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

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Or was Vanessa intimidated by Rick? Jean had talked to everyone except him, the presiding genius, the head eccentric, the central figure of Glendessary House mythology. It was time to yank his chain. “Rick,” she said.

  He looked up from beneath his brow ridge as though surprised to see her at the table. “Oh. Yeah. The interview.”

  “I’d prefer to just visit rather than do anything formal. Have a blether, they’d say here. But however you want to handle it.” Jean felt Vanessa’s gaze on the side of her face like the glare of a heat lamp.

  Rick edged his eyes toward his wife and then back to Jean. “Fairbairn. That would be your father’s name. And his father’s.”

  Again with the genealogy. Cameron wasn’t the only person playing cat and mouse with her. Concealing her impatience, Jean explained, “My great-grandfather Fairbairn came from Stow, in the Borders. My great-grandmother was a MacKay from Sutherland, at the opposite end of the country. They met on an immigrant ship. My mother’s maiden name was Graves, which is English, but her mother was a Thompson, which I understand also counts as MacTavish.”

  Rick nodded, his jaw still working.

  Jean did not conclude by asking, Do I pass the test? “I’d like to write an article about the history of Glendessary House, its restoration, your collection of Jacobite memorabilia—that sort of thing. Like the Louis d’Or George Lovelace brought to my office on Monday.”

  Rick swallowed. “I offered to buy it. He said it should go to the Museum of Scotland.”

  “Did you ask him where he found it?”

  “Yeah, but he was pretty vague about that.”

  Vanessa said, “He was pretty vague, period.”

  “He knew his business,” said Rick. “He was a nice old guy, too.”

  Yes, he was, Jean conceded silently. “Have you thought about looking for more coins? The barrels were buried in this area. But then, that might attract more attention than you’d like. George was concerned about that.”

  Rick tore another roll in half and mopped it around his plate. “Attracting attention isn’t the problem, Jean.”

  “Not now, anyway,” said Vanessa.

  So whatever it was Rick was supposed to tell her, to go public with, would attract attention. No surprise there. But Jean wasn’t supposed to know that he was going to—announce, reveal, come clean with—something. “Tell me about the house,” she prompted.

  Vanessa sighed. “Here we go. Potted history one-oh-one.”

  “Glendessary House,” said Rick. “The house that was here in seventeen forty-six probably belonged to Donald Cameron, the Gentle Lochiel. Who laid down his honor for Prince Charles. Or the house might have belonged to Jenny Cameron’s family. They were all related. One of the noblest clans of the Highlands.”

  Jean didn’t point out that often the local people would take on the name of the chief as a survival tactic. A clan wasn’t necessarily a family.

  “That house was burned by Butcher Cumberland’s troops. The Cameron properties were confiscated. Not returned until the eighteen hundreds, when the English government at last recognized the heroism of the Jacobite chiefs.”

  And after the formerly Jacobite chiefs sent their men to fight Britain’s battles in America and India. To say nothing of first beggaring and then selling out their tenants, to buy themselves social positions in London.

  “In the eighteen thirties, one of the Lochiel’s relatives built a small hunting lodge here. Lots of money to be made off hunting rights.”

  Jean thought of the trophy heads at the MacSorley’s house and the photos in the smoking room. “Do you hunt, Rick?”

  “No point to it. You want meat, order it. You want to shoot things, play paintball.” He shoved his plate away and leaned back in his chair, looking up at the pictures. Outside the windows day faded into night. The chandelier above the table emitted a warm glow, pushing back the darkness. “The house was expanded in the eighteen eighties by an industrialist Cameron,” Rick went on. “He was a recluse. Lived here all year around. Then the house passed to a cousin. Guy named MacSorley who lived in Fort William. He’d rent the place out, only have his buddies in during hunting season.”

  Hunting ran in the MacSorley family, then. “The house was damaged in a fire during World War Two,” Jean prodded.

  “Glendessary House was taken over by the government. Part of the commando school based at Achnacarry. This was the infirmary. One night the place caught on fire. Badly damaged and pretty much abandoned after that.”

  “You’d never know, looking at it today.”

