rail as she did so. The steps were stone, and spiral, and one might so easily slip. As he must have done, she thought. He must have looked over, perhaps to see if he could spot somebody down below, a friend maybe, and then he had lost his footing and top-pled over. It could easily happen—the parapet was low enough.
She stopped halfway down the stairs. She was alone, but she had heard something. Or had she imagined it? She strained her ears to catch a sound, but there was nothing. She took a breath.
He must have been the very last person up there, all alone, when everybody else had gone and the girl at the bar on the landing was closing up. That boy had been there himself and had looked down, and then he had fallen, silently, perhaps seeing herself and Jennifer on the way down, who would then have been his last human contact.
She reached the bottom of the stairs. The man in the blue windcheater was there, just a few yards away, and when she came out, he looked at her sternly.
Isabel walked over to him. “I saw it happen,” she said. “I was in the grand circle. My friend and I saw him fall.”
The man looked at her. “We’ll need to talk to you,” he said.
“We’ll need to take statements.”
Isabel nodded. “I saw so little,” she said. “It was over so quickly.”
He frowned. “Why were you up there just now?” he asked.
Isabel looked down at the ground. “I wanted to see how it could have happened,” she said. “And now I do see.”
“Oh?”
“He must have looked over,” she said. “Then he lost his balance. I’m sure it would not be difficult.”
The man pursed his lips. “We’ll look into that. No need to speculate.”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h It was a reproach, but not a severe one, as he saw that she was upset. For she was shaking now. He was familiar with that.
Something terrible happened and people began to shake. It was the reminder that frightened them; the reminder of just how close to the edge we are in life, always, at every moment.
C H A P T E R T W O
E
AT NINE O’CLOCK the following morning Isabel’s housekeeper, Grace, let herself into the house, picked up the mail from the floor in the hall, and made her way into the kitchen. Isabel had come downstairs and was sitting at the table in the kitchen, the newspaper open before her, a half-finished cup of coffee at her elbow.
Grace put the letters down on the table and took off her coat.
She was a tall woman, in her very late forties, six years older than Isabel. She wore a long herringbone coat, of an old-fashioned cut, and had dark red hair which she wore in a bun at the back.
“I had to wait half an hour for a bus,” she said. “Nothing came. Nothing.”
Isabel rose to her feet and went over to the percolator of freshly made coffee on the stove.
“This will help,” she said, pouring Grace a cup. Then, as Grace took a sip, she pointed to the newspaper on the table.
“There’s a terrible thing in
Grace gasped. “Poor soul,” she said. “And . . .”
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“He died,” said Isabel. “They took him to the Infirmary, but he was declared dead when he arrived.”
Grace looked at her employer over her cup. “Did he jump?”
she asked.
Isabel shook her head. “Nobody has any reason to believe that.” She stopped. She had not thought of it at all. People did not kill themselves that way; if you wanted to jump, then you went to the Forth Bridge, or the Dean Bridge if you preferred the ground to the water. The Dean Bridge: Ruthven Todd had written a poem about that, had he not, and had said that its iron spikes “curiously repel the suicides”; curiously, because the thought of minor pain should surely mean nothing in the face of complete destruction.
Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of McDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd anymore.
She had seen McDiarmid once, when she was a schoolgirl, and had been walking with her father down Hanover Street, past Milnes Bar. The poet had come out of the bar in the company of a tall, distinguished-looking man, who had greeted her father.
Her father had introduced her to both of them, and the tall man had shaken her hand courteously; McDiarmid had smiled, and nodded, and she had been struck by his eyes, which seemed to emit a piercing blue light. He was wearing a kilt, and carrying a small, battered leather briefcase, which he hugged to his chest, as if using it to protect himself against the cold.
Afterwards her father had said: “The best poet and the wordiest poet in Scotland, both together.”
“Which was which?” she had asked. They read Burns at school, and some Ramsay and Henryson, but nothing modern.
T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B
