“Yeah, like your pride.”
His face frosted over, his gaze going from the blue of a sunlit sky to the blue of steel. “Right. I’ll be getting myself dressed. If you’re coming to town with me, you’ll be doing the same.” He walked off down the hall.
Oh for the love of . . . Jean shook her fist at the door, hoping the gesture would filter through to Delaney’s chubby chin, then with the same fist bopped herself on the forehead. What did she expect? Since when did Mars’s orbit ever intersect that of Venus?
They were tired. They were hungry. They were stressed. She should heat up the leftover soup and make sandwiches—great, defaulting to the traditional female role, that was really going to make a statement. Cursing under her breath, she poured the soup into a saucepan and laid out bread and cheese, then looked around first the living room and then the bedroom.
Nothing was out of place—she’d give O. Hawick that much. Dougie, though, was no longer occupying the center of the bed. She bent over to look beneath. Aha, the fierce watch-beast was hiding, looking like a bright-eyed dust kitten. “Good idea,” Jean told him, and straightened up.
Alasdair stood by the dresser, turning the inscribed flake of gravestone over and over in his hands. “I’ll have Logan open the museum,” he said, his voice so detached it was almost clinical. “This needs storing away with the other pieces.”
“Yes, Ciara agreed with that yesterday. Even though it might be safer here, considering the break-in,” Jean replied. Good, her voice was just as neutral. “Minty told me she’d taken Isabel’s burning-glass home with her, for just that reason.”
“The burning-glass is listed on the P and S inventory as belonging to Ferniebank.”
“You want to ask her about it right after her husband’s been murdered?”
“We don’t yet know that it’s murder.”
Jean bit back some retort about big issues at stake. Speaking of which . . . “Alasdair, Miranda learned something from one of Ciara’s investors.
“What’s that?” He opened the wardrobe, held up a tie, then hung it back up.
“She has a deal to write a book about all the secret history stuff, you know, Ferniebank as the next three-ring occult circus. That’s what got the last of the investors on board.”
He continued to stare at the tie, perhaps considering making it into a hangman’s noose. “Well then,” he said dully, “that’s right clever of her. By the by, we were standing about in the bracken whilst apprehending Derek. Check yourself for ticks.”
“Ew.” Jean shuddered. “Well, you got that one off me at Loch Ness.”
Not looking at her, let alone indulging in any reminiscences, Alasdair collected a business-casual outfit and headed toward the bathroom.
Jean waited a minute, but didn’t hear any bottles or brushes crash against the wall. Alasdair didn’t throw things. He’d be better off if every now and then he did.
She took his place at the wardrobe. Her laptop and the Ancient Monuments book were still semi-concealed in the bottom—she’d get to them eventually. Right now, she had to look respectable, for both police business and the interview. . . . Damn. How many other reporters would be stalking Ciara, when it was Jean who had an appointment? At least Noel and the pub would be doing good business.
By the time she’d checked herself for blood-sucking parasites, Alasdair had left the bathroom for the kitchen, where she heard him stirring the soup. If Delaney caught him at that, would he make another crack about wearing the pants? Delaney probably couldn’t boil water. As for whether there was a Mrs. Delaney to do the boiling and take the brunt—Jean shuddered again.
Dressed in her work uniform of skirt, blouse, and jacket, but no reporter’s fedora, not yet, she hurried to a kitchen now fragrant with the warming soup. Alasdair was toasting sandwiches. Beside him on the counter sat one of the plastic food-keepers, now holding the inscribed stone chip nestled on a tea towel like a diamond on velvet. “If Wallace was poisoned—” she began.
“These dishes might be evidence,” he finished. “Everything deserves consideration.”
“Like Ciara’s occult stuff,” Jean told him, hoping for a wind-up and a pitch.
But he wasn’t going to play. “Here, take some nourishment. You’re looking a bit peelie-wallie.”
He was looking sickly too, but she didn’t point that out. For a few moments they simply ate. The warm food loosened the knot in her stomach. So did Alasdair’s face easing from icy back to merely expressionless. She ventured, “What did Derek say? Not much, you told Valerie.”
