“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 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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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 prof-fered hand, noting that it was trembling.
A F T E R N E I L H A D G O N E 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.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h 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.
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 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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desperate means to protect his reputation? In different, less cen-sorious 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 unthink-able; 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?
