The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The flat was filled with the homey fragrance of chicken soup. Alasdair sniffed the air.

  “I fixed dinner,” Jean explained.

  “You fixed it? It was broken, then?” He set the box on the desk and pulled off the lid, revealing a smudged glass disc and a gold blot resting on a bed of tissue paper.

  “Those are the things from the dungeon floor. You climbed down there? All alone?”

  “You’d not be fitting a backup team into that small a space,” he replied, and, as she picked up the disc to look at it more closely, “I’d have collected this lot in any event, but now, with everything falling apart in my hands . . .”

  “Things were falling apart before you got here,” Jean told him, not that anything she could say would convince him. She raised the glass and peered through it at the clock, only to recoil at the distorted smear. “I thought this was the lens from a flashlight, but it’s not.”

  “It’s the magnifying lens from Wallace’s telescope,” said Alasdair. “It fits the one in the lumber room a treat. He was using it as a magnifying glass, I reckon.”

  “Looking at what? What attracted him down that ladder, knees and all? Something more than general curiosity, surely.”

  “One more fine, mystifying question. What do you make of this?” He pressed his forefinger onto the bit of gold and held it up.

  Jean took his cool, dry hand and steadied it before her face so she could focus on the dot. Except it wasn’t a dot. It was a lilliputian gold star. Something very small, but packing quite a punch, exploded in the pit of her stomach. “Good God. That’s from Ciara’s earrings. You remember, she was wearing them yesterday. They sounded like Santa Claus and his eight tiny reindeer. I got a good look at them this afternoon—they’re cascades of little gold stars.”

  His hand went icy. He pulled it away, replaced the star on its tissue bed, and covered the box.

  “Alasdair, she owns the place, she’s been living in Minty’s guest cottage all month, she’s in and out all the time—heck, she and Wallace were working together, he drew the map in her press kit.” She was babbling. She didn’t need to defend Ciara, even though they were, in a way, sisters in arms. Sisters in Alasdair’s arms.

  He shook his head, whether rejecting her words or his reaction to them she wasn’t going to try and guess. “Ciara came here and things began happening. Starting with one of Roddy’s dogs, likely poisoned, he was saying. Then Helen, Wallace, the clarsach, the inscription.”

  “Speaking of the clarsach, Hugh called this afternoon. Thanks to Minty, his friend Dominic got it to the museum in Edinburgh, where it’s under repair. Turns out it’s got a hidden compartment with a scrap of paper inside that looks like a message from the sixteenth century. They’ll need some techie hocus pocus to get it unstuck and out of the hole, though.”

  “Sixteenth-century cloak-and-dagger, eh? Isabel as a secret agent? Not the first time a lady-in-waiting’s been used in a royal plot.”

  “Hugh jokes about arming people with musical instruments, but I never thought he meant it literally. I’ve got Michael on the case.”

  “The case,” Alasdair repeated. “Delaney had a report on Angus Rutherford as well. The man was seen at a pawn shop in Peterborough on the Thursday. I told Gary we’d seen him here, but Angus is still on his missing-persons list. If it was him with Ciara this morning, he’s not yet found his way home.”

  “He hasn’t yet found his way back to Minty, at least. It sounds like he stays gone until his money runs out and he has to pawn something. It’s an odd relationship, but . . . Well, here, take a look at this while I get the food on the table. I think I’ve figured out what Wallace was using his telescope for—plotting occult sites. Maybe he was doing something with the arrangement of the Border abbeys or prehistoric henges, but God only knows what, and He’s not telling. ” She handed Alasdair the folder and headed for the kitchen. She might not have much appetite, but he had the lean and hungry look of someone who’d been thinking too much.

  Jean made sure Dougie had kibble and water, then opened a box of crackers and dished out the soup. “By the way, I bet that stone in the chapel with the name Henricus is a memorial to Prince Henry Sinclair the Navigator. The one who might have sailed to America a century before Columbus. It’s possible. The Vikings sailed back and forth and Henry lived in Denmark for a while and actually held Orkney from Norway, not Scotland.”

  Alasdair’s gaze rolled from the map to the ceiling. “Oh well now, that explains everything.”