“He played the innocent again, said he was home asleep both nights, said that he was after impressing Zoe by picking up something from the crime scene. Not evidence, a polythene bag or a swab, something she’d recognize from the forensics shows on the telly. The fact that even we don’t know what’s evidence and what’s not having escaped him.”
“But you think there’s more to it than that?”
“That I do. Whether he’s frightened of telling or simply hanging on to that chip on his shoulder, the one lads his age develop along with whiskers, I cannot say.”
Shoulder-chips were like epaulettes, symbols of status, Jean thought. And they weren’t an exclusively male fashion accessory. “Did Delaney say anything about Minty and Ciara?”
“By the time Nik and Gary arrived, Minty was sitting in the kitchen, with Ciara dispensing tea and sympathy. Ciara told Gary she was working in the guest cottage when she heard a car in the drive. She looked out, saw Logan going to the front door, and hotfooted it to the main house.”
“Where Minty had answered the door.”
“Logan told Gary that Minty took the bad news very bravely, by which I’m guessing he means quietly, no screaming and the like. Gary’s saying he’s never seen a colder fish.”
“She’s not the expressive sort, no. But then, neither are you, not at first acquaintance.”
Alasdair’s shake of the head rejected any comparison. “Ciara was babbling about Angus passing over to a higher plane and surely his spirit would stay on to help with the renovations. Nik felt Minty could have done without that sort of remark, and offered to ring a relation, but Minty said there were no relations and no need to knock up her friends at that hour, she’d go on to her room and have a rest.”
“You have to wonder what’s going on behind that mask of a face.” Jean sighed. “Delaney to the contrary, Ciara’s not the gold standard of looniness. I’ve known students who were simply not of this Earth, but . . .”
“She’ll do to be going on with,” Alasdair stated, with as weary a tone as she’d ever heard him use. “And just now, we’d better be going on to Stanelaw.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Alasdair signaled the sentry constable to open the gate and release their sortie. Jean didn’t try to shield her face with her reporter’s notebook. She was only a member of the third estate by default, not by temperament. Rubbing her special status with the investigation in the faces of this ravening crew brought her down to their . . . But they were only doing their jobs in a competitive business. Like Delaney was doing his, in a business that had its own competitions.
At least now the cameras, the microphones, the shouting mouths and darting eyes, weren’t on her case like they’d been during the academic scandal in her past. Judging by Alasdair’s fissured lips, he was resisting a similar memory. He jockeyed the car through the journalistic scrum with neither curse nor comment, and accelerated toward Stanelaw, only to slow at the layby at the end of the perimeter wall.
A faint, muddy track led into the woods, now closed off with police tape that looked incongruously cheerful, like party streamers looped from tree to tree. “If you drove far down that track,” Jean said, “you’d need a tow truck on stand by.”
“No need to drive far, just pull into the trees and walk down to the end of the wall. In any event, Gary’s folk found no car. Angus either legged it from town or from Glebe House, if he’d gone back there.”
�
��Or flashlight-person could have driven him out here, then made his, her, its getaway.”
“Aye.” Just as Alasdair picked up speed past Ferniebank Farm, a tall figure leaped through the gate and raised an arm the size of a leg of lamb in the universal gesture of Halt!
Alasdair hit the brakes, throwing Jean forward into the seat belt. Her hand pressing her heart back into her chest, she looked around to see that the imperious figure was neither the ghost of Hamlet’s father nor of Angus roaming in broad daylight.
Roddy Elliot opened the back door of the car and pleated himself into the interior. He was dressed in his Sunday best, a rusty suit and a striped tie hanging askew. “If you’d not object to driving me to the kirk, Mr. Cameron, I’d be willing to overlook the matter of the fishing tackle. I’ve left it a bit late to walk. Those reporters were on my doorstep like crows after carrion. Had to offer to set the dogs on them.”
“Ah, well.” Alasdair swallowed, probably repositioning his own heart. He accelerated again, if only a little. “Certainly, Mr. Elliot. When are services?”
