, who took a mild interest in cars, could recognise; Italian perhaps, an unusual Alfa Romeo, an older Spider? The only good car to come out of Italy, ever, in Isabel’s opinion.

A few minutes later the door into the drawing room opened and Minty came in. Isabel noticed that Paul Hogg snapped to, like a soldier on the arrival of a senior officer. But he was smiling, and obviously delighted to see her. That always showed, she thought; people brightened when they were truly pleased to see somebody. It was unmistakeable.

She looked at Minty, whom Paul Hogg had crossed the room to embrace. She was a tall, rather angular woman in her late twenties; late enough twenties to require attention to makeup, which was heavily but skilfully applied. Attention had been paid to her clothes, too, which were clearly expensive and carefully structured. She kissed Paul Hogg perfunctorily on both cheeks, and then walked over towards them. She shook hands, her glance moving quickly from Isabel ( dismissed, thought Isabel) to Jamie ( interested, she noted). Isabel distrusted her immediately.

C H A P T E R S I X T E E N

E

YOU ASKED HIM nothing about Mark,” said Jamie heatedly as they closed the door at the bottom of the stair and stepped out into the evening street. “Not a single thing! What was the point of going there?”

Isabel linked her arm with Jamie’s and led him towards the Dundas Street intersection. “Now,” she said, “keep calm. It’s only eight o’clock and we have plenty of time for dinner. It’s on me tonight. There’s a very good Italian restaurant just round the corner and we can talk there. I’ll explain everything to you.”

“But I just don’t see the point,” said Jamie. “We sat there talking to Paul Hogg and that ghastly fiancée of his and the subject, from start to finish, was art. And it was mostly you and that Minty person. Paul Hogg sat there looking up at the ceiling. He was bored. I could see it.”

“She was bored too,” said Isabel. “I could see that.”

Jamie was silent, and Isabel gave his arm a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell you over dinner. I would like a few moments to think just now.”

They walked up Dundas Street, crossing Queen Street, and along towards Thistle Street, where Isabel said they would find 1 5 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the restaurant. The town was not busy, and there was no traffic in Thistle Street. So they walked a short distance in the road itself, their footsteps echoing against the walls on either side. Then, on the right, the discreet door of the restaurant.

It was not large—about eight tables in all, and there were only two other diners. Isabel recognised the couple and nodded.

They smiled, and then looked down at the tablecloth, with discretion, of course, but they were interested.

“Well,” said Jamie, as they sat down. “Tell me.”

Isabel arranged her table napkin on her lap and picked up the menu. “You can take the credit,” she began. “Or part of it.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You said to me in the Vincent that I should be prepared to find out that Paul Hogg was the person we were after.

That’s what you said. And that made me think.”

“So you decided that it was him,” said Jamie.

“No,” said Isabel. “It’s her. Minty Auchterlonie.”

“Hard-faced cow,” muttered Jamie.

Isabel smiled. “You could say that. I might not use those exact words, but I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

“I disliked her the moment she came into the room,” said Jamie.

“Which is odd, because I think that she liked you. In fact, I’m pretty sure that she . . . how shall I put it? She noticed you.”

Her remark seemed to embarrass Jamie, who looked down at the menu which the waiter had placed before him. “I didn’t see—”

he began.

“Of course you didn’t,” said Isabel. “Only another woman would pick it up. But she took an interest in you. Not that it stopped her getting bored with both of us after a while.”

“I don’t know,” said Jamie. “Anyway, she’s a type that I just can’t stand. I really can’t.”

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Isabel looked thoughtful. “I wonder what it is that made us—

both of us—take a bizz against her.” The old Scots word “bizz,”

like so many Scots terms, could only be roughly translated. A bizz was a feeling of antipathy, but it had subtle nuances. A bizz was often irrational or unjustified.

“It’s what she represents,” Jamie offered. “It’s a sort of mixture, isn’t it, of ambition and ruthlessness and materialism and—”

“Yes,” Isabel interrupted him. “Quite. It may be difficult to define, but I think we both know exactly what it is. And the interesting thing is that she had it and he didn’t. Would you agree with that?”

Jamie nodded. “I quite liked him. I wouldn’t choose him as a particularly close friend, but he seemed friendly enough.”

“Exactly,” said Isabel. “Unexceptionable, and unexceptional.”

“And not somebody who would ruthlessly remove somebody who threatened to expose him.”

Isabel shook her head. “Definitely not.”

“Whereas she . . .”

“Lady Macbeth,” Isabel said firmly. “There should be a syndrome named after her. Perhaps there is. Like the Othello syndrome.”

“What’s that?” asked Jamie.

Isabel took up a bread roll and broke it on her side plate. She would not use a knife on a roll, of course, although Jamie did. In Germany it once was considered inappropriate to use a knife on a potato, a curious custom which she had never understood. An enquiry she had made of a German friend had received a strange explanation, which she could only assume had not been serious.

“A nineteenth-century custom,” he had explained. “Perhaps the emperor had a face like a potato and it was considered disre-spectful.” She had laughed, but when she later saw a portrait of 1 5 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the emperor, she thought it might just be true. He did look like a potato, just as Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, had looked slightly porcine. She imagined him at breakfast, being served bacon, and laying down his knife and fork and sighing, regretfully, “I just can’t . . .”

“The Othello syndrome is pathological jealousy,” said Isabel, reaching for the glass of gassy mineral water which the attentive waiter had now poured her. “It afflicts men, usually, and it makes them believe that their wife or partner is being unfaithful to them. They become obsessed with the thought, and nothing, nothing can persuade them otherwise. They may eventually end up being violent.”

Jamie, she noticed, was listening very carefully to her as she spoke, and the thought occurred to her: He sees something there.

Was he jealous of Cat? Of course he was. But then Cat was having an affair with somebody else, in his view at least.

“Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “You’re not the sort to be pathologically jealous.”

“Of course not,” he said, too hurriedly, she thought. Then he added, “Where can one read about it? Have you read something about it?”

“There’s a book in my library,” said Isabel. “It’s called Unusual Psychiatric Syndromes and it has some wonderful ones in it. For example, cargo cults. That’s where whole groups of people believe that somebody is going to come and drop supplies to them. Cargo. Manna. The same thing. There have been remarkable cases in the South Seas. Islands where people believed that eventually the Americans would come and drop boxes of food, if only they waited long enough.”

“And others?”

“The syndrome where you imagine that you recognise people.

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You think you know them, but you don’t. It’s neurological. That couple over there, for example, I’m sure I know them, but I probably don’t. Maybe I’ve got it.” She laughed.

“Paul Hogg’s got that too,” said Jamie. “He said he’d seen me.

It was the first thing he said.”

“But he probably had. People notice you.”

“I don’t think they do. Why would they?”

Isabel looked at him. How charming it was that he did not know. And perhaps it was best that he should not. That might spoil him. So she said nothing, but smiled. Misguided Cat!

“So what has Lady Macbeth got to do with it?” asked Jamie.

Isabel leaned forward in her chair.

“Murderess,” she whispered. “A cunning, manipulative murderess.”

Jamie sat quite still. The light, bantering tone of the conversation had come to an abrupt end. He felt cold. “Her?”

Isabel did not smile. Her tone was serious. “I realised pretty quickly that the paintings in that room were not his, but hers.

The invitations from the galleries were for her. He knew nothing about the paintings. She was the one who was buying all those expensive daubs.”

“So? She may have money.”

“Yes, she has money, all right. But don’t you see, if you have large amounts of money which you may not want to leave lying about the place in bank accounts, then buying pictures is a very good way of investing. You can pay cash, if you like, and then you have an appreciating, very portable asset. As long as you know what you’re doing, which she does.”

“But I don’t see what this has got to do with Mark Fraser.

Paul Hogg is the one who worked with him, not Minty.”

“Minty Auchterlonie is a hard-faced cow—as you so percep-1 5 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tively call her—who works in corporate finance in a merchant bank. Paul Hogg comes home from work and she says: ‘What are you doing at the office today, Paul?’ Paul says this and that, and tells her, because she’s in the same line as he is. Some of this information is pretty sensitive, but pillow talk, you know, has to be frank if it’s to be at all interesting, and she picks it all up. She goes off and buys the shares in her name—or possibly using some sort of front—and lo and behold the large profit is made, all on the basis of inside information. She takes the profit and puts it into pictures, which leave less of a trail. Or alternatively, she has an arrangement with an art dealer. He gets the information from her and makes the purchase. There’s no way of linking him to her.

He pays her in paintings, taking his cut, one assumes, and the paintings are simply not officially sold, so there’s no record in his books of a taxable profit being made.”

Jamie sat openmouthed. “You worked all this out this evening? On the way up here?”

Isabel laughed. “It’s nothing elaborate. Once I realised it was not him, and once we had actually met her, then it all fell into place. Of course it’s only a hypothesis, but I think it might be true.”

It may have been clear thus far to Jamie, but it was not clear to him why Minty should have tried to get rid of Mark. Isabel now explained this. Minty was ambitious. Marriage to Paul Hogg, who was clearly going somewhere in McDowell’s, would suit her well. He was a pleasant, compliant man, and she probably felt lucky to have him as her fiancé. Stronger, more dominating men would have found Minty too difficult to take, too much competi-tion. So Paul Hogg suited her very well. But if it came out that Paul Hogg had passed on information to her—even if innocently—then that would cost him his job. He would not have been the insider trader, but she would. And if it came out that she T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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had done this, then not only would she lose her own job, but she would be unemployable in corporate finance. It would be the end of her world, and if such an outcome could be averted only by arranging for something tragic to happen, then so be it. People like Minty Auchterlonie had no particular conscience. They had no idea of a life beyond this one, of any assessment, and without that, the only thing that stood between her and murder was an internal sense of right and wrong. And in that respect, Isabel said, one did not have to look particularly closely to realise that Minty Auchterlonie was deficient.

“Our friend Minty,” said Isabel at length, “has a personality disorder. Most people would not recognise it, but it’s very definitely there.”

“This Lady Macbeth syndrome?” asked Jamie.

“Maybe that too,” said Isabel, “if it exists. I was thinking of something much more common. Psychopathy, or sociopathy—call it what you will. She’s sociopathic. She will have no moral com-punction in doing whatever is in her interests. It’s as simple as that.”

“Including pushing people over the gods at the Usher Hall?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Absolutely.”

Jamie thought for a moment. Isabel’s explanation seemed plausible, and he was prepared go along with it, but did she have any idea of what they might do next? What she had suggested was surmise, no more. Presumably there would need to be some form of proof if anything more were to be done. And they had no proof, none at all; all that they had was a theory as to motive.

“So,” he said. “What now?”

Isabel smiled. “I have no idea.”

Jamie could not conceal his irritation at her insouciance. “I don’t see how we can leave it at that. We’ve gone so far. We can’t just leave the matter there.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The tone of Isabel’s response was placatory. “I wasn’t suggesting that we leave anything anywhere. And it doesn’t matter that I have no idea what to do, right at the moment. A period of doing nothing is exactly what’s needed.”

Seeing Jamie taken aback by this, Isabel went on to explain.

“I think she knows,” she said. “I think that she knows why we were there.”

“She said something?”

“Yes. When I was talking to her—you were chatting to Paul Hogg at the time—she said to me that she had heard from her fiancé that I was interested in—those were her exact words,

‘interested in’—Mark Fraser. She waited for me to say something, but I just nodded. She came back to the subject a little later and asked me whether I had known him well. Again I dodged her question. It made her uneasy, I could see it. And I’m not surprised.”

“So do you think she knows that we suspect her?”

Isabel took a sip of wine. From the kitchen came wafting a smell of garlic and olive oil. “Smell that,” she said. “Delicious.

Does she think we know? Maybe. But whatever she may think, I’m pretty sure that we are going to hear from her at some stage.

She will want to know more about what we’re up to. She’ll come to us. Let’s just give her a few days to do that.”

Jamie looked unconvinced. “These sociopaths,” he said.

“What do they feel like? Inside?”

