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

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Slowly the door opened. Cameron crouched, gun at the ready.

  With a friendly meow Clarinda trotted in the door. Then she stopped, staring into the center of the room. Her fur rippled as though in a breeze. Archie was still standing there. The air, like a sodden quilt, wrapped so heavily around Jean’s shoulders that her knees cracked and bent and she sank down behind the chair.

  Cameron lowered the gun and exhaled audibly, either because he’d almost shot the cat or because he knew a shot would have drawn unwelcome attention. . . .

  Too late. “The cat’s just gone into the sitting room. I’ll have a look.” Kieran’s statement was punctuated by the sound of the front door slamming open and then shut.

  Cameron whispered, “I reckon Neil’s just come back inside. Do you think Mum and Dad are after taking away his popgun?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.” Funny how the darkness behind the chair had suddenly become friendly, not that several inches of leather and stuffing would be much protection. In his white shirt Cameron made an outstanding target. Too late to give him back his jacket, but then, it wouldn’t be much protection, either.

  Archie’s ghost started toward the door, beginning his pre-programmed walk from the sitting room where the fateful game had been played down the hall to the staircase that had probably led to his sleeping quarters. Clarinda backed up, hissing, and bolted into the hall. A blast from the shotgun shattered the silence and Jean convulsed. No! Not the cat!

  Charlotte screamed. “Bugger it!” shouted Neil.

  The door of the sitting room crashed against the wall. Kieran stood outlined by the dim corridor lights, head thrust forward, arms outspread warily, whether serving as point man for Neil or trying to stop him from shooting Jean wasn’t about to guess. She could just see Neil behind him, straining forward, shotgun poised. By the movement of the white blob that was Cameron’s shirt, Jean deduced he’d gestured her to stay down. That’s all right, she didn’t have anywhere to go.

  Archie’s ghost walked toward the door. Kieran’s eyes widened, the whites glinting around the poppy-seed pupils. His jaw dropped, almost unhinging itself. His moustache bristled. A shining strand of spittle ran from the corner of his mouth.

  The spectral allergens were so strong, here, now, that Kieran could see the ghost of his father advancing toward him. The moment, Jean thought incoherently, was a cross between Darth Vader’s Luke, I am your father and Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore. . . .

  Neil shouted to Kieran, “Get out of my way, you doddering old fool.”

  Archie kept on walking. With a cry of horror Kieran fell back into the corridor. Neil leaped past him. Then, also seeing Archie, he yowled and lurched back. Jean braced herself for another shot, but no, he jerked the gun up so that it was less a weapon than a shield held across his open-mouthed mask of a face. Archie walked right through them both. Charlotte screamed again. The sound broadened and lengthened into the wail of sirens.

  A patter of feet and the front door opened. Jean spun around and jerked the drapes aside. Neil, having all the courage of his convictions that most liars had, ran into the night. And was pinned in the sudden glare of headlights coming through the trees.

  He dodged toward the garage. A fluorescent yellow figure leaped out from the shrubbery and tackled him. Not an angel, but close enough—the gate constable in his reflective yellow coat.

  Car engines roared. Voices shouted. Blue lights strobed across the walls of the sitting room. Cameron was on his feet and headed for the door. Jean scrambled up, caught her heel in her hem, dragged the skirt up to her knees and followed.

  From outside came the report of a gun, something smaller than a shotgun. “Oh for the love of God!” Cameron exclaimed and charged off down the hall.

  Jean’s feet danced with indecision, her mind flipping through one image after another. Charlotte sitting on the bottom step of the main staircase, her face in her hands, rocking back and forth wailing. Archie disappearing down the far corridor. Kieran moving in slow motion toward the door.

  Outside the dining room, Fiona crouched over Clarinda’s body, clasping it tightly in her arms. Tears flooded down her face. But Clarinda’s sleek striped fur was imperforate if rumpled, and her golden eyes peered past Fiona’s arm, reflecting gracious tolerance of the embrace. Neil’s shot had hit the wall, blasting a ragged hole in the plaster and exposing the lathes beneath.

  “I was hiding myself in the kitchen when I heard her meow. I came to look. . . .” Fiona’s voice caught in a sob.

