The Sunday Philosophy Club (25 page)

Johnny raised his glass to her. “This is lovely stuff,” he said. “Fifteen quiet years in its cask. Fifteen years ago I was, let me think, thirty, and we had just had our first child and I thought that I was awfully clever and was going to make a million by forty.”

“And did you?”

“No. I never made a million. But I reached my fortieth birthday anyway, which is a greater privilege in a way.”

“Quite,” said Isabel. “Some would give a million for a single year, let alone forty.”

Johnny looked into his whisky glass. “Greed,” he said. “Greed takes so many forms. Polite or naked. But it’s always the same at heart. Our friend Minty, for example …”

“You found out something?”

Johnny looked behind him. A group of people had gathered round a table at the other end of the room. The table was set out with rows of glasses and cut-glass jugs of water.

“Charlie’s about to begin,” he said. “He’s sniffing the air.”

Isabel glanced in the direction of the whisky noser, a well-built man in a comfortable tweed suit and sporting a large moustache. She watched as he poured a glass of whisky and held it up against the light.

“I know him,” she said.

“Everybody does,” said Johnny. “Charlie Maclean. He can smell whisky from fifty yards. Amazing nose.”

Isabel looked down at her modest malt and took a small sip of the liquid. “Tell me what you found out about Minty.”

Johnny shook his head. “Nothing. All I said was that she was greedy, which she undoubtedly is. What I did find out was rather more interesting than that. I found out about what her young friend Ian Cameron has been doing. I knew some of it already, of course, but I gathered quite a bit more from my friends among the discontented in McDowell’s.”

Isabel said nothing, waiting for him to continue. At the other end of the room, Charlie Maclean was pointing out some quality in the whisky to his attentive audience, one or two of whom were nodding eagerly.

“But first, you should have a bit of background,” Johnny said. “Firms like McDowell’s are not all that old. They’ve only recently celebrated their twentieth birthday, I think. And they didn’t start with vast resources either—fifty thousand or so would have been
all that the original two partners would have brought in. Nowadays, fifty thousand would be small change for them.”

Isabel watched Johnny as he spoke. He was looking at his whisky glass, turning it gently to drive a thin meniscus of liquid up the sides, exactly as Charlie Maclean was now doing for his audience at the other end of the room.

“We grew very quickly,” Johnny went on. “We took in pension funds and invested them carefully in solid stocks. The market, of course, was doing well and everything looked very good. By the end of the eighties we were managing more than two billion, and even if our fee was slipping slightly below the half percent we had been taking for our services, you can still imagine what that meant in terms of profit.

“We took on lots of bright people. We watched what was happening in the Far East and in developing countries. We moved in and out fairly successfully, but of course we had our fingers burned with Internet stocks, as just about everybody did. That was probably the first time we had a fright. I was there then and I remember how the atmosphere changed. I remember Gordon McDowell at one meeting looking as if he’d just seen a ghost. Quite white.

“But it didn’t bring us down—it just meant that we had to be quicker on our feet. And we also had to work a bit harder to keep our clients, who were very nervous about what was happening to their funds in general and were beginning to wonder whether they would be safer in the City of London. After all, the reason why one went to Edinburgh in the first place was to get solidity and reliability. If Edinburgh started to look shaky, one might as well throw in one’s lot with the riskier side of things in London.

“It’s about this time that we looked around for some new people. We picked up this Cameron character and a few others
like him. He started watching new stocks, which seemed to be about the only place where one could make a decent bit of money. But of course these new issues were subscribed to by the large people in London and New York, and Edinburgh usually wouldn’t get much of a look-in. This was pretty sickening when you saw them go up in value by two or three hundred percent within a few months of issue. And all this profit went to those who were in a cosy relationship with the issuing houses in London and who were given a good allocation.

