CHAPTER NINE

NOT THINKING about something can be hard, as Isabel discovered the next day. She had decided to put the incident in the kitchen out of her mind, but it kept coming back. Did she really want to see John Liamor again? Did he still mean something to her? Did what one said under hypnosis have anything to do with what really was going on in the subconscious mind? Surely the mind was full of all sorts of old memories that were really of no significance for how one felt; they merely knocked about in some deep region, like the detritus at the bottom of a lake. And if they surfaced from time to time, that did not mean very much.

At first it was awkward with Eddie. He avoided her when he came into the delicatessen the next morning, but Isabel made a point of speaking to him. “Eddie, what happened last night is nothing. I don’t feel bad about it, and neither should you.” She took his arm. Again that feeling of thinness. “Don’t look away from me, Eddie. Come on now.”

“I’m really sorry,” he mumbled.

She reached out and put her hand against his cheek. He looked at her in surprise. “Come on, Eddie. You don’t have to be sorry about anything. John Liamor was my husband. I shouted out his name because I obviously still think about him subconsciously. Maybe I still care for him. I thought I didn’t.”

She moved her hand away, and she felt him relax. She let go of his arm. Holding Eddie was like holding a cat who does not want to be held.

“I’m still sorry,” he said. “They told us that we should be careful about what we did with it.”

She laughed. “Well, that’s one way of learning that. And there was no harm done anyway.”

He rubbed the place on his arm where she had held him, as if he had been bruised. “You seemed very upset about seeing him. About seeing John What’s-his-name.”

“He hurt me,” said Isabel.

Eddie looked up sharply. “Beat you?”

“Not that. No. But there are lots of other ways of being hurt. And they can be as bad.”

Eddie was silent. I could say something now, she thought. I could say to him: I know that you’ve been hurt too, badly. But she did not. Instead, she said, “Are you all right, Eddie? You know that I’m going to go down to the bank today.” She looked at her watch. “In fact, I’ve got two things I have to do. Do you mind being in charge for a while a bit later on?”

He did not. But he did not say anything about the bank, and so Isabel persisted. “I’m going to get that money I promised you. Remember?” She paused, watching him. He bit his lip. “You said you were in trouble, Eddie. Are you sure that you don’t want to tell me what it is?”

“I don’t,” he muttered.

“All right. You don’t need to. But if you change your mind about that and want to talk to me, I promise you that I wouldn’t tell anybody else. All right?”

He nodded his assent and crossed the room to get his apron from its hook. One act, she thought; one act of violence, one act of callous gratification, and a young life was made into this.

         

THE BANK WAS the simple part. They had the money ready for her in a white envelope and slipped it to her across the broad wooden desk. She wondered whether people who worked in banks thought about what their clients did with their money, or whether such interest quickly faded. Money was very mundane, really, and the question of who had what was hardly riveting. Or did she feel that way, she asked herself, because she had more than most? She felt no envy when she read, as one occasionally did, of people earning large salaries or bonuses. But others hated this, and muttered darkly about higher taxes and obscene profits. What was obscene about earning a lot of money? One could not put that reaction entirely down to simple envy; there must be something more to it. Unfairness, perhaps. It was unfair that one should have so much when so many had so little. And it was, she thought. In which case, should she divest herself further? She gave a lot to various causes, and one of these charities had written to her recently in a way which spoke of an appeal—a very tactfully put appeal, but an appeal nonetheless.

She caught a taxi in Charlotte Square and gave the address of the Café Sardi, a small Italian restaurant in the university area. It had been convenient for the old medical school before it moved out to the new infirmary, and there were still some doctors who used it to meet for lunch. He had to be in town, he said, and they could meet there.

She was the first to arrive, and was led to a table near the window that gave her a view over the road to Sandy Bell’s. She looked up. There was a picture of Hamish Henderson on the wall of the restaurant; he had been an habitué of Sandy Bell’s all those years ago and must have eaten here too. She had heard him singing in Sandy Bell’s from time to time, that tireless collector of Scottish folk songs with his great lumbering frame and his toothy smile.

She tried to invoke the memory. Yes, the first time she had heard him he had sung “Freedom Come All Ye” and she had sat at her table at the back of the pub with her friends, utterly arrested, unable to do anything but watch that curious rumpled figure and hear the words that cut into the air like the punch of a fist: “Nae mair will our bonnie callants / Merch tae wer when our braggarts crousely craw.” No more will Scottish boys march off to war to the skirl of the pipes. And at the end she had cried; she had been unable to say why, beyond feeling that what she had witnessed was a heartfelt apology for what Scotland had done to the world as part of the British Empire, for all the humiliation of imperialism.

