The Sunday Philosophy Club

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I happened to be in Nelson Street and happened to see …”

  What would Cat say? She would be shocked at the outset, as anyone would be on the news of a betrayal of this nature. And then perhaps she would move to anger, which would be directed against Toby, and not against the other girl, whoever she was. Isabel had read that women usually attack their partners on discovering infidelity, while men, in the same position, will direct their hostility against the other man, the intruder. For a moment she allowed herself to imagine the scene: Toby, unsuspecting, facing an angry Cat, his self-confident expression crumbling before the onslaught; blushing as the truth was outed. And then, she hoped, Cat would storm out, and that would be the end of Toby. A few weeks later, with her wounds still raw, but not so raw as to require privacy, Jamie could visit Cat in the delicatessen and suggest a meal together. He would be sympathetic, but Isabel would have to advise him to maintain some distance and not to be too quick to try to fill the emotional void. Then they would see. If Cat had any sense, she would realise that Jamie would never deceive her, and that men like Toby were best avoided. But there the fantasy ended; the likelihood was that Cat would make the same mistake again, and more than once, as people always did. Unsuitable men were replaced by unsuitable men; it seemed inevitable. People repeated their mistakes because their choice of partner was dictated by factors beyond their control. Isabel had imbibed sufficient Freud—and more to the point, Klein—to know that the emotional die was cast at a very early age. It all went back to childhood, and to the psychodynamics of one’s relationship with one’s parents. These things were not a matter of intellectual assessment and rational calculation; they sprang from events in the nursery. Not that everybody had a nursery, of course, but they had an equivalent—a space, perhaps.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT WAS THAT EVENING, after a day which she regarded as utterly wasted, that Isabel received a visit from Neil, the young man with whom she had had such an unrewarding conversation on her visit to Warrender Park Terrace. He arrived unannounced, although Isabel happened to be gazing out the window of her study when he walked up the path to the font door. She saw him look upwards, at the size of the house, and she thought she saw him hesitate slightly, but he went on to ring her bell and she made her way to the front door to let him in.

  He was wearing a suit and tie, and she noticed his shoes, which were highly polished black Oxfords. Hen had said, quite irrelevantly, that he worked for a stuffy firm, and the outfit confirmed this.

  “Miss Dalhousie?” he said superfluously as she opened the door. “I hope you remember me. You came round the other day …”

  “Of course I do. Neil, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She ushered him into the hall and through the drawing-room door. He declined her offer of a drink, or tea, but she poured herself a small sherry and sat down opposite him.

  “Hen said you were a lawyer,” she began conversationally.

  “Trainee lawyer,” he corrected. “Yes. That’s what I do.”

  “Like every second person in Edinburgh,” said Isabel.

  “Sometimes it seems like that. Yes.”

  There was a momentary silence. Isabel noticed that Neil’s hands were clasped over his lap, and that his position, in general, was far from relaxed. He was tense and on edge, just as he had been when he had spoken to her last time. Perhaps that was how he was. Some people were naturally tense, coiled up like springs, suspicious of the world about them.

  “I came to see you …” He trailed off.

  “Yes,” said Isabel brightly. “So I see.”

  Neil attempted a quick smile, but did not persist. “I came to see you about … about what we talked about the other day. I did not tell you the whole truth, I’m afraid. It’s been preying on my mind.”

  Isabel watched him closely. The muscular tension in the face aged him, making lines about the corners of his mouth. The palms of his hands would be moist, she thought. She said nothing, but waited for him to continue.

  “You asked me—you asked me quite specifically whether there was anything unusual in his life. Do you remember?”

  Isabel nodded. She looked down at the sherry glass in her right hand and took a small sip. It was very dry; too dry, Toby had said when she had given him a glass. Too dry and it gets bitter, you know.

  “And then I said that there was nothing,” Neil went on. “Which was not true. There was.”

  “Now you want to tell me about it?”

  Neil nodded. “I felt very bad about misleading you. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I just felt annoyed that you had come round to talk to us. I felt that it was none of your business.”

  Which it isn’t, thought Isabel, but did not say it.

  “You see,” said Neil, “Mark said to me that there was something happening. He was scared.”

  Isabel felt her pulse race. Yes, she had been right. There had been something; Mark’s death was not what it had seemed to be. It had a background.

  Neil unclasped his hands. Now that he had started to speak, some of the tension appeared to dissipate, even if he still did not appear relaxed.

  “You know that Mark worked for a firm of fund managers,” he said. “McDowell’s. They’re quite a large firm these days. They handle a lot of big pension funds, and one or two smaller people. They’re a well-known firm.”

  “I knew that,” said Isabel.

  “Well, in that job you see a lot of money moving. You have to watch things pretty closely.”

  “So I believe,” said Isabel.

  “And you have to be particularly careful about how you behave,” Neil said. “There’s something called insider trading. Do you know about that?”

  Isabel explained that she had heard of the term, but was not sure exactly what it meant. Was it something to do with buying shares on the basis of inside information?

