“I sometimes think of him,” said Jamie. “We were quite close. In fact, we were very close.”
He stopped. She reached out for his hand.
“I think of him a lot,” said Jamie.
Isabel squeezed his hand. “Loved him?”
Jamie nodded. “I suppose so. You know how it is with boys. Those intense friendships you have when you’re young.”
“I think so.”
“I went to the place,” said Jamie. “I climbed up there a year or so later. Just by myself—in summer. It wasn’t a hard climb at all—more of a walk, even if the gully itself was quite deep. I looked over the edge and imagined what he had seen as he fell—he must have seen something, unless he was knocked out straightaway, which they thought had not happened. And then I just cried and cried. I went down the hill, cried all the way down.”
She pressed his hand. “Of course.”
“I think I understand why mountaineering involves such … such passion. Climbers do get passionate, you know. They’re very spiritual people.”
Isabel glanced at the Everest book. “Some of them. Maybe not so much now. I think our world has become harder, you know.”
She did not want that to be true, but she thought it probably was. What had happened? Had the human soul shrunk in some way, become meaner, like a garment that has been in the wash too long and become smaller, more constraining?
CHAPTER EIGHT
HAVE YOU EVER CLIMBED ANYTHING, Charlie?”
It was at a party, a rather noisy one, in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Queen Street that Isabel was addressing Charlie Maclean, Master of the Quaich, and Scotland’s greatest expert on whisky. Charlie wore his learning lightly, but everybody in the room knew that if there was one man who could identify a glass of anonymous amber liquid and attribute it to any one of the country’s distilleries, name the man who blended it, and talk at length about the history of the glen from which it came, then it was Charlie.
They were standing at the window of one of the upstairs rooms, and beyond them, swaying in the summer-evening breeze, were the tops of the trees lining Queen Street Gardens. That wind was mild, and had on its breath the scent of the Firth, the river, and of the hills beyond. And of newly cut grass, too, for the gardens had been attended to that day and the smell of the grass was strong.
While Isabel was talking to Charlie, a well-built man in a linen suit and sporting the only monocle still known to be worn in Scotland, Jamie was on the other side of the room, engaged in conversation with a tall man whom Isabel knew well. This was Roddy Martine, a well-liked recorder of social events who kept society, and its doings, in his head. Roddy knew who did what, with whom, and when. He knew, too, who knew what about whom, and why.
Charlie raised his glass to his lips and looked at Isabel across the rim. “Climbed?” he said. “When I was very young I was at school in Dumfriesshire. Until about eleven. Pretty odd place. They used to take us climbing the hills down there—Kirkudbrightshire and so on. Nothing very big. And I climbed a bit when I was at St. Andrews. The occasional Munro. And you?”
“Not really,” said Isabel.
Charlie remembered something about the school. “Funny, I never really think about that place. It’s closed now. It was a pretty dubious institution. One of the masters …”
Isabel imagined that she was about to hear some awful story of cruelty, of the sort that had been surfacing so much—ancient traumas exposed and scratched at, like sores. But no, Charlie’s memories were benign.
“He was called Mr. MacDavid,” Charlie went on. “He was the most unusual teacher. All he ever taught us—for years—was the Boer War. He knew a lot about that. So by the time I was eleven, I knew everything there was to know about the Boer War, but was pretty ignorant about everything else.”
Isabel laughed. “The relief of Ladysmith,” she said. “The siege of Mafeking.”
“Don’t start on that,” said Charlie. “But why did you ask me about climbing?”
Isabel took a sip of her wine. A waiter approached; their host had ordered trays of elaborate canapés and not enough guests were eating them. “Please take something,” pleaded the waiter. “These are very nice.” He indicated a row of miniature haggis pies.
Isabel picked one out; Charlie took two in one hand, popping another one into his mouth. Isabel thanked the waiter before she answered Charlie’s question. “I thought you might know about it. I’ve been reading a book about Everest. I had no idea.”
Charlie, swallowing another tiny haggis, looked interested. “No idea about all those goings-on?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I do,” said Charlie, licking his fingers. “I know somebody who went there a couple of years ago. I met him through Pete Burgess. He went up Everest, but didn’t get to the top. Something went wrong. They’re always dying—once you get past a certain point. Apparently the mountain has got hundreds of bodies on it—they can’t get them down.”
Isabel was thinking. Edinburgh was not a large city. How many people living there would have climbed Everest? One or two, if that. “I think I may know him,” she said. “Or rather, I don’t actually know him, but I know who he is. John Fraser.” And then she added, “I think.”
Charlie was looking across the room as Isabel spoke. She thought at first that he had not heard her, as he started to say something about a woman who stood in the doorway. “I’ve seen her somewhere,” he said. “She’s an actress, I think, and the trouble with actresses is that you think you know them because you’ve seen them …” And then he stopped. “Fraser? Yes. John Fraser. Tall chap. He’s a teacher, I think.”
Isabel felt her heart beat faster. “You said that something went wrong. What?”
“One of them fell. They weren’t all that far up, I gather. This chap fell. I think he was …” He looked away again. The actress was talking to a small, rather neat man; she was taller than him by at least a head.
“Who was he—the one who fell?”
Charlie looked at Isabel again. She found herself studying his moustache—a handlebar affair that seemed to suit him so well. It must have taken years, she thought, to reach that stage of perfection; a generous act, undertaken for the benefit of others, as any act of personal enhancement was, since one did not see it very much oneself.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that he played rugby for Scotland. They had a minute’s silence for him at Murrayfield Stadium. He was one of the wings.” Then he remembered. “Chris Alexander. That was his name. I recall it now because his father was a director of a distillery I had dealings with. Nice chap. I met him. He was also a good amateur nose. He sometimes nosed for one of the distilleries on Islay. I forget which one.”
Isabel had heard Charlie refer to “noses” before. They were the people who remembered just how to achieve the taste of a particular whisky. He was a nose himself.
“Are you interested in all this?” Charlie said. “You’ve never talked about it before.”
She could not tell him, of course, and so she changed the subject. What she had heard confirmed her conviction that something had happened on the mountain to torment John Fraser. And she was already beginning to imagine what it was: Chris Alexander had fallen and John Fraser had left him to die. That was what John Fraser sought to expunge from his conscience, and that, she imagined, was what the anonymous letter-writer had somehow found out. This was quite possible, even if she had not a shred of evidence to support it. But would this hypothesis—for that was all it was—be enough to justify going to the chairman of the board of governors of Bishop Forbes and suggesting that this was what lay in one of the candidates’ past? He might say—and he would be justified in doing so—that she had jumped to conclusions. But if he did not, and if he proved to be willing to listen, then what did all this reveal? Simple cowardice—or something worse than that? Was it murder to leave somebody to die? No, it was not, but it could still be criminal, if you had an obligation to do something to help somebody and you did not. That was called culpable homicide, she believed, and it was not what one would expect to find in the background of the principal of a school.