The Sunday Philosophy Club id-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  It was not large—about eight tables in all, and there were only two other diners. Isabel recognised the couple and nodded.

  They smiled, and then looked down at the tablecloth, with discretion, of course, but they were interested.

  “Well,” said Jamie, as they sat down. “Tell me.”

  Isabel arranged her table napkin on her lap and picked up the menu. “You can take the credit,” she began. “Or part of it.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You said to me in the Vincent that I should be prepared to find out that Paul Hogg was the person we were after.

  That’s what you said. And that made me think.”

  “So you decided that it was him,” said Jamie.

  “No,” said Isabel. “It’s her. Minty Auchterlonie.”

  “Hard-faced cow,” muttered Jamie.

  Isabel smiled. “You could say that. I might not use those exact words, but I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

  “I disliked her the moment she came into the room,” said Jamie.

  “Which is odd, because I think that she liked you. In fact, I’m pretty sure that she . . . how shall I put it? She noticed you.”

  Her remark seemed to embarrass Jamie, who looked down at the menu which the waiter had placed before him. “I didn’t see—”

  he began.

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Isabel. “Only another woman would pick it up. But she took an interest in you. Not that it stopped her getting bored with both of us after a while.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie. “Anyway, she’s a type that I just can’t stand. I really can’t.”

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  Isabel looked thoughtful. “I wonder what it is that made us—

  both of us—take a bizz against her.” The old Scots word “bizz,”

  like so many Scots terms, could only be roughly translated. A bizz was a feeling of antipathy, but it had subtle nuances. A bizz was often irrational or unjustified.

  “It’s what she represents,” Jamie offered. “It’s a sort of mixture, isn’t it, of ambition and ruthlessness and materialism and—”

  “Yes,” Isabel interrupted him. “Quite. It may be difficult to define, but I think we both know exactly what it is. And the interesting thing is that she had it and he didn’t. Would you agree with that?”

  Jamie nodded. “I quite liked him. I wouldn’t choose him as a particularly close friend, but he seemed friendly enough.”

  “Exactly,” said Isabel. “Unexceptionable, and unexceptional.”

  “And not somebody who would ruthlessly remove somebody who threatened to expose him.”

  Isabel shook her head. “Definitely not.”

  “Whereas she . . .”

  “Lady Macbeth,” Isabel said firmly. “There should be a syndrome named after her. Perhaps there is. Like the Othello syndrome.”

  “What’s that?” asked Jamie.

  Isabel took up a bread roll and broke it on her side plate. She would not use a knife on a roll, of course, although Jamie did. In Germany it once was considered inappropriate to use a knife on a potato, a curious custom which she had never understood. An enquiry she had made of a German friend had received a strange explanation, which she could only assume had not been serious.

  “A nineteenth-century custom,” he had explained. “Perhaps the emperor had a face like a potato and it was considered disre-spectful.” She had laughed, but when she later saw a portrait of 1 5 4

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h the emperor, she thought it might just be true. He did look like a potato, just as Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham, had looked slightly porcine. She imagined him at breakfast, being served bacon, and laying down his knife and fork and sighing, regretfully, “I just can’t . . .”

  “The Othello syndrome is pathological jealousy,” said Isabel, reaching for the glass of gassy mineral water which the attentive waiter had now poured her. “It afflicts men, usually, and it makes them believe that their wife or partner is being unfaithful to them. They become obsessed with the thought, and nothing, nothing can persuade them otherwise. They may eventually end up being violent.”

  Jamie, she noticed, was listening very carefully to her as she spoke, and the thought occurred to her: He sees something there.

  Was he jealous of Cat? Of course he was. But then Cat was having an affair with somebody else, in his view at least.

  “Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “You’re not the sort to be pathologically jealous.”

  “Of course not,” he said, too hurriedly, she thought. Then he added, “Where can one read about it? Have you read something about it?”

  “There’s a book in my library,” said Isabel. “It’s called Unusual Psychiatric Syndromes and it has some wonderful ones in it. For example, cargo cults. That’s where whole groups of people believe that somebody is going to come and drop supplies to them. Cargo. Manna. The same thing. There have been remarkable cases in the South Seas. Islands where people believed that eventually the Americans would come and drop boxes of food, if only they waited long enough.”

  “And others?”

  “The syndrome where you imagine that you recognise people.

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  You think you know them, but you don’t. It’s neurological. That couple over there, for example, I’m sure I know them, but I probably don’t. Maybe I’ve got it.” She laughed.

  “Paul Hogg’s got that too,” said Jamie. “He said he’d seen me.

  It was the first thing he said.”

  “But he probably had. People notice you.”

  “I don’t think they do. Why would they?”

  Isabel looked at him. How charming it was that he did not know. And perhaps it was best that he should not. That might spoil him. So she said nothing, but smiled. Misguided Cat!

  “So what has Lady Macbeth got to do with it?” asked Jamie.

