The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

think. We’ve got at least four centuries of music to choose from.”
    Towards the end of the meal, when they were drinking coffee, Isabel said, “You know, I have an awful feeling about John Fraser. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”
    He looked at her with interest. “What do you feel?”
    She knew that she had no grounds for saying what she was about to say. It was ridiculous—a complete whimsy. But the thought had occurred to her and it would not go away. “That he’s killed somebody.” She regretted the words even as she uttered them. It was an accusation—a gross defamation, even if the victim would never hear what was said of him. You can defame people, she thought, even if you speak the words into a void, to be heard by nobody. The wrong in such cases was not that you lowered them in the eyes of others—you did not do this, because nobody heard what you said—but simply that you had
thought
it. It was a wrong done to truth and the cause of truth. And it was
dirtying;
one felt grubby after thinking unkind, uncharitable, or even lascivious thoughts—why? Because for a few moments one imagined that the thought was deed.
    She watched his reaction. At first he looked blank, and then he shook his head. “Surely not.”
    “I know, I know. I shouldn’t think that of him, but that’swhat I feel. I know I haven’t a shred of evidence, other than that his cousin, who may well be over-imaginative—”
    Jamie interrupted her. “Over-imaginative? She believes in ghosts and … and spirits and all the rest. Of course she’s over-imaginative.”
    “Even so, she thinks that he wants to talk to somebody—through a medium. And if that’s true, then it’s possible that he’s killed somebody and wants forgiveness.”
    Jamie was silent as he thought about this. “Do you really think,” he said, “that murderers
want
to talk to their victims? Surely it’s exactly the opposite: they have no desire to hear from them again.”
    Isabel weighed this for a moment. It was probably true that most murderers had no desire to hear from their victims, but there were two objections to Jamie’s statement. One was that people could be killed by accident as much as intentionally: so not all of those who took another’s life were murderers. And secondly, not everybody who even intentionally caused the death of another would be without all conscience; people had their regrets, and lots of them.
    She was on the point of telling Jamie this when he leaned across the table and said to her, very slowly and clearly, “Isabel, listen to me. This is Edinburgh.
Edinburgh
. We haven’t got any murderers here. We just haven’t. At the most, people have little failings. That small.” He held up a hand, with barely a chink of light between his thumb and forefinger. “Mere quirks. So think of something else. Please.”
    She laughed. She knew that he did not mean this: Edinburgh was the same as anywhere else, and had the same range of people as other places did: the good, the bad, the morallyindifferent. They had their quirks, of course; Jamie was right about that. But even their quirks were charming—at least in the eyes of a lover, who would forgive her city anything.
    THEY DECIDED TO WALK BACK from the Café St. Honoré because the night was a fine one and even at ten there was still light in the sky. Being as far north as Moscow, and only three degrees south of St. Petersburg, Edinburgh had summer nights almost as white as those of Russia. Soon the dying day would slip into half-darkness and that curious Scottish half-light, the gloaming, would mantle the city; for now, though, every architectural detail, every branch moving gently in the breeze from the west, was clearly visible.
    They walked up through Charlotte Square, past the well-appointed offices of the financiers. “Money,” said Isabel, “likes to clothe itself in respectability, doesn’t it? And yet why should we kowtow to financiers? All