The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  She made tea, and stood at the window letting the mildly scented steam soothe the tight tendons in her face. Then she sipped. Each droplet of liquid caramel fell like lead shot into the pit of her stomach. She flexed and loosed her fingers on the cup. She was alive. Angus was not. Wallace was not. Helen was not.

  Isabel Sinclair was not.

  A second set of headlights splashed the courtyard. Two policemen scrambled out and disappeared down the path into the thickening mist. They were from Kelso or even Hawick, probably. It would take a while longer for the full official cascade from Edinburgh HQ to wash over Ferniebank.

  She couldn’t see the lights in the chapel. She could lean out one of the larger windows. She could step outside. Or she could stay put, as ordered . . . There. A dark blur in the glistening gray tunnel beneath the trees resolved itself into Alasdair’s compressed form. Jean unlocked the door and let him in.

  He stood hunched as though waiting for a blow to the solar plexus, downcast face scoured with grief, anger, knowledge that this, too, had happened on his watch. Wordlessly she gathered Alasdair, her lover, her significant other, her other half, into an embrace.

  This time he did not resist. His arms came up and wrapped her waist, and pulled her so tightly into the chill aura gathered in his clothing that she had to suppress a squeak. His sweater warmed beneath her breast and hands, and his cheek, prickly with whiskers and frost, warmed against her forehead, but the sinews of his body remained taut as bowstrings.

  At last his grip loosened and a deep breath shuddered down into his chest. “Tea?”

  “Tea.” Releasing him, she filled a cup, doctored it, and pressed it into his hands.

  He managed to force the rim of the cup between his stiff upper lip and his rigid lower lip and downed the restorative in one thirsty gulp. The fault lines in his face eased, microscopically.

  Hating herself for opening yet another one, Jean asked, “Did you move the drawing that was lying on top of the bookcase? The one of the dig?”

  Alasdair swivelled toward the shelves. “No. It’s gone, is it?”

  “Yes.” Jean couldn’t stop herself from glancing over her shoulder toward the door. “I didn’t notice whether it was there this afternoon. Sorry. We left the door unlocked when we ran down to the chapel, but it could only have been for a few minutes.”

  “I sent Logan in to view the drawing of the inscription and the remaining chipping, and the drawing of the dig was there as well. . . . Bloody hell!” Handing the cup in Jean’s general direction, he darted toward the bookcase and frisked it. “Aye, the inscription drawing’s gone as well.”

  “But Logan’s one of the good guys!”

  “Muggins here assumed he was, and so turned his back.”

  “Alasdair . . .”

  The phone bleeped. Alasdair grabbed the receiver off the desk. “Ferniebank.” He cleared his throat. “Aye, Mr. Elliot, we’re having a spot of bother here—no, no need for you to—a car driving away at speed?” He cast a sharp blue glance at Jean. “I’ll have a constable stop by. Thank you kindly.”

  “Someone driving away? From where? When?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough. Ah.” Alasdair threw the door open.

  Jean watched between the curtains while he intercepted a Hawick constable returning to his car. The man’s sharp features working impatiently, he jotted down a note and then pointed toward the flat. Alasdair straightened, indignation written in the angle of his chin, but obviously chose discretion over presenting his resume. He stalked back inside and shut the door very quietly, a sign Jean recognized all too well. “He said thanks and now go away, huh?”

  “Oh aye. Just as he said down by the chapel. Officious young pup!” Another car entered the courtyard. Alasdair leaped for the window again. “Hm. A suit, not a uniform, this time round. Hawick’s resident D.C., I reckon.”

  Lothian and Borders would handle the situation as competently as the Northern Constabulary, Alasdair or no Alasdair. Leaving him braced against the windowsill, Jean retreated into the bedroom with her bag. It was past ten-thirty, too late to call Michael and Rebecca. Let them have a night’s rest before it all hit the fan. But Miranda, now . . . Again she punched in Miranda’s number.

  “Good job, Jean,” said her partner’s smoky voice. “You’ve caught me between acts, catching a whiff of oxygen in the great outdoors.”

  “Here we go again, Miranda.”