  “I hope not,” said Vanessa. “Even with Kieran finding architectural elements recycled from other houses, Rick dropped a fortune rebuilding the old place.”

  “And you rebuilt the game larder, though you don’t hunt,” Jean said.

  “The place was a hunting lodge,” said Rick, that explaining everything.

  Vanessa added, “This end of the house wasn’t badly damaged. There was a west wind the night of the fire, and it was the end with the billiards room that was gutted. I did some rearranging down there—the stairs are a bit different, for one thing.”

  The door to the kitchen swayed gently back and forth. Toby or Neil or even Fiona could be listening, Jean supposed, but then, it wasn’t as though Rick was saying anything they didn’t already know. He’d probably given each of them a prospectus with bullet points when they signed on. “How did you hear about Glendessary House to begin with?”

  “Kieran MacSorley offered it to me,” answered Rick, committing himself to neither Charlotte’s nor Vanessa’s version of events. “That was a deal I couldn’t refuse. The Camerons were indispensable members of Prince Charles’ team. He didn’t have a workable rebellion until the Lochiel brought the Camerons out to Glenfinnan to meet him. Set an example for everyone else.”

  Jean reserved judgment on the wisdom of following examples.

  “And Jenny Cameron at the head of her troops! Courage and beauty. A true heroine! The Prince lost his heart on the spot.”

  Did he? Rick was within spitting distance of the version published by the English propagandists. Jean leaned forward, feeling as though she was finally getting a glimpse into Rick’s thought processes.

  “The Camerons took Edinburgh for the Prince. They were at his side at Culloden. Saved his life. The Lochiel called all the chiefs together here at Loch Arkaig. That’s when they buried the coins. He never surrendered. Went off to France with Charlie. Died planning a new rebellion.”

  Would Lochiel’s or even Charlie’s surrender have convinced the English the Scots were no longer a threat and prevented the ethnic cleansing campaign? Probably not. Frightened people had little appetite for mercy.

  “Fear God and Honor the King. That’s the motto of Clan Cameron.”

  Jean followed Rick’s gaze to the painting of Charles in Edinburgh—men cheering, women fainting, banners flying. The Bonnie Prince had held court in Holyrood Palace like his ancestors. He could have had the crown of Scotland, but no, he’d wanted that of Britain, and invaded England. He should have quit while he was ahead. Left well enough alone. . . . She shifted uneasily.

  Charlie and his dynasty had had courage without common sense, charm without compassion, hot tempers, a taste for hedonism, and centuries of bad luck. Their failures had become tragedies for their followers. Yes, it was all a good story, but Rick wasn’t seeing it as a cautionary tale.

  The door to the kitchen opened. Toby stepped into the room holding a large serving tray like a shield. He collected the dishes, Vanessa flinching at every ding of plate and dong of cutlery, and pushed back through the door. Jean glimpsed Neil leaning against the counter holding a bowl and a spoon, and beyond him Fiona sitting at the long worktable reading a newspaper, the cat washing its face at her feet.

  Toby reappeared with dishes of apple-bread pudding, drowned in crème fraîche and exuding the odor of cinnamon, then brought out a carafe of coffee. Just before the door swung shut, Neil presented his spoon to
the dining room like a gladiator his sword: We who are about to dine salute you.

  Jean smiled at him, then from the corner of her eye saw Vanessa, too, smiling. Okay, so which one of them was Neil saluting? Did it matter?

  She accepted a cup of coffee mostly to inhale its aroma. The pudding was delicious, melting on her tongue. “Miranda lets me write restaurant reviews every now and then. What’s the name of Norman’s restaurant in Inverness?”

  “La Brasserie,” said Vanessa.

  Rick smashed his pudding and crème fraîche into a cow pat. “The Scots were the leaders, the true patriots, during the American Revolution, you know.”

  Except for those who were patriots for the Crown. Like Flora MacDonald and her husband, immigrants to North Carolina.

  “It was a Revolution against the English mentality,” Rick went on. “Religious prejudice, class distinctions. Everything the Stuart kings fought against.”

