The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1)

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean wasn’t about to challenge him, especially after what she’d said earlier about eavesdropping. She walked quickly off down the hall. Behind her Cameron’s calm but forceful voice asked, “Been talking about the matter with your staff, have you, Mr. MacLyon?”

  Fiona was standing guard beside the intricately-carved newel post at the foot of the staircase. “You’re away, then?”

  “Yes. I need to set up another appointment with Rick. With Mr. MacLyon.”

  “Would half-past one the Thursday work for you?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Fine. And this time I won’t show up early.”

  “No, I shouldn’t think so.” Any amusement drowned in the spilled pupil of Fiona’s left eye. “I’ll pencil you in, then.”

  Jean turned toward the door just as it opened. Almost the entire frame was filled by the Scottish version of the Incredible Hulk. The security guard, she assumed, wearing a kilt in the green and blue crossed with yellow and red of the MacLyon tartan. His arms and shoulders strained against the cloth of shirt and jacket. His crew-cut head looked like a bowling ball, his eyes and little rosebud mouth the finger holes.

  “Miss Fairbairn, this is Toby Walsh,” Fiona said. “Toby, Miss Fairbairn will come back again the Thursday, at half-past one.”

  “Right pleased to meet you,” said Toby somberly. Her coat dangled from his huge hands as though it were a dishtowel. “Here, you’ll be wanting this, it’s a bit nippy outside.”

  “Oh, yes, thank you.” She was too tired to object to Toby’s digging around in her car. She’d left it unlocked, after all.

  And here came Neil MacSorley from the back of the house. Fiona took Jean’s laptop and Toby her bag. Neil, exuding an aromatic aura of whiskey, held her coat. Jean promised herself a wee dram of the best single malt in Fort William as soon as she’d parked the car. “Thanks,” she said, and slipped her arms into the chilly sleeves. Reclaiming her laptop and bag, she let Neil’s light touch in the small of her back guide her out the door, past the lighted colonnade, and around the collection of police cars—among them an ominous black van—and MacSorley’s sporty number. The outside air was cold. Cold and fresh.

  The sun had sunk behind the mountains to the west but still the sky blushed like firelight on pewter. The small rental car seemed wonderfully ordinary. Neil opened its door. “Those coppers, Cameron and Sawyer, they looked to be getting out the thumbscrews.”

  “Just doing their jobs, trying to find out what happened.” Jean ducked into the cold interior of the car and groped in her bag for the keys.

  “No joy, eh?”

  “No, I couldn’t tell them a thing. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” There were the keys. Some sort of Murphy’s physics always sent them to the very bottom of the bag. She inserted the right one into the ignition and looked up.

  Neil stood silhouetted against the sky, the icy wind waving his hair. “Have a care. The road’s narrow, a bit dicey after dark.”

  “At least it’s not raining.” She started the engine.

  “Cheers.” Neil slammed the door and stepped back.

  Good try, Jean thought as she piloted her car around the other vehicles, but the cheer was pretty thin tonight. She glanced in her rear view mirror to see Neil walking back to the house, his kilt fluttering fetchingly, his arms crossed as though warming himself. As though once he’d consoled her, he had little comfort left for himself.

  Then she was in the dense shadow of the trees, her headlights picking out the individual trunks but showing nothing behind them. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a phantom hitchhiker step out onto the drive, a commando, perhaps, or one of Charlie’s last broken followers, or even Fionn MacCumhaill, from the myth that illuminated the rim of reality.

  A glow beyond the trees resolved itself into the iron gates and their heraldic pillars, illuminated by floodlights. . . . Oh. The gates looked familiar because they were copies of the gates of Traquair House, an old mansion in the Borders. Gates that were closed after the departure of Bonnie Prince Charlie, so the legend went, not to be reopened until the Stuarts returned to sit on the throne of Scotland.

  These gates were already open. Charles Stuart was gone. So was the throne of Scotland. And George Lovelace wasn’t going to come back, either.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jean woke up feeling like the result of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. Her body parts didn’t quite seem to fit together. Washing and brushing and dressing in clean clothes helped restore physical humanity, but her mind was still disfigured by memory.