  “Please tell me you’re not telling me what I’m thinking you’re telling me.”

  “I’m telling you that there’s been a murder. Another one. We’ve suspected all along that two deaths here earlier this month were, well, assisted in some way—and even now I suppose the man could’ve keeled over on his own, except someone was there with him when he did . . .”

  “Jean, you’re breaking up. And I don’t mean your mobile.”

  “Sorry.” She sat down on the bed and bounced gently, making the bedposts pat the wall. “We saw Angus Rutherford with Ciara earlier today. He’s not missing anymore. What he is, is dead. We just found his body lying half in the well at the chapel.”

  “Ah,” said Miranda, her voice trailing away. “And here’s me, thinking that Ciara’s previous engagement, as per your message, was hair-raising news.”

  “So was someone stealing the inscription. And . . .” Jean carried on about Wallace and sacred geometry and secret messages smuggled in harps, Helen and sheep dogs and Flinty Minty now bereaved, Zoe, Polly, Derek, Valerie, and the ghost, while Miranda made understanding murmurs. Finally she reached a full stop.

  “How’s Alasdair getting on?” Miranda asked.

  “How do you think?”

  “Well then.”

  “I know.” Neither of them had to spell it out. It might not just be Alasdair’s job and Jean’s assignment that collapsed under the press of circumstances. Making love with twenty drill teams whooping it up outside the window seemed like a piece of cake in comparison.

  “So why then,” said Miranda, “are you talking to me and not to him?”

  Because I’m afraid. Of what, Jean wasn’t sure. Whether he would reject her? Or whether he wouldn’t? He might interpret her caring as smothering. She might interpret his self-sufficiency as callousness. In many ways, just managing was a lot easier. . . . The relationship was not the priority.

  “Jean? Duncan’s telling me the second act’s begun. Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  “Then ring me the morn. We’re having a wee dram with one of Ciara’s investors after the show.”

  Right now Jean didn’t give a rat’s ass about Ciara and her financial accomplishments. But she would tomorrow. “Thanks.”

  “You and Alasdair, have a care.”

  “We’re not in dang—” Who had just been searching the apartment for an intruder? “Thanks,” Jean said again, and switched off the phone.

  For what seemed an hour she sat, curved like the clarsach, feeling as though a cold, lead-lined shawl was draped around her shoulders. Alasdair’s voice echoed from the living room, rough and low, reporting the situation to P and S. Confessing his sins, with no hope of absolution, not yet.

  She was also hearing ghostly steps from above. What do you have to do with this, Isabel Sinclair? Did you put something into motion all those years ago? Is that why you’re still running away in terror? And what about you, Wallace? Did you stir something up? Or is Alasdair right, and it’s Ciara’s fault?

  The unearthly steps became fainter and fainter and died away. Alasdair’s voice stopped but his footsteps continued. Those steps did not leave Jean heavy, chilled, and dull. She sat up, hearing her own limbs creaking, then stood up and stretched.

  He’d returned her embrace without hesitation. He’d asked her for tea. They’d agreed to try a relationship, and while no one had actually uttered the words “for better or for worse,” surely they were implicit. Hiding under the couch with Dougie was cheating.

  Jean walked into the living room. Alasda
ir looked around. His expression wavered, like bedrock seen through running water, then solidified again. “Giving Miranda the scoop, were you?”

  “Great Scot isn’t a tabloid, I wasn’t . . . Oh. Sorry.”

  He turned back to the window. “Never mind.”

  If he’d wanted to talk, to speculate, she’d have talked. He didn’t. If he had, she’d have thought the apocalypse was near.

  She sat at the kitchen table and tried to read the tea leaves in the bottom of her cold cup, but unless her future involved wet mulch, she had no clue. Alasdair prowled from the window to the right of the door to the window to the left of the door and back again. Outside, the mist thickened, so that moisture dripped from the eaves onto the courtyard, the repetitive plink-plink echoing the tick of the clock as it inched past midnight. Water torture. Time dilation. Relativity in action.