Isabel smiled. “Unmoved,” she said. “They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved.

Cats are sociopaths, you see. It’s their natural state.”

“And is it their fault? Are they to blame?”

“Cats are not to blame for being cats,” said Isabel, “and therefore they cannot be blamed for doing the things that cats do, such T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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as eating garden birds or playing with their prey. Cats can’t help any of that.”

“And what about people like that? Can they help it?” asked Jamie.

“It’s very problematic whether they are to be blamed for their actions,” said Isabel. “There’s an interesting literature on it. They might argue that their acts are the result of their psychopathol-ogy. They act the way they do because of their personality being what it is, but then they never chose to have a personality disorder. So how can they be responsible for that which they did not choose?”

Jamie looked towards the kitchen. He saw a chef dip a finger into a bowl and then lick it thoughtfully. A sociopathic chef would be a nightmare. “It’s the sort of thing that you might discuss with your friends,” he said. “The Sunday Philosophy Club.

You could discuss the moral responsibility of people like that.”

Isabel smiled ruefully. “If I could get the club together,” she said. “Yes, if I could get the club to meet.”

“Sunday’s not an easy day,” said Jamie.

“No,” Isabel agreed. “That’s what Cat says too.” She paused.

She did not like to mention Cat too much in Jamie’s presence because he always looked wistful, almost lost, when she did so.

C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

E

WHAT I NEED, thought Isabel, is a few days free of intrigue.

I need to get back to editing the review, to doing the crosswords without interruption, to going for the occasional walk into Bruntsfield to have an inconsequential chat with Cat. I do not need to spend my time conspiring with Jamie in pubs and restaurants and brushing up against scheming corporate financiers with expensive tastes in art.

She had not slept well the previous night. She had said good-bye to Jamie after their meal at the restaurant and had not arrived back at the house until well after eleven. Once in bed, with the light switched out, and the moonlight throwing into her room the shadow of the tree outside her window, she had lain awake, thinking of the impasse which she feared they had reached. Even if the next move was down to Minty Auchterlonie, there were difficult decisions to be made. And then there was the whole business of Cat and Toby. She wished that it had never occurred to her to follow him, as the knowledge that she had acquired weighed heavily upon her conscience. She had decided that for the time being she would do nothing about it, but she knew that this was only shelving a problem which she would have to conT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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front at some time or other. She was not sure how she would be able to deal with Toby when next she saw him. Would she be able to maintain her normal attitude, which, even if not friendly at heart, was at least as polite as circumstances demanded?

She slept, but only fitfully, with the result that she was still sound asleep when Grace arrived the next morning. If she was not downstairs, Grace inevitably came up to check on her, bearing a reviving cup of tea. She woke up to Grace’s knock.

“A bad night?” Grace asked solicitously as she placed the cup of tea on Isabel’s bedside table.

Isabel sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t think I went to sleep until two,” she said.

“Worries?” asked Grace, looking down at her.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Worries and doubts. This and that.”

“I know the feeling,” said Grace. “It happens to me too. I start worrying about the world. I wonder where it’s all going to end.”

“Not with a bang but a whimper,” said Isabel vaguely. “That’s what T. S. Eliot said, and everybody always quotes him on it. But it’s really a very silly thing to say, and I’m sure that he regretted it.”

“Silly man,” said Grace. “Your friend Mr. Auden would never have said that, would he?”

“Certainly not,” said Isabel, twisting round in bed to reach for the teacup. “Although he did say some silly things when he was young.” She took a sip of tea, which always seemed to have an immediate effect on her clarity of mind. “And then he said some silly things when he was old. In between, though, he was usually very acute.”

“Cute?”

“Acute.” Isabel started to get out of bed, feeling with her toes for the slippers on the bedside rug. “If he wrote something which was wrong, which was meretricious, he would go back to it and 1 6 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h change it, if he could. Some of his poems he denounced alto-gether. ‘September 1st, 1939’ was an example.”

She drew the curtains. It was a bright spring day, with the first signs of heat in the sun. “He said that poem was dishonest, although I think it’s got some wonderful lines. Then, in Letters from Iceland, he wrote something which had absolutely no meaning, but which sounded magnificent. And the ports have names for the sea. It’s a marvellous line, isn’t it? But it doesn’t mean anything, does it, Grace?”

“No,” said Grace. “I don’t see how ports can have names for the sea. I don’t see it.”

Isabel rubbed her eyes again. “Grace, I want to have a simple day. Do you think that you can help me?”

“Of course.”

“Could you answer the phone? Tell anybody that I’m working, which I intend to be. Tell them that I’ll be able to phone them back tomorrow.”

“Everybody?”

“Except Cat. And Jamie. I’ll speak to them, although I hope that they don’t phone today. Everybody else will have to wait.”

Grace approved. She liked to be in control of the house, and being asked to turn people away was a most welcome instruction.

“It’s about time you did this,” she said. “You’re at everybody’s beck and call. It’s ridiculous. You deserve a bit of time to yourself.”

Isabel smiled. Grace was her greatest ally. Whatever disagreements they might have, in the final analysis she knew that Grace had her interests firmly at heart. This was loyalty of a sort which was rare in an age of self-indulgence. It was an old-fashioned virtue of the type which her philosophical colleagues extolled but could never themselves match. And Grace, in spite of her tendency to disapprove of certain people, had many other T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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virtues. She believed in a God who would ultimately do justice to those to whom injustice had been done; she believed in work, and the importance of never being late or missing a day through

“so-called illness,” and she believed in never ignoring a request for help from anybody, no matter their condition, no matter the fault that lay behind their plight. This was true generosity of spirit, concealed behind a sometimes slightly brusque exterior.

“You’re wonderful, Grace,” Isabel said. “Where would any of us be without you?”

S H E WO R K E D T H E E N T I R E morning. The post had brought a further bundle of submissions for the review and she entered the details of each of these in the book which she kept for the purpose. She suspected that several would not survive the first stage of screening; although one of these, “Gambling: An Ethical Analysis,” revealed, at first glance, some possibilities. What ethical problems did gambling occasion? Isabel thought that there was a straightforward utilitarian argument to this, at the very least. If you had six children, as gamblers so often seemed to do (another sort of gambling? she wondered) then one had a duty to steward one’s resources well, for the children’s sakes. But if one was well-off, with no dependents, then was there anything intrinsically wrong in placing, if not one’s last sou, then one’s surplus sous, on a bet? Isabel thought for a moment. Kantians would be in no doubt about the answer to that, but that was the problem with Kantian morality: it was so utterly predictable, and left no room for subtlety; rather like Kant himself, she thought. In a purely philosophical sense, it must be very demanding to be German.

Far better to be French (irresponsible and playful) or Greek (grave, but with a light touch). Of course, her own heritage, she 1 6 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h thought, was enviable: Scottish commonsense philosophy on one side and American pragmatism on the other. That was a perfect combination. There had, of course, been those years at Cambridge, and that meant Wittgensteinism and a dose of linguistic philosophy, but that never did anybody any harm, as long as one remembered to reject it as one matured. And, I may as well admit it, I am mature, she thought, as she looked out the window of her study, into the garden, with its luxuriant shrubs and the first blossoms of white coming out on the magnolia.

She selected one of the more promising articles to read that morning. If it was worthwhile, she could then send it out for peer review that afternoon, and that would give her the sense of accom-plishment that she needed. The title had caught her attention, largely because of the topicality of genetics—which formed the background to the problem—and because of the problem itself, which was, once again, truth telling. She was surrounded, she felt, by issues of truth telling. There had been that article on truth telling in sexual relationships, which had so entertained her and which had already been commented upon favourably by one of the journal’s referees. Then there had been the Toby problem, which had brought the dilemma into the very centre of her own moral life. The world, it seemed, was based on lies and half-truths of one sort or another, and one of the tasks of morality was to help us negotiate our way round these. Yes, there were so many lies: and yet the sheer power of truth was in no sense dimmed. Had Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn not said, in his Nobel address, “One word of truth will conquer the whole world.” Was this wishful thinking on the part of one who had lived in an entanglement of Orwellian state-sponsored lies, or was it a justifiable faith in the ability of truth to shine through the darkness? It had to be the latter; if it was the former, then life would be too bleak to continue. In that T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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respect, Camus was right: the ultimate philosophical question was suicide. If there was no truth, then there would be no meaning, and our life was Sisyphean. And if life were Sisyphean, then what point in continuing with it? She reflected for a moment on the list of bleak adjectives. Orwellian, Sisyphean, Kafkaesque.

Were there others? It was a great honour to a philosopher, or a writer, to become an adjective. She had seen “Hemingwayesque,”

which might be applied to a life of fishing and bullfighting, but there was no adjective, so far, for the world of failure and run-down loci chosen by Graham Greene as the setting for his moral dramas. “Greene-like”? she wondered. Far too ugly. “Greeneish,”

perhaps. Of course, “Greeneland” existed.

And here was truth telling again, this time in a paper from a philosopher in the National University of Singapore, a Dr. Chao.

“Doubts About Father” was the title, and the subtitle was “Paternalism and Truthfulness in Genetics.” Isabel moved from her desk to the chair near the window—the chair in which she liked to read her papers. As she did so, the telephone in the hall rang.

After three rings it was answered. She waited; no call came from Grace. So she turned her attention to “Doubts About Father.”

The paper, which was clearly written, began with a story.

Clinical geneticists, Dr. Chao said, were often confronted with misattributed paternity, and these cases posed difficult issues of how, if at all, these mistakes should be revealed. Here is a case, he wrote, which involved just such an issue.

Mr. and Mrs. B. had given birth to a child with a genetic illness. Although the child could be expected to live, the condition was sufficiently serious to raise the issue of whether Mrs. B.

should be tested during future pregnancies. Some fetuses would be affected, while others would not be. The only way to tell was prenatal screening.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h So far, so good, thought Isabel. Of course, there were broader issues about screening, including major ones of eugenics, but Dr.

Chao did not seem concerned with those, which was quite right: this was about truth telling and paternalism. Dr. Chao continued: Mr. and Mrs. B. had to have a genetic test to confirm their carrier status. In order for this particular condition to manifest itself, both parents of the affected child would have to be carriers of the relevant gene. When the doctor received the test results, however, these showed that while Mrs. B. was a carrier, Mr. B. was not. The child who had been born with the condition, then, must have been by another man. Mrs. B. (Mrs. Bovary perhaps, thought Isabel), who was not described, had a lover.

One solution was to tell Mrs. B. in private and then to leave it up to her to decide whether she would confess to her husband.

At first blush this solution seemed attractive, as it would mean that one could avoid being responsible for possibly breaking up the marriage. The objection to this, though, was that if Mr. B.

were not told, then he would go through life thinking that he was carrier of a gene which he did not, in fact, possess. Was he entitled to have this knowledge conveyed to him by the doctor, with whom he had a professional relationship? The doctor clearly owed him a duty, but what were the limits of this?

Isabel turned the last page of the article. There were the references, all set out in the correct form, but there was no conclusion. Dr. Chao did not know how to resolve the issue that he had raised. That was reasonable enough: it was quite legitimate to ask questions which one could not answer, or which one did not want to answer. But, on the whole, Isabel preferred papers which took a position.

It occurred to Isabel to ask Grace for her view on this. It was time for morning coffee, anyway, and she had an excuse to go T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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through to the kitchen. There she found Grace, unloading the dishwasher.

“I am going to tell you a rather tricky story,” said Isabel. “Then I’m going to ask you to give me your reaction. Don’t bother about reasons, just tell me what you would do.”

She related the story of Mr. and Mrs. B. Grace continued to unload plates as she listened, but abandoned her work when the story came to an end.

“I would write Mr. B. a letter,” she said firmly. “I would tell him not to trust his wife.”

“I see,” said Isabel.

“But I wouldn’t sign my own name,” Grace added. “I would write anonymously.”

Isabel could not conceal her surprise. “Anonymously? Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “You said that I should not bother with reasons. I should just tell you what I would do. And that’s it.”

