That was the alcohol and the fat making her think she was clever. If she could question Cameron about evidence collection techniques. . . . Oops. She’d stared at him too long. He looked sharply up. With a shrug she looked back down at her dessert and took another bite. It melted in her mouth and left a satiny sheen on her tongue.
Rick threw down his napkin. “Okay,” he announced.
Charlotte stuffed one last spoonful of Atholl Brose into her mouth, leaving a smear clinging to her lip. Vanessa stood up. “Coffee for the ladies upstairs, Fiona.”
Jean wasn’t surprised Rick insisted on that old custom.
“Bring out the Drambuie and the cigars,” he ordered. “And some of the blackberry stuff Neil likes. Just like a kid, isn’t it, to like the sweet stuff?”
Jean took that as a compliment. Pushing back her chair, she met Cameron’s jaundiced eye and wondered whether he’d call Rick’s attention to his—fraudulent—ancestor James VI and I’s tirade against tobacco.
Fiona went into the kitchen. The pipe music stopped. Neil had impressive lungs—he’d played for over an hour. But Jean supposed he was used to that. He’d played a long time the day George was killed.
Vanessa opened the door. Charlotte got up. Neil came through the kitchen door, his fair skin glowing attractively, his hair tousled appealingly. “Music,” Rick said to him. “Toby’s not here. Fix the music.” Bestowing a smile on each of the ladies, Neil brushed by Vanessa and out into the hallway.
Poor Toby, Jean thought, shooting one last glance at Cameron. His eyebrows registered concern but hardly remorse. One way or the other, he was only doing his job.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Jean minced out into the corridor behind Vanessa and Charlotte. Funny how the floor seemed a bit unsteady and the mock candles even dimmer than usual. A nice bright light shone from a door at the far end of the hall, in the room across from the game larder. Vanessa had called that room Toby’s office.
Jean had assumed, when she’d thought about it at all, that the intercom sound system was controlled from Rick’s office. Apparently not. Now that she did think about it, she’d seen electronic equipment in that room moments before she’d seen George Lovelace hanging in the game larder, an image that had nullified all others.
A sudden burst of pipe music filled the air, either Pincock or Skelton, thank goodness, not more of the blandities. Neil walked out into the hall, bowed toward Jean, and strolled back into the dining room. Rick’s voice called expansively, “Sit down, Neil. Have some of this cough-syrup stuff.”
The blackberry and whiskey blend didn’t taste at all like cough syrup, Jean corrected silently. It was sweet balanced with dry, something rarely done successfully.
Vanessa led the way upstairs, turning on lights as she went. Waving Jean and Charlotte toward chairs, she flopped down on the loveseat, next to windows opaque with the night. A moment later Fiona came gliding up the steps like a geisha. She set down a coffee tray, produced gem-like bottles of liqueur and crystal glasses from a nearby cabinet, and drew the curtains. “Will there be anything else?”
“Join the party,” Vanessa answered, adding, “What there is of it.” Skipping one caffeine-delivery system, she reached for another, a bottle of Kahlua. “Coffee? Booze? Help yourselves.”
Fiona sat down on a straight-backed chair at the rim of the circle of lamplight, balancing on the edge of the seat, holding a cup of coffee but not drinking it. In the shadow her face was unreadable.
Charlotte served herself coffee and Amaretto, and began a monologue about a Labrador retriever Kieran once took to hunt grouse. What a shame some factions were trying to stop the hunting. Some people were intent on depriving the cultured and sophisticated of the rewards they deserved, apparently for nothing more than existing.
Tuning Charlotte out, Jean drank a few sips of black coffee. It scoured the sweet cream from her mouth. By the time Clarinda came trotting along, whiskers at full alert, Jean’s head had cleared a bit. But still her every sensation, every thought, left a wake across her mind, ripples that expanded further and further until they lapped up against memory.
The cat padded a sortie around the coffee table, making prissy feline faces at the smell of the liqueurs. Charlotte said cats were cold, selfish, and unfeeling. There was something to be said for not feeling, Jean thought. That could be an exercise in self-preservation. Been there, though. Done that.