  Jean almost swallowed the wrong way. Clearing her throat, she stared up at his thin, intense face. The same Stuart dynasty that had murdered thousands of people in the name of class and religion? Not that the other religious persuasion didn’t commit its own excesses, but still, there was a reason many Scots hadn’t supported Charlie. No matter whether the name was spelled in the Scottish fashion, Stewart, or in the French fashion, Stuart, or even in the Gaelic, Stiubhart, they hadn’t wanted him and his kind back again.

  “Goes to show you the enormous popularity of the Stuarts, how hard the Hanoverian usurpers had to work to suppress their followers. Years later you have Robert Burns mourning their loss. Burns was an aristocrat himself, a cousin of the Dukes of Hamilton. Blood will tell.”

  This was the same Burns who’d written “A man’s a man for a’ that” and prided himself on working as a farmer? Yes, Jean thought, blood will tell, but only to a scientist splitting DNA.

  Rick’s sallow complexion glowed in the soft light of the chandelier. “Did you know Prince Charles was offered the Crown of America? He turned it down, though. Supported democracy.”

  Yeah, right. Jean smothered her guffaw in a bit of caramelized apple and shot a glance toward Vanessa. She was poking holes in the mound of food in her bowl, her chin propped on her elbow. This was nothing new. No big deal.

  It was a deal to Jean, though. Rick’s eccentricity ran deeper than she’d suspected, from charmingly off-base to way the heck out in left field. How could she write an article about him without it sounding like a joke? It wasn’t Cameron who wasn’t for real, it was Rick. He was starting to look more like some sort of alien tartan-bearing creature every moment.

  Maybe all it had taken to get Norman sent on his way during the Lodge meeting was his name. Rick had only hired a man named Hawley because Kieran had pressed him. On the other hand, Rick might have taken on a dubious character named Walsh because Charlie had had a disreputable follower named Walsh. There had been a Robertson somewhere in Charlie’s retinue as well—although Jean had no idea just how Fiona had ended up here, in an asylum run by its owner-inmate.

  Then there was Ogilvy. Rick had invited him to join the Lodge on five minutes’ acquaintance. And he’d greeted D.C.I. Cameron like a long-lost relative. No wonder she’d been put through her own genealogical quiz. Fortunately Fairbairn was an innocuous enough name.

  Why, she wondered, had this particular bee built a hive in Rick MacLyon’s bonnet? Had he grown up sitting around campfires with a group of Civil War re-enactors, singing, “Save your Confederate money boys, the South will rise again”? The Old South owed more than a little to Walter Scott and the Celtic twilight. . . .

  The door to the hall opened so wide it thumped against the wall. Vanessa leaped an inch off the seat of her chair. Rick turned to the doorway. Jean put her last spoonful of cream-bedewed pudding back into the bowl. Think of the devil and he appears. Here we go.

  Alasdair Cameron stood in the doorway. The only color in his face was the crisp, unyielding blue of his eyes. The knot of his tie dangled halfway down the front of his shirt. The sleeves of his coat were wet and muddy. He opened his mouth, inhaled. . . .

  “Sit down, Sandy,” Rick said brightly. “How about some coffee?”

  Cameron stared, mouth still open.

  “Alasdair is a version of Alexander, right? In England that’d be Alex but here in Scotland that’d be Sandy.”

  Cameron shook his head dismissively, a movement that was almost a shudder. “Mr. MacLyon, Mrs. MacLyon, Miss Fairbairn. There’s been an accident. Norman Hawley came away from Glendessary House at half-past five, clocked out of the gate by one of my constables. A few minutes later, as he was passing through Bunarkaig, he veered to avoid a car driven by Charlotte MacSorley, who was just leaving her drive. Hawley’s car ran off the road, down the hillside, and into the loch.”

  Jean covered her mouth with her hand. She knew what was coming next.

  “Mr. MacSorley phoned emergency services. They alerted us straightaway. We discovered Hawley in the water. He never escaped from his car.”

  “He drowned,” said Rick, flat, his glow extinguished. “He’s dead.”

  “Aye,” Cameron said, even flatter.

  Norman left in such a hurry, thought Jean, because he didn’t want to stay in a house with a murderer. He would have been safer here. . . . His death was an accident. Accidents could happen any time, anywhere.