  Suddenly the entrance hall was filled with people. Jean squeezed Fiona’s shoulder and quelled any sarcastic thoughts about zen resignation. She plodded toward the front of the house. Her knees were so wobbly she could hardly walk, and rolled from side to side like a drunk.

  There was Neil, handcuffed and held between two constables, the worse for wear but still haughty. He tried an occasional wriggle, as though the constables were nothing more than flies, but they held on.

  There was D.C. Gunn, holding, appropriately enough, a shotgun. There was D.S. Sawyer, grasping Kieran by the scruff of the neck and replacing his own gun in the holster inside his coat. “You’re lucky I’m a good shot, Sunshine. Could have had your boy’s head off if I’d wanted. Didn’t waste any time throwing down that posh Purdey, did he?”

  “That’s a quality shotgun,” Kieran whined. “Have a care. . . .”

  There was Cameron, giving Sawyer a level stare that said as clearly as words that shooting off either weapon or mouth was out of line. Sawyer deflected that stare with a bellicose sneer.

  A female constable lifted Charlotte off the bottom step and patted her down. “. . . under a great deal of stress recently,” the woman was whining. “Very responsible positions here, terribly stressed. . . .”

  Cameron faced Neil. “Neil MacSorley, I arrest you in connection with the murder of George Lovelace. You are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence.”

  Charlotte gobbled indignantly. Kieran swore. Neil offered Cameron a suggestion that was anatomically impossible. Cameron was unimpressed. “Take him. . . .”

  “Cease and desist at once,” shouted an imperious voice.

  Oh no. Jean stepped around the corner. Everyone looked up. Oh yes.

  Rick, in full panoply of tartan and silver, stood halfway down the staircase, weaving slightly, his face flushed and his eyes blazing. He was holding his cell phone like a scepter. Behind him Vanessa grasped the banister with both hands, her chest inflating and deflating, her eyes so large Jean expected them to fall out and bounce down the steps.

  “Stop this disturbance at once!” shouted Rick. “I command you!”

  No, Jean thought, and forced her bone-weary body to take another step forward. No one had tackled Rick yet.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Cameron murmured a few words and made several subtle gestures. The spear-carriers cleared out, relieving Gunn of the shotgun on their way, but they left the door open just in case. Sawyer took up a position between Kieran and Neil, ready to bring down the ham-handed arm of the law if necessary.

  Fiona appeared beside Jean, her exterior calm again. A well-rehearsed calm, Jean thought. She offered her a sickly smile. Fiona smiled wanly back.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Cameron,” said Rick from his height. “What’s the meaning of this?”

  Cameron opened his mouth, but it was Kieran who answered Rick’s question. “You stupid Yank. You bloody buffoon. Look where you’ve brought us, you and your delusions.”

  Rick drew himself even further erect, almost toppling over backwards. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Playing at being gentry, and all the time the legitimate gentry reduced to scrabbling about amongst your leavings. Tell him,” Kieran said to Jean. “Tell him what that old fool Lovelace did to him.”

  “It wasn’t George alone who did it,” Jean retorted. “It was your idea. You took advantage of George when he tried to do the right
thing by you.”

  Neil was looking at her, eyebrows knotted, lower lip outthrust, as though she’d kneed him in the balls, gratuitously.

  Jean turned the angle of her shoulder toward him and focused on Rick. “Those documents proving your descent from Bonnie Prince Charlie. They’re fake. They’re forgeries. They’re bogus up one side and down the other. The letter saying they’re authentic is just as phony. When Kieran told you he’d taken the documents to the Museum, he lied.”

  Sawyer stifled a snicker. Gunn looked blank, but still whipped out his notebook and pen.

  “Hold on,” said Kieran indignantly. “I never. . . .”

  Rick shook his head. “So you’re part of the conspiracy, too, Jean. A respected journalist, corrupted by the Hanoverians. But you, Alasdair, you’re a Cameron, surely you haven’t fallen for this vile plot?”

  “The documents are fakes,” said Cameron. “You’ve been used. The MacSorleys here set up the entire story so you’d buy Glendessary House from them and they could embezzle the restoration funds.”

  Fiona crossed her arms protectively across her charcoal-stained blouse, dismayed but not surprised.

