Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

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the invitation had been extended; just a quick glance, but enough to tell her that he did not want her to go along.

“I’m sorry,” Isabel said, “but duty calls. My desk is looking awful. In fact, I can’t see the surface for papers.”

Cat looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?”

she asked. “Couldn’t the work wait?”

There was a brief exchange of glances—a niece-to-aunt exchange, a look between women, private, although in the presence of a man. Isabel interpreted it as a plea, and realised that Cat wanted her to be with her. Of course she would have to accede to the request, which she did.

“Yes, of course the work can wait,” she said. “I’d love to come.”

Tomasso turned to face her. “But I cannot put you out like that. No. No. Please: we shall do it some other time when nobody is busy.”

“It’s no difficulty,” said Isabel. “I have plenty of time.”

Tomasso was insistent. “I cannot allow you to be inconvenienced. I have plenty to do myself. I have some business here in Edinburgh—there are people I must see.”

Isabel glanced at Cat. She felt a momentary sense of disappointment that he did not want her company; that was obvious.

Cat, though, had her difficulties ahead. Tomasso was insistent, it seemed, and would not be put off that easily.

The Italian rose to his feet. “I am keeping you both from your work,” he said. “It’s so easy, when one is on holiday oneself, to forget that everybody else has their work to do. Cat? May I telephone you tomorrow?”

“Of course,” said Cat. “I’ll be here. Working, I’m afraid, but I’ll be here.”

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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 turned to Isabel. “And perhaps we shall be able to meet too?”

“I’m here too,” said Isabel. “And I’ll be happy to show you round. I really would.”

Tomasso smiled at her. “You are very kind.”

He bent forward and took Cat’s hand in his; a lingering grasp, thought Isabel. Cat reddened. It was going to be difficult, Isabel thought, but Cat had to learn how to discourage men.

And the easiest way of doing that, in Isabel’s view, was to show excessive eagerness. Men did not like to be pursued; she would have to tell Cat that, tactfully, of course, but as explicitly as she could.

C H A P T E R T W E L V E

E

WELL, Miss Dalhousie. It is Miss Dalhousie, isn’t it?”

Isabel nodded to the young man behind the enquiries desk at the library. “It is. Well remembered.”

She looked at him, noticing the clean white shirt and the carefully knotted tie, the slightly earnest appearance. He was the sort who noticed things. “How do you do it?” she asked. “You must get so many people coming in here.”

The young man looked pleased with the compliment. He was proud of his memory, which came in useful professionally, but the reason why he remembered Isabel was that she had, on an earlier visit, explained to him that she was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. For a young librarian, fresh from a spell as a junior in the journals department, that was an exotic and exalted position.

He smiled at Isabel. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I need to see copies of the Evening News for this past October,” said Isabel. She gave him the date and he told her that she was in luck; while the earlier issues were on microfiche, they still had bound volumes of the more recent months and he would bring these over to her personally. Isabel thanked him 1 1 2

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and took a seat near the window. As she waited she could look down into the Grassmarket and watch people window-shopping.

It had changed so much, she reflected. When she had been young, the Grassmarket had been a distinctly insalubrious place, with winos slumped in the doorways and small knots of desolate people standing outside the entrance to the doss-houses. What had happened to the Castle Trades Hotel, which took through its doorway the homeless and destitute and gave them a bowl of soup and a bed for the night? It had become an upmarket hotel for tourists, its old clientele dispersed, vanished, dead. And a few doors away from it a glittering bank and a shop selling fossils. Money pushed people out of cities; it always had. And yet no matter how much the exterior of the city changed, the same human types were still there; wearing different clothes, more prosperous now, but with the same craggy faces that were always there to be seen on the streets of Edinburgh.

The young man returned with a large blue folder of bound newspapers. “This is two months’ worth,” he said. “But it includes October.”

Isabel thanked him and opened the cover of the folder. The front page of the Edinburgh Evening News of the first of October greeted her eyes. There had been a fire in a nightclub, a large banner headline announced, and there was a picture of firemen directing a stream of water onto a collapsed section of roof. Nobody had been hurt, she read, because the fire occurred after-hours when the building was empty. Isabel was suspicious.

Fires in bars and nightclubs were a well-known way of dealing with shrinking profits. Occasionally there were arrests, but usually nothing could be proved, in spite of the best efforts of the loss adjusters. So the insurers paid up and another, better-F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E