  “All the fringe history, legends, stories, might explain something. One shape on that map is labeled ‘The Harp.’ Like the Ferniebank Clarsach, nudge nudge, wink wink? The one piece of Isabel’s inscription that disappeared before the dig and renovation was the harp.”

  “How long’s this madness been going on, then?” He jammed the papers back into the folder and pitched it onto the desk, where it landed on Jean’s laptop.

  “Since Gerald Rutherford? Since Isabel? Since William Sinclair and the Templars?” When he didn’t answer she said, “Soup’s on. Come and get it.”

  He sat down and gazed as somberly into his bowl as though he were an oracle looking for omens among the celery slices and noodles.

  Jean tried a simple yes-or-no question. “Have you heard from Logan about Derek?”

  “No.”

  She could almost hear him thinking, No one’s reporting to me any more. She couldn’t offer him any comfort, so she offered him crackers. Food. Sublimation.

  He said, “Come the morn, I’m looking about for a postern gate.”

  “A way of getting in that doesn’t involve the gate and the gravel? I’ll help, if I can.”

  “You can do, aye.” He spooned up a bite of the soup.

  It was okay. Not up to Minty’s standards, presumably, but okay. Jean toyed with her portion and recapped the luncheon—Shan, Valerie, Ciara, Minty’s recipes—as much for its amusement value as for any possible clues, while Alasdair ate with what even for him was less than good appetite.

  “Valerie Trotter,” he repeated. “Hackit woman with a head of short, bleached hair?”

  “Worn-looking, you mean? That’s her. Did you talk to her? What did she want?”

  “She was asking me whether P and S would be working security for Ciara, whether we were planning any more digging before the handover, whether we were closing off the dungeon, considering what happened to Wallace. No, no, and no was all I could answer.”

  “She’s listed in the book as a member of the dig team back in the nineties. I guess she’s still interested. Although she could have asked Ciara herself—she stopped and said a couple of words to her outside Minty’s house, before our haggis extravaganza lunch.”

  Alasdair placed his spoon in his bowl and touched his napkin to his lips. “Haggis.”

  “The food wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Neither was Ciara, to be honest.”

  “Sounds like she was rabbiting on as usual. Worse than usual, if that folder’s to be believed.”

  “She isn’t letting the lack of facts stand in the way of a good story, but who ever does? So she’s leaped onto the secret-history bandwagon. She’s still got a feel for the heritage business.”

  An oscillation of his brows conceded that, if reluctantly.

  They stood side by side, washing and drying the dishes. By the time Jean spread the dishtowel on its rack, the night had fallen so silent she fancied she could hear Roddy’s cows chewing their cuds. . . . No. All she heard was the tick tock of the clock, an almost subliminal noise compared to the resonant clink chonk of Minty’s grandfather clock, like stones thrown down a well.

  And then footsteps walked overhead. Jean bowed over the kitchen cabinet, gelid unease oozing down her spine. Alasdair stood stock-still in the center of the living room, grimacing in something that wasn’t quite dyspepsia. Even Dougie sat up and sniffed the air, as though he could smell something the humans could not, and the fur on his back rose into a serrated edge.

  “So doe
s the ghost walk down from the castle to the chapel? That’s in the brochure, but . . .” Jean didn’t have to describe what she was feeling to Alasdair.

  Stiffly, he pulled the massive flashlight from its holder. “Let’s have a look.”

  She got a sweater from the bedroom, then stepped out onto the porch at Alasdair’s side. Beyond the eerie luminescence of the yard light, the night was dark and thick. Wisps of mist curled up from the river and gathered among the trees. The castle facade was a featureless cliff, sepia-toned, like an old photograph—no, there again was that hint of a warm gleam in Isabel’s window. But tonight the clouds were too low and dark to reflect the glow of city lights.

  Alasdair switched on the flashlight and swung its beam around the courtyard, casting the old stones of the wall into harsh relief, and then focused it on the path into the trees. Several gnarled trunks sprang into definition. The shadows between them were all the darker . . . No, there was a movement—Jean tensed—it was the light glistening on a tendril of mist.