  “That’s such a narrow twisty road. I never drive it, I always. . . .” Vanessa turned toward the kitchen door, raising her voice. “Neil?”

  The door opened the rest of the way, revealing the unlikely triumvirate of Fiona, Toby, and Neil jammed together in the opening. Neil was looking a little green around the gills. “My mum?”

  “She’s not been injured,” Cameron told him. “The police surgeon gave her a sedative, and W.P.C. Grant is sitting with her. Your father’s just arrived here, if you’d like to have a word.”

  “Oh aye,” said Neil faintly, and vanished.

  Cameron walked two heavy steps toward the kitchen. Taking his place in the dining room door was Sawyer, looking like a troll with a goat stuck in his craw. “Toby Walsh,” said Cameron.

  Toby’s round face puckered. “Aye?”

  “Mr. MacSorley tells me you had their car in to be serviced yesterday.”

  “Oh aye, so I did, they let me drive it and all.”

  Sawyer shouldered his way past Cameron. “Come with me.”

  “What?” asked Vanessa.

  They think Toby and the car had something to do with the. . . . Jean interrupted her own thought. Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

  Toby, with a despairing glance back at Fiona, went quietly. Fiona shut the kitchen door. Vanessa looked from Jean to Cameron and back as though pleading for help. Then she threw down her napkin and fled.

  Rick opened his mouth, shut it, finally managed to ask, “You want a glass of port, Sandy?”

  Cameron was already turned toward the door, and Jean could only see a three-quarters view of his face. Even so, she could swear that he glanced toward her, as though he, too, expected some response. “No. Thank you.” The door shut softly but emphatically behind him.

  Jean pushed back her chair. Interview. That’s right, the interview. “Rick, we need to sit down tomorrow and continue our conversation. I’m very interested in your take on Scottish history.” And that was no lie.

  “Sure. Tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock. The library. You’ll get a real exclusive. It’ll be worth your while.”

  It had better be. With a wan smile Jean broke free into the corridor, leaving the warm but suddenly stifling light of the dining room behind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Wall sconces shaped like candles looked good but shed little light into the darkness of the hall. Hunching her shoulders, Jean strode off toward the entrance, harboring some vague idea of talking to Cameron. She’d accumulated more than a few bits and pieces of information over the last few hours. Whether any of it or none of it helped the investigation was for him to decide, as he wo
uld no doubt remind her.

  Vanessa, Fiona, and Charlotte were all capable of doing a composite British-American accent. In the anonymous phone call sweepstakes, though, Fiona was in the lead. The caller’s accent had been impeccably American, not Charlotte’s mocking exaggeration. And of all three women Fiona was the only one to express caution about George’s activities. Charlotte dismissed him out of hand. Vanessa saw him as a benign annoyance.

  One problem with that theory, though, was that of the three, Fiona seemed the least likely to make waves. The other was that Cameron, otherwise an intelligent person, refused to consider Fiona a suspect.

  Jean’s stride slowed into a mosey, which stopped at the foot of the staircase. Cameron wouldn’t appreciate her butting in right now, not when he was dealing with another death. Instead of talking to him, she could—yeah, she could collect some more information. Not fooling herself one bit, Jean doubled back down the hall and pushed through the kitchen door.

  The room was lit only by the small light above the stove. Fiona sat alone at the table, silhouetted against the window, Clarinda tucked up on her lap. Or at least part of the cat was on Fiona’s lap. Her tail and a couple of legs didn’t quite fit and hung down on either side. The two faces turned toward the door. “May I help you, Miss Fairbairn?” asked Fiona.

  “I thought I could help you wash the dishes or something.” Jean knew very well how confidences could be exchanged over a dishtowel.

  “We’ve got an automatic dishwasher, thank you.” Fiona’s profile turned back to the window. Clarinda laid her head down again.

  Jean remembered the hours she’d spent cuddling Dougie and staring out her window, lost in memory and regret. So what was Fiona remembering and regretting? Being driven to murder? Or something personal, like a good marriage lost or a bad marriage never abandoned?