His ears almost curled forward as he listened. She retrieved her hand and held her breath. Silence. No. Not silence. Subtle creakings from the building and the moan of the wind outside. And a not-so-subtle thunk from one of the tall windows.
Alasdair leaped forward into the largest window embrasure and pivoted, turning his flashlight toward the pitch-black slit of a cupboard cut into the thickness of the wall. For a moment Jean, at his heels, thought she was seeing two giant crows huddled in the narrow chamber. Then she realized she was looking at two teenagers, their slight bodies layered in snug black pants and shapeless jackets adorned with multiple pewter buckles, their white faces screwed into grimaces at the sudden light.
“Right,” said Alasdair, slipping instantly into police mode. “Come out of there. Move.”
The first one to respond was a boy, Jean decided, judging by the prominence of his Adam’s apple, the thickness of his eyebrows, and the six or so dark hairs on his upper lip. The second was a girl wearing three earrings in each ear, a slash of red lipstick, and so much black eyeliner and purple shadow she resembled a punk raccoon. Both of them had hair blacker than nature intended for their gene pools, his rising in startled spikes, hers back-combed into a rat’s nest and dusted with what Jean at first thought were bits of plaster but then realized were little butterfly clips.
Gallantly the boy extended his hand to help the girl step up from what must have been an earlier flooring level. She ignored him, her hands thrust deep into the oversized pockets of her jacket, even when she almost stumbled.
“How do you do,” Alasdair said. “I’m Detec—Mr. Cameron. This is Miss Fairbairn. You are . . .”
The teenagers slouched carelessly, but their eyes darted right and left, up and down, as though seeking escape routes. “Derek,” said the boy at last.
Jean remembered the woman leaving the pub, talking on the cell phone to her recalcitrant son. Here was the boy himself.
“Surname?” demanded Alasdair.
“Trotter,” Derek said, trying to deepen his voice.
Another hobbit name, Jean thought, if coming from a goblin-child. The poor kid probably suffered for that. Teenagers could make taunts out of names a lot less tempting than “Trotter.”
“Stanelaw lad, are you?” Alasdair asked.
“I am now, sod it all. Me mum and me, we’ve just moved house to be near her relations. Coulda had relations in London, but no, they’re either here or in Middles-bleedin’-brough.”
Middlesbrough? No wonder Jean detected an accent originating in the rust belt of the English Midlands. “Has your father moved here, too?”
“He’s done a runner, hasn’t he? Walked out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jean said.
“Rotter like him? Past time to see the back of him, mum says.”
Ouch, Jean thought. No wonder the boy’s tone was so bitter.
With a grim nod, Alasdair turned to the girl. “And you?”
“Zoe Brimberry,” she replied, her crimson lips pouting.
“You’re Noel’s daughter. You work at the Reiver’s Rest,” said Jean. The girl no doubt cleaned up nicely and didn’t leave black fingerprints on the linen and tea cups.
“A couple hours a day, aye,” Zoe said.
“Well then,” said Alasdair, “as a local lass you’re knowing the castle’s closed just now.”
“We was having us a look at where that old bloke bought it—” Derek began.
Zoe jabbed him with her elbow, still without removing her hands from her jacket pockets.
“Where Mr. Wallace Rutherford died? The place has been locked up, hasn’t it? No one giving tours ’til muggins here arrived.” Alasdair wasn’t any taller than the couple, but he had mastered the feline ploy of making himself look bigger, and the kids bowed in front of him like miscreants before the bench. After a long pause for effect, he turned toward the door. “Come along now. Hop it.”
Derek and Zoe started off across the floor at a fast clip, their boots thudding, then caught themselves and slowed to a devil-may-care saunter behind Alasdair’s marching pace. Smiling with something between amusement and sympathy—she’d been that young, once, and that desperate for a persona—Jean brought up the rear and even remembered to turn out the light.
But when she walked into the Laigh Hall she frowned, confused. The front door should have been on her right, not on her left. Maybe the rooms and passages had shifted around after they passed and even now waited, just outside the corners of her eyes, poised to slip sideways . . . No. Alasdair had merely led Jean and the teenagers down a second staircase.