  The uncanny was here, not there. That all-too-familiar paranormal burden pressed down on Jean’s shoulders. Ice prickled along her neck. Alasdair set his hand in the small of her back, fingers spread, the one warm spot on her body. She set her hand on his arm, hard as steel. He switched off the flashlight.

  A dim shape was forming near the path, a slanting blur of luminescence, faint and pale, but with a human figure inside it . . . There. The body solidified. Jean either saw or sensed—or both—not a shroud but long skirts held in clenched hands, a stiff bodice, a starched ruff, a feathered cap, a small face looking back, grimacing so intently with—fear? determination?—that the teeth flashed between stretched lips and the eyes, nodes of darkness, focused far, far beyond the surrounding walls.

  The ghost crossed the courtyard swiftly but in utter silence, trailing skirts fluttering, slippers rising and falling several inches above the gravel, making a mad, headlong dash for the entrance of the castle. Distantly, echoing through the deeps of time, a door slammed, and all was still.

  Just as Jean started to exhale, she saw another light spring up, at the chapel, leaping and glinting like fire—reflecting off that plastic plaque—and her exhalation reversed into a gasp. “Do you see . . . ?”

  Taking her hand, Alasdair switched on the flashlight and pulled her forward onto the gravel.

  She staggered, shaking off the fourth-dimensional pressure field, and her feet crashed and crushed. Then she was with him, moving quickly if not quietly toward the path. Walter Scott’s words whirled through her mind, nebulous and fragmented as clouds before a storm: Seem’d all on fire that chapel proud, where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie, blazed battlement and pinnet high, so still they blaze, when fate is nigh, the lordly line of high St. Clair . . . What fate, she wondered, whose fate, here, now? Clasping Alasdair’s large, steadfast hand, she ran into the shadows beneath the trees and the mist trailed clammy kisses over her face.

  The light at the chapel dimmed and steadied. The light of Alasdair’s electric torch counted coup along the tree trunks, leaped triumphantly onto the terrace, and flashed among the stone-carved pinnacles, making the gargoyles dance.

  The holy well was glowing with a pale golden light. Inhale, Jean told herself. Exhale. And she whispered, “It’s not paranormal, it’s . . .”

  “A torch in the water,” Alasdair replied.

  They stepped forward over the uneven paving stones. Yes, a flashlight was shining up through the murky water of the well, casting a spectral glow on the human form sprawled along its brink, head and one arm and hand hanging into the water.

  Alasdair thrust his flashlight at Jean. She seized it with both hands, trying to hold it motionless, but the beam of light wobbled back and forth. Cold chills ran down her back and off her limbs. “Please tell me that’s not Ciara.”

  “It’s never Ciara,” said Alasdair. He crouched over the body, heaved it from the water, and rolled it over on the terrace.

  Big feet clad in heavy shoes. Long legs, a tweed jacket, a matching vest buttoned over the unmoving chest. A cloth cap lying crushed on the damp stone. A face turned upwards, glistening wet, mouth open beneath the shadow of a moustache, eyes flat, seeing nothing. A bloated face like the Queen of Faerie’s milk-white steed. A bleached face like Death’s pale horse.

  Alasdair’s voice was a whisper at the rim of hearing. “Angus Rutherford.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jean heard what he said. She saw Angus’s hollow face, drained of humanity. Her mind didn’t comprehend, but shriveled in denial. No no no.

  Gently Alasdair touched the blanched wet throat and tested the waggle of a limp hand. “He’s been dead for an hour.”

  No.

  Standing up, Alasdair reached into his pocket to produce both the keys and his cell phone. He held the former out to Jean and flipped open the latter. In the glow of its screen his complexion seemed almost green. “Unlock the gate.”

  Jean’s feet and legs responded even though her thoughts were caught in a loop, not here, not now, not again, no . . . She stumbled in slow motion up the path, the flashlight sending a bright beam leaping madly before her—tree, shrub, boulder, mist, pale and stark and then gone. Alasdair’s peremptory voice spoke behind her, small in the dark silence of the night, fading away by the time she reached the courtyard.