Isabel was silent. She was used to hearing Grace express unusual views, but this curious preference for an anonymous letter astounded her. She was about to press Grace further, but her housekeeper changed the subject.

“Cat phoned,” she said. “She did not want to disturb you, but she would like to pop in for tea this afternoon. I said that we would let her know.”

“That’s fine,” said Isabel. “I would like to see her.”

Truth telling. Paternalism. She was no further forward, she felt, but suddenly she decided. She would ask Grace her views.

“Here’s another one, Grace,” she said. “Imagine that you found out that Toby was seeing another girl and not telling Cat about it.

What would you do?”

Grace frowned. “Difficult,” she said. “I don’t think I’d tell Cat.”

Isabel relaxed. At least they thought the same way on that issue.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“But then,” Grace went on, “I think I’d probably go to Toby and tell him that unless he gave Cat up, I’d tell the other girl.

That way I’d get rid of him, because I wouldn’t want somebody like that to marry Cat. That’s what I’d do.”

Isabel nodded. “I see. And you’d have no hesitation in doing that?”

“None,” said Grace. “None at all.” Then she added, “Not that this would ever happen, would it?”

Isabel hesitated; here was another occasion on which a lie could slip out. And the moment’s hesitation was enough.

“Oh my God!” said Grace. “Poor Cat! Poor girl! I never liked that boy, you know, never. I didn’t like to say it, but now you know.

Those strawberry jeans of his, you know the ones he wears? I knew what they meant, right from the beginning. See? I knew.”

C H A P T E R E I G H T E E N

E

CAT ARRIVED FOR TEA at three-thirty, having left Eddie in charge of the shop. She was let into the house by Grace, who looked at her strangely, or so Cat thought; but then Grace was strange, she always had been, and Cat had always known that.

Grace had theories and convictions about virtually everything, and one never knew what was going on in her head. How Isabel put up with those conversations in the kitchen, Cat had no idea.

Perhaps she ignored most of it.

Isabel was in her summerhouse, correcting proofs. The summerhouse was a small octagonal building, constructed of wood and painted dark green. It stood at the back, against the high stone wall that enclosed the garden; in his illness her father had spent whole days in it, looking out over the lawn, thinking and reading, although it was hard for him to turn the pages and he would wait for Isabel to do that. For some years after his death she had been unable to go into it, such were the memories, but gradually she had taken to working in it, even in winter, when it could be heated by a Norwegian wood-burning stove which stood in one corner. It was largely undecorated, save for three framed photographs which had been hung on the back wall. Her father, 1 7 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h in the uniform of the Cameronians, in Sicily, under a harsh sun, standing in front of a requisitioned villa; all that bravery and sac-rifice, so long ago, for a cause that was utterly, utterly right. Her mother—sainted American mother; once awkwardly referred to by Grace as her sanitized American mother—sitting with her father in a café in Venice. And herself as a child with her parents, on a picnic, she thought. Foxed at the edges, the photographs needed restoration, but at present they were undisturbed.

It was a warm day for spring—more of a summer’s day, really—

and she had opened the double glass doors of the summerhouse.

Now she saw Cat approaching her across the lawn, a small brown bag in her hand. It would be something from the delicatessen; Cat never came empty-handed, and would give Isabel a small jar of truf-fle pâté or olives picked at random from the shelves of her shop.

“Belgian chocolate mice,” said Cat, laying the packet on the table.

“Cats bring mice as an offering,” remarked Isabel, laying the proofs to one side. “My aunt—your great-aunt—had a cat which caught mice and put them on her bed. So thoughtful.”

Cat sat down on the wicker chair next to Isabel’s. “Grace tells me that you’re in seclusion,” she said. “Not to be disturbed except by me.”

That was tactful of Grace, thought Isabel. It was not helpful to mention Jamie too often.

“Life has been getting rather complicated,” said Isabel. “I wanted a day or two to get on with some work and decomplicate.

I’m sure you know how it feels.”

“Yes,” said Cat. “Curl-up-and-get-away-from-it-all days. I have them too.”

“Grace will bring us tea and we can have a chat,” said Isabel.

“I’ve done enough work for the day.”

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Cat smiled. “And I’m going to throw in the towel too,” she said. “Eddie can look after things until closing time. I’m going to go home and get changed. Then I . . . we’re going out.”

“Good,” said Isabel. We. Toby, of course.

“We’re going to celebrate,” said Cat, looking sideways at Isabel. “Dinner, then a club.”

Isabel caught her breath. She had not expected it, but she had dreaded it nonetheless. And now the moment had arrived. “A celebration?”

Cat nodded. She did not look at Isabel as she spoke, but was staring out over the lawn. Her tone was cautious. “Toby and I are engaged,” she said. “Yesterday evening. We’ll put it in the papers next week. I wanted you to be the first to know.” She paused. “I think that he’s told his parents now, but apart from them, nobody else knows. Only you.”

Isabel turned to her niece and reached to take her hand. “Dar-ling, well done. Congratulations.” She had mustered a supreme effort, like a singer straining for a high note, but her attempt proved inadequate. Her voice sounded flat and unenthusiastic.

Cat looked at her. “Do you mean that?”

“I only want you to be happy,” said Isabel. “If this is what makes you happy, then of course I mean that.”

Cat weighed these words for a moment. “The congratulations of a philosopher,” she said. “Can’t you say something personal?”

She did not give Isabel time to respond, although Isabel had no answer ready and would have had to battle to find one. “You don’t like him, do you? You’re simply not prepared to give him a chance—

even for my sake.”

Isabel lowered her eyes. She could not lie about this. “I haven’t warmed to him. I admit it. But I promise you: I’ll make every effort, even if it’s hard.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Cat seized on her words. Her voice was raised now, the indignation coming through. “Even if it’s hard? Why should it be so hard? Why do you have to say that?”

Isabel was not in control of her emotions. This news was devastating, and she forgot her intention not to mention what she had seen. Now it came out. “I don’t think that he’s faithful to you,” she said. “I’ve seen him with somebody else. That’s why. That’s why.”

She stopped, horrified by what she had said. She had not meant to say it—she knew it was wrong—and yet it had come out, as if spoken by somebody else. Immediately she felt miserable, thinking: So are wrongs committed, just like that, without thinking. The doing of wrong was not a hard thing, preceded by careful thought; it was a casual thing, done so easily. That was Hannah Arendt’s insight, was it not? The pure banality of evil.

Only good is heroic.

Cat was quite still. Then she shrugged off the hand which Isabel had lightly placed upon her shoulder. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You say that you’ve seen him with another woman. Is that what you say?”

Isabel nodded. She could not recant now, and that left honesty as the only option. “Yes. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant to tell you, because I really don’t think that it’s my business to interfere in your affairs. But I did see him. I saw him embracing another girl.

He was going to see her. It was in the doorway to her flat. I was . . . I was passing by. I saw it happen.”

“Where was this?” she asked quietly. “Where exactly did you see this?”

“Nelson Street,” said Isabel.

Cat was silent for a moment. Then she began to laugh, and the tension drained from her. “His sister, Fiona, lives there, you know. Poor Isabel! Of course you had it all mixed up. He often T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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goes to see Fiona. Of course he gives her a kiss. They’re very fond of one another. And it’s a touchy-feely family.”

No, thought Isabel. They’re not a touchy-feely family; not at least according to my understanding of the term.

“Actually, it was his sister’s flatmate,” said Isabel. “It wasn’t his sister.”

“Lizzie?”

“I have no idea what her name is,” said Isabel.

Cat snorted. “It’s nonsense,” she said firmly. “You’ve misinter-preted a peck on the cheek. And now you’re not even prepared to accept that you’re wrong. It would be different if you acknowledged that, but you aren’t. You hate him so much.”

Isabel fought back. “I do not hate him. You have no right to say that.” But she knew that Cat did, for even as she spoke, the image of an avalanche came into her mind, and she felt ashamed.

Cat now rose to her feet. “I’m very sorry about this. I understand why you might have wanted to tell me what you told me, but I think that you’re being totally unfair. I love Toby. We’re going to get married. That’s all there is to it.” She stepped out of the summerhouse.

Isabel rose from her chair, scattering the proofs as she did so.

“Cat, please. You know how fond I am of you. You know that.

Please . . .” She trailed off. Cat had started to run across the lawn, back to the house. Grace was at the kitchen door, a tray in her hand. She moved to one side to let Cat past, and the tray fell to the ground.

T H E R E S T O F T H E DAY was ruined. After Cat’s departure, Isabel spent an hour or so discussing the situation with Grace, who did her best to be reassuring.

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“She may be like that for the time being,” she said. “She may have closed her mind to the possibility right now. But she will think about it and the possibility will work away in her mind.

She’ll start to think maybe, just maybe, it’s true. And then the scales will begin to fall from her eyes.”

Isabel thought the situation bleak, but she had to acknowledge that there was something in what Grace had said. “In the meantime she’s not going to forgive me, though.”

“Probably not,” said Grace, in a matter-of-fact way. “Although it might help if you wrote to her and told her how sorry you were.

She’ll get round to forgiving you in due course, but it will be easier if you’ve left the door open.”

Isabel did as Grace suggested, and wrote a brief letter to Cat.

She apologised for the distress she had caused her and hoped that Cat would forgive her. But even as she wrote, Please forgive me, she realised that only a few weeks before she herself had said to Cat, There’s such a thing as premature forgiveness, because a lot of nonsense was talked about forgiveness by those who simply did not grasp (or had never heard of) the point that Professor Strawson had made in Freedom and Resentment about reactive attitudes and how important these were—Peter Strawson, whose name, Isabel noted, could be rendered anagrammatically, and unfairly, as a pen strews rot. We needed resentment, he said, as it was resentment which identified and underlined the wrong.

Without these reactive attitudes, we ran the risk of diminishing our sense of right and wrong, because we could end up thinking it just doesn’t matter. So we should not forgive prematurely, which is presumably what Pope John Paul II had in mind when he waited for all those years before he went to visit his attacker in his cell. Isabel wondered what the pope had said to the gunman.

“I forgive you”? Or had he said something very different, someT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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thing not at all forgiving? She smiled at the thought; popes were human, after all, and behaved like human beings, which meant that they must look in the mirror from time to time and ask themselves: Is this really me in this slightly absurd outfit, waiting to go out onto the balcony and wave to all these people, with their flags, and their hopes, and their tears?

A H Y P OT H E S I S D E V E L O P E D in a restaurant, after several glasses of Italian wine, and in the company of an attractive young man, was one thing; a hypothesis that could stand the cold light of day was another. Isabel was well aware of the fact that all she had in the case of Minty Auchterlonie was a conjecture. If it was true that there were irregularities in McDowell’s, and if it was true that Mark Fraser had stumbled upon them, then it did not necessarily mean that Paul Hogg was implicated. Isabel’s idea about how he could be implicated was feasible, she supposed, but no more than that. McDowell’s was a large firm, she understood, and there was no reason why Paul Hogg should be the one to whom Mark’s discovery related.

Isabel realised that if she wished to develop a firmer founda-tion for her hypothesis, indeed if she wished to make it remotely credible, then she would need to find out more about McDowell’s, and that would not be easy. She would need to talk to people in the financial world; they would know even if they did not work in McDowell’s itself. The Edinburgh financial community had all the characteristics of a village, as did the legal community, and there would be gossip. But she would need more than that: she would need to discover how one might be able to find out whether somebody had traded improperly on private information.

Would this involve monitoring share transactions? How on earth 1 7 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h would one go about that, trying to glean information about who bought what in all the millions of transactions that take place on the stock exchanges every year? And of course people would be careful to cover their tracks through the use of nominees and offshore agents. If there were very few prosecutions for insider trading—and indeed hardly any convictions—this was for good reason. One simply could not prove it. And if that was the case, then anything that Minty did with the information she gathered from her fiancé would be impossible to track down. Minty could act with impunity, unless—and this was a major qualification—

unless the somebody from within, somebody like Mark Fraser, could link her transactions with information which he knew Paul Hogg would have possessed. But Mark, of course, was dead.