From the courtyard came the sounds of voices, car doors, and engines. The caterers, presumably, packing up and moving out. Was Cameron the only policeman left in the house? Most of the others were in Fort William hounding Toby, the wild. . . . Well no, he wasn’t a wild goose, the forensic evidence was conclusive. Wasn’t it?
Only if the kilt in the bag labeled with his name was really his. She promised herself she’d mention her doubt to Cameron, even if she got a lecture in police procedure in return.
Vanessa poured herself another Kahlua. Fiona responded abstractly to Charlotte. The pipe music played on. If she was going to get drunk, Jean thought, it would be on that music, potent as whiskey, strong as death.
She’d only spent a few hours here when the infernal canned music hadn’t been stuck in her ears like a pebble in her shoe. The only times she could remember not hearing it was late at night and when Neil was piping. It might be Toby’s job to keep the music going, but tonight wasn’t the only time Neil had put on a CD. Thursday night he’d put on Hugh’s new album, right before Hugh himself told her that if Neil had played with Gallowglass at all, it had been in a recording studio. . . .
Jean’s stomach shimmied, sending a wave of cream and coffee and turnip into the back of her throat. Her cheeks went clammy and her hands icy. This must be was what Fiona felt, seeing a vision of the future. Except Jean wasn’t seeing a vision. She was seeing the truth. Neil. A good-looking self-centered kid. A fine musician. Not a murderer. . . . Oh God. No. Please, no.
One small part of her mind whined, leave well enough alone. Let it go. Even if the kilt were Toby’s, they couldn’t convict him on that evidence alone. After a while the case would simply die away. And George’s murderer would go free.
Most of her mind, the stubborn part she’d flexed so often it bulged like a muscle, knew what she had to do—prove her suspicions, one way or another. And if she found a whistle, she had to blow it.
“Excuse me,” she said. Charlotte paused long enough to inhale, then went on. Vanessa stared at the door of Rick’s study, her expression set in deep, almost calculating thought. Fiona watched Jean go, eyes hooded.
Jean found Clarinda outside her room, staring as only a cat could stare down the hall toward the black well of the back staircase. Opening and shutting her door loudly enough to reach the ears in the sitting area, Jean skirted around the cat and walked toward the stairs. She cast only one quick glance behind her, yearning toward the light—the cat’s eyes made two golden gleams, like twin Louis d’Ors—and started slowly and carefully down, one tread at a time.
Being scared of the dark was as irrational as thinking there were monsters beneath the bed. She wasn’t afraid of ghosts—she knew they weren’t monsters. And yet there was something frightening about darkness, about the way ordinary objects changed form, about the way darkness could hide almost anything.
Charlotte’s distant voice mingled with the amplified wail of the pipes. “The Flowers of the Forest.” Neil had played “The Flowers of the Forest” the day George was killed, appropriately enough. But then, the MacSorleys knew how to act at good manners.
The air on the landing was arctic cold, thick with the scent of smoke. Keep moving, Jean told herself. Ghosts can’t hurt you. Darkness can’t hurt you. Living people hurt you. Stepping through the icy patch, she made it down into the back hall and looked right and left, up and down. Archie might be on duty, or standing watch, or whatever ghosts did, but he wasn’t visible now.
A deep breath filled her lungs with cool air, not smoke. She started along the hall toward the far end. Ric
k’s increasingly shrill monologue, cut with Kieran’s oily bray, grew louder the closer she got to the dining room. Occasionally Neil’s smooth murmur annotated a phrase. Once or twice Cameron’s voice laid down a base line, like the drones keeping the music of the pipes tied to the earth and the truth.
She tiptoed past the dining room door, close enough to smell the smoke of the cigars, richer and sweeter than the eerie acrid scent of the burning house, and shut herself in the darkened office. Guided by the blinking lights of the various control panels, she found the light switch.
Bright light stabbed her eyes, but it took only a moment for them to adjust. When they did, she saw that the room looked like it had last Tuesday, littered with odds and ends, the electronics connected by a spider’s web of cords. A blank monitor reflected her image like a fun-house mirror. The lovely melody of “Dark Island” echoed from the hallway outside, but now, here, Jean could hear the tiny whir of the CD player itself and see the display counting out the seconds.
