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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.”