“Bohemian?” said Isabel, laughing.
“That’s right,” he said. “We’re more . . .”
“Elizabeth Blackadder? Flowers and cats?”
They continued their conversation. After fifteen minutes or so, Paul put his glass down on a windowsill.
“Why don’t we go to the Vincent Bar?” he said. “I have to meet Minty at nine, and I can’t be bothered to go back to the flat.
We could have a drink and carry on talking. That’s if you’d like to.
You may have other things to do.”
Isabel was happy to accept. The gallery had filled up and was beginning to get hot. The level of conversation had risen, too, and people were shouting to be heard. If she stayed she would have a sore throat. She collected her coat, said good-bye to the gallery owners, and walked out with Paul to the small, unspoilt bar at the end of the road.
The Vincent Bar was virtually empty and they chose a table near the front door, for the fresh air.
“I hardly ever go to a pub,” said Paul. “And yet I enjoy places like this.”
“I can’t remember when I was last in one,” said Isabel.
“Maybe in an earlier life.” But of course she could remember those evenings, with John Liamor, and that was painful.
“I was a fund manager in an earlier life, I suspect,” said Paul.
“And presumably that’s what I’ll be in the next.”
Isabel laughed. “Surely your job must have its moments,” she said. “Watching markets. Waiting for things to happen. Isn’t that what you do?”
“Oh, I suppose it has its moments,” he said. “You have to read 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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a lot. I sit at my desk and go through the financial press and company reports. I’m a sort of spy, really. I collect intelligence.”
“And is it a good place to work?” asked Isabel. “Are your colleagues agreeable people?”
Paul did not answer immediately. Lifting his glass, he took a long sip of his beer. When he answered, he looked down at the table as he spoke. “By and large, yes. By and large.”
“Which means no,” said Isabel.
“No, I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that . . . well, I lost somebody who worked for me. A few weeks ago. I have —had—two people under me in my department, and he was one of them.”
“He went elsewhere?” asked Isabel. “Lured away? I gather that everybody’s frantically busy headhunting everybody else.
Isn’t that the way it works?”
Paul shook his head. “He died,” he said. “Or rather, he was killed. In a fall.”
It could have been a climbing accident; those happened in the Highlands virtually every week. But it was not, and Isabel knew it.
“I think I know who it was,” she said. “Was it at—”
“The Usher Hall,” said Paul. “Yes. That was him. Mark Fraser.” He paused. “Did you know him?”
“No,” said Isabel. “But I saw it happen. I was there, in the grand circle, talking to a friend, and he came falling down, right past us, like a . . . like a . . .”
She stopped, and reached out to touch Paul’s arm. He was clutching his glass, staring down at the table, appalled by what she was saying.
C H A P T E R S I X
E
IT ALWAYS HAPPENED when one was in a room with smokers.
She remembered reading somewhere that the reason for it was that the surfaces of nonsmokers’ clothes were covered with negative ions, while tobacco smoke was full of positive ions. So when there was smoke in the air, it was immediately attracted to the oppositely charged surface, which made one’s clothes smell. And that was why, when she lifted up the jacket that she had been wearing the previous evening and which she had left lying across the top of her bedroom chair, she was assailed by the stale, acrid smell of tobacco smoke. There had been smokers in the Vincent Bar, as there always were in bars, and even though she and Paul had sat near the door, it had been enough to leave its mark.
Isabel gave the jacket a good shake before the open window, which always helped, before putting it away in the wardrobe. Then she returned to the window and looked out over the garden, to the trees beside her wall, the tall sycamore and the twin birches which moved so readily in the wind. Paul Hogg. It was a Borders name, and whenever she encountered it she thought of James Hogg, the writer known as the Ettrick Shepherd, the most distinguished of the Hoggs, although there were other, even English, Hoggs.
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Quintin Hogg, a lord chancellor (and perhaps slightly porcine in appearance, though, as she reminded herself, one should not be uncharitable to Hoggs), and his son, Douglas Hogg. And so on. All these Hoggs.
They had not stayed long in the bar. The recollection of Mark Fraser’s fall had visibly upset Paul, and although