  Neil nodded. “That’s more or less what it is. You may get information in your job which allows you to predict the movement of share prices. If you know that a firm is going to be taken over, for example, that may send up the share price. If you buy in advance of the news getting out, then you make a profit. It’s simple.”

  “I can imagine,” said Isabel. “And I can imagine the temptation.”

  “Yes,” agreed Neil. “It’s very tempting. I’ve even been in a position myself to do it. I assisted in drafting an offer which I knew would have an effect on the value of the shares. It would have been simple for me to get somebody to buy some shares on my behalf. Dead simple. I could have made thousands.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “You go to prison if you’re caught,” Neil said. “They take it very seriously. It’s because you’re getting an unfair advantage over the people who are selling the shares to you. You know something that they don’t. It undermines the market principle.”

  “And you say that Mark had seen this happen?”

  “Yes,” said Neil. “He told me one evening, when we were in the pub together. He said that he had discovered insider trading going on in the firm. He said that he was completely sure of his facts, and he had the means of proving it. But then he said something else.”

  Isabel put down her sherry glass. It was obvious where this disclosure was going, and she felt uncomfortable.

  “He said that he was worried that the people who were doing it knew that he had found out. He had been treated strangely, almost with suspicion, and he had been given a very strange little pep talk—a pep talk about confidentiality and duty to the firm—which he had interpreted as a veiled warning.”

  He looked up at Isabel, and she saw something in his eyes. What was it saying? Was it a plea for help? Was it the expression of some private agony, a sadness that he was unable to articulate?

  “Was that all?” she asked. “Did he tell you who gave him this talk, this warning?”

  Neil shook his head. “No, he didn’t. He said that he couldn’t say very much about it. But I could tell that he was f
rightened.”

  Isabel rose from her chair and crossed the room to close the curtains. As she did so, the movement of the material made a soft noise, like the breaking of a small wave on the beach. Neil watched her from where he was sitting. Then she returned to her chair.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do with this,” she said. “Have you thought of going to the police?”

  Her question seemed to make him tense once again. “I can’t do that,” he said. “They have already spoken to me several times. I told them nothing about this. I just told them what I told you the first time I spoke to you. If I went back now, it would look odd. I would effectively be saying that I had lied to them.”

  “And they may not like that,” mused Isabel. “They could start thinking you had something to hide, couldn’t they?”

  Neil stared at her. Again there was that strange expression in his eyes. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Of course,” said Isabel quickly, although she knew that this was not true; that he was concealing something. “It’s just that once you don’t tell the truth, then people begin to think that there may be a reason.”

  “There was no reason,” said Neil, his voice now slightly raised. “I didn’t talk about this because I knew very little about it. I thought that it had nothing to do with … with what happened. I didn’t want to spend hours with the police. I just wanted everything to be over. I thought it might be simpler just to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Sometimes that is much simpler,” said Isabel. “Sometimes it isn’t.” She looked at him, and he lowered his eyes. She felt pity for him now. He was a very ordinary young man, not particularly sensitive, not particularly aware. And yet he had lost a friend, somebody with whom he actually lived, and he must be feeling that much more than she, who had only witnessed the accident.

  She looked at him. He seemed vulnerable, and there was an air to him that made her think of something else, another possibility. Perhaps there had been a dimension to his relationship with Mark that was not immediately obvious to her. It was even possible that he and Mark had been lovers; it was not all that unusual, she reflected, for people to be capable of sexual involvement with either sex, and although she had glimpsed him in Hen’s room, that need not mean that there had not previously been different permutations in that flat.

  “You miss him, don’t you?” she said quietly, watching the effect on him of her words.

  He looked away, as if studying one of the pictures on the wall. For a few moments he said nothing, and then he answered, “I miss him a great deal. I miss him every day. I think of him all the time. All the time.”

  He had answered her question, and answered her doubts.

  “Don’t try to forget him,” she said. “People sometimes say that. They say that we should try to forget the people we lose. But we really shouldn’t, you know.”

  He nodded and looked back at her briefly, before he looked away again, in misery, she thought.

  “It was very good of you to come this evening,” she said gently. “It’s never easy to come and tell somebody that you were keeping something from them. Thank you, Neil.”

  She had not intended this to be a signal for him to leave, but that was how he interpreted it. He rose to his feet and put out a hand to shake hands with her. She stood up and took the proffered hand, noting that it was trembling.

  AFTER NEIL HAD GONE she sat in the drawing room, her empty sherry glass at her side, mulling over what her visitor had said. The unexpected meeting had disturbed her in more ways than one. Neil was more upset than she had imagined by what had happened to Mark and was unable to resolve his feelings. There was nothing that she could do about that, because he was clearly not prepared to speak about whatever it was that was troubling him. He would recover, of course, but time could provide the only solution for that. Much more disturbing had been the disclosures about insider trading at McDowell’s. She felt that she could not ignore this, now that she had been made aware of it, and although whether or not the firm engaged in that particular form of dishonesty (or was it greed?) had nothing directly to do with her, it became her concern if this had some bearing on Mark’s death. A bearing on Mark’s death: What precisely did this mean? Did it mean that he had been murdered? This was the first time that she had allowed herself to spell out the possibility that clearly. But the question could not be evaded now.