Vanessa wanted to have a garden party. She’d said the lights and the electronics were all ready to go. . . . Yes. There was the switch, one side reading “Indoor Speakers” and the other reading “Outdoor Speakers.” Jean patted it with her forefinger. Now it was set to “Indoor.” All the time she’d been here it had been set to “Indoor.” Except for that first day. No, there were no video cameras hidden beneath the eaves as she’d first assumed. What was hidden outside were speakers. She’d heard pipe music at the time of the murder, yes. But she’d only seen the piper after it was done. . . .
No. Please, no. A stack of CDs sat on one corner of the desk. Her hands trembling, she went through them. Pipers. Dance bands. Throbbing tenors. Two of Hugh’s recent releases. Easy listening from Yanni to Phil Coulter to Celtic mishmashes. A Gallowglass album. A couple of alternative rock, some pop, and a stray classical disc completed the stack.
Please, no. But if no, if Neil were innocent, then what? Jean started opening desk drawers. From down the hall, muffled by the door, came a gust of laughter. Just below that she heard footsteps. Vanessa thought the ghost was George because Archie had only become active at George’s death. Ghosts were often sensitive to—well, a disturbance in the Force was as good a way of putting it as any. That was as good a description of what she’d felt in the sitting room when George was murdered as any, the groan of a spirit torn unwillingly from this plane of existence. She’d live with any number of ghosts if she had to, but she never wanted to hear, to feel, that groan again.
In a drawer, beneath a stack of brochures for everything from plant food to paint, lay several more CD boxes. The one next to the bottom held a silver disk marked in an ink-penned scrawl, “Demo. Neil MacSorley. ‘Andy Renwick’s Ferret’ and other contemporary pieces. 53 minutes.”
Gritting her teeth—yes, no, yes, no—Jean pulled out the bottom disk. “Demo. Neil MacSorley. ‘Flowers of the Forest’ and other moldie oldies. 58 minutes.”
There it was. Her fingers spasmed on the plastic case. Damn you, Neil!
Means, motive, opportunity. He had them all. He’d even had the garden gloves, to protect his musician’s hands when he’d punched an old man in the jaw and then tightened the garrote around his neck. An old commando trick, easy enough to learn when you’ve spent your life surrounded by stories of old commandos.
The pause followed by a squawk she’d heard the afternoon George died, that was when Neil had turned off the recording, darted the few steps out the back door, and begun actually playing. A few moments later he’d walked by the window of the sitting room and she’d had her first look at his enticing figure. If only I had known, she thought mockingly. But why should she have known? Even Fiona, with her second sight, hadn’t known.
The murder had taken dexterity. It had taken intelligence. It had taken guts. Neil had all those. What he didn’t have was one ounce of integrity.
Just one more thing. One more stream of evidence. Jean took a shuddering breath and commanded herself to stop trembling. Tucking the CD back into the box and the box into her blouse, so it would ride against her waistband—against the flesh Neil had touched—she turned off the light and waited until her eyes adjusted to the dark. Then she opened the door.
The door of the game larder just opposite wasn’t quite shut. A chill, musty draft leaked from the darkness within, making her senses pucker. But physical darkness was not what she feared now.
Again she tiptoed past the door of the dining room, beaming her desperation toward Cameron, trying to lure him out into the hall. He didn’t hear. His voice said, “Lochiel wanted to keep on fighting. He had the men, he knew the country, he could have drawn Cumberland into a guerilla war. It was Charlie who abandoned his troops and legged it into the hills by way of saving his own manicured hide.”
“The prince in the heather. . . .” Rick began.
Jean stepped noiselessly across the tile floor of the entrance hall. Upstairs Charlotte’s voice was still declaiming something about being cheated out of one’s entitlements. And Jean was doing her best to get Charlotte’s son, Charlotte’s spoiled rotten son, shut up in prison for the rest of his life. He was certainly entitled to that.
The recorded pipes might just as well be squeezing her heart. Or her stomach, it was hard to tell. Had Neil ever really wanted her? Or had all his attentions been directed to finding out what George had told her, and if she’d seen or heard anything at the time of the murder? Neil had gone through her things. He’d rattled her doorknob in the middle of the night. If she’d let him in, he wouldn’t have turned down a freebie.
