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

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean emerged from turbulent shadow of the trees, crossed the little bridge over the River Arkaig, and turned onto the main road. She didn’t see any cars coming, not Charlotte burning rubber nor Cameron driving like he did everything else, in tight focus.

  Tight focus. Broad perspective. She looked up the funnel of the loch to the west, to where the mountains made closed ranks of olive drab, khaki, and bronze. Jenny Cameron, born and raised in those mountains, wouldn’t have thought of those colors. Maybe she’d have thought of sepia, like the faded writing on her etching at the Museum.

  Jean wondered again whether the writing was contemporary with Jenny. Hard to say—anyone with knowledge of the syntax and handwriting styles of the time could have added that notation. They could even have faded the ink, so it would look old. Forgers did that all the time. Like on Rick MacLyon’s precious documents, proving a fantasy in a fine calligraphic hand.

  A fine calligraphic hand. She’d thought that before. When?

  She stopped in the middle of the road, crashing into the barricade of the answer. When she saw the handwriting on the back of the receipt she’d given George Lovelace. When she saw his own hand.

  Before her she saw not the magnificent landscape written in water and rock and shadow, but George’s study in Corpach. References. Paper. Pens. Probably bottles of ink, if she’d looked for them. He was an expert in eighteenth-century writing, wasn’t he? Why should the MacSorleys hire someone in Italy to make their forgeries when they already had an expert, an expert who had spent years with a gold coin rubbing a blister in his mind, a blister that had become an abscess?

  Jean breathed a four-letter word. George Lovelace hadn’t just helped Kieran with his scam, had he? He was the scam. For a time the honor of paying his debt trumped the honor of being honest with his employer. Until, torn between the two, George figured out a way of doing both.

  He’d used her, yes. And he’d paid for it with his life. In a way she had caused his death—an accident, manslaughter, not murder, but still she owed him. Cameron had said something about people interpreting honor in their own ways. He had her number, too, no doubt about it.

  She strode out again, as fast as she could go without actually running.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Head down, Jean raced past only three reporters and edged between the gates the moment the constable pushed them open. Once around the first bend of the drive she slowed down, but only a bit.

  The other reporters had gone barking off after fresher meat, no doubt. They’d come back again fast enough, as soon as the case was solved. And it would be solved, she had no doubts about that now. All she and Cameron—that was not an editorial “they”—needed was a name.

  She emerged into the parking area. A florist’s van sat beside a van marked “Montrose Inn.” Beside that stood Cameron, the album and her computer beneath his arm, talking to D.C. Gunn.

  “. . . any number of prints,” the younger man was saying. “MacLyon, Lovelace, MacSorley, they’re all there.”

  “And you’ve sent the documents on to the lab in Inverness?” Cameron asked him.

  “Oh aye, requested the full. . . . Oh hello, Miss Fairbairn.”

  Jean stopped, chest heaving, hair waving, glasses probably gleaming maniacally beneath their water spots. She opened her mouth to speak.

  “Why go to Italy for the forgeries?” Cameron asked her. “Lovelace was an expert. He’d already put himself into MacSorley’s power, although whether MacSorley knew the full story is hard to say. I reckon Lovelace made the forgeries himself.”

  Jean’s prepared statement dissipated in an exhaled breath. Yeah, they were on the same wavelength, weren’t they? This was no more comforting a thought today than it had been yesterday. She said with a thin smile, “I just cannot get ahead of you, can I?”

  “We’re by way of being on the same side, or so you’ve been reminding me.” His own smile reflected more challenge than humor, but the humor was there.

  “George brought me the coin, knowing the story of Charlie’s treasure would be like catnip to a cat. And he knew once I started poking around in Lochaber I’d find Rick MacLyon’s story, too. Heck, George hadn’t even made it back to the train station before Miranda set up an appointment for me to interview Rick. No problem there—George had already talked me up as a sympathetic journalist.”

  “He was planning for you to uncover the truth about the forgeries, his forgeries, without him having to break whatever promise he’d made to MacSorley. There’s a fine balancing act for you.”