Now Zoe and Derek were craning eagerly as Alasdair bent over a patch of stone flags in the deeply shadowed corner of the room next to the entrance. He grasped a metal ring the circumference of a dinner plate and pulled.
The wooden planks of a trap door swung upwards with a tooth-scouring screech. Alasdair laid it down gently. “There you are. The death chamber. It’s closed to the public. But you know all about it, don’t you now, Zoe?”
“Aye,” the girl admitted, while Derek leaned precariously over to peer into the depths.
Alasdair reached out, plucked the boy back from the brink, and set him down a pace or two away. His gaze never left Zoe’s face. “Mr. Rutherford showed you round the place, did he?”
“Every year the school has a day out here. Not the water park, no. This old place. And there’s Wally, handing out leaflets, selling sweeties, telling the same old, same old stories. The healing well. The lairds buried in their armor. The Gray Lady, Isabel’s ghost.”
“Lies, the lot of them,” Derek muttered.
“Lies?” repeated Jean. “Stories aren’t necessarily lies. Of course, they’re not necessarily the truth, either.”
Rolling his eyes, the boy assumed a pose obviously meant to be nonchalant but that ended up simply sloppy.
“Mr. Rutherford,” Alasdair enunciated. “Your folk knew him, didn’t they, Zoe?”
The black fabric covering Zoe’s pockets writhed. She must be clenching and unclenching her hands. “He’d come drinking at the pub. And my granny and my mum, they’d bring him hot meals and stay for a blether, with him living on his own and all.”
“He wasn’t so much on his own. Your grandparents, the Elliots, live just across the road.”
“What of it? My grandad, he said Wally was a nutter and spying on him. Said he expected Granny to look after him as well as doing her own work. And then he said he killed her.”
Derek had apparently heard all this before—he didn’t react. Jean, though, repeated, “Killed her?”
“Your grandfather said Wallace killed your granny?” Alasdair established. “What happened?”
“They found her lying in the road, dead, not three weeks since.”
“Was she hit by a car?”
“Not a mark on her. Heart gave out. My grandad’s saying she was always rushing to and fro, dancing attendance on Wally. So down she went, all alone, with no one to help her, and she died.”
Alasdair glanced at Jean, who could only cock her eyebrows back at him. No, Ferniebank didn’t seem to be a particularly healthy place for the elderly. These things come in threes. “That’s stretching it a bit, then,” he told Zoe, “to be saying Wallace killed her.”
The girl shrugged. Derek gazed raptly at his boots.
“What’s this about Wallace spying?” Alasdair prodded.
“He kept a telescope atop the tower. Star-gazing and train-spotting and naff goings-on, such like.”
“Astronomy has to be a frustrating hobby in this climate,” commented Jean.
“Was Wallace spying, then?” Alasdair asked.
Zoe shrugged again. “Might have been, though there’s nothing worth spying on in a dump such as Stanelaw, let alone Ferniebank Farm.”
“The arsehole of creation,” added Derek.
“It’s dead boring, but it’s all we’ve got, save the pub,” Zoe told him tartly.
“No accounting for
tastes.” Jean strolled over to the trap door and looked down. She saw nothing but a modern metal ladder, its upper rails bolted to the sides of the hole, plunging into subterranean darkness. Again she coughed. But this time the tickle in her chest was quite literal. The musty miasma was emanating from the dungeon. Or, more properly, from the pit prison. A luckless offender—and offense was easy, in the Middle Ages—would be dumped into the underground chamber and left to reflect on his sins and/or rot while the business of daily life went on above him. He or she would have been able to hear voices and music, and smell the food cooking in the kitchen. Now there was highly refined torture.
Alasdair’s hand holding the flashlight appeared in Jean’s peripheral vision. “Thanks.” She took the heavy metal cylinder and flicked the switch.