  The room grew colder as Jean’s adrenaline ebbed into chill. She was about to switch on the electric fire when another car arrived, and a second behind it, and then a third. Like flashbulbs, the headlights bleached Alasdair’s stern face, then were gone. “At long bloody last!” he exclaimed. Outside, doors slammed. Voices spoke in curt phrases. The gravel fractured beneath multiple feet.

  “It takes a lot longer from this side of the crime scene,” Jean said.

  “So it seems,” replied Alasdair.

  Jean claimed a place at the other window and watched human figures in their reflective coats vanish into and appear out of the mist while lights danced on the dim strands that were the tree branches and on the density that was the perimeter wall.

  Alasdair provided technical commentary—the scene of crimes officer, the medical examiner, all the omnium gatherum of officialdom. “Ah, that’s Gary Delaney. He’s been down to view the body.”

  “You know Delaney already?”

  “We’ve met.” The acid tone of his voice did not bode well, as though anything here did. Valerie might have a point about the place being cursed. Once again Jean cast her gaze upwards, but the shadows on the other side of the wall did not speak.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Alasdair wrenched the door open, admitting a chill, gasoline-tinged breath into the flat. He catapulted himself down the steps, only to be intercepted by the Hawick constable, who was unaware he was risking dismemberment. This time Alasdair batted the man aside as he would bat away a midge and strode over to two men in conversation by the path. Their bodies were silhouetted against a nebulous glow rising from behind the trees. Jean knew that was the luminescence of floodlights set up at the chapel, but she couldn’t help but feel aliens had landed.

  Jean watched Alasdair shake hands with a heavyset figure, then with a slender one taller than them both. Strain as she might, she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Their body language, rigidly formal, told her nothing, although she found it encouraging when Delaney gave the Hawick constable, who had tailed Alasdair across the yard, a down-boy signal.

  And here they came, shedding their fluorescent jackets. Jean stepped back from the doorway. Alasdair ushered the two men inside and shut the door. “Inspector Delaney and Sergeant Kallinikos, my—ah—er, Jean Fairbairn.”

  “Hello,” Jean said.

  “Good evening. Morning. Whatever in hell it is.” Delaney briefly grasped her cold fingertips in his damp hand. With his tie loose and askew and his glasses riding down his protuberance of a nose, he looked more like a rumpled and rotund academic than a police detective. But while Delaney’s gaze might be half-obscured by eyebrows like wooly caterpillars, ones that had crawled out of a sagging shock of dark hair streaked with gray, it was a gaze as shrewd as any she’d ever encountered. Alasdair’s “ah-er” hadn’t fooled him one bit, but then, why should it? Here she was and here he was, shacked up together.

  The sergeant, now. Oh my. The tea leaves should have foretold meeting a tall, dark, handsome stranger. With a sprinkling of stone dust, the man could have walked into the British Museum and assumed a pose among the Elgin Marbles. Neither his plain dark suit nor the severe trim of his black hair could conceal the classical perfection of his face and body, marred only—to Jean’s hypersensitive eye—by soft, rounded lips.

  “How do you do,” Kallinikos said. The gaze of his dark eyes glanced off Jean’s rather than meeting it, and darted around the room. His handshake was a quick catch and release. In one long graceful step he was standing by the desk, a notebook and pen in his hand.

  “Well then,” said Alasdair to Delaney. “P.C. Logan’s identified the victim, and—”

  “You’re telling me Rutherford was here this morning? Recognized him, did you?”

  “No. We’d never met. Jean here recognized him from his photos.”

  “Got that good a look at him, did you?” Delaney asked Jean.

  “Well, yes.”

  “You’ve got a good eye to link the man with his photo.”

  “He had a distinctive appearance,” Jean said, although she knew as well as any cop the unreliability of eyewitnesses.

  Kallinikos used the end of his pen to flip the top off the cardboard box.

  “Who else saw him, then?” asked Delaney.

  “Everyone on the mini-bus. He was having, well, words, with Ciara Macquarrie, the tour director.”

  Delaney targeted Alasdair again. “This Macquarrie, she’s your ex-wife, is she?”

  “Aye, that she is,” Alasdair answered without elaboration.

  So Delaney already knew about Ciara, Jean thought, either from Logan or from his previous—meeting? professional relationship?—with Alasdair.