  “Not a balance of powers. A balance of guilts. . . .” Jean wasn’t going to go there. “Whether it was Archie who found the coin to begin with or not, in George’s mind it became associated with him.”

  “He brought you the coin by way of confession, to try and make everything right.”

  “I’m a historian, not a priest. I don’t appreciate him using me. I don’t appreciate him putting me in. . . .”

  “We’re not so sure you’ve ever been in danger.”

  “Thank you,” she retorted. “Tell me that again after you’ve got the killer behind bars.”

  Gunn was looking from Cameron’s face to Jean’s and back again. “Lovelace did the forgeries himself? He confessed to something?”

  There was the light in Cameron’s eyes again, not the heat of anger but the warmth of a finely tuned intelligence at work. No wonder he was so cool on the exterior, he needed to keep his brain from overheating. “Lovelace thought of a way to square his sense of honor with what he’d done. Clever. If ultimately fatal.”

  “He didn’t know he was in danger. He was probably prepared to take whatever the legal consequences of the fraud turned out to be. But it just doesn’t make sense that Rick would kill to protect his fantasy—he doesn’t realize it is a fantasy.”

  “MacLyon’s the killer?” asked Gunn.

  “With MacSorley’s help, he could have played at his fantasy for years to come,” Cameron said.

  “I bet Kieran kept finding reasons to put off the ‘lo I have come among you at last’ announcement, because he knew everything would come tumbling down as soon as Rick went public. It was George who wanted Rick to go public, to reveal the truth. Killing him made it happen sooner.”

  “Because you were on the trail.”

  “So in a way I caused George’s death.” There. She’d said it.

  “No.” Cameron dismissed her attempt at confession with a sideways jerk of his chin and a glance sharp as a scalpel. “He came to you, mind. You did what he expected of you. That’s all.”

  The ache drained from her own abscess. As usual, he was right. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s all.”

  His not unsympathetic gaze moved on past her, to the distant hills, and the crease that indicated deep thought appeared between his brows. “We’ve followed MacSorley’s financial trail. He looks to have been helping himself to the restoration funds, as you suspected. If Lovelace knew that—well, money’s a good solid motive for murder.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?” murmured Jean, half to herself. “Land used to be wealth. Then manufactured things became wealth. Now information is wealth. Nothing substantial, just pixels. Just ideas, like royal ancestry.”

  “We could be charging MacSorley with embezzlement, with selling MacLyon forged documents, for mining his fortune with lies, come to that. But we’d need MacLyon’s cooperation, and I’m not so sure we’d have that.”

  “So MacSorley’s the killer?” asked Gunn with a frown.

  “He can’t be,” Jean said.

  “He might could have corrupted someone else into doing his work for him. Sawyer’s saying he’s finally making progress with Toby.” Cameron turned toward the house.

  He wasn’t going to get rid of her now. Besides, he was still carrying her laptop and George’s photo album. Jean matched him stride for stride through the door at the end of the wing, leaving Gunn to close it behind them. The music of the moment was a tinkly version of “The Bluebells of Scotland,
” which even Hugh’s fiddle couldn’t render less than sappy.

  There seemed to be fewer people in the billiards room today. But then, it was Saturday. Maybe some of the Indians got to go on rotating shifts, leaving the chiefs on watch.

  The chart had leafed out with post-it notes. Used cups and empty fast-food wrappers lined the wet bar. A plastic-draped kilt and jacket outfit hung from one of the cue racks. A uniformed constable stood by the door to the back room, and another just inside. Sawyer sat behind the desk, his sleeves rolled up, his tie askew, a smug smile on his face. Jean expected him to leap up and thump his chest with his fists. “We’ve got him dead to rights,” he announced, then waited one beat, two, before peeling himself out of the chair and offering it to his superior.

  Ambitious, Jean thought. Oh yes. He wants Cameron’s job.

  Sending Sawyer a steady glance, Cameron handed the computer and the album backwards without looking around. Jean grabbed both items. They’d been tucked against his side, and warmed her chilly hands.

