The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Good job I’ve caught you, then,” Hugh said. “I’m off to rehearsal. The band’s playing tonight at the Assembly Rooms. You’re making your getaway in the nick of time. Not to worry, I’ll keep an eye on the actors renting your place, mind that they carry away the rubbish and water the plants.”

  “For what they’re paying, they can redecorate it. Just as long as they put everything back before they leave.”

  “Are you quite certain wee Dougie’ll get on at Ferniebank? He can stop with me, if you like.” Leaning into the car, Hugh offered his forefinger to one of the air holes in the pet carrier. Dougie honored it with a delicate sniff. He had much better taste than to bite the fingertip that played such fine music. After all, he was named for piper extraordinary Dougie Pincock.

  “Thanks, but he’ll be okay in the caretaker’s cottage,” Jean said, and, thinking of music, “Have you ever played at the pub in Stanelaw? The Granite Cross, isn’t it? Odd name for a pub. Unless it used to be the Engrailed Cross, the coat of arms of the Sinclairs of Rosslyn.”

  “Like as not the original owner got shot of the local gentry—Sinclair, Douglas, Kerr, petty tyrants the lot of them—and then turned about and named his establishment after them. Sucking in to the high and mighty in return for their patronage. We’re never free of it, are we? The little guys always get the short end.”

  Jean smiled. Hugh had once been a little guy himself—he had been bequeathed the Ramsay Garden apartment by an admirer with an exquisite sense of irony.

  “Aye,” Hugh went on. “I’ve played there. Fine place for a Saturday night session, come one, come all. The local councillor had me in to the local museum in April to play the Ferniebank Clarsach as well, though I’m not so dab a hand at the harp as some. Still, a musical instrument unplayed is like a woman unloved, or so I’m thinking.”

  That brought new innuendo to the expression “let’s make beautiful music together.” “Was that when the harp—the clarsach—was put on display?”

  “Oh aye. And a bonny thing it is, carved from stem to stern, with hollows for jewelry—that’s long gone, no surprise there. Unusual to see an artifact so valuable on display in its own home. Small museums the length and breadth of the UK have no more than photos of their own heirlooms. The big museums take the most expensive items, all the better to attract the punters.”

  “Michael and Rebecca Campbell-Reid would say the artifacts are better protected in the big national museums. And they made their point with the clarsach. I was going to write about it, too. You know, all things Ferniebank.”

  Hugh mimed the curves of the harp, no more than three feet tall, then played invisible strings. “A pity, that. A seven-hundred-year-old clarsach’s not the sort of thing most thieves would want, even if one of the Sinclairs played it for Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, and another for Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, two centuries on. Even if those stories are nothing more than legend.”

  “Ah, but you know how I feel about legends.” Like tonguing a sore tooth, she asked, “Was the councillor who asked you to play the clarsach named Angus Rutherford?”

  “That he was. Long, lanky chap with a face like the Queen of Faerie’s milk-white steed and a wife holding the whip-hand. But you’ll be meeting up with the pair of them this weekend, I expect.”

  “I doubt it. The Scotsman says Angus went missing in Brussels. Funny how Stanelaw becomes a hotbed of intrigue just as the developers move in.” She let “just as Alasdair and I move in” twist gently in the breeze.

  Hugh’s smile was annotated by a firm nod. He patted his T-shirt, evoking the events at Loch Ness in June. “No problem, Jean. You’ve got D.C.I. Cameron on the premises.”

  “Except he officially retired from the police last week.” Gavin and Hugh both meant well, but neither of them seemed to think she could fend for herself. “Now Alasdair’s making security arrangements for properties managed by Protect and Survive. Castles, abbeys, stately homes. Conservation areas. Local museums, too, I bet, but apparently not the one in Stanelaw.”

  “You’ve barely seen the man since June. You’ve earned yourself a bit of peace and quiet.”

  “He has.” She’d sensed when she first met Alasdair that he was burned out, and therefore pushing himself harder and harder. When she discovered he’d turned in his own partner for corruption and the man subsequently committed suicide, she realized he’d been burning for a long time. All she could do for him was suggest, at first gently, then with the offer of a new job, that he move on. Now she sent up a prayer to whatever hard-bitten being passed for Alasdair’s guardian angel that this career would not be fraught with life-and-death matters, the unfortunate caretaker and the old lady notwithstanding.

