“I can guess,” he interrupted. “You’ve been thinking about what I said to you.”
“Yes. I have. And I’ve been acting on it, too.”
He looked at her anxiously. “I hadn’t intended to draw you in,” he began. “I didn’t imagine that—”
“Of course you didn’t,” she interjected. “But you may recall that I said something about obligation earlier on. One of the consequences of being a philosopher is that you get involved.
You ask yourself whether you need to do something and so often the answer comes up yes, you do.” She paused for a moment. It occurred to her that she should be careful not to make Ian feel stressed. Presumably he had to avoid stress, and shock, too.
“I’ve traced the family of your donor. It wasn’t hard. You could have done it, if you thought about it.”
“I didn’t have the courage,” he said. “I wanted to thank them but . . .”
“And I’ve found your man,” Isabel continued. “The man with the high forehead and the hooded eyes. I’ve found him for you.”
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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 was silent; sitting there in his chair, staring at Isabel, completely taken aback, quite silent. Eventually he cleared his throat. “Well, I’m not sure if I was looking forward to that. But I suppose . . . Well, I suppose that if I don’t do something about this, I’m not really going to give myself much of a chance, am I?
I told you earlier on that I thought this thing would kill me—
this sadness, this dread, whatever we call it. I think it’ll prevent the new heart from . . . from taking, so to speak.” He looked at her, and she saw the anguish in his eyes. “Maybe it’s best to know,” he said. “Do you think so?”
“Maybe,” said Isabel. “But remember, there are some things which we would probably prefer not to know once we’ve found them out. This may be one of them.”
He looked confused. “I don’t see how—”
Isabel raised a hand to stop him. “You see, the difficulty is that this man—the man who looks so like the man of your . . .
your imaginings—lives with the mother of the young man who was the donor.”
He frowned slightly, taking in the information. “How did he die?” he asked. “Did you find out?”
“A hit-and-run accident,” she said. “Still unsolved. It was very close to the house. He was knocked over and he died shortly thereafter in hospital. He was unconscious when they found him, which meant that he was unable to say anything about what happened. But . . .”
“But,” he said, “but he could have been conscious immediately after being knocked over, and the driver could have bent over him and looked at him?”
“Exactly,” said Isabel.
For a few minutes nothing further was said by either of them. Isabel turned away again and looked out into the garden, F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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oblivious now of the weeds, thinking only of the dilemma which she had created for herself and from which there seemed no easy, painless escape. Unless she handed it over to Ian, though he had done nothing to bring the situation about in the first place—other than to tell her about what had happened.
Ian’s voice broke the silence. “Does she know?” he asked.
“Know what?” Isabel had not told him that she had been unable to speak about his vision. “I didn’t tell her about you,”
she said. “I couldn’t. He was there.”
“No,” said Ian. “That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, does the mother of the donor know that this man could have been the hit-and-run driver?”
The question surprised Isabel. She had not thought about that, but it was an obvious possibility. She had assumed that she did not, but what if she did? That put a very different complexion on the matter.
“If she knows, then she’d be sheltering the person who killed her son,” she said. “Would any mother do that, do you think?”
Ian thought for a moment before giving his answer. “Yes,” he said. “Many would. These domestic killings that occur from time to time—the woman often shelters the man. A violent partner harms one of the children. The woman stays silent. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of helplessness. Perhaps out of misplaced loyalty. It’s not uncommon.”
Isabel thought back to her conversation with Rose Macleod. She remembered her expression of eagerness when Isabel had revealed that she might have some information on the incident. That had not been feigned, she thought. Nor was she mis-taken about the man’s anxiety, shown in the tension of his body language when she had broached the subject—a tension which 1 5 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h had visibly dissipated when she had come up with a description of the driver which so clearly excluded him.
“I’m sure that she doesn’t know,” she said. “I really think she doesn’t.”
“Very well,” Ian said. “She doesn’t know. Now what?”
Isabel laughed. “Precisely. Now what?”
“We can go to the police,” Ian said quietly. “We can just hand the thing over.”
“Which will lead to nothing happening,” said Isabel. “The police aren’t going to go and accuse him of being the