  Isabel leaned forward in her chair.

  “Murderess,” she whispered. “A cunning, manipulative murderess.”

  Jamie sat quite still. The light, bantering tone of the conversation had come to an abrupt end. He felt cold. “Her?”

  Isabel did not smile. Her tone was serious. “I realised pretty quickly that the paintings in that room were not his, but hers.

  The invitations from the galleries were for her. He knew nothing about the paintings. She was the one who was buying all those expensive daubs.”

  “So? She may have money.”

  “Yes, she has money, all right. But don’t you see, if you have large amounts of money which you may not want to leave lying about the place in bank accounts, then buying pictures is a very good way of investing. You can pay cash, if you like, and then you have an appreciating, very portable asset. As long as you know what you’re doing, which she does.”

  “But I don’t see what this has got to do with Mark Fraser.

  Paul Hogg is the one who worked with him, not Minty.”

  “Minty Auchterlonie is a hard-faced cow—as you so percep-1 5 6

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h tively call her—who works in corporate finance in a merchant bank. Paul Hogg comes home from work and she says: ‘What are you doing at the office today, Paul?’ Paul says this and that, and tells her, because she’s in the same line as he is. Some of this information is pretty sensitive, but pillow talk, you know, has to be frank if it’s to be at all interesting, and she picks it all up. She goes off and buys the shares in her name—or possibly using some sort of front—and lo and behold the large profit is made, all on the basis of inside information. She takes the profit and puts it into pictures, which leave less of a trail. Or alternatively, she has an arrangement with an art dealer. He gets the information from her and makes the purchase. There’s no way of linking him to her.

  He pays her in paintings, taking his cut, one assumes, and the paintings are simply not officia
lly sold, so there’s no record in his books of a taxable profit being made.”

  Jamie sat openmouthed. “You worked all this out this evening? On the way up here?”

  Isabel laughed. “It’s nothing elaborate. Once I realised it was not him, and once we had actually met her, then it all fell into place. Of course it’s only a hypothesis, but I think it might be true.”

  It may have been clear thus far to Jamie, but it was not clear to him why Minty should have tried to get rid of Mark. Isabel now explained this. Minty was ambitious. Marriage to Paul Hogg, who was clearly going somewhere in McDowell’s, would suit her well. He was a pleasant, compliant man, and she probably felt lucky to have him as her fiancé. Stronger, more dominating men would have found Minty too difficult to take, too much competi-tion. So Paul Hogg suited her very well. But if it came out that Paul Hogg had passed on information to her—even if innocently—then that would cost him his job. He would not have been the insider trader, but she would. And if it came out that she T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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  had done this, then not only would she lose her own job, but she would be unemployable in corporate finance. It would be the end of her world, and if such an outcome could be averted only by arranging for something tragic to happen, then so be it. People like Minty Auchterlonie had no particular conscience. They had no idea of a life beyond this one, of any assessment, and without that, the only thing that stood between her and murder was an internal sense of right and wrong. And in that respect, Isabel said, one did not have to look particularly closely to realise that Minty Auchterlonie was deficient.

  “Our friend Minty,” said Isabel at length, “has a personality disorder. Most people would not recognise it, but it’s very definitely there.”

  “This Lady Macbeth syndrome?” asked Jamie.

  “Maybe that too,” said Isabel, “if it exists. I was thinking of something much more common. Psychopathy, or sociopathy—call it what you will. She’s sociopathic. She will have no moral com-punction in doing whatever is in her interests. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Including pushing people over the gods at the Usher Hall?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Absolutely.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. Isabel’s explanation seemed plausible, and he was prepared go along with it, but did she have any idea of what they might do next? What she had suggested was surmise, no more. Presumably there would need to be some form of proof if anything more were to be done. And they had no proof, none at all; all that they had was a theory as to motive.

  “So,” he said. “What now?”

  Isabel smiled. “I have no idea.”

  Jamie could not conceal his irritation at her insouciance. “I don’t see how we can leave it at that. We’ve gone so far. We can’t just leave the matter there.”

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  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h The tone of Isabel’s response was placatory. “I wasn’t suggesting that we leave anything anywhere. And it doesn’t matter that I have no idea what to do, right at the moment. A period of doing nothing is exactly what’s needed.”

  Seeing Jamie taken aback by this, Isabel went on to explain.

  “I think she knows,” she said. “I think that she knows why we were there.”

  “She said something?”

  “Yes. When I was talking to her—you were chatting to Paul Hogg at the time—she said to me that she had heard from her fiancé that I was interested in—those were her exact words,

  ‘interested in’—Mark Fraser. She waited for me to say something, but I just nodded. She came back to the subject a little later and asked me whether I had known him well. Again I dodged her question. It made her uneasy, I could see it. And I’m not surprised.”

  “So do you think she knows that we suspect her?”

  Isabel took a sip of wine. From the kitchen came wafting a smell of garlic and olive oil. “Smell that,” she said. “Delicious.

