Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (22 page)

“No.”

“Scottish?”

Jamie looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Yes, probably. Not very broad. In fact, not broad at all.”

Isabel wondered. “A lawyer’s voice?”

Jamie looked bemused. “How does one tell that?” But then he nodded. “Yes, maybe.”

S
HE WOULD HAVE CALLED
Jock Dundas at nine o’clock the next morning, which was the earliest she thought that his office switchboard would answer, had it not been for the fact that Jamie suddenly shouted from the garden. She immediately feared that something was wrong—he had taken Charlie out on to the lawn to pull him about on the small, red-wheeled cart that he loved so much. Charlie had fallen out of the cart; Charlie had cut himself; Charlie had swallowed something and stopped breathing—the possibilities ran through her mind as she ran for the back door and pushed it open.

Jamie was standing in the middle of the lawn and Charlie—oh, relief—was sitting securely in his cart, looking up at his father, wondering why the ride had ended so abruptly. Adults could be relied upon, generally, but not always; there were puzzling interruptions of service.

Jamie, looking over his shoulder, beckoned to Isabel to join him.

“There,” he said. “Over there by that big …”

“Azalea?”

“Yes. That bush with all the red flowers.”

She strained her eyes. “What?”

“Brother Fox. Underneath.”

She stared at the shadowy undergrowth. Was that red shape him, or leaves?

“We were standing right here,” said Jamie. “And he went right past. Limping. He’s injured. I think quite badly.”

Isabel now thought that she could just make the fox out; and then, yes, his tail moved, and she saw the shape of a haunch. She took a few steps forward; the fox was not far away and he must have seen her coming. There was a sudden parting of leaves and he emerged, his head lowered, his body strangely twisted. She saw the patch of black on his side—a mat of hair and dried blood.

Brother Fox paused; he looked at Isabel, his head still held low, and then he moved away, going back into the undergrowth, heading for the back wall. She stood quite still. She wanted to go to him and tend him, but she knew that it was impossible; he would bite, and she would only make things worse.

She went back to stand next to Jamie. He had picked Charlie up out of his cart, and the small boy was watching his mother intently as she approached.

“Did you see that wound?” she asked.

Jamie winced; he was more squeamish than Isabel, who could look at blood dispassionately. “Think of it as tomato sauce,” she had once said to him. But that had not helped, and had made him think of blood when he saw tomato sauce, which was hardly the desired result. “It looks nasty,” he said.

“Has somebody shot him?”

Jamie shook his head. Brother Fox had his enemies in the neighbourhood, for sure, but he doubted if they were armed. “Maybe a dog.”
Will there be dugs?

Isabel shivered; she did not like the thought of fox hunting. Why dress up, she wondered, to kill something? If foxes had sometimes to be killed—and farmers had to protect their lambs—she felt that it should be done with regret rather than delight. “His balance seems affected. When he came out he was … well, it was like a lurch.”

It seemed to Isabel that this was no different from any other situation where somebody needed her help. “We have to do something.”

“Yes.”

They walked back towards the house. She remembered the man in Dalkeith with his traps; she had never thought that she would have occasion to contact him, but now perhaps she did. They would never be able to catch Brother Fox unless they could get him into a trap. If they did that, then they could call the vet and the wound could be cleaned out. If they did not do this, then Brother Fox would either get better himself, as happened in the wild, or die a slow and painful death, as also happened in the wild. It seemed to Isabel that the second possibility was the more likely.

“I’m going to phone the man from Dalkeith,” she said. “His number must be in the yellow pages. Under
Pest and Vermin Consultants.
”

“Rat catcher,” said Jamie.