Which meant that she would have to go and see her friend Peter Stevenson, financier, discreet philanthropist, and chairman of the Really Terrible Orchestra.

C H A P T E R N I N E T E E N

E

WEST GRANGE HOUSE was a large square house, built in the late eighteenth century and painted white. It stood in large grounds in the Grange, a well-set suburb that rubbed shoulders with Morningside and Bruntsfield, an easy walk from Isabel’s house and an easier one from Cat’s delicatessen. Peter Stevenson had wanted the house for as long as he could remember and had leapt at the chance to buy it when it unexpectedly came on the market.

Peter had been a successful merchant banker and had decided in his mid-forties to pursue an independent career as a company doctor. Firms in financial trouble could call on him to attempt a rescue, or firms with bickering boards could invite him in to mediate their squabbles. In his quiet way he had brought peace to troubled business lives, persuading people to sit down and examine their issues one by one.

“Everything has a solution,” he observed to Isabel in answer to a question she put to him about his work as he showed her into his morning room. “Everything. All you have to do is to strip the problem down and then start from there. All one has to do is to make a list and be reasonable.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Which people often aren’t,” said Isabel.

Peter smiled. “You can work round that. Most people can become reasonable even if they aren’t in the beginning.”

“Except for some,” Isabel had persisted. “The profoundly unreasonable. And there are quite a few of those, quick and dead.

Idi Amin and Pol Pot, to name two.”

Peter reflected on her turn of phrase. Who still spoke of the quick and the dead? Most people had lost that understanding of

“quick” and would look blank if they heard it. How typical of Isabel to keep a word alive, like a gardener tending to a feeble plant. Good for Isabel.

“The irretrievably unreasonable tend not to run businesses,”

he said, “even if they try to run countries. Politicians are different from businessmen or company people. Politics attracts quite the wrong sort of person.”

Isabel agreed. “Absolutely. All those overgrown egos. It’s why they go into politics in the first place. They want to dominate others. They enjoy power and its trappings. Few of them go into politics because they want to improve the world. Some might, I suppose, but not many.”

Peter thought for a moment. “Well, there are the Gandhis and the Mandelas, I suppose, and President Carter.”

“President Carter?”

Peter nodded. “A good man. Far too gentle for politics. I think that he found himself in the White House by mistake. And he was far too honest. He made those embarrassingly honest remarks about his private temptations, and the press had a field day. And every single one of those who took him to task would have harboured exactly the same sort of thoughts themselves. Who hasn’t?”

“I know all about fantasies,” said Isabel. “I know what he meant . . .” She paused. Peter looked at her quizzically, and she T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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continued quickly, “Not that sort of fantasy. I have thoughts about avalanches . . .”

Peter smiled and gestured to a chair. “Well, chacun à son rêve. ”

Isabel sat back in her chair and looked out over the lawn. The garden was larger than her own, and more open. Perhaps if she cut down a tree she would get more light, but she knew that she could never do that; she would have to go before the trees went.

Oak trees were sobering in that respect; every time you looked at them they reminded you that they were likely to be around well after you had gone.

She looked at Peter. He was a bit like an oak tree, she thought; not to look at, of course—in that respect he was more of a wisteria, perhaps—but he was a person whom one could trust.

Moreover, he was discreet, and one could talk to him without fear of what one said being broadcast. So if she asked him about McDowell’s, as she now did, nobody else would know she was interested.

He pondered her question for a moment. “I know quite a few of the people there,” he said. “They’re pretty sound, as far as I know.” He paused. “But I do know of somebody who might talk to you about them. I think he’s just left after some sort of spat. He might be prepared to talk.”

Isabel answered quickly. This was exactly what she had wanted; Peter knew everybody and could put you in touch with anyone. “That’s exactly what I would like,” she said, adding,

“Thank you.”

“But you have to be careful,” Peter continued. “First, I don’t know him myself, so I can’t vouch for him. And then you have to bear in mind that he might have some sort of grudge against them.

You never know. But if you want to see him, he sometimes comes to our concerts because he has a sister who plays in the orchestra.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h So you need to come to our concert tomorrow night. I’ll make sure you get the chance to talk to him at the party afterwards.”

Isabel laughed. “Your orchestra? The Really Terrible Orchestra?”

“The very same,” said Peter. “I’m surprised you haven’t been to one of our concerts before. I’m sure I invited you.”

“You did,” said Isabel, “but I was away at the time. I was sorry to miss it. I gather that it was . . .”

“Terrible,” said Peter. “Yes, we’re no good at all, but we have fun. And most of the audience comes to laugh, anyway, so it doesn’t matter how badly we play.”

“As long as you do your best?”

“Exactly. And our best, well, I’m afraid it’s not very good. But there we are.”

Isabel looked out over the lawn. It interested her that those who had done one thing very well in their lives would often try to master something else, and fail. Peter had been a very successful financier; now he was a very marginal clarinettist; success undoubtedly made failure easier to bear, or did it? Perhaps one became accustomed to doing things well and then felt frustrated when one did other things less well. But Isabel knew that Peter was not driven in this way; he was happy to play the clarinet modestly, as he put it.

I S A B E L C L O S E D H E R E Y E S, and listened. The players, seated in the auditorium of St. George’s School for Girls, which patiently hosted the Really Terrible Orchestra, were tackling a score beyond their capabilities; Purcell had not intended this, and would probably not have recognised his composition. It was slightly familiar to Isabel—or passages of it were—but it seemed T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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to her that different sections of the orchestra were playing quite different pieces, and in different times. The strings were particularly ragged, and sounded several tones flat, while the trombones, which should have been in six-eight time, like the rest of the orchestra, seemed to be playing in common time. She opened her eyes and looked at the trombonists, who were concentrating on their music with worried frowns; had they looked at the conductor they would have been set right, but the task of reading the notes was all they could manage. Isabel exchanged smiles with the person in the seat beside her; the audience was enjoying itself, as it always did at a Really Terrible Orchestra concert.

The Purcell came to an end, to the evident relief of the orchestra, with many of the members lowering their instruments and taking a deep breath, as runners do at the end of a race. There was muted laughter amongst the audience, and the rustle of paper as they consulted the programme. Mozart lay ahead, and, curiously,

“Yellow Submarine.” There was no Stockhausen, Isabel noticed with relief, remembering, for a moment, and with sadness, that evening at the Usher Hall, which was why she was here, after all, listening to the Really Terrible Orchestra labouring its way through its programme before its bemused but loyal audience.

There was rapturous applause at the end of the concert, and the conductor, in his gold braid waistcoat, took several bows.

Then audience and players went through to the atrium for the wine and sandwiches that the orchestra provided its listeners in return for attendance at the concert.

“It’s the least we can do,” explained the conductor in his concluding remarks. “You have been so tolerant.”

Isabel knew a number of the players and many of those in the audience, and she soon found herself in a group of friends hover-ing over a large plate of smoked salmon sandwiches.

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“I thought they were improving,” said one, “but I’m not so sure after this evening. The Mozart . . .”

“So that’s what it was.”

“It’s therapy,” said another. “Look how happy they were.

These are people who could never otherwise play in an orchestra.

This is group therapy. It’s great.”

A tall oboist turned to Isabel. “You could join,” he said. “You play the flute, don’t you? You could join.”

“I might,” said Isabel. “I’m thinking about it.” But she was thinking about Johnny Sanderson, who must be the man at Peter Stevenson’s side, being led in her direction by her host, and looking at her through the crowd.

“I wanted you two to meet,” said Peter, effecting the introduction. “We might be able to persuade Isabel to join us, Johnny.

She’s much better than us but we could do with another flautist.”

“You could do with everything,” said Johnny. “Music lessons, to start with . . .”

Isabel laughed. “They weren’t too bad. I liked ‘Yellow Submarine.’ ”

“Their party piece,” said Johnny, reaching for a slice of brown bread and smoked salmon.

They spoke about the orchestra for a few minutes before Isabel changed the subject. He had worked with McDowell’s, she had heard; had he enjoyed being there? He had. But then he thought for a moment and looked at her sideways, in mock suspicion. “Was that why you wanted to meet me?” He paused. “Or rather why Peter wanted us to meet?”

Isabel met his gaze. There was no point in dissembling here, she thought; she could tell that Johnny Sanderson was astute.

“Yes,” she said simply. “I’m interested in finding out about them.”

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He nodded. “There’s not much to find out,” he said. “It’s a pretty typical setup. They’re rather dull, in fact, most of them.

I was on social terms with a few of them, I suppose, but for the most part I found them somewhat . . . tedious. Sorry. That sounds a bit arrogant, but that’s what they were. Number people.

Mathematics.”

“Paul Hogg?”

Johnny shrugged. “Decent enough. A bit earnest for my taste, but good at his job. He’s typical of the type that used to work there. Some of the new appointments are a bit different. Paul’s old-style Edinburgh finance. Straight down the middle.”

Isabel passed him the plate of smoked salmon, and he helped himself to a further slice. She lifted her glass and sipped at the wine, which was of a far better quality than the wine which was normally served at such events. That was Peter’s doing, she thought.

Something he had said had interested her. If Paul Hogg was typical of the type that used to work at McDowell’s, and if he was straight down the middle, as Johnny had put it, then what were the new people like? “So McDowell’s is changing?” she said.

“Of course,” said Johnny. “Just like the rest of the world.

Everything. Banks, finance houses, brokers—everybody. There’s a new spirit of toughness. Corners are cut. It’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” said Isabel. He was right, of course; the old moral certainties were disappearing everywhere and were being replaced by self-interest and ruthlessness.

Johnny swallowed his brown bread and salmon and licked at the tip of a finger. “Paul Hogg,” he mused. “Paul Hogg. Mmm. I thought that he was a bit of a mummy’s boy, frankly, and then he went and produced this eighty-four-horsepower bitch of a fiancée, Minty something or other. Auchtermuchty. Auchendinny.”

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“Auchterlonie,” prompted Isabel.

“Not a cousin of yours, I hope,” said Johnny. “I hope I haven’t trodden on any toes.”

Isabel smiled. “What you said about her was roughly my own estimation, but perhaps a bit more charitable.”

“I see that we understand each other. She’s as hard as nails.

She works for that setup in North Charlotte Street, Ecosse Bank.

She’s an absolute tart, if you ask me. She runs round with a couple of young men from Paul’s office. I’ve seen her when Paul has been out of town. I saw her down in London once, in a bar in the City when they thought that nobody else from Edinburgh was around. Well, I was there and I saw her. Hanging all over a rising star from Aberdeen who got his knees under the table at McDowell’s because he’s good at juggling figures and taking risks that paid off. Ian Cameron, he’s called. Plays rugby for some team or other. Physical type, but clever nonetheless.”

“Hanging all over him?”

Johnny gestured. “Like this. All over him. Nonplatonic body language.”

“But she’s engaged to Paul Hogg.”

“Exactly.”

“And Paul, does he know about this?”

Johnny shook his head. “Paul’s an innocent. He’s an innocent who’s taken up with a woman who’s probably a bit too ambitious for him. It happens.”

Isabel took another sip at her wine. “But what does she see in Paul? Why would she bother?”

“Respectability,” said Johnny firmly. “He’s good cover if you want to get on in the Edinburgh financial world. His father was a founding partner of Scottish Montreal and the Gullane Fund. If you were nobody, so to speak, and you wanted to become someT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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body, no better choice than poor Paul. Perfect. All the right connections. Dull Fettesian dinners. Corporate seats at the Festival Theatre, with opera supper. Perfect!”

“And in the meantime she gets on with her own career?”

“Absolutely. She’s interested in money, I would say, and probably not much else. Well, I correct myself. Men friends. A bit of rough like Ian Cameron.”

Isabel was silent. Faithlessness, it seemed, was nothing unusual; the discovery of Toby’s conduct had surprised her, but now that she had heard this story about Minty, perhaps this was exactly what she should expect. Perhaps one should be surprised by constancy, which is what the sociobiologists were hinting at anyway. Men had a strong urge to have as many partners as possible in order to ensure the survival of their genes, we were told.

