“How did you get the job with MacLyon?”
“My mum met Charlotte at an antiques fair. Next thing you know I was on my way to the wilderness.” Jean could almost hear her shudder.
“Did you get on well with everyone else in the house?”
“With everyone who wanted to get on with me. Vanessa’s fun, though how she lives out in the back of beyond without going crackers I don’t know. I hope she has a good strong pre-nup. If it weren’t for Neil, the entire episode would have been a bleeding waste of time.”
“Neil MacSorley.”
“Oh my yes,” said Meg. “You know how it is. There he was, there I was, no clubs, no restaurants, no life. So we had sex. A bit of a giggle. But Vanessa, she was jealous. Makes me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes with her and the lad o’ parts. And oh, they’re nice parts.”
No, Jean thought with something between a wince and a sigh, sex wasn’t anything more than a physical function, a bit of a giggle, no big deal. Or so kids rationalized their taste for instant gratification. And Meg was a kid. So was Neil. Jean, as an adult, consenting or otherwise, told herself not to try and save face by pretending his grapes had been sour, after all.
The taped Cameron said nothing. She imagined him giving Meg his best we-are-not-amused look. The real-time Cameron advised, “Mind the center line, you’re drifting.”
Jean eased back into the lane. As for Vanessa’s jealousy—well, whether Neil was a platonic playmate or a sexual one was only Jean’s business if it had something to do with George. Who, with his antique but hardly invalid sense of honor, would have been shocked at any affair, pre- or extra-marital.
There was the Commando Memorial again, the bronze soldiers only marginally more impassive than Cameron. His head turned toward them, watching until they vanished from view, unreadable as always.
“Toby’s a big teddy bear,” Meg’s voice was saying. “Can’t say the same for Charlotte and Kieran, though. First Charlotte’s chatting me up, who do I know, that sort of thing. Then she found out about the article for The Sunburn—listening in on my phone conversations, mind you—and oh, did the shit go flying then! She grassed me up to Rick, I’m sure of it. She’s no more than a jumped-up little oik. Hard to believe she could produce Neil.”
“And Kieran?” asked Cameron’s voice on the tape.
“Unbelievable pillock. Some sort of local judge, it appears, although his actual job is supporting Rick’s official line. Didn’t half argue with George over historical trivia—between them they almost ruined the one decent party Rick ever gave, at Hogmanay.”
“You took George’s side, then?”
“I stayed clear of them both, but of the two George gave me the least aggro. He was inclined to lecture, though, about honor and duty. Once he told me he owed the MacSorleys a debt of some sort. Borrowed money, maybe, never really said.”
“George owed the MacSorleys a debt?” Jean repeated. “Ogilvy said something about that, too.”
Cameron said, “I’m not thinking he meant in coin of the realm.”
“Now,” said Meg’s voice, “I’ve told you everything I know about the terrible murder at MacLyon Towers, which is to say, sod all. I’m off, my pal Tarquin’s expecting me at his pad, Dowally Castle. Filthy weather—we’ll have to ask Jack and Nettie to dry out the tennis courts with their helicopter. No worries, though, Tarquin’s champers is top hole, better than your tea, Constable. No hard feelings?”
A background mumble from the no doubt bemused constable was cut off when Cameron reached up to the dashboard and popped out the tape.
“Now there’s a good question,” said Jean. “Did Vanessa sign a pre-nuptial agreement?”
“In the event of a divorce she gets a tidy settlement. Financially she’s still better off living with the man. Can’t say about emotionally.”
“So Charlotte’s an eavesdropper. Not that I haven’t overheard the odd tidbit myself, but I try not to do it deliberately.” Jean felt the electrical impulses of Cameron’s glance cross her cheek, but he said nothing. “Funny, Rick’s secretary never knew his biggest secret.”
“I reckon they set her to work with the trivial bits so Vanessa and Fiona could handle the matters vital to the state of Scotland.” He emitted his scalded laugh. “Does the man not realize the moment he stands up and delivers himself of Charlie’s ‘I am come home,’ he’ll be pelted with tomatoes?”