They went inside. Charlie was beginning to niggle, which meant that he was ready for his morning nap; he had been up since six that morning. While Jamie took him to his room, Isabel went into her study and took out the heavy volume of yellow pages from the drawer in which she kept it. She paged through it:
Painters and Decorators—Quality Work Since 2001.
And
before that?
Potato Merchants, Pipers
—who would pay them? she wondered. Finally she found it.
Pest and Vermin Consultants.
She saw the distinctive advertisement, with its picture of a small army of cockroaches, wasps and moles in panic-stricken retreat. Moles? She did not think of them as pests, but then she had none burrowing under her lawn; her attitude might change if moles were actively
undermining
her. So William McClarty of Peebles Street, Dalkeith, was a mowdie man as well. The mowdie man was the mole-catcher in Scots, the subject of a poem she had once known by heart. The mowdie man came on to the land a figure of vengeance, and stalked the mole, the mowdie, whose velvet coat and tiny paws would break the heart of anyone, the poet said—except the mowdie man’s.

There were two numbers—one with
(house)
beside it; the other with
(all other times).
She telephoned the house first but there was no reply. She imagined the phone ringing in the empty corridor of the mowdie man’s house; a dog barking perhaps at the insistent ring, but the mowdie man himself out, stalking the land, driving off those armies of pests. She dialled the other number and the mowdie man answered immediately, or so she thought. But it was not him. “It’s his brither,” came a voice. “You wanting Billy?” She explained that she was, and she was asked to hold the line. So the mowdie man had a brother, she thought, who …

“Billy McClarty speaking.”

She told him who she was. Then: “I have a fox.”

“There’s a lot of them in Edinburgh. They’ve been breeding like Cath …” He stopped himself. “Like nobody’s business.”

Isabel was astonished. She had heard that a long time ago, but nobody said it these days, she thought.… And yet, his
name was Billy McClarty and the Billy could be a giveaway. An Orangeman: Billy McClarty was an Orangeman.

“Like rabbits, you mean,” she said.

Billy McClarty was silent for a moment. Then he continued, “You want him away?”

She caught her breath. She felt as if she were a conspirator, contacting a hit man with a view to a contract killing—which it was, in a way. Their victim was a sentient being, with memory, plans, a family—with some sense of who he was. For a moment an intrusive, unwanted thought crossed her mind: one might invite Billy McClarty to take Minty away; to set a large trap in her walled garden, baited with … What would one bait a Minty trap with? The answer came to Isabel almost immediately: money.

“No, I don’t want him away.”

Billy McClarty continued. “Cannae kill him there,” he said. “I get into trouble with neighbours. Where are you, by the way?”

She told him, and there was a grunt of recognition at the other end of the line. “There are lots of folk there who encourage foxes,” he said. “I’ve heard of a daft wumman there who gies chicken to the fox. Those dafties wouldnae like it if I killed him, ken?”

Isabel said nothing. She was that daft woman. So one of the neighbours had considered trapping Brother Fox, for how else would Billy McClarty know about her? It was a very uncomfortable feeling; Brother Fox
belonged
to her.

She decided to explain. “I like him,” she said. “I know you won’t sympathise, but I actually like this fox. And yes, I do give him chicken. He has as much right to exist as you do, Mr. McClarty.”

Billy McClarty sounded unsurprised. “Oh, aye?”

“Aye,” said Isabel. “So we understand one another now.”

“I think we do.” He paused. “Nobody’s asked me to trap that fox.”

“Well, I’m asking you now,” said Isabel. “He’s been injured and I want to get the vet to take a look at him.”

“Hundred pounds,” said Billy.

Isabel had no idea what the going rate for the trapping of a fox was. One hundred pounds sounded rather a lot—fifty? He was sure to be overcharging her.

“How about fifty?” she ventured.

“That would get you only hauf a fox,” said Billy. “You choose. Fifty for hauf a fox. One hundred for a whole fox.”

She agreed, and they arranged a time. Billy would try to get into town by four in the afternoon; he had work to do until then. She would need to have a roast chicken available—or, if possible, a pheasant. “He cannae resist a pheasant. Mind you,” he warned, “a sick fox sometimes doesnae eat. Even pheasant. We’ll see.”

