“Sometimes,” said Alasdair, “it seems not.”
“I’m sorry,” Jean added.
Alasdair stopped and Roddy opened the door. “Would you care to join me?”
The prospect was tempting, even though Jean’s tastes in religious ritual ran more to smells and bells.
“Thank you,” said Alasdair with his best courtly manner, “but we’ve been detailed to give statements at P.C. Logan’s office.”
“Oh aye, I’ve been directed to do the same, even though I know nothing. It’s been my bad luck to live at Ferniebank is all. Thank you kindly, Mr. Cameron.” Roddy shook hands with Alasdair, nodded dourly at Jean, then unfolded himself from the car and strode off up the drive toward the church. A few parishioners, for the most part about Roddy’s age, stood around the open door. That straight figure like a conductor’s baton draped in black, the focus of every eye, must be Minty.
Alasdair drove on, leaving Jean to look over her shoulder until the church disappeared from sight and they were on the outskirts of Stanelaw. “I guess we got him in as chatty a mood as he’s ever likely to be,” she said at last. “The events of the last month have to have shaken him up.”
“He told us quite a bit, didn’t he? What it means, I’m still processing. Like him having been the caretaker for the castle and chapel. Could be the Rutherfords paid him for keeping watch on the place, income he lost when Wallace moved in.”
“That doesn’t seem enough reason for the bad blood between them, though it didn’t help. I think his beef with Wallace was philosophical. Religious, if that’s not too strong a word.”
“Too strong? He was saying that Ciara’s plans are blasphemous.”
“Yeah, I guess making even a ‘romanish’ Catholic chapel into a spa would be desecration to someone unenthused over contemporary attitudes. He’s probably thrilled the way Presbyterian churches all over Scotland are being turned into bars, restaurants, offices.”
“What was that about Isabel, then? A true story?”
“We saw her running into the castle, a direct contradiction of the story in Wallace’s leaflet. If she was carrying secret messages for Mary Stuart and her supporters . . .”
“A staunch Protestant like Roddy could well be thinking her a traitor.”
“Politics and religion,” said Jean with a grimace. “There’s a volatile mixture. Historically a motive for murder, over and over again. But not here and now, surely.”
“Most murders are done either to avoid something or to gain something, often both at once. What would Roddy be gaining? And how did he do it? Here, Angus, stop in for a wee dram?”
“So you’ve decided Angus’s death was a murder?”
“Just for the sake of argument.” Alasdair turned the car down a side street. The shop on the corner must be the one belonging to Valerie’s uncle.
“Roddy might have a drink with Angus, but with Wallace? And would he kill his own wife?” Jean shook her head, trying to settle the careening thoughts into one pattern, any pattern, but they spun all the faster, out of control, spitting up flotsam. “Maybe Roddy chipped away the inscription—you know, preventing the whore’s grave from becoming a tourist attraction.”
“I was thinking that myself,” said Alasdair.
“Of course you were,” Jean told him. “So did Roddy really want Wallace’s fishing things?”
“I expect so—waste not, want not. But there might be something in those boxes as well.”
“I heard people in the Laigh Hall earlier. Did Minty give the go-ahead to search the boxes?”
“She said something to Delaney about doing whatever needed doing at Ferniebank, which he took as carte blanche. We’ll have ourselves a squint this evening.”
“In the meantime, we have another reason to get to the museum, to see what the story is with Isabel.”
“Assuming it’s relevant to the case.” Alasdair stopped behind a nondescript brown car parked in front of a cottage that fit Rebecca’s description of “vine-covered,” to the point that windows and doors peered through oblong holes in the growth that had probably been achieved with industrial-strength pruning shears. Flowers of every hue rioted in the front garden. A square pebbledash addition to one side looked like the proverbial sore thumb, even with its blue sign reading “Police.” It was more of a police room than a police station.
“What isn’t relevant to the case? Like Valerie’s tattoo—oh, you don’t know about that, do you? I saw her coming out of the pub on Friday. She has a tattoo of a harp on her shoulder.”
Alasdair switched off the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition, and turned to stare, eyes bright, brows at full alert. “Eh?”