  In spite of her dram of whiskey, supplemented by a sandwich, she’d lain awake for hours, caught in a loop of nightmare. George Lovelace had been murdered. He’d been murdered a few paces away from her. Instead of sensing anything useful, like a call for help, she’d sensed a ghost, which might not even have been his. She’d never felt so helpless, so useless, so. . . .

  Hungry. Jean hurried down the main stairs of the hotel and squeaked through the doors of the dining room just as a waiter was closing them. “Can I still get breakfast, please?”

  Receiving an affirmative answer, she sat down by the window and looked out over Loch Linnhe to the mountains opposite, their golden-green flanks glowing in pale sunlight. By the whitecaps on the water, she deduced that the wind was blowing briskly. By the passing pedestrians muffled in coats and hats, she deduced that the wind was cold. By the dark clouds seeping into a gray-tinted sky, she deduced that rain was on its way.

  So far so good. Her faculties were still functioning, albeit at the level of the lowest common mental denominator.

  The teenaged waiter in his starched white shirt and black bow tie arranged a pot of tea, a rack of toast, a bowl of corn flakes, and a plate of bacon and eggs on the table. Jean hoped she wasn’t diminishing Lovelace’s ugly death by having a good appetite—that ghastly moment of discovery would be a permanent scar. But she knew she couldn’t do anyone any good having sinking spells. Of course, she told herself as she slathered her toast with butter and marmalade, whether she could do anyone any good with a full stomach was another question.

  A television set in the back of the room was tuned to the morning news. Hearing a familiar voice, Jean turned around, fork poised. Yes, the screen displayed an image of Alasdair Cameron, coolly and correctly telling the gathered reporters, “Several people are helping us with our inquiries.” By the way spotlights etched the slightly sagging angles of his face, Jean guessed the media had arrived at Glendessary House in force, and jumped him on his way out last night.

  She wasn’t going to get her back up about Cameron. The Northern Constabulary was paying him to find criminals, not practice diplomacy.

  No one was paying her to find criminals, but, damn it, she could hardly help thinking about the case. Surely the murder had been a random one. Lovelace had discovered a burglar in the back hall. . . . No, your average burglar was more likely to run away from than kill a witness. If he did feel moved to kill, he’d bash his victim with a handy objet d’art, not haul him up on a meat hook. Just as your average burglar would be more likely to wait until no one was home before he set out to burgle.

  So what if the murderer was neither a burglar nor average? Most scenarios involving, say, Mafia hit men out to get Rick, depended on someone being able to sneak into the house. But Lovelace hadn’t gotten in without being seen, either by surveillance system or by eyeball.

  Unless what Toby saw in the driveway wasn’t Lovelace at all, Jean thought, but a crisis apparition the old man’s ghost emitted—or however ghosts were created—at the moment of his death. He could have been dead well before she ever got there.

  Yeah, she told herself, just try going to Chief Inspector Cameron with that notion, comforting as it was to her personally.

  Maybe the murderer was from the tourist party. Someone could have slipped away from the group and met Lovelace in the back hall. Jean liked that idea. She hadn’t spent hours alone with the people from the bus, as she had wi
th Glendessary House’s cast of characters and list of suspects.

  Rick MacLyon. Vanessa MacLyon. Fiona Robertson. Neil MacSorley. Toby Walsh. Kieran MacSorley. Who’d all been cozily drinking and—no, not necessarily conspiring, just talking over the situation. If that made you a criminal, thought Jean, she’d better turn herself in now.

  She poured herself another cup of tea. Funny, she’d never drunk hot tea with milk and sugar in her former life. Now she craved it. She was going native. Swallowing the reviving brew, she considered the prime suspects.

  Fiona, housekeeper and personal assistant, the quiet stiff-upper-lip sort. Who was better placed to have her finger on the pulse of the house? And if Cameron’s reaction to her name was any indication, she was known to the police.

  Rick MacLyon, presiding genius. He’d known Lovelace was in the game larder without Jean having told him. Vanessa MacLyon, nee MacDonald, trophy wife. . . . Well, even though she couldn’t be past her late twenties, and Rick, according to his biography, was forty-three, still theirs could have been a love match, not a business arrangement.