  Toby slumped on a chair by the fireplace. Worriedly Jean scanned the desk top for thumbscrews, but nothing lay there but papers, folders, a couple of notebooks, and a tape recorder. Sawyer must simply have hectored him until he cracked. Confession may or may not be good for the soul, but it could get a persecutor off your back. The witch-hunters knew that.

  Spurning the chair, Cameron leaned against the edge of the desk. “Did you search George Lovelace’s house at Corpach?” he asked Toby.

  “Aye,” mumbled Toby. “That I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Was told to.”

  Sawyer rolled his eyes. “We’ve already been over. . . .”

  “By whom?” asked Cameron, with admirable grammar.

  Rick, Jean thought.

  Toby said, “Mrs. MacSorley.”

  “Charlotte MacSorley?” Cameron repeated, without the least trace of surprise. “Why?”

  Jean blinked rapidly, so no one would see how her eyes had widened.

  “She told me she’d have me sent down again,” said Toby, “if I didn’t do what she said.”

  “No one can send you back to prison without cause,” Cameron told him.

  Sawyer snickered. “We’ve got cause now.”

  Toby contracted his massive body, as though by occupying less space he’d escape notice. “She told me to look out some papers. Pages in old-fashioned handwriting. She showed me letters, said they’d look like those.”

  More documents? Jean wondered. Ones that Lovelace was still working on?

  Cameron shot a keen glance at her and then past her, toward the constable standing outside the door. “Bring Mrs. MacSorley here,” he ordered, and asked Toby, “Did you find the papers, then?”

  “Not those, no. Bags of papers there, right enough, I spent hours in George’s study. I’d been there before, mind—he’d set me down to read Great Scot or Harry Potter whilst he worked at his desk.”

  “What was he working on?”

  “Writing of some sort. With peculiar pens, not biros. Right slow and careful, talking to himself like he was trying out the words.”

  Sawyer looked at Cameron as though to say, There you go.

  Cameron didn’t take any notice. “You drove the MacSorleys’ car out to Corpach, then brought it back to the garage in Fort William?”

  “Aye, that I did.”

  And either Toby had been smart enough to leave the car a couple of blocks away from Lovelace’s house, Jean told herself, or Charlotte had told him to. She didn’t need the car herself—Neil had already driven to town in one of Rick’s cars. Whether he had known what his mother was up to was a good question. “Were you finished searching the house when you looked out George’s study window and saw me talking to Mr. Ogilvy from next door?”

  “Here,” Sawyer began. Now Cameron did look at him, sharply, and Sawyer desisted, but not without curling his lip at Jean.

  “All but the attic,” Toby answered.

  Jean shifted her weight. Something was punching into her hip. . . . Oh, the key to her bedroom was in her pocket. She’d seen a key in George’s house, hadn’t she? Was the answer hidden in plain sight? “There was an old key in a box on George’s desk. Do you know whether that goes to anything?”

  “No, Miss. I was thinking he found it detectoring.”

  Cameron nodded, taking in the implications. “Why were you hanging about Miss Fairbairn’s hotel?”

  “I saw her there at George’s house. George told he me was going to see her about a problem he was having with those papers he was writing. I thought maybe she knew where they was. I waited ‘til she drove away, then followed her into Fort William, saw which hotel she was stopping at.”

  Good going. She’d never noticed a car on her tail at all, let alone a distinctive one like the MacSorleys’.

  “But then,” Toby went on, “Mr. and Mrs. MacSorley get right narky when you don’t do just exact what they say, and they never said to ask no one else. So I walked on by. Sorry, Miss Fairbairn.”

  “That’s okay.” At least her seeing him in the hall had given them one more lead. Sort of.

  Sawyer turned on Toby. “This is all well and good, Sunshine. But you’ve not yet told us why you killed George Lovelace.”

  Toby’s already pale face drained to a faint green. “No, sir, I never. George, he was good to me and me mum, he was.”

  “Not the first time a yob takes advantage of some do-gooder,” Sawyer said to Cameron. “I’m telling you, we’ve got him dead to rights.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  The constable peered around Jean. “Sir, Mr. and Mrs. MacSorley. . . .”

