Isabel nodded. “I suppose it’s important to talk to people,” she said. “It’s hard to be honest in a written reference. You expect that the candidate will get hold of it one way or another. And then, if you’ve written something damning, there’s all sorts of trouble. It’s rather like doctors’ notes. They can’t write what they really think any more—the patient can see what’s there.”
Jillian had views on this. “And a good thing too,” she said. “Doctors used to write terrible things in the past. I had a friend who found out that she was described in her medical notes as a ‘dreadful woman.’ ”
“And was she?” asked Isabel. She spoke quickly; it slipped out, and she immediately apologised. “No, I don’t really mean that. I mean …” She trailed off. There were dreadful people, and doctors had to deal with them.
“Not at all,” said Jillian. “Maybe she’s a bit demanding, but that’s not the same as being dreadful.”
“No, of course not.”
“Anyway,” Jillian continued, “it looked as if we’d find no difficulty in getting a very good person to take over, but then my husband received an anonymous letter. Normally he would throw such a thing straight into the wastepaper basket, but in this case there was something that stopped him from doing so.”
“It was about the candidates?”
“Yes. Well, yes and no. It was about one of the candidates. Unfortunately, it didn’t say which one. It merely said that there was something about one of them that would cause the school considerable embarrassment if he were to be appointed. But it gave no further details.”
“A shot in the dark,” suggested Isabel. “The writer of this letter could be trying it on, surely. It could just be a spoiler. Perhaps from one of the unsuccessful candidates. People get pretty upset about these things.”
“I thought that,” said Jillian. “But there was something significant about this letter. It gave the names of all the candidates. So the person who wrote it must have seen the shortlist. And I can’t imagine there were many of those. There were the members of the committee—and it’s hardly likely to have been one of them. And … well, the school secretary, Miss Carty. She’s one of those people you find in schools who never seem to have a first name, but it’s Janet in her case. A rather mousy woman, probably unhappy about something or other.”
One might say that about most of us, thought Isabel. Most of us are unhappy about something or other.
“Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.
Jillian shook her head. “No.”
“Typed?”
“No. Handwritten. In green ink.”
Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”
Jillian reached for her cup again. She had said all she wished to say, it appeared, and she was waiting for Isabel’s reaction.
“It must be rather worrying,” said Isabel. “I can see that. But I don’t know if I can say more than that.”
“Would you look into it?” asked Jillian.
“Well, I don’t really see what I can do. I really don’t.”
Jillian leaned forward. “Please,” she said. “We have to make an appointment. But we just can’t risk appointing somebody who is going to come unstuck because of their past. We can’t afford scandal—you do see that, don’t you?”
Isabel said that she understood that reputation was important. But this did not seem to satisfy Jillian, who returned to the theme. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid scandal,” she said. “Education is competitive these days. Parents have a choice. A whiff of something not quite right and we would lose students—we really would.”
“I understand. But, really, what do you expect me to do?”
Jillian lowered her voice. A young couple had come into the delicatessen and had taken a seat at a neighbouring table. The woman was looking at them in a way that suggested more than casual interest. “We need a very discreet person—and I gather that you are just that. We need somebody to make enquiries and find out which of these three has … well, has a past.”
“We all have a past.”
Jillian brushed this aside. “There are pasts and pasts.” She paused. “Please help us. The last thing we could do is to get professional enquiry agents involved—imagine if that ever got out. So we need somebody like you—somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You’d never be suspect. And I have done my homework on you—you have a reputation, you know, for helping people.”
Isabel stared down at the table. She had more than enough to do over the next few weeks. And yet she had never turned down a direct plea for help. Jillian was not to know it, of course, but Isabel found it very difficult indeed—practically impossible—to say to somebody in need of help that they would get no assistance from her.
“All right,” said Isabel.
Jillian reached out and took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re an angel.”
I’m not, thought Isabel. I’m weak.
“Look,” said Jillian. “I’m not sure how you do these things, but why don’t I send you a photocopy of each candidate’s application? There’s a curriculum vitae with each of them—that’ll tell you all you need to know.”
“And more than I should know,” said Isabel.
Jillian looked blank. “I don’t see …”
“Confidentiality,” said Isabel.
Jillian laughed dismissively. “Oh, we never bother with that.” She paused. “Do you?”
Isabel looked at her in a bemused fashion. “But you yourself said that you wanted me to do this because you didn’t want it to get out. That suggests that you attach at least some importance to confidentiality.”
Jillian was brisk. “Where necessary,” she said. “But not otherwise.”
CHAPTER FOUR
JILLIAN MACKINLAY,” said Isabel from her chair at the kitchen table.
Jamie barely looked up from the stove. He was cooking dinner that night, and with Charlie safely tucked up in bed and asleep by now—he had been tired out by five o’clock and had had been given an early supper and bath—the house seemed quiet. Any sudden absence of children, Isabel noted, made the normal silences of the evening seem more pronounced; a small child could be a centre of noise, like a cyclone moving across the weather map, until suddenly, at bedtime, the storm subsided and quiet returned.
“Jillian who?”
“Mackinlay,” said Isabel. “We met them at the Stevensons’. It was some time ago …” She thought quickly; in the lives of most of us, there is a time before our partner and a time after our partner: in her case, BJ (Before Jamie) and AJ (After Jamie), although AJ suggested that Jamie was in the past, which he was not, and so DJ (During Jamie) might be more appropriate. She was sure that this meeting at the Stevensons’ had been in the DJ years.
“Can’t remember,” muttered Jamie.
Of course he could not, thought Isabel; they met so many people on the social round—such as it was—and one could not be expected to remember every conversation at every drinks or dinner party. Most such conversations were instantly forgettable anyway, merging into one another, smoothed out by banality.