“You should get yourself out more often, then,” Alasdair said.
Delaney shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose so emphatically, Jean expected his finger to go right through his forehead. “Elliot’s swearing he never phoned Wallace. He said they’d just rowed face to face. Why bother phoning?”
“Logan made that call, just as he took two of Wallace’s drawings from the flat here. He missed the one in those boxes, though. If I was compromised when you suspected Ciara, then Logan’s compromised now Minty’s the suspect.” Alasdair directed the flashlight into the dungeon.
Kallinikos walked back into the Laigh Hall, Valerie in tow. That must have been her honking outside the gates. Jean turned all the way back around, trying to read the woman’s mood—anger in the glare of her eyes, determination in the set of her jaw, fear in the way she held her cardigan closed, her hands on the plackets balled into fists.
“What is it you were wanting to tell us about Angus Rutherford?” asked Delaney.
“I could’ve told you in Kelso,” she retorted. “But no, I’m obliged to chase you back here. I’m always coming back here, seems like.”
“We’ve got Derek in the incident room,” Kallinikos told her. “Mr. Cameron and Miss Fairbairn caught him here in the castle.”
“He climbed through that window,” said Jean, rather surprised to hear her own voice.
Valerie’s eyes kindled into a blaze. “I told him to sit tight. I told him it was none of his business.”
“It is his business, though, isn’t it?” asked Alasdair, and switched off the light.
“Oh for the love of . . .” Delaney exclaimed. “Cut along, cut along, let’s do this properly. And you, Cameron”—his forefinger targeted Alasdair like a blunt weapon—“I expect you to behave yourself.”
“Of course, Inspector Delaney.” Alasdair flicked off the flashlight and tucked it beneath his arm as though sheathing a sword.
Scenting her cub, Valerie was already halfway to the door. Kallinikos followed, her, and Delaney stumped along third in line. Alasdair stood staring after them, one moment, two. Then he looked over at Jean, his bland expression fracturing just a bit, like fine, aged porcelain. “Shall we?”
“Yeah. Let’s.” And she walked out of the Laigh Hall, wondering if this time she really welcomed either that we or that let’s.
Chapter Thirty
The courtyard was bathed in the usual sickly light. Jean made a mental note, far down below all her other mental notes, to suggest that Ciara replace the yard light with something else, an elegant gas lamp held by a brass dragon, perhaps.
Beyond the courtyard, above the eastern hills, floated a spectral full moon. Jean imagined that the whine in her ears was Dougie Pincock playing “Bad Moon Rising” on his bagpipes. But no, she was hearing a constable’s radio relaying the bulletin on Minty, demoted from community booster to public enemy number one.
They’d eaten her delicious nuptial dinner, Jean thought as she hurried up the steps to the flat. A good thing the woman hadn’t realized that when she offed Wallace his replacement would be Alasdair and his—determination? Sheer bloody nerve?
Jean pawed through the box, found the book with Wallace’s drawing of the dig, and sped back outside and across the courtyard to the lumber room, raised above its station into an incident room. Kallinikos stepped away from the door so Freeman could exit and Jean could enter.
In the tentative light of the single bulb, the crowded faces seemed indistinct, as though they’d been swiped with Wallace’s eraser. Derek huddled over a steaming mug. Valerie stood over him saying, “. . . done right, telling what you saw at the pub. Minty, was it? Aye, she was after Ciara, I reckon, not poor old Angus.” Her lips, thin and wan without their red lipstick, set themselves into something that wasn’t quite a smile.
This time Alasdair stood to one side of Delaney and his tribunal table, neither guarding his back nor breathing down his neck. Delaney stared belligerently at Jean, maybe expecting her to whip off her bra and burn it. Staring back, she opened the book and showed the drawing to Kallinikos, who passed it on.
Delaney pondered it a moment, then angled it toward Valerie. “This is you?”
“Aye,” she said. “Wally was out and about with his sketchbook that night.”
“You were excavating at night?” asked Alasdair.
