Cat looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she asked. “Couldn’t the work wait?”
There was a brief exchange of glances—a niece-to-aunt exchange, a look between women, private, although in the presence of a man. Isabel interpreted it as a plea, and realised that Cat wanted her to be with her. Of course she would have to accede to the request, which she did.
“Yes, of course the work can wait,” she said. “I’d love to come.”
Tomasso turned to face her. “But I cannot put you out like that. No. No. Please: we shall do it some other time when nobody is busy.”
“It’s no difficulty,” said Isabel. “I have plenty of time.”
Tomasso was insistent. “I cannot allow you to be inconvenienced. I have plenty to do myself. I have some business here in Edinburgh—there are people I must see.”
Isabel glanced at Cat. She felt a momentary sense of disappointment that he did not want her company; that was obvious. Cat, though, had her difficulties ahead. Tomasso was insistent, it seemed, and would not be put off that easily.
The Italian rose to his feet. “I am keeping you both from your work,” he said. “It’s so easy, when one is on holiday oneself, to forget that everybody else has their work to do. Cat? May I telephone you tomorrow?”
“Of course,” said Cat. “I’ll be here. Working, I’m afraid, but I’ll be here.”
He turned to Isabel. “And perhaps we shall be able to meet too?”
“I’m here too,” said Isabel. “And I’ll be happy to show you round. I really would.”
Tomasso smiled at her. “You are very kind.”
He bent forward and took Cat’s hand in his; a lingering grasp, thought Isabel. Cat reddened. It was going to be difficult, Isabel thought, but Cat had to learn how to discourage men. And the easiest way of doing that, in Isabel’s view, was to show excessive eagerness. Men did not like to be pursued; she would have to tell Cat that, tactfully, of course, but as explicitly as she could.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“WELL, Miss Dalhousie. It is Miss Dalhousie, isn’t it?”
Isabel nodded to the young man behind the enquiries desk at the library. “It is. Well remembered.”
She looked at him, noticing the clean white shirt and the carefully knotted tie, the slightly earnest appearance. He was the sort who noticed things. “How do you do it?” she asked. “You must get so many people coming in here.”
The young man looked pleased with the compliment. He was proud of his memory, which came in useful professionally, but the reason why he remembered Isabel was that she had, on an earlier visit, explained to him that she was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. For a young librarian, fresh from a spell as a junior in the journals department, that was an exotic and exalted position.
He smiled at Isabel. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“I need to see copies of the Evening News for this past October,” said Isabel. She gave him the date and he told her that she was in luck; while the earlier issues were on microfiche, they still had bound volumes of the more recent months and he would bring these over to her personally. Isabel thanked him and took a seat near the window. As she waited she could look down into the Grassmarket and watch people window-shopping. It had changed so much, she reflected. When she had been young, the Grassmarket had been a distinctly insalubrious place, with winos slumped in the doorways and small knots of desolate people standing outside the entrance to the doss-houses. What had happened to the Castle Trades Hotel, which took through its doorway the homeless and destitute and gave them a bowl of soup and a bed for the night? It had become an upmarket hotel for tourists, its old clientele dispersed, vanished, dead. And a few doors away from it a glittering bank and a shop selling fossils. Money pushed people out of cities; it always had. And yet no matter how much the exterior of the city changed, the same human types were still there; wearing different clothes, more prosperous now, but with the same craggy faces that were always there to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh.
The young man returned with a large blue folder of bound newspapers. “This is two months’ worth,” he said. “But it includes October.”
Isabel thanked him and opened the cover of the folder. The front page of the Edinburgh Evening News of the first of October greeted her eyes. There had been a fire in a nightclub, a large banner headline announced, and there was a picture of firemen directing a stream of water onto a collapsed section of roof. Nobody had been hurt, she read, because the fire occurred after-hours when the building was empty. Isabel was suspicious. Fires in bars and nightclubs were a well-known way of dealing with shrinking profits. Occasionally there were arrests, but usually nothing could be proved, in spite of the best efforts of the loss adjusters. So the insurers paid up and another, better-positioned bar or nightclub popped up in the place of the one that had gone.
She turned the page and began to read another story. A male teacher had been accused of making indecent remarks to a girl pupil. The teacher had been suspended and would face what was described as a rigorous inquiry into the incident. “This sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen,” said an official from the education department. Isabel paused. Who knew that it had happened? Surely the whole point of an inquiry was to find out whether anything happened at all, and yet here was the official prejudging the matter before a shred of evidence had been produced. And would it not be the easiest thing in the world for a streetwise teenage girl to make up an allegation of that sort in order to embarrass or destroy a teacher to whom she had taken a dislike?
There was a photograph of the suspended teacher, a man in his late thirties, Isabel thought, frowning at the camera. Isabel studied the photograph. It was a kind face, she decided, not the face of a predator. And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch-hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of persecution were much the same—the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised. And exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims. And yet, she thought: What if the girl had been telling the truth? What then?