  Neil MacSorley, piper and resident hunk. He got credit for being attractive, but a debit for knowing it. Kieran MacSorley, local judge, who was known to Jean, at least, as no friend of Lovelace’s. Toby Walsh, gentle giant. Not that body shape was any more indicative of disposition than cosmetic use was of intelligence.

  As for who had had the opportunity to kill, Jean couldn’t say, other than that the MacSorleys were otherwise engaged at the moment of death, and Rick or Fiona would have had to hustle to commit a murder while tending to the private party, as well as to Jean’s tea. Where Toby and Vanessa had been at the time she had no idea.

  The means now, the way the murder was done—that had to be significant. Even a civilian like Jean knew that murder by hanging was considerably less common than murder by poison or gunshot or knife. And such a silent murder, too. Just as she had narrowly missed seeing Lovelace in the driveway, she had narrowly missed seeing his murderer in the back hall. Missed seeing his murder, for that matter, and for that she was profoundly grateful. And yet she hadn’t heard any raised voices or sounds of violence.

  As for motive. . . . She stood up. Motive. Any murder was the means to an end. So what was the purpose of this one? To get revenge? To keep a secret? To eliminate a rival? She heard Cameron’s voice saying, Gold, there’s a motive for you, one of the best.

  Jean paced up the stairs to her room. She sorted her clothes in the wardrobe by color. She arranged her potions and lotions on the glass shelf above the sink, first by size, then alphabetically.

  Lovelace, she told herself, had survived bullets whizzing by his head, bird-watching along slippery precipices, the uneven steps of a turnpike stair—traffic, pollution, all the hazards of modern life—only to die within twenty-four hours of meeting her. Of asking her for help, whether legitimately or not. She’d done what he asked, and he’d been murdered. The two events might be totally unrelated. They might be cause and effect.

  Part of her mind said, Don’t get involved. But the rest of her mind, her spirit, her soul, had to know whether her relationship, however brief, with George Lovelace had brought about his death. She had to have answers, no matter how disturbing they were, and that was that.

  Jean opened her bag and pulled out Lovelace’s card: 5 Beaton Terrace, Corpach. All right then.

  She went down the staircase considerably faster than she’d gone up. The air outside was cold, scented with that partly salt-fresh, partly seaweed-and-fish, odor of the sea. A seagull squawked overheard. She rescued her car from the parking lot and headed first north up the Great Glen, then west along the road to Mallaig, the Road to the Isles of song, story, and tourist brochure.

  Past the uninspired box-buildings of Lochaber High School and over the Caledonian Canal at Banavie, and she was in the village of Corpach. She stopped at a shop to ask directions, and within minutes found herself on Beaton Terrace. Number 5, identified as Corncrake Cottage by a wooden plaque beside the front door, turned out to be half of a white-stuccoed duplex. A picture window looked out at Ben Nevis. A straggly herbaceous border spilled over a low stone fence, branches whipping in the wind.

  Jean parked next to the gate and got out of the car. She’d expected to see a constable standing on the front porch or blue and white police tape surrounding the house. But this house wasn’t the crime scene, MacLyon’s was. Not that it mattered. What she wanted was less Lovelace’s house than Lovelace’s neighbors. If she went back to the original “why”—why had Lovelace come to her with the coin—that might lead on to the larger whys. It wasn’t as though she was going to interfere with the police investigation. She would simply parallel it.

  The garden in front of the other half of the semi-detached house, as they called it here, was set out in apple-pie order. Every group of plants stood to attention and presented leaves and petals. The grassy areas, separated from the flower beds by furrows as straight as rulers, looked like billiard tables. The owner must manicure it with nail scissors. . . . Speaking of whom, a large shape was unsuccessfully concealed behind a rose bush. Jean called, “Hello?”

  A man wearing a floppy hat and a windcheater jacket stood up, pruning shears in hand. He was about Lovelace’s age, but rounder and softer, more at ease with gravity. Jean wasn’t sure whether his plump cheeks and bulbous nose were red from the wind and the sun or from embarrassment—the former, probably, as he greeted her without a trace of shame. “Hullo yourself,” he said in an avast-me-hearties voice. “Come to see poor George’s place, have you? Not a reporter, I hope—had to see off a couple of those late last night. Like locusts, don’t you know?”