  Soundlessly, Kallinikos opened Ciara’s folder and paged through the papers.

  “And now you’re working for Protect and Survive?”

  “That I am. Chief of security.”

  “And here’s me thinking you were on the fast track, superintendent before the age of fifty, eh? But no. The laurels, they got too heavy, I reckon.”

  Thumbscrews would not have gotten an expression out of Alasdair now. Jean swayed toward him, but he didn’t need her to step protectively closer.

  He’d introduced Delaney as “inspector,” not “chief inspector,” his own former rank. The rank he’d held for less than two years, after he’d been promoted for honesty and courage up to, if not beyond, the call of duty. For arresting his own partner for corruption. Another reward like that and he’d have gnawed off his own foot to escape.

  Alasdair’s reputation had indeed preceded him, as Noel Brimberry pointed out. But Alasdair wasn’t the issue. Jean redirected the agenda. “How did Angus die?”

  “Not a mark on him, is there?” Alasdair added quickly.

  “Not a one. He was not forcibly drowned, or so it seems just now. The M.E.’s muttering in his beard about heart attacks. That might have killed him. He might have fallen unconscious into the water and then drowned. If so, the postmortem will find water in his lungs.”

  “Someone was there with him,” stated Alasdair.

  “Because you saw the light of the torch moving about, you’re saying?”

  Jean caught the emphasis on “you’re saying.” And Delaney had hinted it wasn’t Angus she’d seen this morning at all. Crap.

  Alasdair squared both his shoulders and his jaw, catching the same implication. Guilty until proved innocent, if not of criminal behavior, then of slipshod testimony. Been there, done that, Jean thought wearily. Except this time Alasdair was in the dock beside her.

  Kallinikos, head tilted to the side, used his pen to probe inside Alasdair’s P and S envelope. She and Alasdair were getting a similar probe. Maybe if she tried to act more like a gracious hostess than a frazzled witness, let alone a suspect . . . “Please, sit down.”

  “Thank you kindly. A cup of tea would be lovely,” said Delaney.

  Okay. Jean started toward the kitchen.

  Delaney went on, “Sit yourself on the sofa, Cameron,” stumped over to Dougie’s chair, and dropped down onto the furry blanket before Jean could warn him away. Not that his suit wasn�
�t already dusted with lint and crumbs.

  She looked at Kallinikos. He could speak. He’d said four whole words earlier. But now he strolled to the bookshelf and inspected the inscribed stone chip without comment, leaving Jean to deduce he’d like a cup of tea, too. Sending the woman to make tea was a way to divide and conquer the witnesses, although if Delaney had really felt the need to interview her and Alasdair separately, he’d have taken one of them outside. Suspecting them was a necessary formality. Fair enough. As she’d learned when Alasdair was facing her rather than standing beside her, the more you cooperated, the faster the ordeal was over, like getting that root canal.

  Mouth crimped into a tight line—so this was how the other half lived—Alasdair sat down on the sofa. Dougie squirted out the far end and made for the bedroom, paws pattering.

  “What was that, a giant rat?” Delaney demanded.

  Kallinikos said without looking around, “Cat. Domestic short hair. Gray with yellow eyes.”

  Jean put the kettle on. Food might lower the nervous tension meter. She found a package of crumpets in the bread box, and split and buttered them as quietly as she could, her ears rotated backwards.

  Delaney asked, “What’s all this about other suspicious deaths?”

  “Helen Elliot, who lived at Ferniebank Farm across the road, was found dead without a mark on her,” Alasdair replied. “The inquest ruled heart disease. Then Wallace Rutherford, the caretaker here at the castle, was found dead without a mark on him. The inquest ruled heart disease. And now Angus Rutherford. Three similar deaths in three weeks. It’s getting a bit repetitive, isn’t it now?”

  “Were any of these people suffering from heart disease?” Kallinikos sat down in the desk chair and applied pen to notebook.

  “So I’m hearing, for Helen and Wallace, at the least,” Alasdair answered.

  “Their hearts stopped and they died,” said Delaney. “Seems simple enough.”

  “Everyone dies when their heart stops. It’s why the heart stops, that’s the question.”