But women? Perhaps they were subconsciously attracted to the men who were subconsciously ensuring the maximum chance of gene perpetuation, which meant that Minty and Ian were perfect partners.

Isabel felt confused, but not so confused as not to be able to ask her next question in such a way as to make it sound innocent.

“And I suppose Ian and Minty can engage in pillow talk about deals and money and things like that. Can’t you picture it?”

“No,” said Johnny. “Because if they did it would be insider trading and I would personally take the very greatest pleasure in catching them at it and nailing their ears to the New Club door.”

Isabel imagined the picture. It was almost as good as imagining Toby caught in his avalanche. But she stopped herself, and said, instead, “I think that is exactly what has been happening.”

Johnny stood quite still, his glass halfway to his lips, but halted. He stared at Isabel. “Are you serious?”

She nodded. “I can’t tell you exactly why I think this, but I 1 8 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h can assure you that I have good reason to believe it. Could you help me to prove it? Could you help me to track the deals? Could you do it?”

Johnny put down his glass. “Yes. I could. Or I could try. I’ve got no time for financial dishonesty. It’s ruining the market. It undermines all of us—really badly. These people are a pest.”

“Good,” said Isabel. “I’m glad.”

“But whatever you do, you must keep this quiet,” added Johnny. “If you’re wrong, then we would be in serious trouble. You can’t make defamatory allegations about these things. They’d sue us. I’d look stupid. Do you understand?”

Isabel did.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y

E

ON THE EVENING of that unpleasant afternoon when Isabel had voiced her fears in the face of Cat’s good news, Cat and Toby had gone to the restaurant earlier than they had intended, as a table had not been available later on. A meeting of the Franco-British Legal Association had been held by the Faculty of Advocates and many of the members had booked tables for dinner afterwards. It would be a good place to talk about the jurispru-dence of the Conseil d’Etat, and other matters, of course.

Cat had left Isabel’s house in tears. Grace had tried to talk to her as she entered the kitchen, but she had not been prepared to listen. At that stage her emotions were entirely ones of anger.

Isabel could not have made her feelings about Toby plainer; right from the beginning she had kept him at a distance, viewing him, she thought, with such distaste that she would not be surprised if he had picked up on it himself, even if he had never said anything about it. She understood, of course, that there were differences of outlook between them, but surely that was no reason for Isabel to be so dismissive. Toby was not an intellectual in the way Isabel was, but what difference did that make? They had enough common ground to meet somewhere; it was not as if he was a com-1 8 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h plete ignoramus, as she had pointed out to Isabel on more than one occasion.

And yet Isabel had remained distant, all the time comparing him adversely with Jamie. That was what irritated her more than anything else. Relationships between people could not be the basis of comparison by others. Cat knew what she wanted from a relationship, which was a bit of fun, and passion too. Toby was passionate. He wanted her with an urgency that excited her.

Jamie had not done that. He talked too much and was always trying to please her. Where were his own feelings? Did none of that actually matter to him? Perhaps Isabel did not understand that.

How could she? She had been disastrously married a long, long time ago, and since then, as far as she knew, there had been no lovers. So she really was in no position to understand, far less to comment on, something of which she had little inkling.

By the time she reached the delicatessen, her immediate anger had abated. She had even considered retracing her steps and making an attempt at a reconciliation with Isabel, but if she was to meet Toby at six, as she had planned, she would have to get back to her flat quite soon. The shop was only moderately busy, and Eddie seemed to be coping well. He had been more cheerful over the past few days, which she found encouraging, but she did not want to count on him too much. More time would be needed, she felt—years, perhaps.

She spoke briefly to Eddie and then made her way back to her flat. She was still preoccupied with her conversation with Isabel, but was now making a determined effort to put it out of her mind. Tonight was to be their private celebration for the engagement, and she did not want it ruined any more than it had been. Isabel was simply wrong.

Toby was prompt, bounding up the stairs to her door and preT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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senting her with a large spray of carnations. In his other hand he was carrying a bottle of champagne, wrapped in tissue paper, but chilled. They went into the kitchen, where Cat prepared a vase for the flowers and Toby busied himself with opening the champagne.

It had been shaken by his running up the stairs and the cork exploded with a loud report and the foam cascaded over the side of the bottle. Toby made a joke about this which made Cat blush.

They toasted each other before moving through to the sitting room. Then, shortly before their taxi arrived, they moved through to the bedroom and embraced. Toby said that he loved the smell in her bedroom; he disorganised her dress, and she had to struggle to keep her composure. Never before have I felt so intensely, she thought; never.

Over dinner they talked about mundane matters, about the wording of the announcement in The Scotsman, and about the reaction of Toby’s parents when he told them the news.

“The old man seemed mighty relieved,” he said. “He said,

‘About bloody time,’ or something like that. Then I told him that I’d need a raise in pay, and that took the smile off his face.”

“And your mother?” she asked.

“She went on about what a nice girl you are,” he said. “She was pretty relieved too. I think she’s always been worried about my taking up with some awful scrubber. Not that she’s got any grounds to believe that.”

“Of course not,” joked Cat.

Toby smiled at her. “I’m glad that you said yes.” He took her hand. “I would have been pretty upset if you’d said no.”

“What would you have done?” asked Cat. “Found another woman?”

The question hung in the air for a moment. She had not thought about it, but now, quite suddenly, she felt something in 1 9 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h his hand, as if he had been given a small electric shock; a slight jolt. She looked at him, and for a second or two she saw a shadow pass, a change in the light in his eyes. It was almost impercepti-ble, but she saw it.

She let go of his hand, and momentarily flustered, she brushed at the crumbs of bread around her plate.

“Why would I do that?” said Toby. He smiled. “Not me.”

Cat felt her heart beating wildly within her as Isabel’s warning, suppressed until now, came back to her.

“Of course not,” she said lightly. “Of course not.” But the image came to her of Toby and that other girl, Fiona’s flatmate; and he was naked, and standing by a window, looking out, as Toby did when he got out of bed; and she, the other girl, was watching him, and she closed her eyes to rid herself of this thought, of this dreadful image, but it would not leave her.

“What are we going to do?” Cat asked suddenly.

“When? Do when?”

She tried to smile. “What are we going to do now? Should we go back to the flat? Or shall we go and see somebody? I feel sociable.”

“If anybody’s at home,” said Toby. “What about Richard and Emma? They’re always there. We could take them a bottle of champagne and tell them the good news.”

Cat thought quickly. Distrust, like a rapidly creeping strain, egged her on. “No. I don’t want to go all the way down to Leith.

What about Fiona? She’s your sister, after all. We should celebrate with her. Let’s go down to Nelson Street.”

She watched him. His lips parted slightly as she began, as if he was on the point of interrupting her, but he let her finish.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “We can see her tomorrow at my parents’ place. We don’t need to go there now.”

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“No,” she said, “we must go down to Fiona’s. We must. I really want to.”

He did not protest further, but she could tell that he was uneasy, and he was silent in the taxi, looking out the window as they drove down the Mound and then over the ridge of George Street. She did not say anything, other than to ask the taxi to stop outside a late-night wine shop. Toby got out silently, bought a bottle of champagne, and then came back into the taxi. He made a remark about the man in the shop and then said something inconsequential about their planned visit to his parents the following day. Cat nodded, but did not take in what he was saying.

They stopped outside the flat in Nelson Street. Toby paid off the taxi while Cat waited on the steps. There were lights inside; Fiona was in. Waiting for Toby, she rang the bell, glancing at him as she did so. He was fiddling with the paper in which the bottle of champagne had been twist-wrapped.

“You’ll tear it,” she said.

“What?”

“You’ll tear the paper.”

The door opened. It was not Fiona, but another woman. She looked at Cat blankly, and then saw Toby.

“Fiona . . . ,” began Cat.

“Not in,” said the other woman. She moved forward towards Toby, who seemed for a moment to back away, but she reached out and took his wrist. “Who’s your friend?” she said. “Toby?

Who—”

“Fiancée,” said Cat. “I’m Cat.”

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E

E

ISABEL HAD POSTED her letter of apology to Cat the day before the Really Terrible Orchestra concert and Cat had responded a couple of days later. The reply came on a card bearing Raeburn’s picture of the Reverend Robert Walker skating on the ice at Duddingston Loch, a picture as powerful and immediately recognisable, in its local way, as The Birth of Venus. Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different.

She turned the eighteenth-century clergyman on his back and read Cat’s message: Of course, you’re forgiven. You always are.

Anyway, something has happened, and it has proved that you were right. There, I thought that would be so difficult to say, and I suppose it was. My pen almost ground to a halt. But anyway come and have coffee in the shop and I can let you try this new cheese that’s just come in. It’s Portuguese and it tastes of olives. Cat.

Isabel felt grateful for her niece’s good nature, even if an aspect of that same nature was a lack of judgement when it came T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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to men. There were many young women who would not so readily have forgiven the intrusion; and of course there were fewer still who would have admitted that an aunt was right in such a matter. Of course, this was welcome news, and Isabel looked forward to finding out how Toby had been exposed; perhaps Cat had followed him, as she herself had, and had been led to a conclusion by that most convincing of evidence—the evidence of one’s own eyes.

She walked into Bruntsfield, savouring the warmth which was beginning to creep into the sun. There was building work in Merchiston Crescent—a new house was being crammed into a small corner plot, and there was a bag of cement on the muddy pavement. Then, a few steps later, she saw gulls, circling above roofs, looking for a place to nest. The gulls were considered pests in the neighbourhood—large, mewing birds that swooped down on those who came too close to their nesting places—but we humans built too, and left cement and stones and litter, and were as aggressively territorial. The review was planning an environmental ethics issue the following year and Isabel had been soliciting papers. Perhaps somebody would write about the ethics of litter. Not that there was much to say about that: litter was unquestionably bad and surely nobody would make a case in its favour. And yet why was it wrong to drop litter? Was it purely an aesthetic objection, based on the notion that the superficial pol-lution of the environment was unattractive? Or was the aesthetic impact linked to some notion of the distress which others felt in the face of litter? If that was the case, then we might even have a duty to look attractive to others, in order to minimise their distress. There were interesting implications to that.

And one of these implications presented itself to Isabel a mere fifty paces later, outside the post office, from which emerged 1 9 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a young man in his mid-twenties—Jamie’s age, perhaps—with several sharp metal spikes inserted into his lower lip and chin. The sharp metal points jutted out jauntily, like tiny sharpened phal-luses, which made Isabel reflect on how uncomfortable it must have been to kiss a man like that. Beards were one thing—and there were women who complained vigorously about the reaction of their skins to contact with bearded men—but how much more unpleasant it would be to feel these metal spikes up against one’s lips and cheeks. Cold, perhaps; sharp, certainly; but then, who would wish to kiss this young man, with his scowl and his discouraging look? Isabel asked herself the question and answered it immediately: of course numerous girls would wish to kiss him, and probably did; girls who had rings in their belly buttons and their noses, and who wore studded collars. Spikes and rings were complementary; after all. All this young man would have to do was look for the corresponding plumage.

As she crossed the road to Cat’s delicatessen, Isabel saw the spiky young man dart across the road ahead of her and suddenly stumble at the edge of the pavement. He tripped and fell, landing on a knee on the concrete paving stone. Isabel, a few steps behind him, hastened to his side and reached out to him, helping him to his feet. He stood up, and looked down at the ripped knee of his discoloured denim jeans. Then he looked up at her and smiled.

“Thank you.” His voice was soft, with a hint of Belfast in it.

“It’s so easy to stumble,” said Isabel. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. I’ve torn my jeans, that’s all. Still, you pay for ripped jeans these days. I got mine free.”

Isabel smiled, and suddenly the words came out of her, unbidden, unanticipated. “Why have you got those spikes in your face?”

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He did not look annoyed. “My face? These piercings?” He fingered at the spike which projected from his lower lip. “It’s my jewellery, I suppose.”