Yeah, she’d gotten cynical about men. Her cynicism had served her well.
The sound of footsteps echoed down the hall. There was Archie, a shape in the shadows, trudging along toward the staircase. Jean edged around him—around his image—and opened the door of the billiards room.
A few LEDs gleamed, but no one was here. She turned on the lamps that dangled low over the billiard table, making an island of light in the darkened room, and starting pulling the plastic bags of clothing out of their box. Rick’s jacket. Neil’s jacket. Rick’s, Neil’s, and Toby’s shirts. Neil had probably taken off his jacket before he jumped George, maybe rolled up his sleeves. Most butchers worked with their sleeves rolled up, didn’t they?
Jean saw the scene in the corners of her eyes: The old man greeted Neil, a friend, a trusted colleague. Neil’s fist shot out, suddenly, without warning. George staggered back. Neil threw the cord around his neck, pulled and twisted. George collapsed. Neil followed him down, still twisting. Only then did George’s body—and Jean hoped that by then he was a body—fall against Neil’s lap. Against his kilt.
She remembered Neil’s hands, his slender hands, capturing and holding hers, playing them like he’d play the chanter. Her skin crawled. Thinking sex was cheap was one thing. But he thought life was cheap.
In the back room she found Rick’s press kit just where Cameron had left it. She pulled out the photo of Neil posing with his pipes in front of the house. Yes, his kilt fit perfectly. She propped the picture against one of the evidence boxes and opened the plastic bags holding the three kilts.
She should be wearing gloves. She was contaminating the evidence. Cameron would demand to know why she hadn’t waited. Well, she’d tell him. . . . The kilts were made of a very soft, smooth wool, the waists lined with broadcloth. High quality materials and beautifully constructed, the belt loops and the folds matched almost invisibly to the pattern, each pleat straight and sharp as the blade of a knife. Jean arranged the three kilts each on top of its bag. They’d been custom-made for their owners, right? For Rick, for Neil, and for Toby.
The fit, as Cameron had said, was subtle but important. A properly made kilt wasn’t just a roll of fabric wrapped around a man’s hips, like it had been centuries ago. The hem had to hit right at the wearer’s kneecap. A too-short kilt looked like Bermuda shorts, a too-long one looked like a tablecloth. The apron, the flat part over the wearer’s stomach where the tw
o ends wrapped, had to be made of two equal widths of fabric so that the overlap met exactly. If the buckle that extended through a buttonhole from the inside edge didn’t fasten to its external half just so, the two buckles on the outside edge would be off and the fabric would either bulge or bunch.
The kilt in the bag labeled with Toby’s name had a smaller circumference by two or three inches than the one in the bag labeled with Neil’s. It was also longer by a good two inches than the one in the bag labeled with Rick’s name. That one was perceptibly, if not by a huge amount, smaller around than the one supposedly belonging to Toby.
Q.E.D., Jean told herself with a sigh that was almost a moan. The kilt labeled as Rick’s really was his. But the one labeled as Toby’s actually belonged to Neil. How Neil had managed to switch kilts Jean didn’t know, but he was quite capable of a bit of sleight of hand in the chain of evidence. Especially when the only reason the police collected his clothes at all was to be fair. To stick to form. Not because he was a viable suspect.
It was her own testimony that had established his alibi. Just as it was her work that had encouraged George to set his plan in motion by bringing her the coin. Maybe he, too, knew her personal history, knew she couldn’t leave well enough alone. . . . Don’t flatter yourself, Cameron would say.
Now she had to go into the dining room and—no, she didn’t have to denounce Neil to his face, she simply had to draw Cameron aside and show him the evidence. He was the pro. She’d done more than enough already.
Her feet weren’t moving. She was still standing beside the line of kilts, the blues, greens, reds, and golds glowing in the lamplight.
This was no time to be giving Neil the benefit of the doubt. There could be no doubt. And yet. . . . If she just folded each kilt back into its bag and went back upstairs with her tail between her legs, would Cameron or anyone else think of trying the same comparison? Trust me, she thought, to ruin another young man’s life. Throwing Neil to the wolves wouldn’t bring George back. Protecting him would allow a fine young musician to—to live a lie. To get away with murder.
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 31