“Noon.” Each slow word in Roddy’s deep voice sounded like the toll of a bell. “Normally I’d not hold with such foolishness as that new female minister, but I’m thinking that the word of the Lord can withstand the voice it’s delivered in, no matter how dainty.”
The wisest fool in Christendom, Jean thought. She extended her hand around the headrest. “Hello, Mr. Elliot. I’m Jean Fairbairn.”
Doubtfully, he took her small, soft hand in his huge, calloused one and released it. “How do you do. A relation of the Fairbairns of Selkirk, by any chance?”
“Not that I know of, no, but my great-grandfather did come from Stow, near Galashiels.”
“But you’re a Yank, like that Keith Bell chap.”
“Yes.” Jean wasn’t sure if that was something he expected her to apologize for, so she used it as an excuse to ask, “Have you seen Keith and Ms. Macquarrie’s plans for Ferniebank?”
“My daughter was showing me a folder with drawings,” Roddy answered.
One beat, two. “What did you think of them?” prodded Alasdair.
“Madness, the lot of it. The Rutherfords would have done better to tear the place down and sell the stone. Muckle good stone in those buildings, but little else save treachery and sorrow.”
Treachery, Jean repeated silently. “I hear Wallace enjoyed researching the history of the area.”
“Wallace was a nutter, like that Macquarrie female, spying, blaspheming—” He stopped dead, then added, “But he was a grand fisherman, for all that.”
Jean didn’t expect him to expand his comments to include Wallace’s supposed role in Helen’s death, and sure enough he didn’t.
“Have you had the police as well this morning?” Alasdair’s mild tone emphasized the “as well,” claiming a brotherhood that didn’t strictly exist.
“That I have. That dark chap with the queer name, polite enough, but I had to put him in his place when he started in with questions that were none of his business.”
“Questions about Angus?” Jean asked.
“With them finding the man dead at the old romanish chapel, and me hearing someone legging it up the road, I reckon looking for clues was his business.” Roddy’s bemused tone indicated that a clue was some exotic species of butterfly.
No one corrected his “them.” Slowing down so far an arthritic snail could have outpaced them, Alasdair said, “Your granddaughter Zoe was visiting the castle Friday. Does she stop with you often?”
“Often enough. Sleeps in her mum’s room at the farm instead of sharing with her sister. She and her granny, they . . .” He paused, then concluded, “Zoe and me, we get on well enough, even though she dresses like she’s got no home and no family to watch out for her.”
“Like Derek Trotter dresses,” Alasdair observed.
Roddy snorted so loudly Jean almost checked the back of her neck for snot. “That young tearaway. Much better he and his mum go on back south, leave us decent folk alone. He was hanging about this morning looking for Zoe, but I’d sent her home. A crime scene’s no place for a girl.”
“You sent Derek on his way, then?”
“I turfed him out quick as you like. Same as I’d turf his mother out of the castle, years ago. I was caretaker there, before Wallace and Angus and that perjink Maitland wife of his tarted the place up. And now they’ve sold it. The love of money is the root of all evil.”
“Is the castle evil?” Jean asked, not bothering to agree that Minty was finicky.
“There’s aye been muckle evil in this world, Miss Fairbairn. Murder, thievery, adultery, pridefulness, drinking, and carousing on the Lord’s day. Mind, I have no objection to a wee dram before dinner, but I’ve told Polly’s Noel again and again, it’s wrong to open the pub of a Sunday. But he and Polly, they’re wanting money, they say. For posh clothes and posh cars and holidays. In my day we’d visit Largs and were glad of it, but no, nowadays Zoe and Shannon, they’re obliged to go to Spain or Florida. This world we live in. This world.”
“There’s always been murder and thievery and the like,” Alasdair said quietly. “There’s always been folk profiting at the expense of others. In some ways, the world’s a better place now than it was in, say, Isabel Sinclair’s time.”
Again Roddy snorted. “Isabel.”
“That’s a bit of inscription from her gravestone on the seat beside you,” said Jean.
“Zoe was, erm, looking at it on the Friday,” Alasdair added.
