Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (21 page)

“I know this sounds impetuous,” she said, “but I want to see Peter. Could I go round there while your potatoes are dauphinoising?”

Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “Why? Can’t it wait?”

It could wait, of course, but Isabel herself could not. If she did not see Peter now she would spend the night pondering the implications of what he had said to Jamie. And if she did that, then the next day she would be too tired to work, would get behind with the
Review
, and that would prey on her mind sufficiently to ruin her sleep the following night. No, she had to talk to Peter now.

Jamie tried to be gracious. “All right. But please don’t be too late—potatoes dauphinois get soggy if you leave them.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek and went to the telephone. Susie, Peter’s wife, answered and said that Peter was in the garden with the dog. Of course he would be happy to see Isabel; they had no plans for the evening and she was not yet even thinking about supper. “We had a late lunch today,” she said.

Isabel put on a light coat; the day itself had been warm, but evenings in Edinburgh could be chilly, particularly when the sky was empty of clouds, as it was this evening. Deciding to add a scarf to the coat, she went out of the house and set off for the Stevensons’ house in the Grange. It was not a long walk, but it was an interesting one for Isabel, as wherever she walked in Edinburgh she passed places with particular associations for her. So now, by taking a shortcut, she found herself walking past the house of Alex Philip, the architect whom she had consulted about possible alterations to her house, and then past the house of Haflidi Hallgrimsson, the composer whose latest piece she had listened to a few days previously. And round the corner from that she saw the road that led to the house of a well-known politician, and past the house of another of whom she had heard a most cutting remark passed—ten years ago, but still clear in
her mind. She knew that she should not find it amusing, but she did: somebody had said of that person, with devastating accuracy, “He always does the right thing. It just so happens that the right thing is always in his best interests.” It was a remark devoid of charity, and she wondered whether there was a duty not to bring such words to mind but rather to let them fade. It would be an act of memory-housekeeping of the sort that perhaps we all needed to undertake from time to time. In this way might one rid the heart of ghosts, she thought.

Could we remember, though, only those things we wanted to? Could there be acts of forgetting, just as there could be acts of remembrance? Human memory was frequently difficult and unruly, but it was not beyond telling. And it was possible, she thought, to say to another who wanted one to forget something, an embarrassing or shameful incident perhaps,
Yes, I have forgotten it.
That was a lesson that one of her school friends could take to heart; whenever Isabel saw her now she delighted in remembering how as twelve-year-olds they had teased a vulnerable teacher, imitating her voice when she turned to write something on the blackboard, unaware of her lack of sureness of herself, her crippling inadequacy in the face of taunting schoolgirls.
Don’t remind me of that
, Isabel wanted to say, but did not because it sounded like an abrogation of responsibility for what she, like the other girls, had been. And yet that twelve-year-old
was
a different person in the moral sense; she, the mature Isabel Dalhousie, would never do what that near-teenage girl had done. It was not her; it simply was not her any more.

She crossed the road at Church Hill and made her way along the road to the gateway of West Grange House. Peter was in the garden, bending over to examine something in a flower bed, and was alerted to the arrival of Isabel by the barking of his dog.

“I know it’s an odd time to come and see you,” said Isabel. “But there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

Peter smiled. “And it couldn’t wait?” he said. “Your impatience has always been one of your most charming qualities.” He gestured to a bench to the side of the front door. “We can sit there. It’s still warm enough to be outside. And light enough. The one consolation of our poor Scottish summers is the light, don’t you think?”

Isabel agreed. Then there was a silence, during which Peter looked at her expectantly. Eventually he said, “Minty Auchterlonie?”

She nodded.

“I thought it might be,” said Peter. “Did Jamie tell you that I met him at Hughes’?”

“Yes. And you said that you thought that she was in trouble.”

Peter nodded. “I did. And she is.”

She waited for him to expand on this, but when he spoke again it was to question her. “Are you … Well, I was about to say
interfering
again, but I realise that’s not exactly tactful. And I realise, too, that you can’t help yourself.”