“Cameron started to get his hands on to some of these issues. He also started to take charge of one or two other things, moving funds slowly out of stocks that were not going to do so well. He’s very good at that, our friend Cameron. Quite a few stocks were quietly disposed of a month or so ahead of a profit warning. Nothing very obvious, but it was happening. I didn’t know about that until I spoke to my friends who had been working with him—I was in a different department. But they told me of two big sales that had taken place in the last six months, both of them before a profit warning.”

Isabel had been listening intently. This was the flesh that her skeletal theory needed. “And would there be any concrete evidence of insider knowledge in these two cases? Anything one could put one’s finger on?”

Johnny smiled. “The very question. But I’m afraid that you won’t like the answer. The fact of the matter is that both of these sales were of stocks in companies in which Minty Auchterlonie’s bank was involved as adviser. So she might well have had inside knowledge which she passed on to him. But then, on the other hand, she might not. And there is, in my view, no way in which we could possibly prove it. In each case, I gather, there’s a minute
of the meeting at which Cameron raised the possibility of selling the stocks. In both cases he came up with a perfectly cogent reason for doing so.”

“And yet the real reason may well have been what Minty said to him?”

“Yes.”

“And there’s no chance of proving that money changed hands between Cameron and Minty?”

Johnny looked surprised. “I don’t think that money would necessarily change hands—unless he was sharing his bonus with her. No, I think it more likely that they were doing this for mixed motives. She was involved with him sexually and wanted to keep him. That’s perfectly possible. People give their lovers things because they’re their lovers. That’s an old story.”

“Or?” prompted Isabel.

“Or Minty was genuinely concerned about Paul Hogg’s department getting into the mire and wanted to give it a boost because Paul Hogg was part of her overall plan to penetrate the heart of the Edinburgh establishment. It was not in her interests as the future Mrs. Paul Hogg to have hitched her star to a has-been.”

Isabel mulled over what she had been told. “So what you’re telling me, then, is that there may well have been insider trading, but that we’re never going to be able to prove it? Is that it?”

Johnny nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s about it. You could try to take a closer look at Minty’s financial situation and see if there are any unexplained windfalls, but I don’t see how you’ll get that information. She’ll bank at Adam & Company, I suspect, and they are very discreet and you’d never get round any of their staff—they’re very correct. So what do you do?”

“Shrug the whole thing off?”

Johnny sighed. “I suspect that’s all we can do. I don’t like it, but I don’t think that we’ll be able to do anything more.”

Isabel lifted her glass and took a sip of her whisky. She had not wanted to mention her real suspicions to Johnny, but she felt grateful to him for the enquiries that he had made and she wanted to confide in somebody other than Jamie. If Johnny thought that her theory about what had happened in the Usher Hall was farfetched, then perhaps she should abandon it.

She put her glass down on the table. “Would you mind if I tell you something?” she asked.

Johnny gestured airily. “Anything you wish. I know how to be discreet.”

“A little while ago,” said Isabel, “a young man fell to his death from the gods in the Usher Hall. You probably read about it.”

Johnny thought for a moment before he replied. “I think I remember something like that. Horrible.”

“Yes,” Isabel went on. “It was very distressing. I happened to be there at the time—not that that’s relevant—but what is interesting is that he worked at McDowell’s. He would have gone there after you had left, but he was in Paul Hogg’s department.”

Johnny had raised his glass to his lips and was watching Isabel over the rim. “I see.”

He’s not interested, thought Isabel. “I became involved,” she went on. “I happened to be told by somebody who knew him well that he had discovered something very awkward for somebody in the firm.” She paused. Johnny was looking away, watching Charlie Maclean.

“And so he was pushed over that balcony,” she said quietly. “Pushed.”

Johnny turned round to face her. She could not make out his
expression; he was interested now but the interest was tinged with incredulity, she thought.

“Very unlikely,” he said after a while. “People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t.”

Isabel sighed. “I believe that they might,” she said. “And that’s why I wanted to find out about Minty and this insider trading. It could all add up.”