“Well, late of a summer’s evening, after Professor McSporran went to ground at the hotel in Kelso. Set great store by his dinner, did the professor. Minty spoiled him with picnic baskets and suppers at Glebe House, but that night she was away in Edinburgh, London, I don’t know. Away.”
“Who was—” Alasdair began.
Delaney interrupted. “I’ll handle this, Cameron. Val, you’d better send the boy outside.”
“No,” she said, and her claws pressed down on Derek’s shoulder.
“All right then,” said Delaney. “Who was here at Ferniebank that night?”
“Angus, Wallace, me.”
“Not your husband?”
“He wasn’t me husband, not then. He never knew the full story.”
“Which is?” Delaney prodded.
Valerie inhaled deeply. “We opened Isabel’s grave. That’s where we went wrong. Should have let her be, but no, Wallace said Gerald opened her grave, she was already walking. Now there was a loony, Gerald. Wallace, Ciara, they’re a bit off, but not mental, not like Gerald.”
That, Jean thought, had also been Roddy’s assessment.
“What did you find in the grave?” asked Delaney
“Her bones, mostly. They cut her down like an animal, you could see it. Dreadful. If the curse wasn’t on the place already then, that’s where it began. And we found Gerald’s poem.”
“He buried his poem with her?” Jean asked, and averted her eyes from Delaney’s scowl to Alasdair’s quirked lip. At least the archaeologists had science to excuse disturbing Isabel’s grave. All Gerald had was a necrophiliac crush.
“That he did. Wrote this sick-making epic poem about Isabel’s life and then buried it in Isabel’s grave, in a wee medieval cist from the family store. Wallace said there was a poet last century—century before, now—who buried his work with his dead wife, then had second thoughts some years later and dug it up again.”
“Cool,” said Derek.
Valerie thumped his head as though it was a watermelon. “Leastways Isabel was already gone to bones. And Gerald never dug up the poem.”
“Wallace knew it was there?” asked Alasdair.
“Aye. He was after getting Gerald’s things from the grave without the professor knowing what a loony his grandfather was.”
Social embarrassment runs in the family, Jean commented to herself.
“So he had me and Angus shove aside the inscribed slab, and me drop down into the grave—I’m small, mind, neither of them would fit. Then we replaced the slab. The professor came along the next day and opened it up again, and I handed over the empty chest. Wallace put it about that the poem had been amongst Gerald’s papers.”
Kallinikos’s pen tapped his paper with the dot at the end of the sentence. Jean leaned back against the frame of the door. If she stepped outside, she’d be able to see the walls of the chapel and Isabel’s uneasy resting place. If she turned around, she’d see the castle. But she didn’t need to look at either to know they were there. It was like holding her hand above the burner on a stove and feeling heat, except what she felt was cold.
Alasdair stepped forward, a flicker in the depths of his eyes drawing Jean erect again. Treasure found at the dig. A chest. A treasure chest. “Was there anything else in the chest?”
Valerie’s smile crimped at the edges. “A small but right choice collection of jewelry.”
“Jewelry?” Delaney demanded. “Gerald’s family jewels. Hah. No pun intended.”
“Family, aye, or so Angus kept saying. Wallace said it was the jewelry from the harp.”
Jean felt her mouth fall open, and she shut it with a pop. Kal
linikos murmured, “Well now.”
For once, Alasdair and Delaney wore the same expression, stunned disbelief. But Alasdair found his voice first. “Gerald stripped the jewelry from the clarsach and buried it with his poem. Angus was saying the jewelry belonged to the family, so it was all right to—”
“Steal it,” Valerie said. “Wallace kept saying there were rules, some question as to whether it was treasure trove and all, it should go to a big museum. But Angus, he took it, because Minty wanted herself a cooking school, and what Minty wanted, Minty got.”
“She knows all about the jewelry, then.”
“She doesn’t miss a thing, that woman doesn’t.”
And at the luncheon, Jean thought, I told Minty there was a sketch of the dig in the flat. She’d excused herself and phoned Logan, telling him to confiscate it. She knew the truth, all right. And it was a very inconvenient truth indeed.