The tiny chamber below her leaped into definition. She saw no ineradicable bloodstain, like that supposedly marking a sixteenth-century murder in Mary Stuart’s apartments in Holyrood Palace. No, the dungeon floor consisted of prosaic gray dirt, broken by humps of living rock and imprinted with the ribbed bootprints of the team that had rescued not Wallace, but his body. The walls were the foundations of the keep, stones of all shapes and subtle gradations of gray piled one upon the other. Two rough steps led up to the rim of a small pit within the larger one—the prisoner’s privy. In the opposite corner something glinted in the light, a glass disk, it looked like, and beside that winked an almost microscopic gold dot. Neither had been there long enough to gather much dust.
From her height, Jean couldn’t estimate size. Was she seeing the lens and nosepiece from a pair of old-fashioned round eyeglasses? Or was the glass the pane protecting the bulb of a flashlight? Although, manifestly, not the flashlight she was holding, which was a shiny new one. As for the gold, small as a punctuation mark, well, it was probably part of a candy wrapper. She sure wasn’t going to climb down and investigate.
Imagining an electric torch dropping from Wallace Rutherford’s ill, shaking hand, she stepped back from the edge and switched off the light. Alasdair didn’t need any more lamps for his third-degree.
He was still gazing, po-faced on purpose, at Zoe. “Why were you sneaking about the place in the dark? It’s been open all day. I’d have let you in without paying.”
Through his guise of utter boredom, Derek insisted, “We was after seeing where the old bloke died is all. No harm in that.”
“Just having ourselves a giggle.” Zoe’s body language conveyed nervousness, not boredom.
Alasdair pounced. “Turn out your pockets, Zoe.”
Her hands stopped moving beneath the fabric. She stared. Derek’s not terribly square jaw dropped. “How did you know . . . ?”
“Derek,” Zoe hissed, a remarkable feat when his name had no sibilants in it. She yanked her hands from her jacket pockets and displayed an MP3 player, a penlight, some change, and a lipstick.
“And?” Alasdair asked, extending his hand.
Jerkily, resentfully, she pulled out what might have been a jumbo-sized flint flake and dropped it into Alasdair’s outstretched palm.
Jean stretched her neck to better see the piece of weathered stone roughly the size of a paperback book, carved with the letters “IC” and “J.” Years of freezing and heating could have caused the flake to slough off of a larger piece. Or it could have been hacked off. “Where did you find this?” she asked.
“Upstairs. On a windowsill. On show, like.” Jean could see something of Zoe’s father in the curves of her face, but her gaze through the thorns of her eyelashes, first at Jean, than back to Alasdair, held nothing of Noel’s affability.
“Give that answer another go,” said Alasdair, his voice whetted and drawn a handsbreadth from its scabbard. “Where did you find this?”
In other words, Jean told herself, that stone had not been part of any windowsill displays when Alasdair did his tour of inspection this afternoon.
Zoe’s crimson lower lip extended even further, making a shelf. “In Isabel’s room. The Gray Lady’s chamber. Lying on the floor. Derek trod on it.”
“Eh? What?” blurted Derek.
Zoe, obviously the brains of the operation, elbowed him again.
“And just when did you find it?” Alasdair asked.
A silence so long Jean could have counted each of the quartet of breaths, Alasdair’s the slowest, Zoe’s the fastest. Then Zoe said with a sigh, “Ten days since. The day Wally died.”
“Were you here with a school group that day?”
“No. I was here on my own.”
“You was with me,” Derek snorted.
Zoe’s dagger-like glance indicated that with him around, she might just as well be alone.
“And now you’re bringing the stone back,” Alasdair said.
“It’s bad luck, isn’t it?” exclaimed Zoe. “The oven at the pub packed up, and my mum sliced open her hand working for Flinty Minty, and my sister Shan’s failed her exams. And Old Wally, Soor Ploom Logan found him dead there, in the dungeon. The exact same day.”
“I see.” Alasdair’s tone indicated that he did indeed see something, if not the aptness of Zoe referring to Constable Logan as a sour plum or Minty Rutherford as flinty.
“None of that happened because you took the stone,” Jean told the girl. “It was right to bring it back, but not because it’s bad luck.”
Zoe didn’t react. Neither did Alasdair. Since at the moment he was the brains of their operation, Jean said nothing more.