  “It’s only money,” said Rick with a regal wave of his phone. “What’s at stake here is principle. The truth of the secret history of the Stuarts. Are you telling me, Alasdair, that you’ve turned against that truth? That you’re betraying your clan and all of those who died for me?”

  Cameron braced one foot on the bottom tread of the stairs and set his hands on his tartan-clad hips. He seemed taller than Rick, even with Rick several steps above him. “No one’s died for you. Because of you, aye. George Lovelace died for the truth. So did Norman Hawley, in a way.”

  Charlotte flinched at Norman’s name and looked around at Kieran.

  But Kieran didn’t crack that easily. “Doddering old fool, George Lovelace. I never thought him capable of making so much trouble. And Hawley, no better than a common yob.”

  “Never underestimate the malice behind a smiling face,” Neil said. “Isn’t that right, Jean?”

  “You should know.” She didn’t even feel bitter or resentful toward him, she decided. Bitterness and resentment took caring.

  Turning to Cameron, Charlotte explained, “George cheated us of our inheritance, then had the neck to brag to Kieran about it.”

  Cameron said nothing, simply watched her with his patented half-skeptical, half-menacing composure. Gunn scribbled furiously.

  “We had to defend ourselves,” Charlotte went on, indignant. Why wasn’t everyone nodding in understanding and letting them go?

  “Defend yourself from what?” demanded Jean. “Fiona’s cat?”

  “A man has to see to his family before anything else,” said Kieran.

  “Even when his son commits murder?” Sawyer asked.

  Neil turned on him. “What are you calling murder, you witless oik? What would you know about loyalty? George was out to get us, just as he was out to get Archie. He wanted stopping.”

  “Are you confessing to the murder of George Lovelace?” asked Cameron.

  “You execute traitors and murderers. You hang them. George was a traitor and a murderer. He murdered my grandfather.”

  “We used to hang murderers,” Cameron told him. “I should think you’d be pleased that’s one custom no longer observed.”

  Some of the color drained from Neil’s face, but still he kept up his devil-may-care stance. His demonic self-assurance. But his gilded surface had been rubbed away to reveal a mind so abscessed it made George’s guilt look no bigger than a pimple.

  “Traitors?” repeated Rick. “Traitors?”

  Vanessa was no longer hyperventilating, and her astonished expression had hardened into resignation. She set her hand on her husband’s arm. “Rick, let it go.”

  Jean remembered the waiters removing his plates as full as they’d set them down. How much alcohol had he poured into an empty stomach? What was surprising wasn’t that he’d slipped into total lunacy, but that he was speaking in complete sentences and standing on his feet to do it.

  Rick’s already flushed face went purple. He shook Vanessa’s hand away. “Good God! To think I have lived to see this!”

  In the immortal words of Charlie himself, advised not to march on Culloden. . . .

  In one clumsy but effective movement, Rick dropped the phone, pulled the dirk from its sheath, and charged down the stairs. “You’ve cheated me, Kieran! You’ve cheated me of my inheritance!”

  Kieran quailed. Charlotte squealed. Cameron spun out of Rick’s way, then grabbed his shoulder. For a second Jean thought he was doing the Vulcan nerve pinch. But no, he was slowing Rick down so that Sawyer could step forward and twist the knife out of his hand. Rick shrieked in pain and rage, then buckled to the floor. If there had been any carpet he’d have chewed it, in the fine tradition of generations of rationality-impaired kings. Maybe he did have royal blood.

  Vanessa hurried down the stairs and wrapped her arms about Rick’s moaning form. “I’m here, baby. I’m here.”

  “Can we get on with it now?” Cameron asked, losing himself so far as to make a broad gesture that was part frustration, part disgust. “Take them all to Fort William.”

  Charlotte’s voice reached a register only dogs could hear. “You don’t understand, Chief Inspector. Neil was raised properly, he’s never misbehaved in his life, always did his poor old mother proud. . . .”

  Constables surged back into the entrance hall. Gunn tucked his notebook away. Sawyer plucked up Rick and steered him out the door, Vanessa supporting him from the other side. Neil shot one glance back at Jean. “Look what you’ve done,” he sneered, and then he was gone.