“Your jewellery?” Isabel stared at him, noticing the tiny golden ring which he had inserted into an eyebrow.

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wear jewellery. I wear jewellery. I like it. And it shows that I don’t care.”

“Don’t care about what?”

“About what people think. It shows that I have my own style.

This is me. I’m not in anybody’s uniform.”

Isabel smiled at him. She appreciated his directness, and she liked his voice with its definite cadences. “Good for you,” she said. “Uniforms are not a good idea.” She paused. The sun was glinting off one of the spikes, casting a tiny, bobbing reflection onto his upper lip. “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms. That’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

The young man tossed his head backwards. “Okay,” he said, laughing. “I’m the same as everybody else with piercings. So?”

I S A B E L L OO K E D AT H I M . This was a strange conversation, and she would have liked to prolong it. But she reminded herself that she had to see Cat and that she could not spend the morning standing there with that young man discussing facial piercing. So they said good-bye to each other, and she made her way into the delicatessen, where Eddie, standing beside a shelf on which he was stacking Portuguese sardines, glanced at her and then looked back, with some intensity, at the sardines.

She found Cat in her office, finishing off a telephone call.

Her niece replaced the receiver and looked at her. Isabel noticed, 1 9 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h with relief, that there seemed to be no resentment in her expression. The card she received had reflected what Cat really felt.

Good.

“You got my card?”

“Yes, I did. And I’m still very sorry that I upset you. I take no pleasure in hearing about it.” She knew, as she said this, that it was not true, and faltered at the last words.

Cat smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. But let’s not talk about it if you don’t mind.”

They drank a cup of coffee together and then Isabel returned home. There was work to do—a new crop of articles had arrived for the review—but she found that she could not settle to it. She wondered when she would hear from Johnny Sanderson, if he would call back at all.

H E D I D T E L E P H O N E Isabel, as he had said he would, a few days after the Really Terrible Orchestra concert. He could meet her, he said, at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society rooms in Leith that Friday evening at six. There was a whisky nosing, and she could sample the whisky—if she had the stomach for it. He had information for her, which he could pass on at the event itself. There would be opportunities to talk.

Isabel knew very little about whisky, and rarely drank it. But she knew that it had much the same apparatus of sampling as did wine, even if the language was very different. Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the preten-tiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to re-condite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel. Isabel saw the merit in this. The Island malts, which she could barely bring T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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herself to sample—in spite of her father’s enthusiasm for them—

reminded her of antiseptic and the smell of the school swimming pool; and as for taste, “diesel fuel” seemed to express it perfectly.

Not that she would utter these views in the rooms of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, or even confess them to Johnny Sanderson, who was said by some to have whisky in his veins, on the strength of four generations of Highland distillers in his pedigree, starting, he proudly pointed out, with a humble crofter who ran an illegal still at the back of his sheep fank. Purveyors of alcohol were well known to found dynasties, of course: that was the case, she thought, with a politician whom Isabel’s grandfather had known slightly before the Second World War. Isabel’s grandfather, a principled man, had seen through him and had rebuffed an entic-ing offer for their company. Thereafter he had merely shuddered when the politician’s name was mentioned, an eloquent enough comment—more expressive, indeed, than mere words.

Isabel was amused by the idea that gestures should accompany verbal references. She was intrigued to see devout Catholics cross themselves at the mention of the BVM—and she liked the acronym BVM itself, which made Mary sound so reassuringly modern and competent, like a CEO or an ICBM, or even a BMW. And in places like Sicily, there were people who spat to the side when the names of their enemies were uttered, or as was sometimes the case in Greece, when Turkey or even a Turk was spoken of. She recalled the Greek uncle of a friend of hers, who was protected by his family from all mention of Turkey, lest he have a heart attack. Or the proprietor of a Greek island hotel at which she had once stayed, who refused to acknowledge that the distant coast of Turkey could just be made out from the terrace of the hotel; he simply denied that land could be seen, and did not see it. So might one wish Turkey out of existence, if one were so 1 9 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h inclined. All of this was to be avoided, of course, and Isabel knew it. She had never spat at the mention of a name, or even rolled her eyes upwards—well, that perhaps she had done once or twice, when the name of a well-known figure in the arts cropped up. But that, she felt, was fully justified, unlike the views of Greeks on Turks, and of Turks, one imagined, on Greeks.

Johnny Sanderson was already there when she arrived, and he led her to a quiet seat in the corner of the room.

“One question right at the beginning,” he said. “Do you like it, or hate it? If you hate it, I’ll get you a glass of wine instead.”

“I like some whiskies,” said Isabel. “Some.”

“Such as?”

“Speysides. Soft whiskies. Whiskies that don’t bite.”

Johnny nodded. “Reasonable enough,” he said. “Macallan. A lovely fifteen-year-old Speyside. It would offend nobody.”

Isabel sat back while Johnny went to order the whiskies from the bar. She liked this temple to whisky, with its high ceilings and its airiness. And she liked the people, too: direct and open-faced people who believed in fellowship and good humour. They were people, she imagined, who did not disapprove of their fellow man, unlike those who patrolled mores today; these people were tolerant, just as gourmets, by and large, tended to have tolerant, expansive outlooks. It was the obsessive dieters who were unhappy and anxious.

A paper had been submitted to the review which suggested that there was a duty to be thin. “Fat Is a Moral Issue” had been the title which the author had chosen; Isabel thought it an intriguing title. But the argument was poor; entirely predictable and entirely depressing. In a world of need, it was wrong to be anything other than thin. Until everybody was in a position to T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

1 9 9

consume a surfeit of calories, then nobody should carry extra weight. The fat were therefore not entitled to be what they were.

Fairness of distribution demanded otherwise.

She had read the paper with increasing irritation, but then, at the end, when she had tossed it aside and gone into the kitchen for a slice of cake, she had paused at the very plate on which the cake rested, and stopped, and thought. The author of “Fat Is a Moral Issue” may have been pious in her tone, but she was right: the claims of the needy for food were moral claims of a particular sort. One could not ignore them—one could not walk away from them, even if those who made them on behalf of the hungry sounded like killjoys. And that, perhaps, was the problem: it was the tone with which the author had made her point—her accus-ing tone—that had irritated Isabel; it was the moral condescen-sion in it that made her feel that she was being accused of self-indulgence and greed. But the fundamental truth contained in her paper could not be shrugged off: we cannot ignore the pleas of the hungry. And if that meant that we needed to examine the overconsumption which deprived others of food, then that had to be done. And with that thought, she had looked at the cake and then put it back in its tin in the cupboard.

Johnny raised his glass to her. “This is lovely stuff,” he said.

“Fifteen quiet years in its cask. Fifteen years ago I was, let me think, thirty, and we had just had our first child and I thought that I was awfully clever and was going to make a million by forty.”

“And did you?”

“No. I never made a million. But I reached my fortieth birthday anyway, which is a greater privilege in a way.”

“Quite,” said Isabel. “Some would give a million for a single year, let alone forty.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h Johnny looked into his whisky glass. “Greed,” he said. “Greed takes so many forms. Polite or naked. But it’s always the same at heart. Our friend Minty, for example . . .”

“You found out something?”

Johnny looked behind him. A group of people had gathered round a table at the other end of the room. The table was set out with rows of glasses and cut-glass jugs of water.

“Charlie’s about to begin,” he said. “He’s sniffing the air.”

Isabel glanced in the direction of the whisky noser, a well-built man in a comfortable tweed suit and sporting a large mous-tache. She watched as he poured a glass of whisky and held it up against the light.

“I know him,” she said.

“Everybody does,” said Johnny. “Charlie Maclean. He can smell whisky from fifty yards. Amazing nose.”

Isabel looked down at her modest malt and took a small sip of the liquid. “Tell me what you found out about Minty.”

Johnny shook his head. “Nothing. All I said was that she was greedy, which she undoubtedly is. What I did find out was rather more interesting than that. I found out about what her young friend Ian Cameron has been doing. I knew some of it already, of course, but I gathered quite a bit more from my friends among the discontented in McDowell’s.”

Isabel said nothing, waiting for him to continue. At the other end of the room, Charlie Maclean was pointing out some quality in the whisky to his attentive audience, one or two of whom were nodding eagerly.

“But first, you should have a bit of background,” Johnny said.

“Firms like McDowell’s are not all that old. They’ve only recently celebrated their twentieth birthday, I think. And they didn’t start with vast resources either—fifty thousand or so would have been T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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all that the original two partners would have brought in. Nowa-days, fifty thousand would be small change for them.”

Isabel watched Johnny as he spoke. He was looking at his whisky glass, turning it gently to drive a thin meniscus of liquid up the sides, exactly as Charlie Maclean was now doing for his audience at the other end of the room.

“We grew very quickly,” Johnny went on. “We took in pension funds and invested them carefully in solid stocks. The market, of course, was doing well and everything looked very good. By the end of the eighties we were managing more than two billion, and even if our fee was slipping slightly below the half percent we had been taking for our services, you can still imagine what that meant in terms of profit.

“We took on lots of bright people. We watched what was happening in the Far East and in developing countries. We moved in and out fairly successfully, but of course we had our fingers burned with Internet stocks, as just about everybody did.

That was probably the first time we had a fright. I was there then and I remember how the atmosphere changed. I remember Gordon McDowell at one meeting looking as if he’d just seen a ghost.

Quite white.

“But it didn’t bring us down—it just meant that we had to be quicker on our feet. And we also had to work a bit harder to keep our clients, who were very nervous about what was happening to their funds in general and were beginning to wonder whether they would be safer in the City of London. After all, the reason why one went to Edinburgh in the first place was to get solidity and reliability. If Edinburgh started to look shaky, one might as well throw in one’s lot with the riskier side of things in London.

“It’s about this time that we looked around for some new people. We picked up this Cameron character and a few others 2 0 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h like him. He started watching new stocks, which seemed to be about the only place where one could make a decent bit of money. But of course these new issues were subscribed to by the large people in London and New York, and Edinburgh usually wouldn’t get much of a look-in. This was pretty sickening when you saw them go up in value by two or three hundred percent within a few months of issue. And all this profit went to those who were in a cosy relationship with the issuing houses in London and who were given a good allocation.

“Cameron started to get his hands on to some of these issues.

He also started to take charge of one or two other things, moving funds slowly out of stocks that were not going to do so well. He’s very good at that, our friend Cameron. Quite a few stocks were quietly disposed of a month or so ahead of a profit warning. Nothing very obvious, but it was happening. I didn’t know about that until I spoke to my friends who had been working with him—I was in a different department. But they told me of two big sales that had taken place in the last six months, both of them before a profit warning.”

Isabel had been listening intently. This was the flesh that her skeletal theory needed. “And would there be any concrete evidence of insider knowledge in these two cases? Anything one could put one’s finger on?”

Johnny smiled. “The very question. But I’m afraid that you won’t like the answer. The fact of the matter is that both of these sales were of stocks in companies in which Minty Auchterlonie’s bank was involved as adviser. So she might well have had inside knowledge which she passed on to him. But then, on the other hand, she might not. And there is, in my view, no way in which we could possibly prove it. In each case, I gather, there’s a minute T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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of the meeting at which Cameron raised the possibility of selling the stocks. In both cases he came up with a perfectly cogent reason for doing so.”

“And yet the real reason may well have been what Minty said to him?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no chance of proving that money changed hands between Cameron and Minty?”

Johnny looked surprised. “I don’t think that money would necessarily change hands—unless he was sharing his bonus with her. No, I think it more likely that they were doing this for mixed motives. She was involved with him sexually and wanted to keep him. That’s perfectly possible. People give their lovers things because they’re their lovers. That’s an old story.”

“Or?” prompted Isabel.

“Or Minty was genuinely concerned about Paul Hogg’s department getting into the mire and wanted to give it a boost because Paul Hogg was part of her overall plan to penetrate the heart of the Edinburgh establishment. It was not in her interests as the future Mrs. Paul Hogg to have hitched her star to a has-been.”