She sighed. The world was an imperfect place, and our search for justice in it seemed an impossible task. But she had not come to the library to be immersed in such reports and the speculations they provoked. She had come to find out about the events of a very particular week: the week during which Ian had had his heart transplant. That was in mid-October, which would be about a quarter of the way through the volume, she assumed. She slid a finger into the bound pages and turned over the heavy wad of paper. October the tenth: she had come in too early. She fingered the paper, preparing to turn another week’s worth of papers. But before she did so, she saw the headline: “Teacher Dies.” It was the same man, the one who had been suspended from duties pending the investigation of an allegation against him. He had been found dead at the edge of the Pentland Hills, just outside the city. A note had been recovered, and the police were not treating the death as suspicious. He was survived by a wife and two children.
Isabel read the report with a heavy heart. A friend was quoted as saying that he was an innocent man who had been hounded to his death. The police confirmed that a teenager, who could not be named for legal reasons but who was connected with the case, had been charged with a separate offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice. That meant the making of a false allegation.
She made a conscious effort to put the case out of her mind. She had the moral energy, she thought, for one issue at a time. She could do nothing to help that schoolteacher and his sorrowing family. But she could help Ian, if he wanted her help—which was another matter. Now she was looking at the first newspaper in her targeted week, and she ran her eye over each column, scanning the pages for the headline that she wanted. “Major Row Hits City Parks.” No. “Lord Provost Defends Road Plans, Says Public Will Come to Welcome Them.” No. “Police Dog Turns on Handler, I
s Demoted.” No. (She avoided the temptation to read that one; she had to get on with the task in hand. Demoted?)
It was all the typical stuff of local papers: the planning disputes, the school prize-givings, the crimes great and small. It was immensely distracting, as local papers always are, but she persisted and, four days into her search (in newspaper terms), she came across the information for which she had been looking. A young man had been killed in what appeared to be a hit-and-run incident. There was his photograph, across two columns, a young man of twenty, wearing a white shirt and a plain tie, smiling into the camera. Rory Macleod, the caption read. Former pupil of James Gillespie’s School. Shortly after the celebration of his twentieth birthday.
Isabel studied the face. He had been the sort of young man she had walked past every day in Bruntsfield, or George Street, or anywhere like that. He could have been a student or, with his white shirt and tie, a bank clerk from the Bank of Scotland in Morningside. In other words, he was unexceptional, as she had imagined he would be.
She turned to the report. He had played in a squash match in Colinton, the newspaper said, and had then gone with friends for a pint of beer at the Canny Man’s. A friend had walked with him as far as the post office and then had left him to go up to the Braids while he had turned left into Nile Grove. Possibly only five or ten minutes after the friend had said goodbye to him, he was found in Nile Grove itself, lying on the edge of the pavement, half hidden by a parked car. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the Infirmary, but he died later that night. He had been only twenty yards away from his front door. The newspaper then gave the address of that front door and a quote from an uncle, who spoke of the devastation of the family and the sense of loss at the ending of a life so full of promise. And that was all.
Isabel read through the report several times. She noted the number of the house in Nile Grove and the name of the uncle who had been interviewed. He had an unusual name, Archibald, which would make it comparatively easy to trace him, should she need to do so. She took a last look at the photograph, at the face of Rory Macleod, and then turned to the next day’s Evening News. There was a further small item on the incident, confirming that Rory appeared to have been struck by a car and fatally injured. The police had appealed for anybody who had been in the vicinity of Nile Grove that night to come forward. “Anything you saw may be important,” the police spokesman said. “Any unusual behaviour. Anything out of the ordinary.”
She looked at the following day’s paper, but there was nothing more on the incident. So she closed the folder and started to carry it back to the young man at the enquiry desk. He saw her coming and leapt to his feet.
“Miss Dalhousie,” he whispered. “Please let me take that.”
She handed him the folder and thanked him.
“How is the Review going?” he asked her, as he took the folder from her.
“I’m almost putting the next issue to bed,” said Isabel. “It’s a busy time for me.”
He nodded. He would have liked to have asked her for a job, but he could not bring himself to do so. He would stay in the library service, he thought, and become old like those above him. And Isabel, looking at him, at his eager face, reflected on mortality. He could have been the young man in that photograph, but was not. Rory had died instead of this young man, because Rory had had the bad luck to be at that precise point in Nile Grove at the exact moment when the driver of the car had struck him. And then she thought of the driver. That could have been me, she reflected, or this young librarian, but it was not. That had been a man with a high brow and hooded eyes, and with that scar. Or it could have been. Just could have been.