She was thinking of this when Dr. Norrie Brown came in. She knew it was him from the way he hesitated at the door, looking for someone he did not know; and he knew it was her from the way she sat there, waiting for somebody similarly unknown to her.

“Isabel Dalhousie?”

She reached out and shook his hand. He sat down opposite her and looked at her appraisingly. There was no attempt to conceal what he was doing; he was taking her measure. She blushed.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “Tactless of me. I can’t help it, I’m afraid. When I meet somebody for the first time, I’ve got into the habit of looking at them as if they’re a new patient. I don’t quite take the blood pressure, but I do sum things up.”

She smiled. There was a pleasant frankness about the way he spoke, and she liked the look of him too. He was in his mid-thirties, she decided; open-faced, uncomplicated. A straightforward doctor.

“Oh well,” she said. “We all look at others according to our calling. I have a lawyer friend who immediately examines people as if they’re in the witness box. And my hairdresser looks out of the window and comments on the hair of people going past. Bad hair day. That sort of thing!”

He reached for the menu. “I assure you, you look quite well. And so I conclude that you don’t want to consult me professionally.”

“Certainly not.”

He glanced at the menu. “So? Do you mind if I ask why you got in touch? You said it was to do with a mutual friend.”

“Yes,” she said. “Marcus Moncrieff.”

He replaced the menu on the table. “Oh. Marcus.”

“Yes. I know his wife, you see. Not very well, but enough to know that she’s terribly worried about him.”

He watched her as she spoke. The openness she had detected earlier on was being replaced, she thought, by a marked guardedness.

“Marcus is pretty low, is he? I haven’t seen him for a month or so; I must go round. I take it that it’s the…”

“Disgrace?”

“You could call it that. And I suppose that’s what it was.”

The waitress came and took their order. Norrie, she noticed, chose a salad and a diet drink. “I’m training as a gastroenterologist now,” he said. “I see what people put in their stomachs. It’s enough to put one off eating altogether.”

She smiled. “But you won’t disapprove of what I have.”

He laughed. “Probably. But I won’t say anything. An Italian diet is reasonably healthy, anyway. It’s the stuff they eat in Glasgow that does the damage. The fries. The red meat. The fried fish. My cardiac colleagues could keep you entertained for hours on the subject.”

Isabel steered the conversation back to Marcus. “The incident,” she began. “The incident that led to the complaint. Do you think it was his fault?”

Norrie said nothing for a moment, but fingered the stem of an empty glass in front of him. When he eventually spoke, he seemed to be choosing his words with care. “The finding against him was clear,” he said. “He was negligent. The figures of the dosage were far too high. He should have checked. He didn’t.”

“Where did those figures come from?”

“From the lab.”

Isabel watched Norrie carefully. His manner was very matter-of-fact, as if he were relating everyday events, rather than ones that had brought a career to an end.

“And what did you think? What did you think of the figures?”

Again he took his time to answer, and again, when he did, his words were careful. “I just took note of them and passed them on.”

“That’s all?”

He held her gaze. He neither blinked nor looked away. “It wasn’t for me to say anything. I was—am—a junior doctor. I came to medicine late, you see. I did a degree in engineering and then changed my mind. It’s going to be some time before I catch up.”

“It wasn’t for you to say anything?”

“No. That’s what I’ve just told you.”

She persisted. “Even if you thought they were high?”

His self-controlled manner slipped a little. “Listen,” he said, an edge appearing in his voice. “I didn’t have a clue.”

She made a calming gesture with a hand. “All right. Sorry, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just think that Marcus may have been harshly treated. I was hoping that we could find out something which puts him in a better light.”

This remark seemed to take him by surprise. “Harshly treated?”

She explained that she felt that a momentary lapse of judgement should not, in her view, end a career. Anybody could make a mistake—indeed everybody made mistakes. But that did not make them culpable. “So,” she concluded. “I was wondering whether I could come up with something that could help him to establish that he was not blameworthy. I wondered if I could get him off this awful hook of blame.”

Norrie stared at her, almost incredulously. “You want it reopened?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “If need be.”

The waitress now brought his salad and Isabel’s pasta, and laid the plates before them. Norrie took up a fork and began to pick at the meal. “If I were you,” he said quietly, “I’d leave well enough alone. Don’t try to open anything up. Just don’t.”

Isabel speared a shell of pasta with her fork, and then another. “But if there is anything which could help him,” she said, “surely it should be brought up.”

