The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (20 page)

Alex was about to say something, but seemed to check herself. She looked at Isabel’s
cup and offered her more tea. “Tell me,” she said as she began to pour. “Tell me:
Have you got any idea who’s behind this?”

Isabel sighed. “None at all. You see, I know absolutely nothing about the world of
art theft.”

Alex digested this silently. Then she said, “But Martha said that you were somebody
with a reputation for sorting out extremely difficult situations. She said that you
had helped people find out all sorts of things.”

Isabel shook her head. “Would that that were true. I suppose I’ve been able to help
a few people who have found themselves in a bit of a mess, but nothing more than that.
I have no qualifications for any of it.”

“Perhaps being a philosopher is the best qualification of all,” suggested Alex.

“For what? For tracking down art thieves? Surely not.”

Alex persisted. “For understanding things that are difficult to understand.”

“To an extent,” said Isabel. “But not this sort of thing.”

“So you have no idea?” asked Alex, again.

“No,” said Isabel. “Sorry.”

Alex shifted in her seat. She leaned back, closed her eyes and then opened them again,
to fix Isabel with a playful but still serious stare. “So what if I were to suggest
to you that it’s my brother?” she asked.

CHAPTER TWELVE
 

H
OW EXACTLY DID SHE
put it?” asked Jamie.

They were sitting at the kitchen table, their evening meal over, the dishes stacked
in the dishwasher, their two wine glasses, which Isabel preferred to wash by hand,
now rinsed and standing inverted on the drying rack. It was half past nine, and at
fifty-five degrees and fifty-six minutes’ latitude, where Edinburgh lay, the sky still
had plenty of light in it; Isabel loved these white nights of summer.

“How did she put it? Well, at first I thought it was a joke—but then I realised that
it wasn’t quite that.”

“Not quite?”

“No. I think that she … well, she sort of meant it. I know that sounds pretty vague,
but that’s how I felt.”

Jamie looked puzzled. “I’m not sure what ‘sort of meaning’ something amounts to.”

“It means that you mean it, but aren’t really sure.” Isabel paused; she was not sure
Alex had meant it when she suggested that her brother might be behind the theft of
the painting. Perhaps she had intended to raise it as a possibility—something that
she thought might be true but for which she had no evidence.
And, as it happened, Alex had initially not taken the matter further, but had merely
shrugged and raised an eyebrow when Isabel had asked her why she thought her brother
might have stolen the painting. After a while, though, she had said, “He’s greedy,
my brother.”

“Any more greedy than the rest of us?” asked Isabel.

Alex laughed. “If you mean more than me, yes, much more. He likes money. He likes
the way it smells. He likes the power it gives you.” She warmed to her theme. “He
works in the pharmaceutical industry, you know. Oh, he likes to portray it as all
being very high-minded, but it’s all about money and profits—just like any other industry.”

Isabel found herself defending Patrick. “Don’t most people enjoy such things? Maybe
those of us who feel ourselves free from all that—and I assume you, like me, are one—would
have to admit that we’re still susceptible.”

Alex had looked at her slightly askance. “Not many. My brother, you see, needs money
because of his habits. They’re expensive—some of them very expensive. And I suspect
that he’d do anything for money.”

Isabel had expected her to continue on this theme, but she steered the conversation
in another direction. About twenty minutes later, when Alex brought the visit to an
end, Isabel felt that she had learned very little about the other woman, who had seemed
more interested in finding out about her than revealing anything about herself. She
had elicited at least some information, though: she had discovered that Alex was engaged;
that she was interested in art; and that she had what seemed like an unusually strong
dislike of her brother. Isabel already knew that there was a close relationship between
Alex and her father, and she could imagine why this should be: Alex’s manner, her
air of slight reserve, something that might easily be mistaken for shyness, mirrored
that of Duncan Munrowe; he would see himself in her, no doubt, more so, perhaps, than
he might in his son—if what Alex had said about Patrick’s venality were true.

“It sounds to me,” Jamie said, “as if this is a classic case of sibling jealousy.
And if it is, then I wouldn’t pay any attention to what they say about each other.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Why would he steal one of his father’s paintings? Presumably
he’ll get his share of everything when he and his sister eventually inherit. Why steal
now?”

“He may need the money now rather than later. She mentioned expensive habits.”

Jamie shook his head. “Again, we don’t know whether that’s true or not. Other people’s
habits are expensive—our own, never.” He paused. “And anyway, what are you going to
do with the information, even if you decide to take it seriously? Are you going to
tell the father that his son’s a thief? You want to be supportive towards him—I don’t
think that telling him that will be all that helpful, frankly.”

She agreed. “You’re right. It’s probably best for me to put it out of my mind.”

“Good.”

She hesitated. “Although it’s difficult, isn’t it, to forget something you’ve been
told? Mud sticks. We used to say that as children.”

Jamie smiled. “Yes. It does.” He looked at her affectionately. “What else did you
say?”

“As a child?”

“Yes.”

She looked out of the window. A branch from the tree that
grew outside the kitchen moved against the sky, gently, almost imperceptibly. The
things that we said as children stayed with us, like certain religious beliefs which
we might have grown out of even if the faith that underlay them might still be there.
One might stop believing in angels, for instance, and yet feel their presence, or
think one does; one might stop believing in hell and still feel nagging concern over
the possibility of punishment. As a child she had picked up the superstitious belief
that one should never store shoes above one’s head—to do so resulted in headaches
that could last for two weeks or more. Even now, her shoes were stored only at foot
level.