SHE HAD ARRANGED to meet Jamie at the Elephant House, a café farther down George IV Bridge. It was a spacious, L-shaped room, with windows at the back which looked down on Candlemaker Row. High-ceilinged and with exposed floorboards, it had a slightly cavernous feel to it—a cavern adorned with pictures and models of elephants on every wall. Isabel felt comfortable there, amongst its elephants and students, and regularly chose it as a place to meet her friends. And if her Sunday Philosophy Club were ever to meet again—it seemed to be impossible to find a date that suited the members—then this would have been a good place to sit and talk about the nature of good and our understanding of the world. For Jamie, who taught bassoon for six hours a week at George Heriot’s School, it was less of a meeting place than a convenient place to go for a strong coffee after finishing with his pupils.
He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a table near a window in the back part of the room, a cup of coffee in front of him and immersed in one of the café’s copies of the Scotsman. He looked up as she arrived and rose to his feet in welcome.
“You’ve been here for hours,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Five minutes,” he said. “Still on page three of the newspaper.”
He put the paper to one side and offered to go and buy her coffee.
“That can wait, Jamie,” said Isabel. “I’ve been reading the newspaper too.”
He glanced at the paper. “And?”
“The Evening News,” she went on. “In the library.”
“What an odd thing to do,” he said. “Unless . . .” He paused. Isabel had that look about her which told him she was on to something. He could always tell when she was about to embark on some temporary obsession. It was a look in her eyes, perhaps, a look of determination, a look that said I shall not rest until I get to the bottom of this.
For a moment Isabel appeared embarrassed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I suppose that I am on to something.” She held up a hand. “I know, I know: you don’t have to tell me again.”
Jamie sighed. “I wasn’t going to lecture you. I know that that’s no use—you’ll go right ahead, no matter what I say. All I would say is this: Be careful. One of these days you’re going to get involved in something which gets seriously out of hand. You will, you know. You really will.”
“I understand that perfectly well,” said Isabel. “And I’m grateful to you for saying it. I do listen to you, you know.”
Jamie took a sip of his coffee. He wiped a small trace of milk from his upper lip. “It doesn’t always seem like that to me.”
“But I do!” protested Isabel. “I listened to you over that business with Minty Auchterlonie. I listened to you very seriously.”
“You were lucky there,” said Jamie. “You could have got seriously out of your depth. But let’s not talk about the past. What are you getting involved in now?”
Over the next few minutes Isabel told him about her chance meeting with Ian and about their conversation at the Scottish Arts Club. Jamie was interested—she could tell that—although he, like Isabel herself, seemed incredulous when she mentioned cellular memory.
“There’s a rational explanation for these things,” he said when she had finished talking. “There always is. And I just don’t see how anything other than brain cells could store memory. I just don’t. And that’s on the strength of my school biology course. It’s that basic.”
“But that’s exactly the problem,” retorted Isabel. “We’re all stuck with the same tried and trusted ideas. If we refused to entertain the possibility of something radically different, then we’d never make any progress—ever. We’d still be thinking that the sun revolved round the earth.”
Jamie affected surprise. “Isabel, don’t start challenging that now!”
Isabel accepted his scepticism good-naturedly. “I should point out that I’m completely agnostic on all this,” she said. “All I’m doing is trying to keep an open mind.”
“And where does this take you?” asked Jamie. “So what if the cells in the transplanted heart, or whatever, think they remember a face. So what?”
Isabel looked about her, for no reason other than that she felt a slight twinge of fear. That was in itself irrational, but she felt it.
“The face that he remembers could be the face of the driver who killed the donor,??
? she said. “It could have been imprinted in memory—whatever sort of memory—after he had been knocked down and the driver came and looked down at him.”
Jamie’s lip curled. “Really, Isabel!”
“Yes,” she said quickly. “Really. And if it is the face of the driver, then we may have a description of the person responsible for the death.”
Jamie thought for a moment. It was now obvious to him what Isabel had been doing in the library. “You’ve found a report of the accident?” he asked. “You know who the donor was?”
“I think so,” said Isabel. “We know that the donor was a young man. That’s as much as Ian knows. So I put two and two together and concluded that a sudden, violent death on the day on which they called Ian in for his transplant would probably supply the identity of the donor. And it has. There’s nothing brilliant in that. It’s all pretty obvious.”
But was it? It crossed her mind that she was assuming too much, and too readily. There might have been other incidents, other young men who could have been donors, but no, Edinburgh was not a very large place. It would be unlikely that two young men had died a sudden death that night. Her assumption, she decided, was reasonable.
Rather against his better judgement, Jamie felt himself being drawn in. He could not resist Isabel, he had decided. There was something about her that fascinated him: the intellectual curiosity, the style, the verve. And she was an attractive woman too. If she had been a bit younger—quite a bit younger—then he could have imagined that she would have been every bit as exciting as Cat. Damn Cat!
“So?” he said. “So who is he? And what do we do?”
We do, he thought. I should have said you do, but once again, I’ve played straight into Isabel’s hands. I’m trapped. In nets of golden wires.
Isabel was oblivious of Jamie’s struggle with himself. She had invited him to meet her to discuss what she had found out; she had not asked him to join her in her inquiry. Of course, if he wished to do so, then that would be very helpful; but she had not asked him.