“Better than cannonballs. . . .” Something loomed through the mist and trees. Jean dived into a passing place. The huge tow truck carrying Norman’s mud-smeared car churned past at the pace of a funeral cortege, spewing dirty water from beneath its wheels. Yes, Rick’s mania would be either funny or sad if people didn’t keep dying. As it was, his mania was dangerous. She pulled back onto the road.
Beside her Cameron turned the tape over and over in his hands as though it were a deck of tarot cards he was just about to deal. “You said charlieism is a minor disease. Doesn’t seem so now, does it?”
Again he was reading her mind. “Yes, Rick’s gone way overboard. But there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with myths of origin and identity, just like there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with whiskey.”
“Look at Charlie himself, refusing to believe Cumberland would permit his soldiers to pillage and murder, because he refused to believe he himself could have caused so much suffering with his wee ego trip.”
“If you’re drawing a parallel between Charlie and Rick, fine. Just stop throwing the baby out with the bath water.” The way Fiona is doing, she concluded silently. She wasn’t ready to mention Fiona, not yet.
Cameron’s smile wasn’t a bit like Fiona’s. She could feel its tautness without seeing it. “Be that as it may, George had to have known the documents are false. No need waiting on the Museum to confirm that.”
“No,” Jean agreed.
“It could be MacLyon killed him, thinking he’d come to you to blow the gaff.”
“There’s just one problem with that theory.”
“If MacLyon doesn’t know—doesn’t accept—that the papers are false, he’d not feel threatened by George’s disclosure. Aye, I’m seeing that.”
“But if he thought George was a traitor to the cause, not with the program, not a member of the team. . . . Is Rick crazy enough to kill?”
“Most killers of my acquaintance have thought they were acting quite logically to rid themselves of a problem,” said Cameron, with chilling sanity. “MacLyon has the motive, the means, and the opportunity, right enough.”
“So did Vanessa. Maybe she killed George to try and preserve her investment.”
“That’s possible as well.”
Jean took one hand off the steering wheel and made a frustrated gesture. “Even after all this I don’t understand why George came to me with the coin. To lure me out here and to draw my attention to Rick?”
“To force MacLyon’s hand?” Cameron slipped the tape into his pocket. “Was MacLyon intending to go public with his delusions or is he simply playing a live-action game?”
“He could have gone on for years with his Lodge, that’s true. It was George’s death that forced his hand. My showing up was secondary.” If she knew what George’s expectations had been, she thought glumly, she could at least try to live up to them. But she could only guess, and without enough evidence for that guess to be a particularly educated one.
The road ran alongside a bay in Loch Lochy. Relatively youthful trees screened the view, of misty mountains seen through many a rose-colored memory. The young George wouldn’t have known the trees, but he’d have known those dark waves with their sheen of lead running into the pebbly beach, one after the other, inexorably. The commandos used to stage “opposed landings” in this area. Surely at least several of the accidental deaths had occurred then. But not Archie’s. At least, his ghost was somehow connected to the fire in the house. Had it been George who’d accidentally wounded him, leading to his being trapped in the burning house? Now there was a thought.<
br />
“We—you—need to talk to George’s neighbor, Ronald Ogilvy. He might know what George meant about owing a debt to the MacSorleys. Something about Kieran’s father, maybe. George said something to Ogilvy about fate working in strange ways.” Fate. There was another reminder of Fiona, as though the woman were riding in the back seat of the car.
“Gunn interviewed the man, but then, he didn’t know what to ask, did he? I’ll phone, set up another appointment.”
Jean sped up a bit as they passed the MacSorleys’ cottage, the better to avoid looking at the mud wallow beside the Loch.
Cameron, she saw from the corner of her eye, gazed long and hard at it. “Andy Sawyer talked with the manager of Hawley’s restaurant in Inverness. The MacSorleys ate there often, he says, were always sending bits of food back to the kitchen and demanding it be cooked properly this time round.”
Jean snorted humorlessly.
“More than once they came in with an elderly man with a gray moustache and an English accent. He always had a carrier bag filled with books and papers.”