  Jean thudded across to the gate, tucked the flashlight beneath her arm and jabbed the key into the lock. Her fingers were so cold she could hardly turn it. The mechanism clanked. Grasping the icy iron bars, she threw her weight backwards to drag the gate open. The scream of the hinges rasped the enamel of her teeth. The grumble of a dove sounded from the battlements and then stilled.

  Now what? What could she do? Screaming wouldn’t help. Neither would banging her head against the harsh walls of Ferniebank.

  Illuminated by the lamp on the outbuilding, the courtyard looked surreal, severe as a moonscape. The splash of light from her electric torch was diffused and swallowed by the bulk of the castle. And yet that rosy gleam still lingered in Isabel’s window, rising, shifting, fading.

  She hadn’t walked with stately tread from the castle to the chapel. She’d run from the gate to the castle as though the hounds of hell were on her heels.

  The nape of Jean’s neck puckered and she pulled the sweater closer around her body. Inhale, she reminded herself, and tasted smoke. Roddy’s fire, not Isabel’s. A cozy fireplace at Ferniebank Farm, in the flat, at Glebe House, and empty chairs before them all.

  She and Alasdair had seen a light moving around the chapel. But Angus—Angus’s body—was cold. Cold as the grave. Someone else had been there. Someone must have seen his body sprawled half in and half out of the well. The healing well.

  Once again Jean imagined a flashlight dropping from a shaking hand, this one not ill but frightened. Or even culpable. Perhaps those hands had dragged Angus into the well to begin with, perhaps held him down in it until he drowned.

  She could barely see the watery glow, the ripple of submerged light, at the end of the tree-lined path. A will o’ the wisp, like she thought she’d seen there the night before. But her sixth sense had never been able to foresee the future.

  The light winked out and then shone again as Alasdair paced back and forth, keeping vigil over the crime scene. That was Alasdair’s body cutting off the glow, wasn’t it? It wasn’t the . . .witness, the person who’d dropped the flashlight . . . lurking in the trees, waiting to pounce. . . . Jean lunged toward the path, then twirled at the sound of a car, the roar of its engine loud as a jet plane’s. With a squeal of brakes, headlights burst suddenly through the gateway and gravel spattered.

  The lights went out, a blob in a yellow reflective coat hurtled from the car, the slam of the door ricocheted across the yard. Logan’s face seemed gray and sagging as dirty laundry.

  “He, they, they’re on the terrace by the chapel . . .” Jean began.

  “Into the flat with you. Lock your doors.” Logan swung his own ma
ssive flashlight toward the building in an arc so broad that Jean dodged. By the time she’d found her feet again he was pounding down the path, his light licking the trees, the mist tattered behind him.

  Why should anyone bother to say please? Or tolerate her presence? Switching off her flashlight, Jean plodded up the steps and into the flat, shut the door, and locked it.

  The room looked the same, furniture, dishes, the book on the coffee table, the inscribed stone on the shelf, Alasdair’s cardboard box and Ciara’s folder . . . How long’s this madness been going on, then?

  And Angus made three.

  Now, with events pushed from puzzle to chaos, something should have appeared different . . . Something did. Wallace’s drawing of the dig was no longer lying beside the stone. Had it been there this afternoon? She hadn’t noticed.

  They’d run down to the chapel without locking the door. How long had the place been open? Five minutes? Ten? What if that rattle she’d heard last night hadn’t been the wind catching at something loose. What if it had been someone trying the doorknob? Only if that someone had levitated over the gravel. Although someone apparently had, getting down to the chapel.

  For all she knew, all of Ferniebank was honeycombed with secret passages. Clutching her flashlight like a truncheon, Jean searched the apartment and found no one. Not even Dougie. But the panel over the spyhole was in place. She gave it a rap and then tensed, waiting for something to rap back from the other side. Nothing did.

  She kneeled down to look beneath the couch. A tip-tilted pair of amber eyes looked accusingly back at her. “If you had any room,” she told Dougie, “I’d be under there with you.”

  For an eon or two she sat on the floor beside the couch, her brain feeling like an amoeba, oozing from side to side of her skull. Then, slowly, she gathered her will. Time to put the kettle on. No matter what the crisis was, in this part of the world the remedy was as much the mundane act of brewing up as the resulting cup of tannic acid moderated by generous dollops of milk and sugar.