Isabel mulled over what she had been told. “So what you’re telling me, then, is that there may well have been insider trading, but that we’re never going to be able to prove it? Is that it?”

Johnny nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s about it. You could try to take a closer look at Minty’s financial situation and see if there are any unexplained windfalls, but I don’t see how you’ll get that information. She’ll bank at Adam & Company, I suspect, and they are very discreet and you’d never get round any of their staff—they’re very correct. So what do you do?”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Shrug the whole thing off ?”

Johnny sighed. “I suspect that’s all we can do. I don’t like it, but I don’t think that we’ll be able to do anything more.”

Isabel lifted her glass and took a sip of her whisky. She had not wanted to mention her real suspicions to Johnny, but she felt grateful to him for the enquiries that he had made and she wanted to confide in somebody other than Jamie. If Johnny thought that her theory about what had happened in the Usher Hall was far-fetched, then perhaps she should abandon it.

She put her glass down on the table. “Would you mind if I tell you something?” she asked.

Johnny gestured airily. “Anything you wish. I know how to be discreet.”

“A little while ago,” said Isabel, “a young man fell to his death from the gods in the Usher Hall. You probably read about it.”

Johnny thought for a moment before he replied. “I think I remember something like that. Horrible.”

“Yes,” Isabel went on. “It was very distressing. I happened to be there at the time—not that that’s relevant—but what is interesting is that he worked at McDowell’s. He would have gone there after you had left, but he was in Paul Hogg’s department.”

Johnny had raised his glass to his lips and was watching Isabel over the rim. “I see.”

He’s not interested, thought Isabel. “I became involved,” she went on. “I happened to be told by somebody who knew him well that he had discovered something very awkward for somebody in the firm.” She paused. Johnny was looking away, watching Charlie Maclean.

“And so he was pushed over that balcony,” she said quietly.

“Pushed.”

Johnny turned round to face her. She could not make out his T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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expression; he was interested now but the interest was tinged with incredulity, she thought.

“Very unlikely,” he said after a while. “People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t.”

Isabel sighed. “I believe that they might,” she said. “And that’s why I wanted to find out about Minty and this insider trading. It could all add up.”

Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think that you should let go of it. I really don’t think this is going to get you anywhere.”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m very grateful to you, anyway.”

Johnny acknowledged her thanks with a lowering of his eyes.

“And if you want to get in touch with me, here’s my mobile number. Give me a call anytime. I’m up and about until midnight every day.”

He handed her a card on which a number had been scrawled, and Isabel tucked it into her bag.

“Let’s go and hear what Charlie Maclean has to say,” said Johnny, rising to his feet.

“Wet straw,” said Charlie at the other end of the room, putting his nose into the mouth of the glass. “Smell this dram, everyone.

Wet straw, which means a Borders distillery in my book. Wet straw.”

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O

E

OF COURSE JOHNNY was right, Isabel thought—and she had decided accordingly by the following morning. That was the end of it; she would never be able to prove insider trading by Minty Auchterlonie, and even if she did, it would still be necessary to link this with Mark’s death. Johnny knew these people much better than she did, and he had been incredulous of her theory. She should accept that, and let the whole matter rest.

She had reached this conclusion sometime during the night of the whisky tasting, when she had woken up, stared at the shadows on the ceiling for a few minutes, and finally made her decision. Sleep followed shortly afterwards, and the next morning—a brilliant morning on the cusp of spring and summer—she felt an extraordinary freedom, as one does at the end of an examination, when the pen and pencil are put away and nothing more remains to be done. Her time was her own now; she could devote herself to the review and to the pile of books that was stacked invitingly in her study; she could treat herself to morning coffee in Jenners, and watch the well-heeled Edinburgh ladies engage in their gossip, a world which she might so easily have slipped into and which she had avoided by a deliberate act of self-determining T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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choice—thank heavens. And yet, was she any happier than they were, these women with their safe husbands and their children who were set to become like their parents and perpetuate this whole, self-confident world of haut-bourgeois Edinburgh? Probably not; they were happy in their way ( I must not be condescending, she thought), and she was happy in hers. And Grace in hers and Jamie in his, and Minty Auchterlonie . . . She stopped herself, and thought. Minty Auchterlonie’s state of mind is simply no concern of mine. No, she would not go to Jenners that morning, but she would walk into Bruntsfield and buy something that smelled nice from Mellis’s cheese shop and then drink a cup of coffee in Cat’s delicatessen. Then, that evening, there was a lecture she could attend at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Professor Lance Butler of the University of Pau, a lecturer whom she had heard before and who was consistently entertaining, would speak on Beckett, as he always did. That was excitement enough for one day.

And of course there were the crosswords. Downstairs now, she retrieved the newspapers from the mat on the hall and glanced at the headlines. new concern for cod stocks, she read on the front page of The Scotsman, and saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? She answered her own question: more than one might imagine—an electronic culture of e-mail tales and computer-generated images, fleeting and derivative, but a culture nonetheless.

She turned to the crossword, recognising several clues immediately. The falls, artist is confusingly preceded again (7), which required no more than a moment’s thought: Niagara. Such a 2 0 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cliché in the crossword world, and this irritated Isabel, who liked novelty, however weak, in clues. And then, to pile Pelion (6) upon Ossa (4), there was Writers I shortly have, thoughtful (7). Isabel was pensive, which solved that one, until she tripped up over An unending Greek god leads to an exclamation, Mother! (6). This could only be zeugma—Zeu(s) g (gee!) ma—a word with which she was unfamiliar, and it sent her to Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which confirmed her suspicion. She liked Fowler ( avian hunter of words, she thought) for his opinions, which were clear and directive. Zeugmata, he explained, were a bad thing and incorrect—unlike syllepses, with which they were commonly confused. So Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair was sylleptical, requiring a single word to be understood in a different sense, while See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned was a zeugma and called for the insertion of another quite different verb, surrounded, which was not there.

By the time that Grace arrived, Isabel had finished her breakfast and had dealt with the morning mail. Grace, who was late, arrived in a state of anxiety and a taxi; a sylleptical arrival, Isabel noted. Grace was strict about punctuality and hated to be even a few minutes late, hence the costly taxi and the anxiety.

“The battery of my alarm clock,” she explained as she came into the kitchen, where Isabel was sitting. “You never think of changing them, and then they die on you.”

Isabel had already prepared the coffee and she poured her housekeeper a cup, while Grace tidied her hair in front of the small mirror that she had hung on the wall beside the pantry door.

“I was at my meeting last night,” Grace said, as she took her first sip of coffee. “There were more people there than usual. And a very good medium—a woman from Inverness—who was quite T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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remarkable. She got right to the heart of things. It was quite uncanny.”

Grace went on the first Wednesday of each month to a spiri-tualist meeting in a street off Queensferry Place. Once or twice she had invited Isabel to accompany her but Isabel, who feared that she might laugh, had declined the invitation and Grace had not persevered. Isabel did not approve of mediums, who she felt were, for the most part, charlatans. It seemed to her that many of the people who went to such meetings (although not Grace) had lost somebody and were desperate for contact beyond the grave.

And rather than help them to let go, these mediums encouraged them to think that the dead could be contacted. In Isabel’s view it was cruel and exploitative.

“This woman from Inverness,” Grace went on, “she’s called Annie McAllum. You can tell that she’s a medium just by looking at her. She has that Gaelic colouring—you know, the dark hair and the translucent skin. And green eyes too. You can tell that she has the gift. You can tell.”

“But I thought that anybody could be a medium,” said Isabel.

“You don’t have to be one of those fey Highlanders to do it.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Grace. “We had a woman from Bir-mingham once. Even from a place like that. The gift can be received by anyone.”

Isabel suppressed a smile. “And what did this Annie McAllum have to say?”

Grace looked out the window. “It’s almost summer,” she said.

Isabel stared at her in astonishment. “That’s what she said?

Now, that’s really something. You have to have the gift to work that out.”

Grace laughed. “Oh no. I was just looking out at the magnolia. I said that it’s almost summer. She said lots of things.”

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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h

“Such as?”

“Well,” said Grace, “there’s a woman called Lady Strath-martin who comes to the meetings. She’s well into her seventies now and she’s been coming to the meetings for years apparently, since well before I joined. She lost her husband, you see, quite a long time ago—he was a judge—and she likes to contact him on the other side.”

Isabel said nothing, and Grace continued. “She lives in Ainslie Place, on the north side, and the Italian consul, a woman, lives below her. They go to a lot of things together, but she’s never brought the consul to our meetings until last night. And so she was sitting there, in the circle, and Annie McAllum suddenly turned to her and said: I can see Rome. Yes, I can see Rome. I caught my breath at that. That was amazing. And then she said: Yes, I think that you’re in touch with Rome. ”

There was a silence as Grace looked expectantly at Isabel and Isabel stared mutely at Grace. Eventually Isabel spoke. “Well,”

she said cautiously, “perhaps that’s not all that surprising. She is, after all, the Italian consul, and you would normally expect the Italian consul to be in touch with Rome, wouldn’t you?”

Grace shook her head, not in denial of the proposition that Italian consuls were in touch with Rome, but with the air of one who was expected to explain something very simple which simply had not been grasped. “But she wasn’t to know that she was the Italian consul,” she said. “How would somebody from Inverness know that this woman was the Italian consul? How would she have known?”

“What was she wearing?” asked Isabel.

“A white gown,” said Grace. “It’s really a white sheet, made up into a gown.”

“The Italian consul? A white gown?”

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“No,” said Grace, again with a patient look. “The mediums often put on a gown like that. It helps them make contact. No, the Italian consul was wearing a very smart dress, if I remember correctly. A smart dress and smart Italian shoes.”

“There you are,” said Isabel.

“I don’t see how that makes any difference,” said Grace.

H A D G R AC E H A D the gift, then she might have said: Expect a telephone call from a man who lives in Great King Street, which is what happened that morning at eleven. Isabel was in her study by then, having postponed the walk into Bruntsfield until noon, and was engrossed in a manuscript on the ethics of memory. She set aside her manuscript reluctantly and answered the call. She had not expected Paul Hogg to telephone her, nor had she anticipated the invitation to drinks early that evening—a totally impromptu party, he pointed out, with no notice at all.

“Minty’s keen that you should come,” he said. “You and your friend, that young man. She really hopes that you’ll be able to make it.”

Isabel thought quickly. She was no longer interested in Minty; she had taken the decision to abandon the whole issue of insider trading and Mark’s death, and she was not sure whether she should now accept an invitation which appeared to lead her directly back into engagement with the very people she had decided were no concern of hers. And yet there was an awful fascination in the prospect of seeing Minty up close, as one viewed a specimen. She was an awful woman—there was no doubt about that—but there could be a curious attraction in the awful, as there was in a potentially lethal snake. One liked to look at it, to stare into its eyes. So she accepted, adding that she was not 2 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sure whether Jamie would be free, but she would ask him. Paul Hogg sounded pleased, and they agreed on a time. There would only be one or two other people there, he said, and the party would be over in good time for her to make her way up to the museum and Professor Butler’s lecture.

She returned to the article on the ethics of memory, abandon-ing the thought of the walk to Bruntsfield. The author of the paper was concerned with the extent to which the forgetting of personal information about others represented a culpable failure to commit the information to memory. “There is a duty to at least attempt to remember,” he wrote, “that which is important to others. If we are in a relationship of friendship or dependence, then you should at least bother about my name. You may fail to remember it, and that may be a matter beyond your control—a nonculpable weakness on your part—but if you made no effort to commit it to memory in the first place, then you have failed to give me something which is my due, recognition on your part of an important aspect of my identity.” Now this was certainly right: our names are important to us, they express our essence. We are protective of our names and resent their mishandling: Charles may not like being called Chuck, and Margaret may not approve of Maggie. To Chuck or Maggie a Charles or a Margaret in the face of their discomfort is to wrong them in a particularly personal way; it is to effect a uni-lateral change in what they really are.