“George, in other words. That makes sense, the restaurant was close to the Library where he was working. But he wouldn’t have wanted to go there, he hated that kind of food. Kieran and Charlotte must have taken him in there to—what? Get him to slip the faked papers in with the real ones. . . . Oh!” Her eyes ricocheted off Cameron’s, like striking sparks from a flint, and returned to the wet strip of tarmac ahead.
“Have we been looking at the accident the wrong way round?” Cameron asked. There was that “we” again. “What if one of the MacSorleys deliberately ran Hawley off the road, then bashed the brake line themselves?”
“They were afraid Norman had overheard them plotting with George at the restaurant.”
“Was the job at Glendessary House by way of a bribe?”
“Or simply a way of keeping an eye on him?”
“I hear MacSorley, not MacLyon, gave Hawley his day out the day of the Lodge meeting. A day out just when he’d be expecting to work might could have roused his suspicions. Maybe he went so far as to talk about them to MacSorley. He was the cunning sort, I’m hearing.”
“But how would Charlotte or Kieran know Norman was going to be driving by at that exact moment?”
“Could be someone rang them from the house. MacLyon’s always going about with his mobile phone.”
“At dinner he didn’t know Norman had quit.”
“So he was saying.”
“Yeah, so he was saying,” Jean conceded. “If Rick more or less ordered Norman killed, he could have done the same with George. Charlotte and Kieran have alibis for the murder—so does Neil, for that matter—but Vanessa and Toby don’t.” She left Fiona’s name dangling unspoken.
“So we’re back to thinking the murder was MacLyon’s personal do-it-yourself project.”
“I don’t know about Toby, though. Is he hired muscle or scapegoat?”
“Both,” said Cameron, his voice murky as the day.
The Dark Mile closed over the car, the trees dripping and drooping in the moist gloom. The moss-covered stone walls and thick underbrush that pressed close against the road muffled the noises of the car, the engine, the swish of the tires, the tic-tac of the windshield wipers. Jean tensed and then loosened. Even now, no evil ringwraiths would come galloping along. The evil at Glendessary House was only too human.
Cameron shifted in his seat. “This forest reminds me of Tolkien’s Fangorn Wood, where the trees walk and talk. Although, under the circumstances, we’d be more likely to see Black Riders. Ringwraiths. Nazgul.”
Naz . . . Jean almost slammed on the brakes so she could stare at him. He was familiar with Tolkien! She’d thought he disliked fantasy. But then, he wouldn’t fear its misuse if he didn’t know its power. If he’d never been seduced by fantasy himself. And it wasn’t as though Tolkien had claimed his Middle Earth was the definitive version of existence, or used it to justify any less than palatable ends.
She confined herself to a quick glance at the spare angles of Cameron’s face, illuminated less by the dashboard lights as by her moment of perspective. That’s why his manner was so intense. Like her, he had to concentrate to keep his mind from winging away into forests of unfettered imagination and free association. That sort of alertness, constant input, constant evaluation, made overload and subsequent burn out an ever-present threat. Eyes to see and hearts to know. . . .
Okay. That was the last straw. She had to clear the air, now more than ever. Now that he, however inadvertently, had extended a tendril of personality from his shell. “Meg never mentioned Fiona at all. Do you think she has one of Tolkien’s magic rings, so she can make herself invisible?”
His sudden jerk of startlement—of recognition, like seeing a ghost—didn’t escape her. “His are rings of power. Fiona’s never wanted power.”
“No, she doesn’t. That’s one of Tolkien’s themes, how power can consume you.” The sudden taste of acid in her mouth wasn’t from the cappuccino. Get on with it. “I ran into Fiona while I was eating lunch. She told me about her second sight. How she’s chosen surrender—no desire, no pain. Everyone to her own choice, of course, but me, I’ll stick to believing in free will. To fighting fate.”
“I’d never have guessed you were a fighter.” A quick edge in his voice, like a blade drawn an inch from its sheath, made Jean look across at him. He was sitting to attention, just as she was, his face turned away from her.
“Did she tell you she ‘saw’ George hanging in the game larder and me standing on the front porch?”