  Does she think we know? Maybe. But whatever she may think, I’m pretty sure that we are going to hear from her at some stage.

  She will want to know more about what we’re up to. She’ll come to us. Let’s just give her a few days to do that.”

  Jamie looked unconvinced. “These sociopaths,” he said.

  “What do they feel like? Inside?”

  Isabel smiled. “Unmoved,” she said. “They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved.

  Cats are sociopaths, you see. It’s their natural state.”

  “And is it their fault? Are they to blame?”

  “Cats are not to blame for being cats,” said Isabel, “and therefore they cannot be blamed for doing the things that cats do, such T H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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  as eating garden birds or playing with their prey. Cats can’t help any of that.”

  “And what about people like that? Can they help it?” asked Jamie.

  “It’s very problematic whether they are to be blamed for their actions,” said Isabel. “There’s an interesting literature on it. They might argue that their acts are the result of their psychopathol-ogy. They act the way they do because of their personality being what it is, but then they never chose to have a personality disorder. So how can they be responsible for that which they did not choose?”

  Jamie looked towards the kitchen. He saw a chef dip a finger into a bowl and then lick it thoughtfully. A sociopathic chef would be a nightmare. “It’s the sort of thing that you might discuss with your friends,” he said. “The Sunday Philosophy Club.

  You could discuss the moral responsibility of people like that.”

  Isabel smiled ruefully. “If I could get the club together,” she said. “Yes, if I could get the club to meet.”

  “Sunday’s not an easy day,” said Jamie.

  “No,” Isabel agreed. “That’s what Cat says too.” She paused.

  She did not like to mention Cat too much in Jamie’s presence because he always looked wistful, almost lost, when she did so.

  C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

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  WHAT I NEED, thought Isabel, is a few days free of intrigue.

  I need to get back to editing the review, to doing the crosswords without interruption, to going for the occasional walk into Bruntsfield to have an inconsequential chat with Cat. I do not need to spend my time conspiring with Jamie in pubs and restaurants and brushing up against scheming corporate financiers with expensive tastes in art.

  She had not slept well the previous night. She had said good-bye to Jamie after their meal at the restaurant and had not arrived back at the house until well after eleven. Once in bed, with the light switched out, and the moonlight throwing into her room the shadow of the tree outside her window, she had lain awake, thinking of the impasse which she feared they had reached. Even if the next move was down to Minty Auchterlonie, there were difficult decisions to be made. And then there was the whole business of Cat and Toby. She wished that it had never occurred to her to follow him, as the knowledge that she had acquired weighed heavily upon her conscience. She had decided that for the time being she would do nothing about it, but she knew that this was only shelving a problem which she would have to conT H E S U N D A Y P H I L O S O P H Y C L U B

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  front at some time or other. She was not sure how she would be able to deal with Toby when next she saw him. Would she be able to maintain her normal attitude, which, even if not friendly at heart, was at least as polite as circumstances demanded?

  She slept, but only fitfully, with the result that she was still sound asleep when Grace arrived the next morning. If she was not downstairs, Grace inevitably came up to check on her, bearing a reviving cup of tea. She woke up to Grace’s knock.

  “A bad night?” Grace asked solicitously as she placed the cup of tea on Isabel’s bedside table.

  Isabel sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t think I went to sleep until
two,” she said.

  “Worries?” asked Grace, looking down at her.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Worries and doubts. This and that.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Grace. “It happens to me too. I start worrying about the world. I wonder where it’s all going to end.”

  “Not with a bang but a whimper,” said Isabel vaguely. “That’s what T. S. Eliot said, and everybody always quotes him on it. But it’s really a very silly thing to say, and I’m sure that he regretted it.”

  “Silly man,” said Grace. “Your friend Mr. Auden would never have said that, would he?”

  “Certainly not,” said Isabel, twisting round in bed to reach for the teacup. “Although he did say some silly things when he was young.” She took a sip of tea, which always seemed to have an immediate effect on her clarity of mind. “And then he said some silly things when he was old. In between, though, he was usually very acute.”

  “Cute?”

  “Acute.” Isabel started to get out of bed, feeling with her toes for the slippers on the bedside rug. “If he wrote something which was wrong, which was meretricious, he would go back to it and 1 6 2

  A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h change it, if he could. Some of his poems he denounced alto-gether. ‘September 1st, 1939’ was an example.”

  She drew the curtains. It was a bright spring day, with the first signs of heat in the sun. “He said that poem was dishonest, although I think it’s got some wonderful lines. Then, in Letters from Iceland, he wrote something which had absolutely no meaning, but which sounded magnificent. And the ports have names for the sea. It’s a marvellous line, isn’t it? But it doesn’t mean anything, does it, Grace?”

  “No,” said Grace. “I don’t see how ports can have names for the sea. I don’t see it.”

  Isabel rubbed her eyes again. “Grace, I want to have a simple day. Do you think that you can help me?”