“It could be coincidence, but we already have enough of those. She grew up here and was at the Ferniebank dig.”
“The Ferniebank Clarsach. No coincidence, no.” Alasdair jangled the keys pensively, then climbed out, locked the doors—and froze, staring at the car in front of them.
Jean walked to his side and saw what he was looking at. The brown finish of the car was splashed with dried mud, and the tires were caked with it. “Whoa,” Jean said. “I recognize that car.”
Alasdair used the all-purpose syllable again. “Eh?”
“Keith was driving it at Minty’s house yesterday. And it wasn’t muddy then, because Ciara was talking to Valerie, and her car was muddy.”
The door of the police annex opened. Keith Bell slipped through the aperture, seeming no more solid than a tendril of smoke. Then Ciara stepped around the corner of the building like an ambulatory rose bush, despite her flowing fabrics and rainbow shades just as insubstantial.
Chapter Twenty-three
Alasdair jolted to attention, his mental equivalent of Kallinikos’s notebook and pen jotting down the particulars, his face betraying all the expression of a blank piece of paper. He opened the garden gate for Jean and she stepped through, then to the side as Ciara swept past.
Ciara’s cream-puff complexion sagged just a bit, though it was hardly curdled. The tinkle of her signature earrings seemed muted and dirge-like. She was not wearing her pink pelt, but a beaded shawl that glittered as she moved. “Poor Angus, passing before his time. He’ll be missed.”
“How’s Minty holding up?” asked Jean.
“So brave. So calm. Preparing to open the cookery school as usual this coming week. But we know that Angus’s spirit will linger on, don’t we?”
“Jeez.” Keith was inspecting his fingertips—Logan would have taken his prints as well as Ciara’s. “Most normal people—”
Ciara’s voice cut through his like a flute cutting through a drone. “The pub at two, Jean? It’s my shout. Is Alasdair still drinking whiskeys so dry they shrivel your tongue?”
Alasdair might be on a first-name basis with dry, but his tongue was anything but withered. “Why’d you phone Val Trotter at half past six this morning, Ciara?”
Keith looked around at Alasdair, the sunlight on his glasses hiding his expression.
Ciara stopped dead, then asked with an indulgent smile, “Aren’t you the clever boots?”
“Not a bit of it,” Alasdair replied. “Val told me.”
“Giving her the third degree, were you?”
“By not answering the question, you’re leaving me to make assumptions. And what I’m assuming is that you and Val are old mates.”
Say what? Jean asked herself, but for once saw good reason not to speak.
Alasdair’s supple tongue moved on. “You told the Brimberry girl to have herself the Saturday morning off just so’s you could sneak about with Angus, is that it? I don’t know what all this is in aid of, Ciara, but I’m advising you to come clean. Now.”
“Sneaking about with Angus, when everyone knew we were doing business?” Ciara’s smile broadened. “Now is no time for negativity, Alasdair. What goes round, comes round.”
“Aye, that it does. Best you remember that.” He made an about-face and headed for the building at a quick, businesslike clip.
>
Keith spun around, considerably less neatly, and plunged through the gate. “Let’s go, Ciara.”
But Ciara lingered, first watching Alasdair stride up the path, then turning to Jean with a sympathetic crinkle to her brow. “Over twenty years in the police force will do that to a man. Pity.”
Outside the fence, Keith was climbing into the car and starting the engine. By the time Ciara reached the passenger door, he was already starting to pull away. Was he trying to outrun the law? Jean wondered as she hurried up the path. Or trying to outrun Ciara?
She caught up with Alasdair near the door of the police annex, beside a garden bench. “I’d say that was a shot in the dark about Ciara and Val, but you never scattershoot.”
“No, that was no guess. Ciara’s got a tattoo of a harp as well, though not on her shoulder.”
Jean felt her eyes cross, visualizing where the tattoo might be, complete with the corollary of Alasdair seeing it—not that that was the issue, murder was the issue. “Yeah, Ciara and Val must not have been introduced by her uncle. At least, not as recently as Val implied. Okay, so they’re good enough mates to get the same tattoo, one that refers to Ferniebank. So what? They’ve both got an interest in Ferniebank.”