Before she rang off, Isabel had a last shot to fire. “And a final thing, Mr. McClarty: I’m not daft.”

Billy McClarty laughed. “I wasnae meaning to be rude.”

“Well, in general people don’t like to be referred to in those terms …” She did not complete the sentence. It would not help to lecture Billy McClarty on this; it would merely confirm his view. And she needed him now; or, rather, Brother Fox needed him. The contradiction struck her forcibly—this agent of Nemesis for foxes was about to become his rescuer.

SHE DECIDED
that it would be better to see Jock Dundas in person. A telephone conversation was sufficient for ordinary transactions, but not for those circumstances in which one needed to assess the other person’s reaction. Minty had mentioned the name of his firm, and it was simple work to arrange with his secretary an appointment for later that morning. Isabel looked at her watch; if she left now and walked to the lawyers’ offices in the West End she would arrive with a few minutes in hand.

She chose to walk down to the bridge at Harrison Gardens and to follow the canal towpath to the basin at Fountainbridge. There were few people about—a handful of dog owners taking their dogs for a walk, a couple of runners glistening with sweat and engaged in an earnest discussion between their exhausted pantings, a teenager on a bicycle—the youth wore a leather jacket on which the words
Attack Squad
were embroidered in red. Who was being attacked, she asked herself, and why? He looked pallid, not unlike Eddie, and certainly not the type to attack anybody, Isabel thought, which was probably why he wore the jacket in the first place. Real members of an attack squad presumably never advertised themselves.

The towpath afforded an unusual view of the city—the backs of tenement buildings with their rough stone walls making for a crazy-paving effect, pinched back greens on which drying washing was pegged on laundry lines, arched stone bridges, a disused brewery. And in the basin itself, where the canal came to an abrupt end, brightly painted barges were tethered against the side of the canal, smoke coming from their tin-can chimneys, bicycles and other day-to-day paraphernalia stacked on narrow decks. The corners of a city, she thought, are where the
sense of place was strongest. The world saw the official Edinburgh, the elegant Georgian squares, the lines of fluttering flags in Princes Street Gardens, the bands and the spectacles. It did not see the back greens, the closes, the streets where people led ordinary lives. It was possible, she reminded herself, to love both equally—the Scotland of the romantic tourist posters and this unadorned, workaday Scotland—and she was, in fact, fond of both of them and not ashamed, as some were, of the romanticised vision. Myth could be as sustaining as reality—sometimes even more so.

She left the canal basin and made her way towards Lothian Road. Like all cities, Edinburgh changed quickly: a block or two could bring one to a different world. Lothian Road was traffic and bustle; all cheap Italian restaurants where spaghetti bolognese would count as the day’s special and low-life bars outside which black-suited pugilists served as bouncers, their broken noses bearing stark witness to their profession. Isabel did not like this street and wished it was not there, but knew that it had its role. Soldiers came here at night, down from the barracks at Redford, ready for hard drinking and picking up girls. If there was blood on Scottish pavements it was because of old wounds, not new; things that had happened a long time ago, old hardships, old cruelties, old exploitation and old injustice.

And then, quite abruptly, the surly atmosphere of Lothian Road gave way to the Edinburgh of law and finance, and, amongst other discreet entrances, to the doorway of Messrs McGregor, Fraser & Co., Solicitors and Notaries Public, Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet. Isabel went in that door, just on the edge of Charlotte Square, and found herself in a waiting room not unlike the drawing room of one of the Georgian flats that
graced the square just a few hundred yards away. A sofa and several armchairs surrounded a low table on which a selection of the day’s papers were arranged alongside
Scottish Field, Homes & Interiors Scotland
and
The Economist.
There was an air of calm to this room that belied what the business of McGregor, Fraser was all about: conflict and holding on to what one had. In the back offices somewhere in the building, there would be people in their shirtsleeves watching turbulent markets and planning litigation; but out here, in the front, there was no sign of that.