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.
C H A P T E R T W E L V E
E
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 1 1 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h 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-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
1 1 3
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 perse-cution 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 1 1 4
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h 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, Is Demoted.” No. (She avoided the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
1 1 5
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.