Whether the Rutherfords had violated the laws of treasure trove was a moot point. Even if the jewelry had been family property, selling it on the open market would have drawn the enthusiastic attentions of the National Museum, to say nothing of Inland Revenue. “Minty and Angus sold the jewelry to repay their debt,” said Jean, “bit by bit, if not on the black market, at least under the counter at auction houses and to shady dealers. And Angus was seen at a pawn shop, too.”
“Several pawn shops,” Kallinikos said. “Peterborough, London, Dover.”
“Oh, that,” said Valerie. “He was shifting some of Wallace’s silver cufflinks, photo frames, and such. Minty got better money than that for the jewelry.”
“How much of that money came to you?” asked Delaney.
Derek looked up hopefully.
Valerie looked down at her feet. “Angus paid for me bakery in Middlesbrough and popped round with gifts for Derek is all.”
“Did you think of blackmailing Minty?”
“I’m never that stupid.”
“But you never thought of reporting the theft, either.”
Valerie laughed humorlessly, her narrow cheeks puckering. “Aye, the likes of me, telling tales about Mr. and Mrs. Councillor Rutherford. I’ve had problems enough, thank you just the same.”
“There’s bad feeling between you and Minty even so,” said Alasdair.
“She’ll have none of the likes of me, that’s true, but it’s because of Derek here.”
Delaney leaned forward, out of Alasdair’s shadow. “The Middlesbrough constabulary had your husband, Harry—”
“Ex-husband. I should have quit him years ago, but inertia can be right powerful.”
Jean could sympathize with that.
“. . . in for an interview,” Delaney went on. “He’s still swearing Derek’s not his son, that your ‘posh friends’ stitched up the results of the DNA test. He knows Angus gave you money, but he thinks it’s because Angus is Derek’s father, is that right?”
“Old Horse Face?” Derek made a gagging sound, but no further comments about poshery.
“Minty thought the lad was Angus’s, too, did she?” asked Alasdair.
“She did that, aye, though there was never more than a cuddle between us—starved for affection, the man was, no surprise there. But Minty, what she wanted was the baby. She was after me for months to just hand him over, so she could bring him up proper, like. Even after the DNA test proved he was Harry’s, she offered me money, like she could buy a human being. I deserved me share of the money from the jewelry, right enough, but not like that.”
“Flinty Minty. The posh bitch.” Horrified, Derek leaned up against his mother’s side as though he was a marsupial aiming for the maternal pouch. Valerie put her arm around him.
Jean remembered Minty looking into Linda’s pram in the hallway of the museum. She and Angus had no children. No heirs to the Rutherford name. No wonder she’d been so resentful of Valerie and Derek. Of Noel and Polly and their daughters, for that matter.
“Wallace now, he thought I deserved a share,” Valerie went on. “But all he could do was send Ciara to me, so’s I could answer questions about the dig and Gerald. She paid me, fair and square, for helping her with her research, her little books and tours and all. When the bakery went bust she offered me work here. We’ll not long be taking charity from me uncle and from Polly and Noel.”
“Why’s Ciara got a tattoo of a harp like yours?” asked Alasdair, drawing a raised brow from Delaney.
Valerie’s tip-tilted smile indicated she, too, knew Alasdair’s role in Ciara’s life. “We got to be good mates. Sisters, like. I said, let’s get us tattoos, just for laughs, and Ciara, she says, let’s get ones like the Ferniebank clarsach, ’cause Ferniebank’s changed our lives. And now it’s called me back, just as it’s called her. The pair of us, we’ll set the place to rights, and we’ll find us our fortunes along the way.”
“Does Ciara know about the jewelry?” Delaney asked.
“Aye. Very accepting person, Ciara is.”
Alasdair went a bit cross-eyed at that.
“Minty doesn’t know you’re working with Ciara, does she?” asked Delaney.
“She was obliged to tiptoe round Minty, right enough, with her book and with me and all. Minty was right narked that I was back in town—no one’s ever told her no before. Ciara’s worth two of Minty, for all her daft ideas.”
“Do you believe her daft ideas, then?” Delaney asked. “Is there a map?”