“Isabel?”

She gave a start. “What did we say? Well, we said something about where you put your
shoes.”

“I didn’t,” said Jamie. “But I did say something about frogs giving you warts.”

“But of course they do,” said Isabel. She smiled; there is a particular delight in
discovering that those whom one loves share similar memories of childhood. “You should
never pick up a frog. And then there was something about bread.”

“Oh yes?”

“We said that if you cut bread crooked, you’ve told a lie.”

He laughed. “But I always do. You’ve seen my toast.”

“There must be exceptions,” said Isabel. “Every rule has its exceptions.”

Jamie remembered something. “And what about getting a cut in the skin between one’s
thumb and forefinger—in that bit of webbed skin? What about that?”

“Oh, that,” said Isabel. “Everybody knows the consequences of that: lockjaw.”

“Yes,” said Jamie. “And you died, just as you were likely to die of blood poisoning
if somebody stabbed you with the nib of a pen.”

“We ignore these things at our peril,” said Isabel gravely.

Jamie thought of Charlie. He cast his eyes up at the ceiling; it was how they referred
to their child when they were in the kitchen and he was in his room directly above.
“Do you think he’ll pick these things up?”

“I’m sure he will,” said Isabel. “But I hope that he doesn’t have the fears we had—the
real fears. Remember your boyhood. You must have been frightened of some things.”

He had been. He had been frightened that his father would die; he had been frightened
that a boy called James MacArthur would punch him and break his nose, as he had threatened
to do on a number of occasions; he had been frightened that somebody would come into
his room at night when he was asleep and put a pillow over his head—a fear that came
from hearing of what the wicked uncle did to the Princes in the Tower. Much later,
as a teenager, he had been frightened that he would never find a girlfriend, and that
he would die without ever discovering sex.

“All of those things?” said Isabel sympathetically.

“Yes. And what about you?”

She thought. “As a very small girl I was frightened that the cat we had would be run
over. I was frightened that my pants would fall off in gym.”

Jamie let out a hoot of laughter. “What a terrific fear! That your pants will fall
off!”

“It was very real,” said Isabel. “And it happened to a girl in my class. Toffee Macleod.
Her pants fell off. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never fully recovered.”

“Toffee Macleod? What a name. What happened to her?”

“She went to Australia and married a pilot. That’s as much as I know.”

“Nobody in Australia would have known,” said Jamie. “She left her shame behind in
Scotland.”

Isabel was about to say something more about Toffee—to tell the story of how she was
the first girl in the class to be asked to the cinema by a boy (not a boy and his
parents, but a boy acting under his own auspices). But then the telephone rang and
she knew, by some inexplicable sixth sense, that it would be Duncan. It was. Contact
had been made, he said, and they should go to Rutland Square the following morning
at nine-thirty. They should be on foot, and they should walk round the square until
they were contacted further.

Jamie, who had been able to overhear this conversation, said nothing, but looked disapproving.
Once Isabel had put down the phone, he said quietly, “Rutland Square?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Apparently so.”

“Why there?”

She had no idea. “The picture won’t be there. We’ll get instructions.”

“Promise me one thing,” said Jamie. “Promise me you’ll phone and let me know where
they’ve told you to go.”

“I promise.”

She suddenly remembered the cucumber sandwiches. “She promised cucumber sandwiches,”
she said. “But they never appeared.”

“She must have forgotten.”

Isabel had to concede that was possible. “It’s a ridiculous thing to resent something
like that,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t, and so I shan’t.” There were so many bigger
moral problems
connected with food—our duty to help the hungry, the implications of genetic manipulation
of crops and so on; these dwarfed all those smaller food issues that were really not
much more than questions of etiquette. And that reminded her—“Jamie?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think of this? Somebody told me the other day that they had invited friends
round to dinner and they had agreed that the couple who had been invited would bring
a course. It was that sort of casual, kitchen-supper arrangement in which everybody
contributes.”

“So?”

“Well, the guests—a husband and wife—brought a casserole dish of stew. The hosts provided
the starter and the pudding.”

“All right.”

“Everything went very well,” Isabel continued. “The guests, though, had brought too
much stew. There were only four people at the table and their stew would have fed
six. So there were two portions left over. The hostess noticed and thought,
Good, that’ll do for our dinner tomorrow. I won’t have to cook
.”

Jamie listened. “Stew improves, doesn’t it? I think it tastes better the next day.”

“So do I,” said Isabel. “Perhaps one should always eat leftovers. One would cook everything
a day in advance and not touch it until the next day. But that’s not the point of
this story. The point is this: at the end of the meal the guests took the leftovers
away with them.”

Jamie looked pensive. “It was their casserole dish. That’s reasonable enough.”

Isabel had thought of that. “Yes, they had to take it back. But the stew had been
taken from their casserole dish before the dinner and put into the host’s serving
dish.”

Jamie frowned. “So they put it back into their casserole?”

“Yes. At the end. They all cleared up and she—the guest—spooned the stew back into
its original casserole, which she then took away with her.”

Jamie did not hesitate to condemn that. “Way out of line,” he said. “The stew belonged
to the hostess from when it was transferred to her serving dish.” He paused. “But
it was also mean.”

“That’s what I think,” said Isabel. “The whole case becomes complicated because of
the casserole dish. It would be simpler if it had been breakfast they were having
and the guests had brought, say, eight croissants—two each—and people didn’t finish
them.”

“Four left?” suggested Jamie.

“Yes. Four. Let’s say they’ll be sitting on a table still in their brown-paper packet.”