“I don’t think so,” said Jamie.
Grace looked at him reproachfully. “Being cooped up in the car—” she began.
“I don’t think so,” Jamie said again. “Thank you anyway, Grace.”
Outside, Isabel whispered, “Well done!”
“He’s my son,” said Jamie.
Isabel nodded her agreement. Grace meant well, but she had a tendency to assume that she knew best about most things, including Charlie’s welfare. She felt proud of Jamie for sticking up for himself; she wanted him to do that, to be more assertive—within limits, of course.
“It’s a very effective thing to say,” she remarked as they loaded Charlie into his car seat. “ ‘I don’t think so.’ It has a magisterial quality to it. I don’t think so. And that’s the end of the matter.”
“My mother used to say ‘argument over’ a lot,” said Jamie. “Sometimes she’d say it before we had the chance to open our mouths. Argument over. And that was it.”
Isabel went round to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. Jamie very rarely spoke about his family. His parents, she understood, were divorced, and his mother had left Scotland to live in London with a new husband, whom Jamie did not get on with. His father had left the country altogether and lived in Spain. There had been a sister, who had married a naval officer, but he said that he very rarely heard from her.
“Do you miss them?” she had once asked.
He had replied, “No. Not really. We’ve all grown apart, I suppose.” And then he had changed the subject, and she had seen this as a sign that he did not want to talk more about it. But it was also for her a confirmation that he did miss them.
“Will you say ‘argument over’ to Charlie, do you think?” she asked.
He was dismissive. “Of course not.”
Isabel reached for her seat belt and draped it over her shoulder. The green Swedish car was a safe car, but Swedish glass made the same impression on the human head as any lesser glass. “And yet people do tend to say the things that their parents said, don’t they? We become our parents, you know. We think that we never will, but we do. We start talking like them, acting like them, holding the same views that they held, no matter how much we think that we don’t.” Her sainted American mother had been a model to her, and she would willingly have emulated her—except perhaps for her little failing, her affair.
Jamie thought about this as he slipped the key into the ignition. “Do we? No, I don’t think we do.” And then he added, “Argument over.”
ISABEL HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD, and Stella was expecting her.
“I told him,” she said, as she met Isabel at the door.
“That I was coming?”
Stella shook her head. “No. I told him that I thought that Norrie was responsible. That he had changed the figures.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “And what did he say to that?”
Stella looked pained. “He went off the deep end. He told me that it was absolute nonsense. He said that Norrie had never had any interest in the place up north and that the whole idea was ridiculous.” She sighed. “He just refused to listen to what I had to say. He refused point-blank.”
Isabel frowned. “Well, I can’t imagine that he’s going to take it from me, either.”
“Please try,” said Stella. “At least try. Even if he won’t listen to me, then he might pay attention to somebody who’s more or less a stranger. He can hardly be as rude to you as he was to me.”
“I’ll try,” said Isabel. But she felt it was hopeless. All that she had to back up her theory that Norrie and the drug manufacturers had acted together was the dubious evidence of her visit from David McLean—and that was hardly evidence. And then there was the question of Marcus’s depression. People in a state of depression often did not listen, being so caught up in their misery, their preoccupations. Marcus was not suddenly going to become open, become rational, just because of a few facts put before him by Isabel.
She followed Stella through to the drawing room with the wide window. Marcus was sitting exactly where he had been when she had last visited him; it was as if he had not moved at all. And he had probably moved very little. Perhaps he slept in that chair, she thought. Day in, day out, he sat there, virtually immobile. If this was shame, or guilt, then it was as vivid an instance of it as one might imagine.
“Isabel Dalhousie has come to see you,” announced Stella in a loud voice. She spoke as if she was addressing a child, or someone hard of hearing.
Marcus Moncrieff looked up and stared at Isabel. His expression was flat, but for a moment there was a flicker of a smile, a wan smile, produced, thought Isabel, through great effort. “Miss Dalhousie? Good morning.” It was said without enthusiasm, but Isabel thought the instinctive good manners of the Edinburgh doctor had not deserted him. Some of that was still there—fragments of personality surviving the onslaught of the clinical depression.
He tried to rise to his feet out of politeness, but Stella put a hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him back into his chair. “She won’t mind if you don’t get up,” she said. “She can sit here.”
She gestured to a chair in front of the window. Isabel shook hands with Marcus before she sat down opposite him. She glanced through the window; down below, far below, the buses crawled along Princes Street; flags fluttered from the top of the Scottish National Gallery, a Union flag and a Scottish saltire. Beyond the gallery, the curious spire of the Scott Monument, blackened by ancient soot, poked at the sky. Walter Scott in his chair looking upon a street that would be recognisable to him in some ways even today, but in others so alien; a street taken over by strangers.
Marcus interrupted her thoughts. “You’ve come to see me about this business of my nephew,” he said. “Or I assume that’s what you’ve come about.”
Isabel fixed him in the eye. “Yes. I have.”
