Isabel hesitated. “It’s confidential, I’m afraid.”
Grace stared at her. “I can keep a secret,” she said, adding, in an accusing tone of voice, “You know that.”
Isabel did know that. Grace would never reveal anything that happened in the house; she trusted her on that. “All right, Bishop Forbes. You see it if you drive out past West Linton.”
“I know,” said Grace testily. She leaned forward, looking pointedly at the envelope. “How many?”
“Three,” said Isabel. “This is the short leet.” She used the Scots word for list, as many still did. “I really don’t think I should say any more about it, though.”
Grace turned. “Come on, Charlie. We’re not wanted here.”
“I don’t want to sound rude,” said Isabel hurriedly.
“And I don’t want to know things you don’t want to tell me,” said Grace. “Even if I happen to know who one of them is anyway.”
Isabel held up a hand. “Excuse me?”
Grace affected insouciance. “I happen to know, now that I think of it. There’s a man called Fraser. He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
Isabel looked in the envelope; the names were clearly written at the top of the first page of each application. Grace was right. John Fraser. “How on earth did you know?” she asked. The envelope had been sealed; Grace could not have opened it on its short journey from the garden path to Isabel’s study, and even if she could, she would not have done such a thing. She might be nosy at times, but she was utterly correct in her dealings with others.
“Yes,” said Grace, not without an air of satisfaction. “John Fraser is the cousin of a woman who comes to our meetings. I sit next to her sometimes. She told me. He told her, and then she told me. He said he wanted the job because at the moment he’s an assistant principal at some school near Stirling. He’s ambitious, she said.”
Isabel digested this. The meetings to which Grace referred were, of course, her spiritualist sessions. All sorts of people went there, it seemed, as Grace often mentioned contacts she had made at some seance or other. She remembered her conversation with Guy Peploe about villages; not only was Edinburgh a village, but so was Scotland.
“You haven’t met him, have you?” asked Isabel.
“No. Not him. As I said, his cousin sometimes sits beside me.”
Isabel nodded. “Has she said much about him?”
Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. She likes him a lot, though. They were quite close as children, I think, and they’ve kept up with one another. He’s …”
Isabel waited. “Yes?”
“He’s a mountaineer, I think. He …”
A shadow moved outside; Isabel noticed it out of the corner of her eye. Brother Fox? He sometimes slunk through the gardens during daylight hours, leaving the path he had created for himself under the rhododendrons and venturing out into the middle of the lawn, blinking in the direct sunlight. What did foxes see? she wondered.
“So he’s a climber. Interesting.”
“I think he’s one of these people who climbs Munros. You know—they collect them.”
Isabel did know. Munros were Scottish mountains above three thousand feet, named after a famous Scottish mountaineer. There were several hundred of them, and the real Munro-baggers tried to climb them all in as short a time as possible; sometimes that was a few years, sometimes it was a lifetime.
Isabel thought for a moment. She, too, had had a cousin, Delia, who was a mountaineer, a cousin of her father’s generation who had been a staunch member of the Scottish Ladies’ Climbing Club. Cousin Delia had taken the eighteen-year-old Isabel to climb in Glencoe, and they had stayed in a bothy belonging to the club. It had been during the high summer, with its white nights, and Isabel had awoken early, not long after four, and the tops of the mountains were already touched by the first rays of the sun. She had ventured outside, startling a couple of sheep grazing at the side of the small whitewashed building, and they had scurried away up a slope, sending scree trickling down the hillside. The experience had remained in her mind, as some moments can, like a photograph filed away in an album, a captured moment of her life.
And later that day, when they were coming down the mountain, for a while they followed the course of a river that was joined at one point by a burn tumbling off the mountainside. At this confluence there was a pool, bounded by smooth rocks that sloped gently under the water. Delia had turned to her and said—Isabel remembered her words so clearly, again one of those curious memories that lodge in our minds for no particular reason—“This is where the men swam; the lady mountaineers bathed in a pool just a little further down.” And in her eighteen-year-old’s imagination she saw the men in the water, swimming purposively, as men might do, while round the corner, in their concealed pool, the Scottish ladies stood half submerged, like Diana and her nymphs caught by some passing artist and fixed for ever in paint.
She looked at Grace, who had picked up Charlie again and was bouncing him up and down, to his evident pleasure. “Do you think I could meet the cousin?”
Grace continued to bounce Charlie. “Him?”
“No, her. Your friend. The woman who goes to …”
“The Psychic Centre?” It was the name of the organisation that ran Grace’s meetings.
“Yes. I’d like to meet her.”
Grace shrugged. “She’s not there every week. Most weeks, but not every week.”
Isabel assured her that this would be perfectly all right and asked when the next meeting would be.
“Tomorrow night,” said Grace. “There’s a man from Denmark coming to speak to us.”
“I’d be most interested in coming,” said Isabel. “A medium?”
“Another of these psychic locators,” said Grace. “He finds missing people. He goes into a trance and sees people. He is very effective.”
“That reminds me,” said Isabel. “Have you seen my Chambers Dictionary? I had it somewhere and I can’t …”
Grace responded quickly. “In the morning room. Beside that green chair.”
Isabel smiled. “You saw it?” she asked.
Grace looked at her suspiciously. “Don’t joke about these things, please. They are not for laughing at.”
“But I wasn’t joking,” said Isabel. “I simply asked you if you saw it. The trouble with English is that words mean so many different things.” And that was true, she thought. English was such a strange language, one in which even the words please and thank you could be used as stinging weapons in arguments.
Grace raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes,” she said, meaning, in fact, that she did not believe Isabel’s protestations of innocence.
Charlie began to niggle. He was bored with all this, and meant exactly what he said.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE DID NOT TALK to Jamie about the cellist; every couple has areas into which they know it is best not to venture. Isabel sensed that Jamie did not want to discuss what he had told her the previous evening, and she did not broach the subject. He would talk to her again, she thought, but only when he felt ready to do so, when he had adjusted to the fact that his colleague would not recover.
She told him, though, of her intention to go with Grace to the lecture by the Danish parapsychologist. Would he care to accompany them? Cat had recently suggested she might babysit, and Isabel wanted to take her up on the offer. It would help to cement her niece’s relationship with Charlie, which was not as close as Isabel might have wished. She could not force Charlie on Cat, but she could make it possible for her to unbend a bit and forgive her tiny cousin for being her ex-boyfriend’s child.
Jamie looked doubtful. “I’m not interested in all those … those spirits,” he said. “Is it a good idea? If people survive death, why bother them? It’s like running after people you’ve said goodbye to and trying to start the conversation all over again.”