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.
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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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