She returned to the kitchen and switched on the radio. It was the end of a news programme, and the world, as usual, was in disarray. Wars and rumours of war. A politician, a minister in the government, was being pressed for a response and refusing to answer. There was no crisis, he said. Things had to be kept in perspective.
But there is a crisis, insisted the interviewer; there just is.
That is a matter of opinion; I don’t believe in alarming people unduly.
It was in the middle of the politician’s embarrassment that 3 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the doorbell sounded. Isabel put the mushrooms into a bowl and went through to the hall to open the door. Grace had suggested that she install a spy hole in order to identify callers before she opened the door, but she had never done so. If anybody rang very late, she could peer at them through the letter box, but for the most part she would open the door on trust. If we all lived behind barriers, then we would be dreadfully isolated.
The man on the doorstep had his back to her and was looking out over the front garden. When the door opened he turned round, almost guiltily, and smiled at her.
“You’re Isabel Dalhousie?”
She nodded. “I am.” Her glance ran over him. He was in his mid-thirties, with dark, slightly bushy hair, smartly enough dressed in a dark blazer and charcoal slacks. He had small, round glasses and a dark red tie. There was a pen and an electronic diary of some sort in the top pocket of his shirt. She imagined Grace’s voice: Shifty.
“I’m a journalist,” he said, showing her a card with the name of his newspaper. “My name is Geoffrey McManus.”
Isabel nodded politely. She would never read his paper.
“I wondered if I could have a word with you,” he said. “I gather you witnessed that unfortunate accident in the Usher Hall last night. Could you talk to me about it?”
Isabel hesitated for a moment, but then she stepped back into the hall and invited him in. McManus moved forward quickly, as if he was concerned that she might suddenly change her mind. “Such an unpleasant business,” he said, as he followed her into the living room at the front of the house. “It was a terrible thing to happen.”
Isabel gestured for him to sit down and she placed herself on the sofa near the fireplace. She noticed that as he sat down he T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
3 1
cast an eye around the walls, as if assessing the value of the paintings. Isabel squirmed. She did not like to vaunt her wealth, and felt uncomfortable when it came under scrutiny. Perhaps he did not know, though. The painting by the door, for example, was a Peploe, and an early one. And the small oil beside the fireplace was a Stanley Spencer—a sketch for a part of When We Dead Awaken.
“Nice paintings,” he said jauntily. “You like art?”
She looked at him. His tone was familiar. “I do like art. Yes. I like art.”
He looked around the room again. “I interviewed Robin Philipson once,” he said. “I went to his studio.”
“You must have found that very interesting.”
“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t like the smell of paint, I’m afraid.
It gives me a headache.”
McManus was fiddling with a mechanical pencil, releasing the lead and then pushing it back in again. “May I ask you what you do? That is, if you work.”
“I edit a journal,” said Isabel. “A philosophical journal. The Review of Applied Ethics. ”
McManus raised an eyebrow. “We’re both in the same trade, then,” he said.
Isabel smiled. She was about to say “hardly” but did not. And in a sense he was right. Her job was a part-time one, involving the assessment and editing of scholarly papers, but ultimately it was, as he suggested, about getting words onto paper.
She returned to the subject of the incident. “What happened in the Usher Hall,” she said. “Is there anything more known about it?”
McManus took a notebook out of the pocket of his jacket and flipped it open. “Nothing much,” he said. “We know who the young man was and what he did. I’ve spoken to his flatmates and 3 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h I’m trying to get in touch with the parents. I’ll probably be able to see them this evening. They’re up in Perth.”
Isabel stared at him. He was proposing to speak to them this evening, in the middle of their grief. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you have to speak to those poor people?”
McManus fingered the spiral binder of his notebook. “I’m writing a story about it,” he said. “I need to cover every angle.
Even the parents.”
“But they’ll be terribly upset,” said Isabel. “What do you expect them to say? That they’re sorry about it?”
McManus looked at her sharply. “The public has a legitimate interest in these things,” he said. “I can see you don’t approve, but the public has a right to be informed. Do you have any problem with that?”
Isabel wanted to say that she did, but she decided not to engage with her visitor. Anything she said about intrusive journalism would make no difference to the way in which he saw his job. If he had moral qualms about speaking to the recently bereaved, she was sure that these would be kept very much in the background.
“What do you want to know from me, Mr. McManus?” she asked, glancing at her watch. He would be offered no coffee, she had decided.
“Right,” he said. “I would like to know what you saw, please.
Just tell me everything.”
“I saw very little,” said Isabel. “I saw him fall, and then, later on, I saw him being carried out on the stretcher. That’s all I saw.”
McManus nodded. “Yes, yes. But tell me about it. What did he look like going down? Did you see his face?”
Isabel looked down at her hands, which were folded on her lap. She had seen his face, and she had thought that he must 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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have seen her. His eyes had been wide, with what was either surprise or terror. She had seen his eyes.
“Why would you want to know if I saw his face?” she asked.
“That might tell us something. You know. Something about what he was feeling. About what happened.”
She stared at him for a moment, struggling with her distaste for his insensitivity. “I didn’t see his face. I’m sorry.”
“But you saw his head? Was he turned away from you, or facing you?”
Isabel sighed. “Mr. McManus, it all happened very quickly, in a second or so. I don’t think I saw very much. Just a body falling from above, and then it was all over.”
“But you must have noticed something about him,” McManus insisted. “You must have seen something. Bodies are made up of faces and arms and legs and all the rest. We see individual bits as well as the whole.”
Isabel wondered whether she could ask him to leave, and decided that she would do so in a moment. But his line of questioning suddenly changed.
“What happened afterwards?” he asked. “What did you do?”
“I went downstairs,” she said. “There was a group of people in the foyer. Everybody was pretty shocked.”
“And then you saw him being carried out?”
“I did.”
“And that’s when you saw his face?”
“I suppose so. I saw him going out on the stretcher.”
“Then what did you do? Did you do anything else?”
“I went home,” said Isabel sharply. “I gave my statement to the police and then I went home.”
McManus fiddled with his pencil. “And that was all you did?”