Johnny shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think that you should let go of it. I really don’t think this is going to get you anywhere.”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m very grateful to you, anyway.”

Johnny acknowledged her thanks with a lowering of his eyes. “And if you want to get in touch with me, here’s my mobile number. Give me a call anytime. I’m up and about until midnight every day.”

He handed her a card on which a number had been scrawled, and Isabel tucked it into her bag.

“Let’s go and hear what Charlie Maclean has to say,” said Johnny, rising to his feet.

“Wet straw,” said Charlie at the other end of the room, putting his nose into the mouth of the glass. “Smell this dram, everyone. Wet straw, which means a Borders distillery in my book. Wet straw.”

O
F COURSE JOHNNY
was right, Isabel thought—and she had decided accordingly by the following morning. That was the end of it; she would never be able to prove insider trading by Minty Auchterlonie, and even if she did, it would still be necessary to link this with Mark’s death. Johnny knew these people much better than she did, and he had been incredulous of her theory. She should accept that, and let the whole matter rest.

She had reached this conclusion sometime during the night of the whisky tasting, when she had woken up, stared at the shadows on the ceiling for a few minutes, and finally made her decision. Sleep followed shortly afterwards, and the next morning—a brilliant morning on the cusp of spring and summer—she felt an extraordinary freedom, as one does at the end of an examination, when the pen and pencil are put away and nothing more remains to be done. Her time was her own now; she could devote herself to the review and to the pile of books that was stacked invitingly in her study; she could treat herself to morning coffee in Jenners, and watch the well-heeled Edinburgh ladies engage in their gossip, a world which she might so easily have slipped into and which she had avoided by a deliberate act of self-determining
choice—thank heavens. And yet, was she any happier than they were, these women with their
safe
husbands and their children who were set to become like their parents and perpetuate this whole, self-confident world of haut-bourgeois Edinburgh? Probably not; they were happy in their way
(I must not be condescending,
she thought), and she was happy in hers. And Grace in hers and Jamie in his, and Minty Auchterlonie … She stopped herself, and thought. Minty Auchterlonie’s state of mind is simply no concern of mine. No, she would not go to Jenners that morning, but she would walk into Bruntsfield and buy something that smelled nice from Mellis’s cheese shop and then drink a cup of coffee in Cat’s delicatessen. Then, that evening, there was a lecture she could attend at the Royal Museum of Scotland. Professor Lance Butler of the University of Pau, a lecturer whom she had heard before and who was consistently entertaining, would speak on Beckett, as he always did. That was excitement enough for one day.

And of course there were the crosswords. Downstairs now, she retrieved the newspapers from the mat on the hall and glanced at the headlines.
NEW CONCERN FOR COD STOCKS,
she read on the front page of
The Scotsman,
and saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? She answered her own question: more than one might imagine—an electronic culture of e-mail tales and computer-generated images, fleeting and derivative, but a culture nonetheless.

She turned to the crossword, recognising several clues immediately.
The falls, artist is confusingly preceded again
(7), which required no more than a moment’s thought: Niagara. Such a
cliché in the crossword world, and this irritated Isabel, who liked novelty, however weak, in clues. And then, to pile Pelion (6) upon Ossa (4), there was
Writers I shortly have, thoughtful
(7). Isabel was pensive, which solved that one, until she tripped up over
An unending Greek god leads to an exclamation, Mother!
(6). This could only be zeugma—Zeu(s) g (gee!) ma—a word with which she was unfamiliar, and it sent her to Fowler’s
Modern English Usage,
which confirmed her suspicion. She liked Fowler
(avian hunter of words,
she thought) for his opinions, which were clear and directive. Zeugmata, he explained, were a bad thing and incorrect—unlike syllepses, with which they were commonly confused. So
Miss Bolo went home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair
was sylleptical, requiring a single word to be understood in a different sense, while
See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned
was a zeugma and called for the insertion of another quite different verb,
surrounded,
which was not there.