Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

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positioned bar or nightclub popped up in the place of the one that had gone.

She turned the page and began to read another story. A male teacher had been accused of making indecent remarks to a girl pupil. The teacher had been suspended and would face what was described as a rigorous inquiry into the incident. “This sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen,” said an official from the education department. Isabel paused. Who knew that it had happened? Surely the whole point of an inquiry was to find out whether anything happened at all, and yet here was the official prejudging the matter before a shred of evidence had been produced. And would it not be the easiest thing in the world for a streetwise teenage girl to make up an allegation of that sort in order to embarrass or destroy a teacher to whom she had taken a dislike?

There was a photograph of the suspended teacher, a man in his late thirties, Isabel thought, frowning at the camera. Isabel studied the photograph. It was a kind face, she decided, not the face of a predator. And here, she said to herself, is the victim of the witch-hunt, or its modern equivalent. Not much has changed. Witchcraft or sexual harassment: the tactics of perse-cution were much the same—the loathed enemy was identified and then demonised. And exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims. And yet, she thought: What if the girl had been telling the truth? What then?

She sighed. The world was an imperfect place, and our search for justice in it seemed an impossible task. But she had not come to the library to be immersed in such reports and the speculations they provoked. She had come to find out about the 1 1 4

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h events of a very particular week: the week during which Ian had had his heart transplant. That was in mid-October, which would be about a quarter of the way through the volume, she assumed.

She slid a finger into the bound pages and turned over the heavy wad of paper. October the tenth: she had come in too early. She fingered the paper, preparing to turn another week’s worth of papers. But before she did so, she saw the headline: “Teacher Dies.” It was the same man, the one who had been suspended from duties pending the investigation of an allegation against him. He had been found dead at the edge of the Pentland Hills, just outside the city. A note had been recovered, and the police were not treating the death as suspicious. He was survived by a wife and two children.

Isabel read the report with a heavy heart. A friend was quoted as saying that he was an innocent man who had been hounded to his death. The police confirmed that a teenager, who could not be named for legal reasons but who was connected with the case, had been charged with a separate offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice. That meant the making of a false allegation.

She made a conscious effort to put the case out of her mind.

She had the moral energy, she thought, for one issue at a time.

She could do nothing to help that schoolteacher and his sorrowing family. But she could help Ian, if he wanted her help—

which was another matter. Now she was looking at the first newspaper in her targeted week, and she ran her eye over each column, scanning the pages for the headline that she wanted.

“Major Row Hits City Parks.” No. “Lord Provost Defends Road Plans, Says Public Will Come to Welcome Them.” No. “Police Dog Turns on Handler, Is Demoted.” No. (She avoided the F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E

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temptation to read that one; she had to get on with the task in hand. Demoted?)

It was all the typical stuff of local papers: the planning disputes, the school prize-givings, the crimes great and small. It was immensely distracting, as local papers always are, but she persisted and, four days into her search (in newspaper terms), she came across the information for which she had been looking.

A young man had been killed in what appeared to be a hit-and-run incident. There was his photograph, across two columns, a young man of twenty, wearing a white shirt and a plain tie, smiling into the camera. Rory Macleod, the caption read. Former pupil of James Gillespie’s School. Shortly after the celebration of his twentieth birthday.

Isabel studied the face. He had been the sort of young man she had walked past every day in Bruntsfield, or George Street, or anywhere like that. He could have been a student or, with his white shirt and tie, a bank clerk from the Bank of Scotland in Morningside. In other words, he was unexceptional, as she had imagined he would be.

She turned to the report. He had played in a squash match in Colinton, the newspaper said, and had then gone with friends for a pint of beer at the Canny Man’s. A friend had walked with him as far as the post office and then had left him to go up to the Braids while he had turned left into Nile Grove.

Possibly only five or ten minutes after the friend had said goodbye to him, he was found in Nile Grove itself, lying on the edge of the pavement, half hidden by a parked car. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the Infirmary, but he died later that night. He had been only twenty yards away from his front door. The newspaper then gave the address of that front door 1 1 6

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h and a quote from an uncle, who spoke of the devastation of the family and the sense of loss at the ending of a life so full of promise. And that was all.

Isabel read through the report several times. She noted the number of the house in Nile Grove and the name of the uncle who had been interviewed. He had an unusual name, Archi-bald, which would make it comparatively easy to trace him, should she need to do so. She took a last look at the photograph, at the face of Rory Macleod, and then turned to the next day’s Evening News. There was a further small item on the incident, confirming that Rory appeared to have been struck by a car and fatally injured. The police had appealed for anybody who had been in the vicinity of Nile Grove that night to come forward.

“Anything you saw may be important,” the police spokesman said. “Any unusual behaviour. Anything out of the ordinary.”

She looked at the following day’s paper, but there was nothing more on the incident. So she closed the folder and started to carry it back to the young man at the enquiry desk. He saw her coming and leapt to his feet.

“Miss Dalhousie,” he whispered. “Please let me take that.”