Derek abandoned nonchalance for impatient little jiggles. He probably felt he should intervene to protect the girl, but didn’t dare. Status emergency in progress. As soon as Alasdair let them go, Derek would find someone younger or smaller to start a fight with, maybe even Zoe herself.
“What made you decide that this was bad luck, then?” asked Alasdair.
Again the girl looked around for an escape, but saw none. “It was the Macquarrie woman, wasn’t it? Poncing in here, everyone bowing and scraping like she was the Queen herself, and her going on about ghosts and fairies and secret codes. She’s not half loony.”
Alasdair did not disagree.
“She says it’s a bit of gravestone, it should be put back where it came from.”
“In the castle? Not in the chapel?” Alasdair, by now encased in his full professional suit of armor, stared down at the miscreant and her guilty-by-association confederate. If it were anyone else, Jean thought, she’d swear he was enjoying making them squirm.
“I found it in the castle,” Zoe stated.
“And you nicked it the day P.C. Logan found Mr. Rutherford dead? What time, exactly?”
“How should I know that? Before tea-time.” By now Zoe had shrunk so far down into her jacket she looked like a turtle.
Tea-time being a flexible concept, Jean assumed that the stone had left the building mid- to late afternoon. But Wallace wasn’t found until after closing time, seven-thirty this time of year.
“Were there many visitors that day?” Alasdair asked.
“I wasn’t keeping count, was I? You’d best be checking your own records for that.”
Touché, Jean thought.
Alasdair registered no amusement. “Did you see anyone else here?”
“A bus tour. The Mystic Scotland woman, Macquarrie. She was hanging about the chapel whilst Wally lectured her group here.”
“Yeh,” added Derek. “And one gent was right upset with Wally, ticking him off good and proper, and Wally giving as good as he got.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “They were just having a bit of a chin-wag, is all.”
“I know an argy-bargy when I hear one,” Derek retorted. “Heard enough of them when we was living with my dad, didn’t I?”
“You heard a man arguing with Wallace,” established Alasdair.
“Yeh,” said Derek. “After the day trippers moved on.”
“No,” Zoe said at the same time, loudly.
“Do you know who it was? Was it Roddy?”
Derek looked even blanker.
Zoe’s red lips thinned. “It was never my grandad, no.”
Upstairs something tapped and then stopped. Now that was a branch against a window, Jean told herself. Wasn’t it?
Alasdair waited, but both the ashen faces in front of him had closed down, locked up, and put out Do Not Disturb signs. At last he drew the hearing to a close, handing Zoe back her things but keeping the bit of carved stone. “Very well, then. Away with you, the pair of you. And mind your manners in the future.” He was smart enough not to add, “And don’t let me catch you here again”. That would have been throwing down the gauntlet.
Liberated, the kids jogged briskly across the Laigh Hall and out the entrance into the cool, fresh air. Alasdair and Jean less herded than followed them, and stood on the steps watching as they crunched off across the courtyard. Their shadows made amorphous blobs in the light of the yard lamp and an oval moon, rising luridly in the east.
It was dangerous for them to walk along the narrow road in such dark clothes, Jean thought. “Do you need a ride back into Stanelaw, Zoe? Derek?”
Zoe said, “No, I’m stopping with my grandad across the road.”
“We’ve got a house just up the way. Nice and quiet, Mum says. Dead dull.” Derek’s left hand fluttered toward the south, past Ferniebank’s entrance gate.
After a few more steps, Zoe called back, incongruously, “Ta, madam.” And the two figures diminished and disappeared out the gate and into the night
Chapter Eight
A dog started barking, Roddy’s gruff voice bellowed, and a door slammed. Jean hoped Derek wasn’t going on his way with Jackie or Hector clamped onto his coattail.
She looked around to see Alasdair standing so still and silent frost might just as well have gathered on his jaw and cheekbones. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think about Zoe’s story?”
“What were you after doing there?” he demanded, so unexpectedly she flinched. “Playing good cop to my bad cop, were you?”
“What? You’re not a bad cop.” Oh, she thought. Damn. “Did you think I was butting in?”
“If I did do, it’d be too late to say so now.”
The Burning Glass Page 7