  Had Mark been sent to his death because he had threatened to disclose damaging information about somebody in the firm? It seemed outrageous even to pose the question. This was the Scottish financial community, with all its reputation for uprightness and integrity. These people played golf; they frequented the New Club; they were elders—some of them—of the Church of Scotland. She thought of Paul Hogg. He was typical of the sort of people who worked in such firms. He was utterly straightforward; conventional by his own admission, a person one met at the private shows at galleries and who liked Elizabeth Blackadder. These people did not engage in the sort of practises which had been associated with some of those Italian banks or even with the more freewheeling end of the City of London. And they did not commit murder.

  But if for a moment one assumed that anybody, even the most outwardly upright, is capable of acting greedily and bending the rules of the financial community (it was not theft, after all, that one was talking about, but the mere misuse of information), might such a person not, if he were faced with exposure, resort to desperate means to protect his reputation? In different, less censorious circles it would probably be less devastating to be exposed as a cheat, simply because there were so many other cheats and because almost everybody would be likely to have been engaged in cheating at some point themselves. There were parts of southern Italy, parts of Naples, for example, she had read, where cheating was the norm and to be honest was to be deviant. But here, in Edinburgh, the possibility of being sent to prison would be unthinkable; how much more attractive, then, would it be to take steps to avoid this, even if those steps involved removing a young man who was getting too close to the truth?

  She looked at the telephone. She knew that she had only to call Jamie and he would come. He had said that before, on more than one occasion—You can give me a call anytime, anytime. I like coming round here. I really do.

  She left her chair and crossed to the telephone table. Jamie lived in Stockbridge, in Saxe-Coburg Street, in a flat he shared with three others. She had been there once, when he and Cat had been together, and he had cooked a meal for the two of them. It was a rambling flat, with high ceilings and a stone-flag floor in the hall and in the kitchen. Jamie was the owner, having been bought the flat by his parents when he was a student, and the flatmates were his tenants. As landlord he allowed himself two rooms: a bedroom and a music room, where he gave his music lessons. Jamie, who had graduated with a degree in music, earned his living from teaching bassoon. There was no shortage of pupils, and he supplemented his earnings by playing in a chamber ensemble and as an occasional bassoonist for Scottish Opera. It was, thought Isabel, an ideal existence; and one into which Cat would fit so comfortably. But Cat had not seen it that way, of course, and Isabel feared that she never would.

  Jamie was teaching when she called and promised to call her back in half an hour. While she waited for the call, she made herself a sandwich in the kitchen; she did not feel like eating a proper meal. Then, when that was finished, she returned to the drawing room and awaited his call.

  Yes, he was free. His last pupil, a talented boy of fifteen whom he was preparing for an examination, had played brilliantly. Now, with the boy sent off home after the lesson, a walk across town to Isabel’s house was just what he wanted. Yes, it would be good to have a drink with Isabel and perhaps some singing afterwards.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t feel in the mood. I want to talk to you.”

  He had picked up her anxiety and the plan to walk was dropped in favour of a quicker bus ride.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Y
es,” she said. “But I really need to discuss something with you. I’ll tell you when you come.”

  The buses, so maligned by Grace, were on time. Within twenty minutes, Jamie was at the house and was sitting with Isabel in the kitchen, where she had started to prepare him an omelette. She had taken a bottle of wine from the cellar and had poured a glass for him and for herself. Then she started to explain about the visit to the flat and her meeting with Hen and Neil. He listened gravely, and when she began to recount the conversation she had had with Neil earlier that evening, his eyes were wide with concern.

  “Isabel,” he said as she stopped speaking. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

  “That I should keep out of things that don’t concern me?”

  “Yes, absolutely.” He paused. “But I know from past experience that you never do. So I won’t say it, perhaps.”

  “Good.”

  “Even if I think it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Jamie grimaced. “So what do we do?”

  “That’s why I asked you to come round,” said Isabel, refilling his glass of wine. “I had to talk the whole thing through with somebody.”

  She had been speaking while she prepared the omelette. Now it was ready and she slid it onto a plate that had been warming on the side of the stove.

  “Chanterelle mushrooms,” she said. “They transform an omelette.”

  Jamie looked down gratefully at the generous omelette and its surrounding of salad.

  “You’re always cooking for me,” he said. “And I never cook for you. Never.”

  “You’re a man,” said Isabel in a matter-of-fact way. “The thought doesn’t enter your head.”

  She realised, the moment she had spoken, that this was an unkind and inappropriate thing to say. She might have said it to Toby, and with justification, as she doubted whether he would ever cook for anybody, but it was not the right thing to say to Jamie.