From someone else she might have resented this remark, but not from an old friend. “I don’t know if it’s interfering to respond to a clear request from somebody,” she said. “She sought me out. She asked me.”

Peter conceded. “All right. I take it back. No interference.”

“And I
can
help myself,” Isabel added.

Peter was gracious. “Of course you can. Anyway, Minty: Do you want me to tell you what I know?”

She wondered if he was teasing her. “Will you?”

Peter looked at her as if weighing her up. “Well, I’m not sure if I can say much.”

Isabel reassured him. “I won’t repeat what you tell me. I’m quite discreet, you know.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Peter. “But I’m afraid I can’t give you all that much to be discreet about. I have my suspicions, though.”

“About her honesty.”

Peter thought for a moment. “Yes, you could say that. The definition of business honesty is a tricky thing, but it certainly covers what you don’t say just as much as what you do say.”

Isabel knew what he meant. There were many situations where failing to say something one should say could seriously harm somebody else; the difficulty, though, was judging just when there was a duty to say something in the first place.

“My understanding,” Peter continued, “is that Minty Auchterlonie has been accused of withholding information from an investor in her bank, a man called George Finesk. He’s furious as a result and is muttering about suing her. Nothing’s happened yet. But people have heard about it and that can’t be doing her much good.”

“And did she do this?” asked Isabel.

Peter hesitated before replying.

“Perhaps,” he began. “She’s not a crook. I suspect that she’s far too clever to break the law. But she is what I call flaky. She bends the rules to suit her own interests. She’s got to the top in a man’s world at a very young age, and she has an extraordinary record of bringing home the bacon. So people have been prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt, as you did, wrongly in my view, over that insider-dealing affair, when she managed to push the blame on to a largely innocent colleague of her fiancé. And I am aware of several other occasions when she has taken unprincipled shortcuts.”

Isabel absorbed this. Peter was careful in his judgements, and if he had reached this view of Minty there would be good grounds for it. “And this George Finesk?” she asked. “What about him?”

Peter leaned back on the bench. “As it happens I know him reasonably well. He used to own a large tea estate in Darjeeling—the Finesks had stayed on in India after Independence, through difficult times politically and financially, and eventually George inherited the estate from his father in the late nineteen-eighties. He ran it for a while before he sold out to some big Bengali investment company. George loved India but his wife had an aged mother in the Borders, and for one reason and another he thought it better to come home.

“They had money in Scotland too—they used to be shipping people from Glasgow, on his mother’s side. George used this to set up a family investment company—quite a successful one. Minty would know this, of course, and so when she was looking for a new investor in the bank, he was an obvious person to approach. George proved amenable and came up with one and a half million. That’s quite a bit of money, even for him.”

Peter stopped, and they sat in silence while Isabel thought over what he had said. She wondered whether there was a connection between the threats that Minty had been receiving and this argument between her and George Finesk. Could George Finesk have been so outraged that he might have started some sort of campaign against Minty, fighting underhand dealings with underhand methods? It seemed improbable, and yet the whole issue was unlikely if one stopped to think about it. It was unlikely that Minty would have an affair, and let herself become pregnant, and yet she had. It was unlikely that the
father of that child would suddenly develop a burning interest in getting to know his son, and yet Jock Dundas had done exactly that. It was unlikely that she, a total stranger to these issues, should be enlisted as an intermediary—at the child’s birthday party, no less—and yet she had. It was all unlikely.

“So what’s going to happen?” asked Isabel. Peter had explained it clearly enough, but she still felt a bit out of her depth. In particular, she felt that she was no match for Minty Auchterlonie and her machinations. The world of finance was not Isabel’s world, yet it was the very air that Minty breathed.

Peter shrugged. “It depends on whether George continues to make a fuss. He may give up. Or he may not. I suppose that Minty and her co-directors are hoping to keep a lid on the whole thing—but I imagine they’ll still be frightened that George may be so angry that he’ll expose the matter regardless of the consequences to his investment.”