Isabel paused in this line of thought and asked herself: What is the name of the author of this paper I am reading? She realised that she did not know, and had not bothered with it when she had taken the manuscript from the envelope. Had she failed in a duty to him? Would he have expected her to have his name in her mind while she read his work? He probably would.

She thought about this for a few minutes, and then rose to T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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her feet. She could not concentrate, and she certainly owed the author her undivided attention. Instead she was thinking of what lay ahead: a drinks party in Paul Hogg’s flat that had clearly been engineered by Minty Auchterlonie. Minty had been flushed out, that at least was clear; but it was not clear to Isabel what she should now do. Her instinct was to abide by her decision to dis-engage. I need to forget all this, she thought; I need to forget, in an act of deliberate forgetting (if such a thing is really possible).

The act of a mature moral agent, an act of recognition of the moral limits of duty to others . . . but what, she wondered, would Minty Auchterlonie be wearing? Now she laughed at herself. I am a philosopher, Isabel thought, but I am also a woman, and women, as even men know, are interested in what others wear.

That is not something of which women should be ashamed; it is men who have the gap in their vision, rather as if they did not notice the plumage of the birds or the shape of the clouds in the sky, or the red of the fox on the wall as he sneaked past Isabel’s window. Brother Fox.

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E

SHE MET JAMIE at the end of Great King Street, having seen him walking up the hill, across the slippery cobbles of Howe Street.

“I’m very glad that you could make it,” she said. “I’m not sure that I could face these people on my own.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “This is rather like going into the lion’s den, isn’t it?”

“Lioness,” corrected Isabel. “A bit, maybe. But then I don’t think that we shall pursue anything. I’ve decided that I’m not going to get any further into all this.”

Jamie was surprised. “You’re dropping it?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I had a long chat with somebody called Johnny Sanderson last night. He worked with these people and knows them well. He says that we won’t be able to prove anything and he also poured cold water on the idea that Minty had anything to do with Mark’s death. I thought long and hard about it.

He rather brought me to my senses, I suppose.”

“You never cease to astonish me,” said Jamie. “But I must say that I’m rather relieved. I’ve never approved of your messing T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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about in other people’s affairs. You’re becoming more sensible by the hour.”

Isabel tapped him on the wrist. “I could still surprise you,”

she said. “But anyway, I accepted this evening out of a sense of horrible fascination. That woman is a bit like a snake, I’ve decided. And I want to see her up close again.”

Jamie made a face. “She makes me uneasy,” he said. “It’s you who called her sociopathic. And I’ll have to be careful that she doesn’t push me out the window.”

“Of course, you know that she likes you,” said Isabel casually.

“I don’t want to know that. And I don’t know how you’ve worked that out.”

“All you have to do is watch people,” said Isabel, as they arrived at the front door and she reached forward to the bell marked hogg. “People give themselves away every five seconds.

Watch the movement of eyes. It says absolutely everything you need to know.” Jamie was silent as they climbed the stairs, and still looked pensive as the door on the landing was opened by Paul Hogg. Isabel wondered whether she should have said what she had said to Jamie; in general, and this was quite against the conventional wisdom, men did not like to hear that women found them attractive, unless they were prepared to reciprocate the feeling. In other cases, it was an irritation—burdensome knowledge that made men uneasy. That was why men ran away from women who pursued them, as Jamie would steer clear of Minty now that he knew; not that she would regret Jamie’s keeping well away from Minty. That would be an appalling thought, she suddenly reflected: Jamie being ensnared by Minty, who would add him to her list of conquests, a truly appalling prospect that Isabel could not bear to contemplate. And why? Because I feel protec-2 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tive of him, she conceded, and I cannot bear for anybody else to have him. Not even Cat? Did she really want him to go back to Cat, or was it only because she knew that this would never happen that she was able to entertain the thought of it?

There was no time to resolve these thoughts. Paul Hogg greeted them warmly and led them into the drawing room; the same drawing room with its misattributed Crosbie and its vibrant Peploe. There were two other guests there already, and as they were introduced to them Isabel realised that she had met them before. He was a lawyer, an advocate with political ambitions, and she wrote a column for a newspaper. Isabel read the column from time to time, but found it tedious. She was not interested in the mundane details of journalists’ lives, which seemed to be the stuff of this woman’s writing, and she wondered whether her conversation would be in the same mould. She looked at the woman, who smiled encouragingly at her, and Isabel immediately relented, thinking that perhaps she should make the effort. The lawyer smiled too and shook hands warmly with Jamie. The journalist looked at Jamie, and then glanced back briefly at Isabel, who noticed this quick movement of the eyes and knew immediately that this woman thought that she and Jamie were a couple in that sense and that she was now revising her opinion of Isabel. Which she was indeed doing, for the woman now cast her eyes down, at Isabel’s figure—so obvious, thought Isabel, but it was curiously satisfying to be thought to have a much younger boyfriend, particularly one who looked like Jamie. The other woman would be immediately jealous because her man, who sat up all night working in the Advocates Library, would be worn out and not much fun, and always talked of politics, which is what politicians inevitably did. So there was the journalist thinking: This Isabel woman has a sexy young boyfriend—just look at him—which is T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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what I would really want, if the truth be told, if one were totally honest . . . But then Isabel thought: Is it right to allow people to entertain the wrong impression about something significant, or should one correct a misapprehension in another? There were moments when being the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics was burdensome: it seemed so difficult to be off-duty; difficult to forget, in fact, as Professor . . . Professor . . . might have observed.

Minty now made her entry. She had been in the kitchen, and came into the drawing room holding a silver tray of canapés. She put the tray down on a table, moved over to the lawyer, and kissed him on both cheeks. Rob, I’ve voted for you twice since we last met.

Twice! And then on to the journalist. Kirsty, so good of you to come at no notice whatsoever. Then to Isabel: Isabel! That was all, but there was a change in the light in her eyes, subtle, but observable.

And it’s Jamie, isn’t it? The body language changed now; she stood closer to Jamie as she greeted him, and Isabel noticed, to her satisfaction, that Jamie moved back slightly, as a magnet will do when confronted with the wrong end of another magnet.

Paul had been on the other side of the room preparing drinks, and now he returned. They took their glasses and turned to one another. It was an easy conversation—surprisingly easy, thought Isabel. Paul asked Rob about a current political campaign and he replied with amusing details of a constituency fight. The names of the protagonists were well known: a towering ego and a notorious womaniser engaged in dispute over a minor office. Then Minty mentioned another political name which brought forth a snort from Rob and a knowing shaking of the head from Kirsty.

Jamie said nothing; he knew no politicians.

A little later, when Jamie was talking to Kirsty—about something that had happened in the Scottish Opera orchestra, Isabel noted—Isabel found herself standing next to Minty, who took her 2 1 8

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h arm gently and steered her over towards the fireplace. There were even more invitations on the mantelpiece than last time, Isabel noticed, although she could not read them now (except for one, which was in large print, presumably to allow for easy reading by one’s guests).

“I’m very pleased that you could come,” said Minty, her voice lowered. Isabel realised that this was not a conversation to be overheard, and when she replied she spoke in similarly hushed tones.

“I sensed that you wanted to talk to me.”

Minty’s gaze moved slightly to one side. “There is something, actually,” she said. “I gather that you are interested in McDowell’s. I’ve heard that you’ve been speaking to Johnny Sanderson.”

Isabel had not expected this. Had somebody reported to Minty that she had been in a huddle with Johnny at the whisky tasting?

“Yes, I’ve spoken to him. I know him slightly.”

“And he’s been talking to people at McDowell’s. He used to work there, of course.”

Isabel nodded. “I know that.”

Minty took a sip of wine. “Then do you mind my asking: What is your interest in the firm? You see, first you asked Paul about it, and then you start talking to Johnny Sanderson, and so on, and this makes me wonder why you’re suddenly so interested. You’re not in a financial job, are you? So what explains the interest in our affairs?”

“Your affairs? I didn’t realise you worked for McDowell’s.”

Minty bared her teeth in a tolerant smile. “Paul’s affairs are closely linked with mine. I am, after all, his fiancée.”

Isabel thought for a moment. On the other side of the room, Jamie looked in her direction and they exchanged glances. She T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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was uncertain what to do. She could hardly deny the interest, so why not tell the truth?

“I was interested,” she began. “I was interested, but not any longer.” She paused. Minty was watching her, listening intently.

“I’m no longer involved. But I was. You see, I saw a young man fall to his death a little while ago. I was the last person he saw on this earth and I felt that I had to enquire about what had happened.

He worked for McDowell’s, as you know. He knew something untoward was happening there. I wondered whether there was a link. That’s all.”

Isabel watched the effect of her words on Minty. If she was a murderess, then this was as good as a direct accusation. But Minty did not blanch; she stood quite still; there was no shock, no panic, and when she spoke her voice was quite even. “So you thought that this young man had been disposed of ? Is that what you thought?”

Isabel nodded. “It was a possibility I felt that I had to look into. But I’ve done so and I realise that there’s no proof of anything untoward.”

“And who might have done it, may I ask?”

Isabel felt her heart beating loud within her. She wanted to say: You. It would have been a simple, a delicious moment, but she said instead: “Somebody who feared exposure, obviously.”

Minty put her glass down and raised a hand to her temple, which she massaged gently, as if to aid thought. “You evidently have a rich imagination. I doubt very much if anything like that happened,” she said. “And anyway, you should know better than to listen to anything Johnny Sanderson had to say. You know he was asked to leave McDowell’s?”

“I knew that he had left. I didn’t know in what circumstances.”

Minty now became animated. “Well, maybe you should have 2 2 0

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h asked. He didn’t see eye to eye with people there because he was unable to adjust to new circumstances. Things had changed. But it was not just that, it was because he was suspected of insider deals, which means, in case you don’t know, that he used confidential information to play the market. How do you think he lives as he does today?”

Isabel said nothing; she had no idea how Johnny Sanderson lived.

“He has a place up in Perthshire,” Minty went on, “and a whole house in Heriot Row. Then there’s a house in Portugal, and so on. Major assets all over the place.”

“But you never know where people get their money from,”

said Isabel. “Inheritance, for a start. It might be inherited wealth.”

“Johnny Sanderson’s father was a drunk. His business went into receivership twice. Not a notoriously good provider.”

Minty picked up her glass again. “Don’t listen to anything he tells you,” she said. “He hates McDowell’s and anything to do with them. Take my advice and keep away from him.”

The look which Minty now gave Isabel was a warning, and Isabel had no difficulty in interpreting it as a warning to stay away from Johnny. And with that she left Isabel and returned to Paul’s side. Isabel stood where she was for a moment, looking at a picture beside the mantelpiece. It was time to leave the party, she thought, as her hostess had clearly indicated that such welcome as she had been accorded had now expired. Besides, it was time to walk up the Mound to the museum and to the lecture on Beckett.

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F O U R

E

THE LECTURE AT THE MUSEUM was well attended and Professor Butler was on form. Beckett survived the professor’s reassessment, much to Isabel’s relief, and afterwards, at the reception, she was able to talk to several old friends who had also attended. Both of these things—Beckett’s survival and the meeting with old friends—contributed to a raising of her spirits. The conversation with Minty had been unpleasant, although she was very much aware that it could have been worse. She had not expected Minty to launch into an attack on Johnny Sanderson, but then she had not expected the other woman to know that she and Johnny had met. Perhaps she should not have been surprised by this; it was hard to do anything in Edinburgh without its getting around; look at Minty’s own affair with Ian Cameron. Presumably she would not have imagined that others knew all about that.

Isabel wondered what Minty might take from their meeting.

She would be confident, perhaps, that Isabel was no longer a danger to her; Isabel had very explicitly said that she was no longer taking an interest in the internal affairs of McDowell’s.

And even if she were involved in Mark’s death, which Isabel—on the basis of Minty’s reactions to her comments about this—was 2 2 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h now firmly convinced could not be the case, then she would be bound to conclude that Isabel had uncovered nothing about how it had happened. She doubted, then, if she would hear any more from Minty Auchterlonie, or from the unfortunate Paul Hogg.