The crease between Alasdair’s brows indicated that the subject was under consideration.
“What about Keith’s muddy car?” Jean went on. “You didn’t ask him about it.”
“I’m not the investigating officer. I cannot impound the car for testing. If I’d asked him, I’d have warned him off. Logan, now, he’ll get onto Delaney . . .”
Logan appeared in the doorway, arms crossed, visage grim, his five o’clock shadow more of a ten o’clock eclipse. He’d probably been up most of the night, too. “Mr. Cameron, I’ll take your statement now. Miss Fairbairn, if you’d be so kind as to wait in the garden.”
With a sharp sideways glance at Jean, conveying everything from behave yourself to here we go again, Alasdair stepped into the office and Logan closed the door.
Jean sat down on the bench. Keith had some explaining to do, as did Ciara, but as suspects went . . . Not that anyone was walking around with blood on their hands. No gore, as Miranda had said. Poison had once been an unusual weapon in this part of the world—stabbing, bashing, hanging, and pitching over precipices all worked just fine. Jean imagined the glee when gunpowder presented yet another way of bloodily proving your point. Poison now, poison was subtle.
Shaking her head, she focused on her surroundings. For starting in such mirk and doubt, the day had become tourist-brochure perfect, the clouds lifting and contracting into big white poufs drifting in a blue sky. Bees buzzed drowsily from flower to flower, dodging plaster gnomes half-concealed in the shrubbery. She plucked a leaf from a sage plant and inhaled the fragrance.
The “vine-covered” Mrs. Logan must be the gardener, although Logan’s black temperament didn’t have to extend to his thumbs. As for where the lady of the house was now, an open window behind Jean’s back emitted the murmur of televised voices and eight notes of a clock chiming half past the hour. Twelve-thirty. Time flies.
Jean sat up straighter. A clock. The Westminster chimes. So Minty’s house wasn’t the only possible site of the anonymous phone call. Which probably wasn’t anonymous to Wallace. A shame he didn’t record his caller’s name, but then, he hadn’t expected to either drop dead or be done to death immediately thereafter.
As though echoing her musings, her phone trilled. She burrowed into her bag to find her phone had once again worked its way to the bottom. Ah, Hugh. “Good afternoon. You’ve heard.”
“That I have,” Hugh replied soberly. “Poor Angus. He could be a bit befuddled at times—so can we all, come to that—but he meant well.”
“You said you met him when you were here for the museum opening in April.”
“Him and his wife and a collection of local worthies, including the woman negotiating for Ferniebank dressed in what looked to be a cross between a haystack and a chandelier. Everyone was pretending not to notice.”
Yeah, Jean told herself, money speaks loud enough to drown out even Ciara’s overly audible clothing choices, a luxury not permitted to Zoe and Derek. Had she told Hugh about Alasdair and Ciara? She wasn’t going to get into that now. “Did anyone say anything about the true story of Isabel Sinclair and the harp and . . . Well, I don’t even know what to ask, it’s all so vague.”
“Angus was saying it was time for a true story to be coming out at last, but Madam shushed him right smartly, and I cannot say whether he was referring to Isabel or the dig at Ferniebank.”
“A true story about the dig?” Jean asked, sitting up so straight her rump left the bench.
“Haven’t a clue. The other Rutherford, Wallace, he was saying he’d made quite a study of Gerald’s writings about Isabel and the Sinclairs and had urged the dig to begin with. But then, it was all idle chitchat whilst we stood about after the formalities, where I spoke a bit about the clarsach and played ‘The Keiking Glass.’ ”
“ ‘The Looking Glass?’ That’s appropriate. I feel as though I’ve fallen through one. Any moment now, a white rabbit in a waistcoat is going to burst out of the bushes and go for my throat.”
“But you’re not considering coming back to Edinburgh, are you now?” Without waiting for the answer, Hugh concluded, “If I can recall anything else said at the opening, I’ll phone.”
“Yes, please. Any time. And thanks.”