They sat on the bench for a little while longer, joined after a few minutes by Susie, who brought out glasses of diluted elderflower cordial. “From the garden,” she said. “We have an elder at the back that never fails us.”

“I have one too,” said Isabel. “Each year I say this will be the year I make elderflower cordial, and each year I forget, or put it off, or think of an excuse. I suppose I’m just weak.”

Susie shook her head. “You’re not. You’ve got a journal to run, as well as a child and a fiancé. You’ve got more than enough in your life.”

“But I could do something about elderflower cordial. It’s not a big thing.”

“Well, you have to draw the line somewhere,” said Susie.

“The problem, though, is where to draw that line,” observed Isabel. “Don’t you think?”

Peter looked at her. “Yes, that’s right. And it seems to me that you have difficulty with that. Hence your getting involved in other people’s problems.” He paused. “Are you doing that right now? Are you getting mixed up in Minty’s affairs?”

She knew that she could not conceal anything from Peter; he would know immediately. And yet she could not tell him about Minty’s approach to her, as she had promised that she would pass that secret on to nobody but Jamie.

“A bit,” she said. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk about it. I hope you’ll understand.”

Peter did. “But I really feel I should warn you,” he went on. “Be careful. That woman is dangerous. Just be careful.”

Susie looked anxious. “I’ve never liked her,” she said quietly. “She’s …” She looked around for the right word. Susie was charitable.

“Wicked,” said Peter. “Susie’s too kind to say it.”

Isabel looked over the lawn at the monkey-puzzle tree that grew in front of the Victorian greenhouse. There was something ruthless about Minty—that was clear enough—but was she wicked? There were plenty of people who were excessively ambitious and self-seeking, who would think nothing of tramping over others to get what they wanted, but were such people
wicked
? Wickedness was surely something very extreme: an attitude of utter and callous disregard for the feelings of others, coupled with a desire to hurt them; it was a deliberate, chilling perversity. She had no evidence that Minty showed such a cast of mind, even if she was selfish and greedy. No, she would have to reserve judgement on that just a bit longer.

“Wicked,” repeated Peter. He looked intently at Isabel as he spoke, as if to make certain that she understood exactly what he meant.

SHE ARRIVED
back at the house slightly later than she had anticipated. She went into the kitchen to find Jamie leaning against the sink, looking disconsolately at a red Le Creuset oven dish on the draining board. He looked up when she came in, but then his gaze fell.

“Your potatoes dauphinois?” she asked.

He nodded. “Burned,” he said. “Ruined. I put them in and went off to play the piano. I forgot about them.”

“And I was late,” she said. “It’s my fault. I’m very sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “It was mine.”

She walked across the room and put her arms around him. “Darling Jamie.”

It seemed to her as if he was somehow resisting her. His body felt taut, wound up like a spring. She touched his cheek with the back of her hand, gently, as if to take his temperature. His skin was smooth. His eyes had been closed; now they opened. She saw the flecks of colour.

“I don’t love you just because you can cook potatoes dauphinois,” she said.

His eyes widened. “You don’t?”

They both laughed.

“Nor because you play the bassoon,” Isabel went on. “Nor because your hair goes like that at the front and you can make up funny little songs out of nowhere.”

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re making me laugh when I don’t want to laugh. I want to feel cross.”

She disengaged from him, smiling with pleasure. “Look,” she said. “Take off the top layer—like that—and, see, everything is fine underneath. We can have potatoes dauphinois after all.”

He did as she instructed, laying each burned slice on a plate beside the oven dish.

“Somebody phoned,” he said as he tipped the contents of the plate into the bin.

Isabel licked a piece of creamy potato off the tip of her finger. “Who?”

“He wouldn’t say,” Jamie replied. “He asked for you and then just more or less slammed the phone down when I said that you weren’t here. Rude.”

Isabel felt a sudden twinge of concern. “Not a voice you recognised?”