“He said—no, all he did was give me the impression—that he found the coin while he was bird-watching. I did wonder if he found it on private property.” Lovelace hadn’t actually told her very much at all, had he? About his discovery, at least. As for what he had told her. . . . “I’d like to think Lovelace is just being a public-spirited citizen and trying to protect the site, but he doesn’t need me for that. If anything, his coming to me has made me very suspicious.”
“So ask him what he’s on about,” Rebecca told her.
“You bet.” With her entire hand, not just one finger, Jean gestured toward Lovelace’s name gleaming in the cold blue light of the computer. “No more Ms. Nice Guy. Tomorrow I am having a very serious conversation with George Lovelace, Leicester University, retired.”
“In the meantime I’ll report the coin to the Advisory Panel and send it for analysis.” Michael took off his gloves and started filling out a label.
What else was going to happen, Jean wondered. “I don’t suppose the French government will try to claim it the way Spain’s been trying to claim the stuff hauled up from shipwrecks off Florida.”
“Louis the Fifteenth gave Charlie the money to begin with,” said Rebecca, “but Charlie doesn’t have any descendants to claim it.”
“Might as well let the Crown claim the coin and pay for it, make an ironic historical footnote out of it.” Michael stuck the label to the box. “The Crown’s ancestors would have confiscated every last coin and most of Charlie’s body parts if they’d ever caught him up.”
“Brutality as public policy. A time-honored tradition.” Jean leaned back against the door, her arms folded.
Through the windows across the room she could see several rooftops, their slates laced with green lichen. Beyond them rose the gable end of Greyfriars Church. In the sunlight, the old building seemed greeting-card peaceful. One dark, damp evening in March, though, Jean had taken a tour of the graveyard with its rows of broken, moss-covered stones. The guide had stopped beside a walled-off area lined with rotting tombs that had once served as a prison for religious dissenters. Jean had needed neither his lurid stories nor the wind moaning in the naked tree branches to convince her that ghosts lurked there. She could sense their presence, like seeing a whisper or feeling a shadow. But then, Scotland’s history was dark and bloody enough to produce armies of uneasy spirits, enough to sneak up even on people who, unlike Jean, had spent their lives blithely oblivious to the presence of the past.
But then, the country provided comic relief as well. “Speaking of private property, Miranda’s also setting me up an appointment to interview Rick MacLyon. The rich American who bought Glendessary House.”
Michael and Rebecca exchanged a glance of amusement edged by caution. “Oh aye. Rick MacLyon, esquire. Born Richard Douglas in Ro-a-noke Vir-gi-nee-yah.” Michael drawled the names.
“Douglas is a good Scottish name,” said Jean. “Why the theatrical, not to mention artificial, ‘MacLyon’? Do you know?”
“Only that he’s gone over the top playing the laird of the castle.” Rebecca nodded toward an engraved wine glass sitting at one end of the counter. “The amen glass there, that’s his. Or will be.”
Michael flicked the glass with his fingernail, producing a clear chime. “A dealer gave me it last week to authenticate, with an eye to MacLyon buying it. And it’s authentic, right enough. The provenance is in apple-pie order as well, been in the same family two hundred years. You’d know the name. Ancient title, ancient house needing repairs, no money—the usual story. They’ll make a packet off the glass, though.”
“No need quite yet to marry a son to an American heiress?” Jean looked more closely at the solitary wine glass standing atop a small turntable. An air-twisted stem spread into a trumpet-shaped bowl, which was engraved with several lines of elegant eighteenth-century script and an intricate cipher. “A crown, ‘JR’, and ‘8’. Jacobus Rex, James Stuart, Prince Charlie’s dad, the Old Pretender, who would have been James the Eighth of Scotland and the Third of England, if Charlie had won. What’s the rest say?”
“‘God save the King, Send him victorious,’” Michael read. “Sound familiar?”
“That’s the British national anthem. Is that where it came from, an old Jacobite hymn? Talk about irony.”
“This part of the world is lousy with irony,” Rebecca commented.
