“I’m so sorry,” said Isabel. “I can imagine how hard it must be for you.” The McCunn. Land of the Mountain and the Flood.
Such a romantic piece. And then the thought occurred to her, and for a moment her heart stood still.
“You knew what they played that night?” she asked. Her voice was small, and Hen looked at her in surprise.
“Yes, I did. I forget what the rest was, but I noticed the McCunn.”
“Noticed?”
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“On the programme,” said Hen, looking quizzically at Isabel.
“I saw it on the programme. So what?”
“But where did you get the programme? Did somebody give it to you?”
Again Hen looked at Isabel as if she was asking pointless questions. “I think I found it here, in the flat. In fact, I could probably lay my hands on it right now. Do you want to see it?”
Isabel nodded, and Hen rose to her feet and riffled through a pile of papers on a shelf. “Here we are. That’s the programme.
Look, there’s the McCunn and the other stuff is listed here.”
Isabel took the programme. Her hands were shaking.
“Whose programme is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Hen. “Neil’s maybe. Everything in the flat is either his or mine or . . . Mark’s.”
“It must be Neil’s,” said Isabel quietly. “Mark didn’t come back from the concert, did he?”
“I don’t see why the programme is so important,” said Hen.
She gave the impression now of being slightly irritated, and Isabel took the opportunity to excuse herself.
“I’ll go downstairs and wait for Neil,” she said. “I don’t want to hold you up.”
“I was going to have a bath,” said Hen.
“Well, you go ahead and do that,” said Isabel quickly. “Does he walk back from work?”
“Yes,” said Hen, getting to her feet. “He comes up from Toll-cross. Over the golf links there.”
“I’ll meet him,” said Isabel. “It’s a gorgeous evening and I’d like the walk.”
*
*
*
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h S H E W E N T O U T S I D E , trying to keep calm, trying to control her breathing. Soapy Soutar, the boy downstairs, was dragging his reluctant dog to a patch of grass at the edge of the road. She walked past him, stopping to say something.
“That’s a nice dog.”
Soapy Soutar looked up at her. “He disnae like me. And he eats his heid off.”
“Dogs are always hungry,” said Isabel. “That’s what they’re like.”
“Aye, well this one has a hollow stomach, my mum says. Eats and disnae want to go for walks.”
“I’m sure he likes you, though.”
“No, he disnae.”
The conversation came to a natural end, and she looked down over the links. There were two people making their separate ways up the diagonal path, and one of them, a tall figure in a lightweight khaki raincoat, looked as if he might be Neil. She began to walk forward.
It was Neil. For a moment or two it seemed as if he did not recognise her, but then he smiled and greeted her politely.
“I came to see you,” she said. “Hen said that you would be on your way home, so I thought I’d meet you out here. It’s such a wonderful evening.”
“Yes, it’s grand, isn’t it?” He looked at her, waiting for her to say something else. He was uneasy, she thought, but then he would be.
She took a deep breath. “Why did you come to me?” she asked. “Why did you come to talk about Mark’s worries?”
He answered quickly, almost before she had finished her question. “Because I had not told you the whole truth.”
“And you still haven’t.”
He stared at her, and she saw his knuckle tighten about the 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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handle of his briefcase. “You still haven’t told me that you were there. You were there in the Usher Hall, weren’t you?”
She held his gaze, watching the passage of emotions. There was anger to begin with, but that soon passed, and was replaced by fear.
“I know you were there,” she said. “And now I have proof of it.” This was only true to an extent, but she felt that it would be enough, at least for the purpose of this meeting.
He opened his mouth to speak. “I—”
“And did you have anything to do with his death, Neil? Did you? Were there just the two of you left up there after everybody else had gone downstairs? That’s true, isn’t it?”
He could no longer hold her gaze. “I was there. I was.”
“I see,” said Isabel. “And what happened?”
“We had an argument,” he said. “ I started it. I was jealous of him and Hen, you see. I couldn’t take it. We had an argument and I gave him a shove, sideways, to make my point. I had no intention of it being anything more than that. Just a shove, hardly anything. That’s all I did. But he overbalanced.”
“Are you telling me the truth now, Neil?” Isabel studied his eyes as he looked up to reply, and she had her answer. But then there was the question of why he was jealous of Mark and Hen.
But did that matter? She thought not; because love and jealousy may have many different wellsprings, but are as urgent and as strong whatever their source.
“I am telling the truth,” he said slowly. “But I couldn’t tell anybody that, could I? They would have accused me of pushing him over the edge and I would have had no witnesses to say that it was anything but that. If I had, I would have been prosecuted.
It’s culpable homicide, you know, if you assault somebody and they die, even if you had no intention of killing them and it’s only 2 4 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h a shove. But it was an accident; it really was. I had no intention, none at all . . .” He paused. “And I was too scared to tell anybody about it. I was just scared. I imagined what it would be like if nobody believed me.”
A man walked by, stepping onto the grass to avoid them, wondering (Isabel imagined) what they were doing, standing in earnest conversation under the evening sky. Settling a life, she thought; laying the dead to rest; allowing time and self-forgiveness to start.
“I believe you,” said Isabel.
Philosophers in their studies, Isabel reflected, grapple with problems of this sort. Forgiveness is a popular subject for them, as is punishment. We need to punish, not because it makes us feel any better—ultimately it does not—but because it establishes the moral balance: it makes a declaration about wrongdo-ing; it maintains our sense of a just world. But in a just world one punishes only those who mean wrong, who act from an ill will.
This young man, whom she now understood, had never meant ill.
He had never intended to harm Mark—anything but—and there was no reason, no conceivable justification, for holding him responsible for the awful consequences of what was no more than a gesture of irritation. If the criminal law of Scotland stipulated differently, then the law of Scotland was simply morally indefensible, and that was all there was to it.
Neil was confused, Isabel thought. Ultimately it was all about sex, and not knowing what he wanted, and being immature. If he were punished now, for something that he had never meant to happen, what point would be served by that? One more life would be marred, and the world, in this case, would not be a more just place for it.
“Yes, I believe you,” said Isabel. She paused. The decision was really quite simple, and she did not need to be a moral 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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philosopher to take it. “And that’s the end of the matter. It was an accident. You’re sorry about it. We can leave it at that.”