“Namely?”
“Well, Miss Carty knew who was on the list, didn’t she?”
He laughed. “You do have it in for her, don’t you?”
“Well, she had the information and she had a motive. What if she didn’t want Harold Slade to leave? What if she thought that the best way of ensuring this was to prevent, or at least delay, the appointment of his successor?”
His reply was brusque. “Out of character. As much out of character as … having an affair with Harold Slade.”
Isabel considered this. He seemed confident of his opinion, even if he had earlier admitted to her how wrong he had been about that poor man in Glasgow.
“May I tell you something?” she said. “When I was being shown in here, she—Miss Carty—said to me that she had no idea who was on the list. She said that. Nor, apparently, has she seen any of the candidates. Why would she mislead me?”
He frowned. “Is that what she said?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure you didn’t mishear her?”
“Positive.”
He frowned again. It was as if he was searching for an explanation. It came. “Discretion,” he said. “She’s very discreet. What would you do if somebody engaged you in conversation about a sensitive topic—one of which you had confidential knowledge? Might you not say, ‘I don’t know anything about it?’ I would. It puts people off.”
He seemed pleased with this, and he looked at her expectantly, as if challenging her to refute what he had said. Isabel said nothing. She looked at the letter in his hand. “May I?” she said.
He handed it to her. “Offensive thing, isn’t it?”
She noticed that the letter was crumpled where he had been holding it. She felt chilled at the thought of the venom that went into the writing of something like this. Snideness too. Cowardice.
“Did you show it to anybody?” she asked.
Alex Mackinlay answered in an offhand way, “Show it? No, of course not.”
“So nobody else—absolutely nobody—saw it? Not even your wife?”
“I certainly didn’t show it to Jilly,” he said. “I put it in that file and that’s where it remained. It disgusts me. I feel dirty even handling a thing like that.”
“But you mentioned it to other people?”
“No,” he replied. “As far as I recall, the only person I told was Jilly.”
Isabel felt her breath coming in short bursts. She was getting close. When they had first discussed this over coffee at Cat’s delicatessen, Jillian had told her that the letter was written in green ink, and yet she had never seen it. Her mind raced ahead. That meant that … No, all that it meant was that her husband had probably told her. Letters in green ink were unusual, and he could well have mentioned that feature of it to Jillian. She felt disappointed: it would all have been so neat.
“Green ink,” she muttered, looking at the letter.
Alex frowned. “What?”
She gestured to the letter. “Green ink.”
He shrugged. “Oh, I see. Or don’t, rather. I have the usual male thing—red-green colour blindness.”
She spoke very quietly. “You can’t tell?”
He seemed slightly irritated by her question, as if he wanted to get back to the subject in hand. “No, I can’t. And lots of men are in the same position. It’s very common. You women don’t seem to suffer from it—or hardly ever.”
For a few brief, delicious moments, Isabel experienced a sense of euphoria. It was akin to the satisfaction felt on solving a difficult crossword puzzle, or seeing the reasoning behind a mathematical proof. This fact established the authorship of the letter beyond question. Alex Mackinlay could not have told his wife that the letter was written in green ink, nor had he shown the letter to her. It was she who wrote it.
He was staring at her. “You look as if you’ve had a brainwave,” he said. “Care to share it?”
Isabel opened her mouth, and then closed it. No, she thought. No, I don’t care to share it.
“Well?”
She handed the letter back to him with a shrug. “The whole point about anonymous letters,” she said calmly, “is that we don’t know who wrote them.”
He took the letter from her and slipped it back into the file. He was losing interest; she could tell. And that, she thought, was the way this man was; he was interested in those who could help him, but not in others. She had a strong intuition to that effect, and this time she decided to trust it.
She looked at her watch. “I really must get back to town,” she said. “I’m sorry that I’ve been unable to help you very much.”
He was polite, even if there was a lack of warmth in his voice. “I’m most grateful to you, Miss Dalhousie. I’m most grateful to you for the time you have spent on this matter, even if we are no further forward than when we began.”