“I’ve noticed,” returned Jean. “Works for me.”
“MacLyon is right keen on Charlie and the Forty-five and all,” Michael went on. “He’d fancy this coin especially.”
“Unless it was found on his land to begin with, in which case he’d claim it.” Second verse, same as the first, Jean added to herself. “So how do I approach MacLyon—with a shaker full of salt?”
“He’s reality-challenged, no doubt about it,” said Rebecca.
“Living a fantasy,” Michael said.
Jean smiled wryly. “Aren’t we all.”
“But then,” Rebecca went on with a laugh of agreement, “Popcom Technologies is known as much for games as for software. Or was, before MacLyon sold out to Microsoft for God only knows how many million. Talk about timing—he got out of the dot-com business five minutes before the walls came tumbling down.”
“Claymore’s a grand game.” Michael joined his hands on an imaginary hilt and made a sweeping motion, lopping off an imaginary English head. “I’ve seen more historical accuracy on cereal boxes, mind you, but it’s a grand game.”
“Myth can make a lot better story than the truth,” said Jean. “After a while it becomes the truth. If it didn’t, I’d be out of work.”
“So would we.” Rebecca’s motion included the Museum and the city surrounding it. “Would you like a cup of tea, Jean? We can actually sit out on the balcony for a change.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got to get home and collect my wits, such as they are. You know how it is, Miranda proposes and I dispose.”
“Have a safe trip then,” said Michael. “Give us a shout if we can help out.”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
“And let us know what Lovelace’s story is,” Rebecca added.
“I’ll do that, too. Take care.” Jean wended her way back to the elevator, allowing herself to remember her one all-too-brief pregnancy, years ago when she and Brad were emotionally as well as legally married. But that water was so far under the bridge it had already evaporated and come back to earth as rain. National past glories were the stuff of legends. Personal might-have-beens were the stuff of neuroses.
She took the door leading from the new building into the vast Victorian atrium of the old Royal Museum next door. The odor of coffee from the snack bar almost tempted her off her course, but no, it was too late in the afternoon for caffeine, the excellent British tradition of teatime to the contrary.
Instead, she pitched a penny into the koi pond. Several other coins shimmered beneath the water the way the gold Louis d’Or had shimmered beneath her desk lamp. On a distant balcony a clock chimed, counting off the minutes, the hours, the years that coin had lain—somewhere.
Gold, Jean thought, was incorruptible. A shame she couldn’t say the same about people.
CHAPTER FOUR
By the time Jean reached the Lawnmarket and the building occupied by the Great Scot offices, she’d turned her conversation with Lovelace over and around and peered at it through a magnifying glass, like Michael inspecting the coin.
Her indulgent attitude toward the old man had curdled into resentment blunted only by bewilderment. He could have been trying to hide the site where he found the coin, but what a ham-handed way of doing it! Maybe his real motive was the opposite, to publicize his find and make himself a celebrity. All his protestations could have been intended to pique her interest. And yet, again, what a clumsy way of going about it. Surely she didn’t come across in her articles as a reporter who’d rush out and reveal off-the-record details the instant she heard them.
So she didn’t have privileged information. What she di
d have was two options. She could believe Lovelace was a nut case. Or she could give him the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t know what was going on in his life. She didn’t know what pressures had driven him to—no, he hadn’t lied to her, not in so many words. But he’d sure as hell meant to use her. What he’d accomplished was to give her curiosity an edge of urgency.
Two open-topped buses edged by each other in the street, the tourists with their headphones listening to some version or another of national myth. Music leaked out of an open shop door, a lushly-orchestrated easy-listening arrangement of the otherwise fiery “Scotland the Brave.”
Now that, Jean thought, was sacrilege. Scottish music was passion in sound. To buff off its jagged edges, to pour sweet oil on its turbulence—to take away its challenge—betrayed its beating heart. But then, she understood only too well the craving for safety.
She walked on by the office and headed up Castle Hill, picking her way through the tourists crowding the sidewalks and spilling out into the street, then veered right into Ramsay Lane. In the distance, a siren wailed. The late afternoon air was thickened by a mingled scent of musty age and cooking food that was distinctly Edinburgh, where the dead and the living occupied the same space if not the same time.
