The Charming Quirks of Others

“Not that I would want him to give everything up,” Jillian went on. “I can imagine nothing worse than having one’s husband underfoot all day. So he carries on with my blessing, and I fulfil the role of chairman’s wife as best as I can, although frankly I find school politics pretty stultifying. It’s the pettiness. Any institution is like that, I suppose.

“The principal is a very good man—Harold Slade. Maybe you know him. He rowed for Scotland in the Olympics years ago. Rather like that politician—what’s his name?—Ming Campbell. He was an Olympic runner, wasn’t he? Well, Harold announced that he wanted to take up the headship of an international school in Singapore. He wasn’t going for the money—I think he was just ready for a change, which was fair enough. He had been principal for twelve years, which is quite a long time for one person to hold the job. So we advertised, and Alex was the chairman of the appointment committee—naturally enough.”

Jillian sipped again at her coffee. “We had rather more applications than we expected. Some of them were very good. One or two withdrew for various reasons, but eventually they put together a rather strong shortlist of three candidates, all of them from Scotland. We had expected to get some impressive applicants from England, but for some reason the English candidates were rather weak. So it’s pretty much a local list, which makes it easier to get in references and so on. Alex likes to talk to referees face-to-face if he possibly can, and he’s been able to do that since all three are Scottish.”

Isabel nodded. “I suppose it’s important to talk to people,” she said. “It’s hard to be honest in a written reference. You expect that the candidate will get hold of it one way or another. And then, if you’ve written something damning, there’s all sorts of trouble. It’s rather like doctors’ notes. They can’t write what they really think any more—the patient can see what’s there.”

Jillian had views on this. “And a good thing too,” she said. “Doctors used to write terrible things in the past. I had a friend who found out that she was described in her medical notes as a ‘dreadful woman.’ ”

“And was she?” asked Isabel. She spoke quickly; it slipped out, and she immediately apologised. “No, I don’t really mean that. I mean …” She trailed off. There were dreadful people, and doctors had to deal with them.

“Not at all,” said Jillian. “Maybe she’s a bit demanding, but that’s not the same as being dreadful.”

“No, of course not.”

“Anyway,” Jillian continued, “it looked as if we’d find no difficulty in getting a very good person to take over, but then my husband received an anonymous letter. Normally he would throw such a thing straight into the wastepaper basket, but in this case there was something that stopped him from doing so.”

“It was about the candidates?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no. It was about one of the candidates. Unfortunately, it didn’t say which one. It merely said that there was something about one of them that would cause the school considerable embarrassment if he were to be appointed. But it gave no further details.”

“A shot in the dark,” suggested Isabel. “The writer of this letter could be trying it on, surely. It could just be a spoiler. Perhaps from one of the unsuccessful candidates. People get pretty upset about these things.”

“I thought that,” said Jillian. “But there was something significant about this letter. It gave the names of all the candidates. So the person who wrote it must have seen the shortlist. And I can’t imagine there were many of those. There were the members of the committee—and it’s hardly likely to have been one of them. And … well, the school secretary, Miss Carty. She’s one of those people you find in schools who never seem to have a first name, but it’s Janet in her case. A rather mousy woman, probably unhappy about something or other.”

One might say that about most of us, thought Isabel. Most of us are unhappy about something or other.

“Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.

Jillian shook her head. “No.”

“Typed?”

“No. Handwritten. In green ink.”

Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”

Jillian reached for her cup again. She had said all she wished to say, it appeared, and she was waiting for Isabel’s reaction.

“It must be rather worrying,” said Isabel. “I can see that. But I don’t know if I can say more than that.”

“Would you look into it?” asked Jillian.

“Well, I don’t really see what I can do. I really don’t.”

Jillian leaned forward. “Please,” she said. “We have to make an appointment. But we just can’t risk appointing somebody who is going to come unstuck because of their past. We can’t afford scandal—you do see that, don’t you?”

Isabel said that she understood that reputation was important. But this did not seem to satisfy Jillian, who returned to the theme. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid scandal,” she said. “Education is competitive these days. Parents have a choice. A whiff of something not quite right and we would lose students— we really would.”

“I understand. But, really, what do you expect me to do?”

Jillian lowered her voice. A young couple had come into the delicatessen and had taken a seat at a neighbouring table. The woman was looking at them in a way that suggested more than casual interest. “We need a very discreet person—and I gather that you are just that. We need somebody to make enquiries and find out which of these three has … well, has a past.”

“We all have a past.”

Jillian brushed this aside. “There are pasts and pasts.” She paused. “Please help us. The last thing we could do is to get professional enquiry agents involved—imagine if that ever got out. So we need somebody like you— somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You’d never be suspect. And I have done my homework on you—you have a reputation, you know, for helping