“Aye, that she did.”
“I assume you have no problem with her ESP. Some of your colleagues would, though. I know how you must feel, having to hide an awkward sixth sense.”
“Do you know how I feel, then? You make a living off your ghosts.”
“And off history, whether fantasy or truth or some weird mixture of the two. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. You wouldn’t have asked me to help out with the case if I didn’t. Or that’s what you said you wanted, anyway.”
“That’s what I said, aye.”
“You’re one of a very select company—few people know I can see ghosts. And of them, you’re the only one who can do it, too. It’s not that I lie about it. I just don’t mention it. Maybe that’s dishonest. Dishonorable, even. Maybe it’s simple self-preservation. I don’t know.”
He didn’t reply.
“It’s a shame you never met George. You’d agree with him about honor.” A chill was starting to emanate from the passenger seat, and it wasn’t one the defrost would ease. But she was in it like quicksand now. “Fiona didn’t have to tell me about her husband. I already knew that.”
“Aren’t you the proper little detective, then? I let you into the case and you’ve repaid the favor by investigating me.”
She could retort, You were investigating me. Or, Your bio’s been all over the papers. But she’d already breached his privacy. She didn’t need to insult his intelligence.
The road emerged from the dark tree-lined tunnel. To the right whiskey-colored water plunged down the hillside, leaping and foaming over boulders smooth as bones. Jean guided the car into the parking lot next to the falls, shut off the engine, and sat with her hands braced on the steering wheel. Water, water everywhere. The waterfall. The fog-shrouded mountains. Picnic tables spread with raindrops. A muddy path staggering from rock to rock up the hillside. Puddles of every shape and size.
Cameron faced the window. All she could see of his expression was a thin reflection against the rocky slope. But she knew what he looked like, lips crimped, eyes frosted, each hair rigidly in place. His breath must be cold—it wasn’t fogging the glass.
She realized only now how much he’d loosened up, comparatively speaking, since they’d first met. That she cared whether he had loosened up with her was not something she wanted to examine. Neither did she want to examine just why it was important that she be ruthlessly honest with him now. Why sh
e had taken advantage of an opening to drive in a wedge, when she could just as easily have thrown out a line.
He said, “I should have stopped with my first impulse, to see you off as simply another reporter.”
“But you decided you could use me.”
“No more than you’ve been using me.”
“To get a story? Yes. But there’s one hell of a lot more to it than that. I have to know whether I caused George’s death.” She slapped the steering wheel, as though that would help her find the right words. “And okay, yes, I’m noticing your personal story because it’s like mine. I realize the guy I turned in is alive and well, if working in a Burger King because he’ll never be able to get a job in academia, thanks to me. He wasn’t actually hurting anyone by copying his dissertation. It was the principle of the thing. At least you were serving the community.” She wasn’t going to get out of her paragraph gracefully, but she blundered on. “He fought back, viciously, which dulled the guilt I felt for starting the whole messy episode. Though it didn’t dull one moment of the pain.”
“Pain?” said Cameron. “They promoted me. They gave me a commendation.”
“Fiona doesn’t blame you.”
“I know that.”
“It would be easier if she did, wouldn’t it?”
He said nothing.
Some men would have retorted, What do you mean by that? This man knew what she meant. He’d rejected surrender in favor of suppression. His calm, silent surface, like an arctic ice sheet, concealed rip tides beneath. “The scandal didn’t cost me my marriage,” she went doggedly on, “not directly, at least. It just made me realize it was over. That it was time for me to find myself, if you’ll excuse the expression.”
He turned on her. No, his eyes weren’t frosted at all. They were blazing, hot as a clear August sky. “Marriage. I should just have cut my own throat and had done with it.”
Before she could reply—not that she had a reply—he opened the door and reached for the clasp of his seat belt. For a full minute he sat looking out at the rain and the mud. The roar of the waterfall filled the car. That was what the inside of Jean’s head sounded like, thoughts plunging and splattering on the boulders of her emotions. You had an alliance with him. Detente. And you threw it over the edge by getting personal. You just can’t leave well enough alone.
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 25