Norrie seemed to weigh this for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “If I tell you something, will you give me your word that you won’t use it publicly in any way?”

She considered this. It would not be easy to give an assurance of confidentiality if he was going to come up with some information that could exculpate Marcus. But if she did not agree, then she would not hear it. She decided that she had no alternative.

“Very well. I give you my word. Even if it’s going to hamper me.”

“It won’t hamper you,” Norrie said quickly. “And it won’t be to Marcus’s disadvantage. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t see—”

But he cut her short. He had abandoned his salad now, and there was light in his eyes. “Marcus Moncrieff is even more guilty than you imagine. He got off lightly.”

She sat back in her seat. “I don’t see—”

“No,” he said quickly. “You don’t, do you? You don’t because you don’t know the first thing about it. Sorry to be so frank, but these things are very complex. The truth of the matter, you see, is that I warned him that the figures were high. I said to him that he should go and check the figures and see whether they really reflected what that patient had taken. And he didn’t. He said no, it wasn’t necessary. And then I spoke to him a second time, and asked him to note my reservations, but he told me not to be such a fusspot and he didn’t note anything.”

He attacked his salad. “So, you see,” he said. “Not so simple. If that had come out at the enquiry it would have looked even worse for him.”

“But you didn’t mention it?”

“No. I wasn’t even asked to make a statement. I kept quiet. I didn’t want things to get even worse for him. He’s a good doctor, you see.”

“You protected him?”

He stared at her. “You could put it that way. But let me say something else. If you mention this at all, and in particular if you suggest to anybody that I protected him, I shall simply deny that this conversation took place.”

She was puzzled. “Then why tell me?”

“To protect him again,” he said. “To protect him from you.” He pointed at her with his fork, on which half an olive was balanced. The olive tumbled down into the thick of the salad and was lost. “The last thing he needs is anybody opening up the whole can of worms. If you’re really concerned for him, then you’ll back off now that you know you only risk making it worse.”

They both ate in silence for a while. Then he spoke again. “And there’s another thing which nobody knows. In the case of the second patient, there was nothing wrong with the figures from the lab. And the dosage was not nearly as high. Yet the lab report, when it came to be looked at again, had much higher figures. Somebody had altered them.”

He looked at her knowingly.

“You’re saying that Marcus did?”

“Well, I didn’t change them,” he said.

“And you didn’t do anything about it?”

“By then it was too late. I noticed it only when the whole thing started to be investigated.”

It did not make sense to Isabel. She could understand sloppiness and not bothering to check up on suspect figures, but why should Marcus have deliberately falsified data?

Norrie sensed the reasons for her puzzlement. “Because he didn’t want the drug to be compromised,” he said. “Because he didn’t want its use to be stopped because of some awkward side effects at relatively low doses. If these things happened with absolutely sky-high doses, then that would not be the fault of the drug, it would be a sort of freak—the sort of risk that people will live with precisely because hardly anybody is ever going to swallow enough of the stuff for that sort of thing to happen.”

Isabel digested this. It certainly made sense. But why, she wondered, would he have such a stake in the continued use of the drug?

Norrie put down his fork. He had finished his salad, although a small piece of dark lettuce was stuck to the front of his teeth. His tongue moved round as he tried to dislodge it, and Isabel stared in awful fascination.

“Excuse me,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail. “There. That’s better. What do they say about these things? Follow the money. Isn’t that it?”

“He had a financial interest in the company?”

“Not directly,” said Norrie. “He wouldn’t have had shares—that would have been too obvious. But that same company had backed his research. He was beholden to them. He probably wanted them to back him in the future. So…”

Isabel listened carefully. What was occupying her now was the question of why Norrie should have so readily covered for Marcus. Was this the way that the medical profession looked after its own? She had been under the impression that all that had changed. It was difficult to understand.

“But what I can’t work out,” she said, “is this: Why did you not say something? Why did you not reveal your suspicions that he had actually gone so far as to change data?”

Norrie pushed his plate away from him and glanced at his watch. “I’m going to have to dash,” he said. “I’m doing a couple of endoscopies this afternoon in an hour or so.” He paused, as if weighing whether to say something. Then he did. “All right, bearing in mind that this conversation is completely deniable: Marcus Moncrieff is my uncle. He’s my mother’s brother.”

He looked at her in a way that she thought said: You are admitted to a conspiracy; I think you understand. Then he signalled to the waitress to bring the bill.

“Edinburgh’s a bit like that,” he said.