and invited applications from “hard-working appli-2 3 6
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h cants only”; a plaintive advertisement asked for news of Smoky,
“a grey cat with half a tail” who had absented himself from home ten days ago and whose disappearance had led to “heartbreak, regret, tears.” Isabel gazed at that final notice; that a cat should leave such things behind him.
She went inside. A woman in late middle age, hair tied back, emerged from behind a curtained door. In the background somewhere, music played softly. Mahler, guessed Isabel.
“Yes? What can I do for you?” The woman’s voice was soft, the accent of somewhere farther west, Oban perhaps.
Isabel explained that she was looking for Frank Anderson.
He lived somewhere nearby, she said, but she was not sure where. Did she know him, by any chance?
“Not exactly know,” said the woman. “He hardly ever comes into town. But of course I know where he lives. It’s a house along the road, out beyond Cultybraggen. You know the old training camp with all those funny wartime Nissan huts? Out beyond that about two miles. There’s a track up to the left—you don’t see the house from the road. But it’s up there.”
Isabel thanked her and left. She had asked the woman whether she thought that he would be in and she had replied that it was highly likely. Frank Anderson, she said, appeared never to go anywhere, although she had seen him in Perth once or twice. “He hirples a bit,” she said, using the Scots word for limping. Isabel nodded; the hirple would be why he needed the orthopaedic operation that Mrs. Buie had mentioned—the operation that the state was failing to provide.
We care for one another, thought Isabel, but we still don’t care quite enough.
She drove out of Comrie, back along the road by which she had entered the village and away in the direction of Glenartney.
The road was empty, a snake of black tarmac heading up the T H E C A R E F U L U S E O F C O M P L I M E N T S
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glen, and without any difficulty she found the turnoff to which the woman in the newsagent’s had referred. The surface of this road—which was really little more than a track—had been neglected, and in one or two places the grass growing in the middle, between the two tyre tracks, brushed against the bottom of the car, making it sound as if Isabel was driving through water.
The house was unexpected, or at least unexpected in that place. It suddenly appeared from behind a rise, a small white-painted house that would have been a farmhouse or, more likely, a shepherd’s house. In front of the house a wooden high-backed bench had been placed, and beside this a peony was in full flower, a flourish of pale red against the white wall of the building. Isabel noticed that at the side of the house, half obscured by a small trailer, was an old, dusty-looking car.
She parked and went up to the front door. It was open.
There were voices within—a discussion on the radio.
“Mr. Anderson?”
Inside the house, the radio was switched off abruptly. A bird called behind her, the clicking sound of an alarmed grouse. She half turned round. The sun was in her eyes.
“Yes?”
He was standing before her in the door, and she knew immediately it was McInnes. The face had changed, in a way that she would have found difficult to describe, but behind the beard were the eyes that she recognised from the pictures.
Isabel stared at him. “Mr. McInnes?”
McInnes said nothing, but she saw the effect of her words.
He seemed to take a step back, but then corrected himself. He closed his eyes.
“Are you from . . . a newspaper?” His voice was strange, mellifluous even—the rich voice of a classical actor.
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A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h She shook her head. “No, I’m not from a newspaper. Certainly not.”
Some of the tension seemed to go from him, but his voice when he spoke was still strained. “Do you want to come in?”
“Only if you don’t mind,” said Isabel. “I haven’t come to . . .
to be difficult. Believe me, I haven’t.”
McInnes gestured for her to follow him into the sitting room at the front of the house. It was not a large room, but it had been made to be comfortable. Against one wall was a sofa bed, strewn with cushions; on the walls, Isabel immediately saw, there were paintings by McInnes and others; a paint-bespattered easel was propped up against a wall. It was an artist’s room.
“I can make you some tea, if you like,” he said. “But please sit down. Anywhere where’s there’s a space.”
“Thank you.”
He stood and watched her as she moved a couple of the cushions on the sofa bed. “Why have you come?” he asked.
She detected a note of fear in his voice. And that was understandable, she thought; I have broken in upon his privacy—the privacy that must have cost him so much to create. And why?