Jean tucked her phone away. Closing her eyes, she envisioned Ciara with long white ears and a pink nose. That made her smile. Now if she could just breathe deeply and relax her shoulders, which were almost embracing her own modestly extended ears.
The door of the police office flew open. Jean looked up to see Alasdair exiting the room like an iceberg aiming for the Titanic. “Your turn,” he said, forcing the words out between his teeth.
Giving a statement was an entirely different thing from taking one, wasn’t it? Especially with Logan staking out his somewhat ambivalent territory. Jean whispered, “Did you ask him about the drawings?”
“Oh aye, he took them,” replied Alasdair, not whispering at all. “He’s saying I meant for him to take them, that they’re safe as houses here, aren’t they?”
Logan stepped into the doorway and gestured Jean inside.
In the stuffy, cluttered little room, she sat where she was told to sit and accepted a cup of tea, which Logan doctored with milk from an old-fashioned glass bottle—one of Roddy’s products, no doubt, evading the draconian standards of the EU. Holding the mug between her hands to quell any gesticulatory comments, she gave her name and address and detailed the events of the night before. Just the facts, no fancies—not that fancy and fact weren’t getting harder and harder to distinguish. At least she didn’t have to offer up her fingertips. She was already, as they said, known to the police.
Logan’s thick, black eyebrows made semi-circles over his eyes, like protective arches. They didn’t move while she spoke, or when she signed her statement, or as she placed the empty mug on the corner of the desk and made her escape. He made a good foil for Minty in—what? Protecting and promoting the public welfare? Keeping up community appearances?
Alasdair was pacing the garden path, fingering a strand of lavender and exchanging mistrustful looks with a ceramic fairy posing on a ceramic toadstool. When he saw Jean, he took off for the gate so fast she had to hurry to keep up, her feet crunching on the gravel path as though walking through cornflakes. “I get the feeling,” she said, “that Logan is trying to signal he’s not intimidated by you.”
“I’m not after intimidating him.” Alasdair leaped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
Jean slammed her door. “Yeah, well, it’s our beliefs that make us act, not the facts, right?”
“Right.” Alasdair made a deft U-turn back toward town.
“Here’s a fact—a factoid, a factule—for you. Logan’s got a striking clock. Wallace’s phone call, remember?
Maybe Logan was delivering a friendly warning. Maybe Roddy phoned in a threat while he was delivering milk.”
“Circumstantial evidence,” said Alasdair predictably. “Though either is possible, aye.”
Jean came about on another tack. “Hugh called. He was at the museum when it opened last April. He thought Angus said something about the dig having a true story, although he could have been talking about Isabel. Either way, Minty shut him up fast. And Wallace was saying the dig was his idea. That’s not what Minty told us, was it? Didn’t she say she’d organized the dig to give Wallace a job after he retired and to clean up the neighborhood?”
“That she did, though her taking credit’s not surprising. Neither is hearing there’s something peculiar about the dig, when there’s something peculiar about Ferniebank from riverbank to cap house.” Alasdair stopped at the intersection with the main road and glanced into the back seat—yes, the plastic container was still there, not that they had left the car unobserved. “Logan said he’d come by presently and unlock the museum, so’s we can leave the chipping.”
“Good. Maybe the museum will give us the Grand Unified Theory of motivation or something.”
There was the shop again, this time with Valerie herself walking off down the sidewalk. Maybe she was on her way to the pub. Great. Let’s have a convention. “Ciara has the tattoo of a harp?” Jean couldn’t help asking.
“She didn’t have it when we were married. I saw it the last time I saw her, six, seven years since.” The corner of his mouth tucked itself into a wry smile—Jean wasn’t fooling him, but then, she never could. “It’s high on her hip. She was wearing a short blouse and low-riding jeans on a warm day. When she bent over to fetch her phone from her bag, I noticed it. I thought it had something to do with Mystic Scotland, that’s what she was blethering about at the time.”
Oh, Jean thought. “What was she doing before Mystic Scotland? When she was with you?”
“Working for a company that published tourist brochures, postcards, those little books of ghost stories, and the like. Not so far from what you’re doing, if the truth be told.”
The Burning Glass Page 23