  Jean smiled back. “I’m Jean Fairbairn. And I am with Great Scot magazine, but Mr. Lovelace came to see me in Edinburgh two days ago. . . .”

  “Aye, that he did. ‘Miss Fairbairn,’ he said, ‘she’ll know about the—’ You know. Thing.” He tapped the side of his nose with his free hand, acknowledging the mutual secret. “Ronald Ogilvy here, George’s neighbor and landlord. You heard, then. The bad news. Poor old sod.”

  “Ah—yes, I heard. I was at Glendessary House when the police arrived. I was supposed to interview Rick MacLyon. But mostly I came out here, to Fort William, to see Mr. Lovelace about the—er—thing. You knew about it?”

  “He told me last week he’d made up his mind what to do with it. Then he told me Monday night he’d done it. No more than that. George believed in keeping his business to himself, not like these modern tabloid tarts.”

  I noticed, Jean said to herself. Still, she was disappointed.

  Ogilvy came about on another tack. “Bloody shame, fine chap like George getting himself mixed up with American nutters like MacLyon. . . . Ah, you’re American yourself, are you?”

  “Yes. But I agree with you about Rick MacLyon.”

  “The man’s not shy of a bob or two, no doubt about it. Used to come and go in a helicopter ‘til the machine went down in the loch—minor accident, everyone cold and wet is all—and he decided he’d best keep to the road. Well, if he wants to support the local economy, more power to him. George, though, I advised George to steer clear. MacLyon, what sort of name is that, I asked him? How can you trust a chap with a frivolous made-up name?”

  Jean did not disagree. “Have you ever met him?”

  “Once. MacLyon took on about my name, strange to say, something about a historical society. But George was the historian. I’ve quite enough to do here and now without spending time in the past.”

  A historical society, Jean repeated silently. The private party? And MacLyon did have a thing about names.

  “Every so often I’d ask George,” Ogilvy went on, “why he danced attendance on a nutter like MacLyon. All he’d say is that the man was his cross to bear, or one mustn’t complain when it came to doing one’s duty, or that fate worked in strange ways.”

  Fate. He’d shied when she’d used that word about his finding the coin. “Mr. Lovelace went out to Gl
endessary House often?”

  “Oh aye. He was putting together a proper scholar’s library for MacLyon. Spent a fair amount of time at Glendessary and in Inverness as well, looking out old books, letters, and the like. I reckon he was a wee bit uncomfortable taking a commission for his work, it being a labor of love and all that, but it’s only proper, isn’t it, to be paid for your work?”

  “Yes, it is,” Jean said, filing away that nugget of information to be appraised later.

  “And George needed something to occupy his time after his Annie died, I’ll grant you that. Could only spend so much time plowtering about the hills watching birds, could he?”

  “How long did Mr. Lovelace live here?”

  “Fourteen years. Every night he’d sit at his desk in front of the window. Upstairs, on the right, that was his study—Mildred and I, we’d see the lamp shining. Like a lighthouse on a rocky coast it was, a beacon to the weary traveler and all.” Ogilvy’s face sagged, his shoulders slumped, and his lips quivered. He was probably thinking for the hundredth time that George Lovelace’s beacon was now permanently extinguished.

  Jean imagined the two elderly men having a wee dram and reminiscing about old times, Orpington, and a child who loved legends. Diplomatically she looked away, from the small upstairs window to the large picture window below. It reflected the houses opposite and the mountain now half-concealed by clouds. . . . Her eye darted upward again.

  A shape moved in the smaller window. Was it a reflection of an airplane flying down the glen? She turned, looked, neither saw nor heard a plane, looked back. The window was a dark square reflecting nothing, inert. “Is someone in Mr. Lovelace’s house?”

  Ogilvy peered from beneath the brim of his hat like a badger. “Eh?”

  “I thought I saw someone inside. Surely the police have. . . .”

  “Oh aye, a couple of constables and a detective named Sawyer—bit of a Saxon if you ask me, not half-chuffed with himself—came by late last night with George’s keys. I asked for their identification. Not going to stand by and let just anyone into the house, am I?” His red face darkened to purple and he threw down the shears. “A burglar, that’s it, some yob heard that poor old George bought it and thought he’d help himself to his things. Wait here, I’ll fetch the key, we’ll see them off.”