  Cameron stood with Jean and Fiona alone in the midst of the battlefield. If he’d had a sword he’d have leaned on it. She wished she had something to lean on, and settled for the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Her voice seemed thin and reedy. “What have I done? I figured out that Neil used a recording of the pipes to set himself up an alibi and switched Toby’s kilt for his own. Yeah, it’s my fault. It’s always someone else’s fault, isn’t it?”

  “That’s how he did it, then,” said Fiona. “I’ve always thought Neil was too clever by half.”

  Jean had to ask, “Who did you think killed George?”

  Fiona shook her head. “Rick, I suppose. In any case, I was living with a murderer.”

  “Was MacSorley storing his gun here?” Cameron asked her.

  “Oh aye. He persuaded Rick that this was a hunting lodge, Charlie was mad for hunting, and the illegalities of it all be damned. Good job Neil’s such a poor shot.”

  “A very good job.” Jean took off the coat and gave it back to Cameron, even though a chill was starting to permeate not just her limbs but her bones. “Here.”

  “Are you all right?” He took the coat from her hands.

  “No,” she said. “But I will be. Thanks, Chief Inspector.”

  With a curt nod and the least trace of a smile, Cameron said, “Good night then, Miss Fairbairn. Fiona.” He shut the door behind him.

  “I don’t know,” Jean said, half to herself, “whether to kick him or kiss him.”

  Fiona started to say something, stopped, and settled for, “He cleans up right nicely, does Alasdair.” Humor moved in her eyes, those eyes afflicted with second sight. Jean would have wondered just what Fiona was seeing now, what it was that amused her either about Cameron or about Jean herself, except for once she simply didn’t want to know.

  The first seven notes of “Scotland the Brave” sounded tinnily from the staircase. Fiona picked up Rick’s phone and switched it off. Outside cars started up and drove away. Silence fell, broken only by the distant complaint of a bird and the wind in the trees. The house was empty, filled with nothing but shadow and the acid dregs of greed. Jean would have felt more at home in a carnival fun house.

  Keep busy, she told herself, or else you’ll think about it. “Let me change my clothes and I’ll help you
clean up the dining room.”

  “Thank you kindly,” said Fiona.

  Jean glanced back from the top of the steps to see Archie walking through the entrance hall. He crossed within a foot of Fiona, but she didn’t notice. With all the strong emotion of the last few days, even Vanessa, even Kieran and Neil, had heard and seen Archie’s phantom. But not Fiona. Given a choice, Jean would rather see the past than the future, be it amusing, tragic, or any combination of the two.

  She went into her room. The toiletries ranged along the glass shelf above the bathroom sink looked just the same. Her reflection didn’t. Her eyes were fixed and her face ashen with a shocky expression she didn’t like, although maybe noticing it meant she wasn’t going to faint. Her glasses had stayed on her face through it all.

  Now she took them off and spent a long moment hanging onto the side of the washbasin, chills racking her body. It was over. Lives had been lost, families shattered, but for her it was over. Whatever effects would linger—and they would, she knew that—were of little import, considering.

  At last she was able to wash her face and brush her teeth, willing the ordinary gestures to soothe the emotions she’d not only rediscovered, but exfoliated. She wondered if Cameron, wherever he was right now, was shivering in reaction too, then decided, no, he wasn’t. He was still at work.

  Her skirt and blouse were pretty much totaled. Pitching them aside, she dressed in jeans, a Great Scot T-shirt, a sweater, and athletic shoes. Downstairs she found Fiona, similarly dressed and similarly shocky-looking, collecting the broken dishes. Jean waded in. Clarinda did her bit by sitting next to her bowl in the kitchen and complaining until she got a well-earned extra serving of kitty kibble. The footsteps paced up the hall to the far end, again and again. Jean jerked around every time, fighting up through the dense, cold air, hardly able to breathe. Finally the dustpan clattered from her numb fingers and she knew it was time to act before she lost it entirely. Besides, in a way she owed something to Archie, too.

  “He’s restless, is he?” asked Fiona.

  “Yes. Who can blame him? Come on, I’m going to try something. It’s not like there’s anything to lose if it doesn’t work.”