Shortening her steps on the steep downhill grade, Jean turned left into Ramsay Garden, strolled across the courtyard, and arrived at her own front door.
The Garden was a cluster of buildings tucked in between the Castle and the University’s School of Divinity. Despite having been built in the heavy-handed Victorian era, the buildings with their cupolas, towers, and chimneys had a whimsical air, like the illustration to a fairy tale wedged into a book of sermons. The site not only suited Jean’s taste for incongruity, it was so close to the office she didn’t need to keep a car. Plus her apartment had just been renovated. The new appliances and colorful Arts and Crafts wallpaper had not only exorcised any temperamental plumbing, but also any lingering traces of earlier residents, leaving Jean to fill the four small rooms with her favorite books, prints, movies, and music, claiming them as her own.
She opened the door, collected a couple of letters from the basket attached to the mail slot, and pitched them onto the desk. In the bedroom she found her roommate dozing on what had been her neatly-smoothed bedspread, a ball of yarn shredded beside him. At least it wasn’t the yarn from her current knitting project. Jean pointed to the basket-and-cushion combo beside the coal-effect fireplace in the living room. “You have a bed.”
The small gray cat looked up with a yawn. Jean didn’t need to speak feline to interpret that remark. “Fine,” she said. “Have it your way.”
Dougie had had it his way since a week after Jean moved in. She’d opened the front door one afternoon to find the cat lying on the stone step, basking in a rare moment of sunshine. He might just as well have announced, “Lucy, I’m home.” The next thing Jean knew, she had two bowls on the kitchen floor, a litter box in the bathroom, and a warm furry beast to sit purring on her lap when rain, fog, and regret blurred her view.
Today, though, the view through the bow windows was crystal clear, over Princes Street Gardens and past the tidy Age-of-Reason squares of the New Town to the Firth of Forth, a shining strip of silver, and the blue hills of Fife beyond. Today the clear evening lingered like a man with a slow hand. . . .
Jean laughed. Spring must mean the rising of her sap. But even if she could imagine the physical side of sex again, the emotional side, the intimacy—the passion, to use a loaded word—was still beyond her. By initiating an academic scandal, she’d burned the safe bridges of her job and her marriage. Now she was not only reinventing her exterior life, she was rediscovering her emotions. That was quite enough to deal with now, thank you.
She changed into her comfortable old jeans and a sweatshirt and tucked her knitting bag away in a cabinet. Dougie—not the “Duggie” of American dialect but Scotspoken “Doogie”—was waiting expectantly in the kitchen door. Jean triaged the leftovers in her refrigerator, trying to decide which to eat tonight and which to throw out. She’d be gone two nights, probably. Which reminded her. . . .
A strain of music filtered through the wall, one of the more energetic Wolfstone pieces, accompanied by a live fiddle. The band wasn’t the first to realize that bagpipes made a splendid rock ‘n roll instrument, but it was among the best. Tapping her toe, she poured kitty kibble into a bowl and pitched in a bit of leftover moo shu pork. Dougie’s crunches repeated the rhythmic reverberation of the drums.
Jean slipped out of her front door and down the steps to her neighbor’s. She knocked. Inside the flat the music came to an abrupt halt. The door opened a crack and Hugh Munro’s sharp blue eyes glared through the slit. “Ah, it’s you, is it? Thought I was having another visit from the music Gestapo. Come through, I’ve got a grand new single malt.” He opened the door and stepped back, shouldering his fiddle like a rifle.
Hugh’s bald head with its fringe of white hair, his crisp gray beard, and his stomach bulging coyly between his suspenders made him look like Santa Claus. But Hugh’s sleigh had two left runners. He’d earned his place in Edinburgh’s traditional-music scene with social protest folk-rock, skillfully balancing his diatribes about the evils of capitalism with its benefits there in Ramsay Garden, in a flat bequeathed to him by an admirer with a sense of humor to equal his own.