Valerie shrugged. “Ciara says if it’s not amongst Wallace’s papers, then it’s here at Ferniebank. He told her the day he died he knew there was proof, though just what and where it was, he was saving for the next time he saw her. Derek here heard him hinting about it to Roddy and Minty—trying to convince them they were wrong about Ciara, I reckon.”
“During the argy-bargy, like,” added Derek. “Me and Zoe, we heard him saying, ‘I’ve got the proof, and you’ll be sorry when it comes out.’ ”
Proof? Good grief, she’d been right. Jean looked at Alasdair, but he was eyeing the massive flashlight, standing like a flagpole on the corner of Delaney’s table. The pit prison. Wallace had forced himself down the ladder soon after he’d taunted Roddy and Minty. Soon after Minty had spilled the beans to Logan, who intervened. Soon after eating his fatal meal.
“Proof? And I’m Duke of Argyll.” Delaney rolled his eyes heavenward. “Who stole the clarsach from the Stanelaw Museum?”
“That was poor old Angus. Ciara kept going on and on about the music and the map and all, and how Gerald must have known all about it, and what a pity the harp was locked up in the museum with the key in Minty’s grasping hands, else we could have ourselves a look.”
“Angus disassembled it looking for a second secret compartment with the, ah, map,” said Alasdair. “Then he couldn’t put it together again, so he left it in a safe place.”
“We’ve tracked him from Brussels,” Kallinikos said. “He took a train through the Chunnel, hired a car in Dover, and stopped at a pawn shop there. The dates match. And the London shop’s half a mile from the auction house where the harp turned up.”
“Angus was a bit timid,” Valerie said, “and clumsy as an ox to boot, but a good chap overall.”
“You last saw him at the dinner at the Granite Cross?” asked Delaney.
“That I did. Poor old guy. All this time he’d been going along, the way he did all his life, I reckon. Then, on the Saturday, Ciara told him of her book deal. And the balloon went up. Minty wasn’t best pleased with Ciara’s tales, but she carried on, seeing advantages for herself. A book, though, about Isabel and the harp as secret agents of the Templars and all . . .”
“Would attract attention to Gerald,” Alasdair finished. “He wrote about the jewelry, did he? Wallace knew he put it in Isabel’s grave.”
“Wallace being the expert on Gerald and Gerald being the expert on Isabel.” Valerie ran both her hands through her hair, so that it stood on end like Derek’s.
That’s what Angus and Ciara had been talking about in the van, Jean thought, w
hen Ciara dismissed his concerns with a laugh. Angus had gone home to Minty, and—what? Had she realized something had gone wrong, and extracted the news from him like extracting a tooth? However she’d learned the truth, her response had been to once again fill her little vial of poison. Poor old Angus indeed, steamrolled by the women in his life, Minty with cool deliberation, Ciara casually, cheerfully, carelessly.
Delaney sat back in his chair, folding his hands over his waistcoat as though after a good meal. “With the book, folk would start asking questions about the jewelry. There’s motive for you.”
“Over and beyond eliminating the purveyors of embarrassing fancies,” added Alasdair. “With Ciara and Wallace gone, Minty could run Ferniebank as she saw fit. Eat her cake and have it as well.”
Yeah, but . . . Catching Alasdair’s frown, Jean said, “What about Wallace?”
Kallinikos flipped through his notebook. “Polly Brimberry brought him his last meal, the leftover food from a cooking class.”
“Helen and Polly took him dozens of those,” Valerie said. “Easy enough to add a bit of poison. Proving it, now . . .”
Delaney’s hands tightened, no doubt with heartburn. Derek shifted restlessly and dropped his mug. Valerie made a one-handed catch and gave it to Kallinikos.
Jean realized she was hearing voices and vehicles. Lights flashed. She looked over her shoulder to see headlights glaring through the gate, the media following Delaney from Kelso. Then the gate shut with a clang behind two patrol cars.
From one issued W.P.C. Blackhall, who marched toward the door of the incident room. Kallinikos brushed past Jean to intercept her, and after a muttered consultation announced to Delaney, “The dustbins at the pub are overflowing, but the crime-scene lads are having a good look. Minty’s at Glebe House.”
The Burning Glass Page 31