“It was her partner, her bidie-in,” she went on. “He came into the room, and I looked up and saw that he was the man whom Ian had seen. Yes. A high brow and hooded eyes. Scarred. Exactly the man I had imagined from Ian’s description.”
For a moment Jamie said nothing. He unfolded his arms, and then he looked down at the table before lifting his gaze again to fix Isabel with a stare.
“Oh no,” he said quietly. And then, even more quietly,
“Isabel.”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I was stopped in my tracks, as you might imagine. So I made up some ridiculous story about being a medium and having seen the accident in my mind. It was terrible, melodramatic stuff. Ghastly. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say.”
Jamie thought for a moment. “That was quite clever of you,” he said. “I’m not sure that I would have been so quick on my feet.”
“I felt pretty bad,” said Isabel. “That poor woman. It’s a pretty awful thing to do—to lie to somebody in her grief and claim to have seen the person she’s lost.”
“You didn’t set out to do that,” said Jamie. “It’s not as if F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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you’re some charlatan exploiting bereaved people. I wouldn’t think any more about that.”
Isabel looked up. “Really?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, rising to his feet to make the tea. “Really.
Your trouble, Isabel, is that you agonise too much. You worry about everything. You need to be a bit more robust. Lay off the guilt for a while.”
She made a helpless gesture. “It’s not that easy,” she said.
“Easier than you think,” said Jamie. “Look at me. I don’t worry about what I do all the time. You don’t see me plagued by guilt.”
“That may be because you haven’t done anything you feel guilty about,” countered Isabel. “Tabula rasa—a blank leaf.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Jamie. He hesitated for a moment and then he said, “I had an affair with a married woman.
Remember that? You yourself took a dim view of it.”
“That was because—” Isabel stopped herself. She had already hinted that she was jealous of Jamie’s company; she should not spell it out.
“And then I did something else,” said Jamie. “A long time ago. When I was about sixteen.”
Isabel raised a hand. “I don’t want to hear about it, Jamie,”
she said.
“All right. Let’s get back to this visit of yours. What a mess.”
“Yes,” she said. “What do I do now? If Ian’s theory is correct, then the hit-and-run driver is the mother’s partner. And I suppose it’s a theory that isn’t all that improbable. Let’s imagine that he had been driving back from a party, or from the pub, and he’s had too much to drink. He’s almost home when Rory steps out from behind a parked car and he knocks him over. He’s 1 3 8
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h sober enough to realise that if the police are called —and they would of course turn up if an ambulance were summoned—he will be tested and found to be under the influence. Every driver these days knows that that means prison if you kill somebody in such a state—and a long sentence too. So he panics and drives round the corner or wherever it is that he parks. He checks the paintwork—no obvious marks. So then he goes home and pretends it never happened.”
Jamie listened carefully. “That sounds perfectly credible,”
he said once Isabel had finished. “So what now?”
“I just don’t know,” said Isabel. “It’s not very straightforward, is it?”
Jamie shrugged. “Isn’t it? Let’s say Ian’s description means anything, then all you’ve done is find out in pretty quick time that the person the police should be questioning is this man the mother’s living with. You just have to pass the information on to the police. And that will be that. You can drop out of it.”
Isabel did not agree. “But what if he’s innocent? What if Ian’s story means nothing? Imagine the impact of my intervention on their marriage, or their relationship, or whatever it is they have.”
“It’s one of your nice moral dilemmas, isn’t it?” said Jamie, smiling. “You write about them a lot in your editorials in that
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
E
SCEPTICAL ME, thought Isabel. But one has to be, because if one were not sceptical about things like this, then one would end up believing all sorts of untenable things. The list of traps for the gullible was a long one, and seemed to grow by the day: remote healing, auras, spoon-bending, extrasensory perception.
Of course there was telepathy, which seemed to be something of an exception to these New Age enthusiasms; it had been around for so long that it had almost become respectable. So many people claimed to have had telepathic experiences—
level-headed, rational people too—that there might be something in it. And yet had not Edinburgh University’s