“She was, was she?” Roddy shifted around and, as far as Jean could tell from the corners of her eyes and the rearview mirrors, soberly considered the plastic container with its tea towel and chip of stone. Did his tangled gray brows rise and then fall? Hard to tell. “Isabel was a whore,” he said at last. “Deserved what she got. Sins will out.”
Alasdair hit the brakes again and swivelled, his incredulous look clicking against Jean’s as it swung into the back seat. “What?”
“Begging your pardon, madam,” Roddy said to Jean’s stunned face. “My late wife would go on about my language, and about Isabel as well—defending her and all, like Wallace, like Gerald, but there’s the truth, right there on the stone for all to see. The word ‘catin.’ It means—well, as I said. It’s French.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Jean. “You mean where that requiescat in pace is oddly spaced? Yeah, it looks like ‘catin,’ but what about that ‘requies’ just sort of hanging in mid-air?”
“And why a French word in the midst of the Latin?” Alasdair demanded.
“Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, she spoke French, didn’t she?” Roddy sat back, his arms folded. Two and two make seventeen and that’s that.
He had dirt beneath his nails, Jean saw, and beard and hair both looked like they’d been combed with a pitchfork. She was reminded of an Old Testament prophet, and wondered if his ruddiness was due to alcohol after all, or to basking in the glow of his own righteousness. Turning back around, she shared yet another look with Alasdair. They’d thought Ciara was making some leaps of fancy. What was Roddy making—leaps of faith? Fancy and faith were almost two sides of the same coin, and very often involved actual physical coinage.
“So what did Isabel get, then?” asked Alasdair.
“Her death. The wages of sin.”
“The fire in her room, you mean?” Jean asked. “The burning-glass and signaling her, ah, friend?”
“That’s Gerald’s version of events, bowdlerized for the ladies—Wallace’s mother, most like, and a fine douce woman she was. My mum was her lady’s maid. That’s why Wallace never came forth with the truth, even in that twee bittie booklet of his. Gerald and Wallace Rutherford, they make Angus look right rational. Made. They’re all gone now. All gone to their rewards.”
“And what . . . “ began Alasdair, just as Jean asked, “Where . . .”
“Carry on,” he told her.
“Where did Gerald learn another version of events?” she asked.
> “Papers, letters, the clarsach.” Roddy crouched to peer through the windshield at the roofs of Glebe House and the cooking school just rising from the fields ahead. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but it’s gone a quarter ’til, and it’s disrespectful to come late into the church and draw attention to yourself.”
Alasdair lifted his foot from the brake but didn’t press the gas pedal, so that the car crept forward at idling speed. “Where are these papers and letters now?”
“Stanelaw Museum, like as not. Clarsach’s been pinched, though.”
“It’s been recovered,” Jean told him. “Did you know it has a secret compartment for messages? Is that what you mean by Gerald learning the true story from it, that he knew about the compartment and how Isabel used it? He actually wrote a poem about her, you know, based on Hogg’s ‘The Queen’s Wake,’ about a contest of harpers before Mary, Queen of Scots.”
“Another whore, Mary was. And Isabel helping her with her plots—aye, you can learn a lot about folk from the company they keep and the goods they hold valuable. And what they waste their time on, poetry and all.”
Reflected in the mirror, his face was as silent and secret as Glebe House with its curtains closed and its driveways vacant. Yeah, Jean thought, you can learn a lot about people, poetry and all.
So many cars were parked along the road in front of the church that Alasdair had to ease past them. More than one sightseer with a camera stood beside the fence, taking pictures of the two dark, damp holes in the ground, the yawning graves of Helen Elliot and Wallace Rutherford. Judgement Day, Jean thought, had reached Stanelaw, and the graves were giving up their dead.
“The police,” Roddy said, his voice cold. “They asked permission to dig up poor Helen. Have you no respect for the dead? I replied. But the dark one with the queer name, he said ’twas all in the interests of justice. So I agreed. There’s scant respect for anything anymore, not for the dead, not for justice, not for the truth.”
The Burning Glass Page 22