  “Chief Inspector, I must lodge a protest about your sending a uniformed constable to interrupt very important preparations.” Pushing Jean aside, Kieran surged into the small room, Charlotte in his wake. Jean found herself pressed against the side of the desk and Cameron’s compact body both. Quickly she stepped back into the corner, but not so far she didn’t notice that Kieran’s gag-a-moose aftershave did not complement the metallic odor of lubricant hanging over the paintball guns.

  Cameron stood up very straight, which still left him four inches shorter than Kieran, and looked past him to the door. “D.C. Gunn!”

  Gunn materialized just outside. “Sir?”

  “Drive Walsh here to Fort William. We’ll be holding him overnight.”

  Did Kieran smirk a bit at that? Jean wondered. Hard to tell. The hostility in his beady lizard eyes canceled out the unctuous upward curve of his lips. And Charlotte’s red mouth was set as rigidly as the sculpted waves of her hair.

  “D.S. Sawyer, take two lads to Lovelace’s house in Corpach, find this key, and look out a lockbox of some sort in the attic.” Cameron’s eyes edged toward the MacSorleys, seeing what effect that had on them.

  None. They stood so stiffly posed Jean had the impression they were trying not to exchange any incriminating glances.

  Sawyer’s mouth opened, shut, and then emitted a graceless, “All right, then.”

  He’d probably have preferred prisoner transfer, thought Jean. More chance to bully the already cowed Toby. Sawyer brushed roughly by the MacSorleys, barked like a seal at the people in the outer room, and stamped out the far door. The constables frog-marched Toby from the room.

  Housekeeping accomplished, Cameron turned to Charlotte and Kieran. His voice was calm, quiet, and menacing. “Now then. Mrs. MacSorley.”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector? How may I assist you?”

  “By telling me why you threatened Walsh into burgling Lovelace’s house.”

  Charlotte’s slit of a mouth flapped wordlessly. Kieran leaned into Cameron’s face. “Inspector, I realize you have very demanding duties to discharge, but may I suggest you focus on the convicted felon, not on a lady of good character. Threats. Very strong language. Quite inappropriate.”

  Jean could see the ice forming on Cameron’s brow ridge and cheekbones. “Walsh says Mrs. MacSorley asked him to look out
some papers amongst Lovelace’s effects. What do you know about that?”

  “Not a thing,” Kieran blustered. “Why should I?”

  “Did you take several documents belonging to Rick MacLyon to the Museum of Scotland?”

  “Documents? What documents?” He was about as guileless as a T. Rex.

  “May I suggest you start cooperating?”

  “It’s always my aim to cooperate with the police, Inspec—Chief Inspector, but when you make such ridiculous charges. . . .”

  “No one’s charging you with anything. Not just yet. Mrs. MacSorley, did you have Walsh search Lovelace’s house? Yes or no?”

  Charlotte drew herself up. “Of course not. The man is a criminal, I’ve had as little contact with him as possible.”

  “And the papers, MacSorley?” Cameron asked. “MacLyon’s set of documents proving his claims?”

  “Ah, those,” said Kieran, with a fly-shooing gesture. “You should simply have said so, Chief Inspector. Those were all George’s doing, he found them amongst the archives whilst he was drawing up genealogies. He took them to the Museum of Scotland, he did, then showed round a letter certifying their authenticity. Amazing story. Positively mind-boggling.”

  “We had our doubts, mind you,” Charlotte hedged. “It’s quite difficult to reconcile such claims with an American of—well, perfectly solid ancestry, I’m sure. But George was a respected expert. We had a very good look at his credentials before we allowed Rick to hire him.”

  So they were blaming George for the whole thing, Jean thought. How convenient that the man wasn’t here to defend himself.

  Judging by the skeptical angle of Cameron’s head, to say nothing of the glacier creeping down his jaw line, he agreed. “So you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the documents are not genuine at all?”

  Charlotte gasped and put her hand to her mouth. Kieran tut-tutted. “I’m shocked, Chief Inspector. Who’d have thought an erudite old man capable of such a devious lie?”

  “I should imagine,” said Cameron, “that erudition and intelligence make lying all the easier.”