“Thanks, but I can’t come in,” Jean told him. “I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving town for a couple of days, and ask if you’d mind feeding the cat and cleaning out his box.”
Hugh beamed. “No problem at all. Off on another historical quest, are you?”
“I’m doing an article on Bonnie Prince Charlie’s French gold and another one on Rick MacLyon and Glendessary House, more or less at the same time. You were telling me about him, weren’t you? MacLyon, although you’ve certainly told me enough about Charlie.”
“Oh aye. MacLyon hired the lads and me for a Hogmanay concert. Brought in the New Year right and proper we did, with all the old customs and a few new ones we invented for the occasion. All the same to him.”
“It must have been one heck of party,” Jean said.
“Brilliant.” Hugh licked his lips reminiscently. “Not so many guests but lashings of food and drink even so, all best quality. And his staff and us tucking in with the rest. No sending the working class away with second best.”
“Was anybody famous there? Besides you, that is.”
He shrugged that away. “A couple of film people, aye. And MacLyon himself done up like a tartan nightmare, dirk, plaid, and all. But mostly there were businesspeople muttering about stock prices and some po-faced sorts I took to be toadies. Several locals were there as well—at least MacLyon’s not playing the absentee landlord, exploit and run. The only sour note was some regional functionary quarreling with a retired military chap.”
Her ears perked forward like the cat’s. “A retired military chap?”
“Pleasant enough old fellow, except for his tendency to blether on and on about his childhood in Orpington.”
Orpington. Feeling as though fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck, Jean asked, “His name wasn’t George Lovelace, was it?”
“Could have been, didn’t really notice. You know him?”
“We’ve met. He was arguing with a local official? What about?”
“Haven’t a clue, just heard them getting up each other’s noses. MacLyon’s wife Vanessa dressed them down, told them to boil their heads or whatever it is you Americans say. She’s just a slip of a girl but she’s right—assertive—even so.”
Nothing wrong with assertive, Jean thought. Within the bounds of courtesy, at least. She was feeling rather assertive herself at the moment. “I can hardly wait to get out there and start digging around! Not literally, my chances of actually finding gold aren’t too good. I’ll settle for some explanations and a good story.”
“The cast of characters looks to be right dramatic,” Hugh said with a twinkle that ha
d a sharply-honed edge to it. “Put the spare key through the letter box then, I’ll see to the moggie.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. If you need me, you have my cell phone number.”
“Have a safe trip now.” The door shut. A moment later the music started up again.
It’s got a great beat, thought Jean, and if you don’t dance to it, you haven’t got a nerve in your body. With a shimmy and a pirouette she regained her own flat.
Dougie, who was named after rock ‘n’ reel piper Dougie Pincock, was sitting on the window sill washing his face. His ears rotated like radar dishes when Jean walked into the sitting room, but he didn’t actually look around. “Already taking me for granted?” she asked. He smoothed his whiskers, concealing what was no doubt a smug smile. Funny, she hated smug in men, but found it appealing in cats.
Lovelace hadn’t acted smug. If she had any consolation at all, it was that he hadn’t seemed to be enjoying himself while he scammed her.
Sitting down, Jean booted up her laptop and started making notes. While she could come up with any number of scenarios explaining Lovelace’s actions, she couldn’t prove a thing without more evidence. The nugget that Hugh had given her, that Lovelace knew MacLyon well enough to rate an invitation to a party, could well be irrelevant. Still, there was a chance that Lovelace’s relationship with MacLyon or the stuffed-shirt official might have something to do with his true motive.
No, he hadn’t told her everything she needed, let alone wanted, to know. Whether he would come clean about his—scheme, scam, whatever—when she confronted him was another matter. Even if he did tell her or the Museum where he’d found the coin, though, that didn’t mean archaeologists could uncover the entire stash. The odds were that the barrels of coins had been hidden in different places. Some of the money had been paid out in 1746. The rest could have been stolen either en masse or in bits and pieces down the years. . . .
Just as Jean reached for a reference book, the phone emitted its double blat.
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 3