  Judging by the sympathetic gleam in Hugh’s eye, she was looking like a human version of Dougie’s pincushion effect. But he picked up his guitar and his fiddle without further comment. “I’m away then. Have a good honeym . . . er, holiday. I’ll be looking out for you and Alasdair both soon.”

  “Well, yeah.” Alasdair had sold his house in Inverness and put his belongings into storage, and was going to stay at Ferniebank until he found a new caretaker. Which might take longer than he’d intended, now. And then . . . Well, she could almost see P and S headquarters on George Street from her living room. Her flat wasn’t too small for two if they were on good terms.

  Even that McMansion in Dallas hadn’t been large enough, at the end. She and Brad had staked out their individual territories, occasionally meeting in the kitchen like strangers at Starbucks. Jean had no idea where Alasdair had lived his married life. He only ever mentioned his marriage in the same way a cancer survivor mentioned his excised tumor. Jean didn’t even know his ex-wife’s name.

  Her flat was small. Stanelaw was small. Scotland was a small country. One where you had to make your peace with the past, because that past was never really gone.

  Hugh was already several paces away, laughing back over his shoulder.

  “Can I drop you off anywhere?” Jean called.

  “I’ll get there faster on Shanks’s pony. Cheers.” He made it across the courtyard in time to join the conga line of costumed dancers snaking its way up Ramsay Lane.

  With her own laugh, Jean turned to her car. Once more unto the breach, she told herself, and then remembered that line ended with something about filling a wall with dead bodies. Never mind. Wishing she had eyes in the back of her head, she inched out onto the narrow medieval street and into what was less the flow of traffic than the curdle.

  Chapter Three

  By the time Jean pulled into the small, shady parking lot beside the Granite Cross, she’d caught her breath, soothed her nerves, and committed herself to her fate. Which had more than once proved to be a jokester, but then, she and Alasdair had more than once proved to be fighters.

  In the back seat, Dougie was sound asleep, his tail wrapped around his paws. The contents of the ice chest beside him were presumably still chilled. As Jean had hoped, the air here was cooler and fresher than that in the city—if scented faintly with aroma of cow. She’d leave the windows cracked and make her visit a quick one, she assured herself, and climbed out of the car.

  Stanelaw was an attractive town. Its main street was lined with one- and two-story buildings, some covered in white-painted stucco, others revealing walls of local gray stone. A shop, a tea room, a hardware store, and other commercial establishments proclaimed the viability of the community. Down the occasional side street, Jean glimpsed modern houses. Beyond them, the countryside was tamed into farm plots of green and gold, bunched around the steep-sided hill, or law, that had probably given the place its name. Above, the vault of the sky shone clear and blue as Alasdair’s eyes.

  This was a much gentler land geologically than the crag, moor, and loch of the Highlands. But the Borders were no gentler historically. For centuries the region had been macerated between the jaws of Scotland and England, debatable lands supporting debatable folk, hardy souls who lived as much by plundering as b
y farming and herding. The myth of the miserly Scotsman had begun here, where no possession and no person was free of threat. Jean took a second look at the house across the street from the pub, obviously one of the oldest in town, its thick walls and small windows proclaiming it as much fortress as home.

  Several steps led up to its front door and a sign reading, “Stanelaw Museum, Home of the Ferniebank Clarsach.” On the door itself, a notice added, “Closed. Please Call Again.” Was it coincidence that a police car was parked half on the sidewalk in front of the building, or was the local plod dusting for fingerprints? Again, Jean assumed, since the theft was old news by now.

  She turned toward the pub. Hanging baskets of flowers softened its stern stone facade. A signboard read “The Granite Cross,” the words arching above a painted knight bearing a black shield with, sure enough, the white engrailed, or scallop-edged, cross of the Sinclairs. That family had ridden the storm of centuries of Scottish history, but were popularly known today for building Rosslyn Chapel just outside Edinburgh in Roslin village, confusingly enough.

  A burst of pipe music diverted Jean to a side entrance, a gate in a stone wall. A woman was just leaving. She was even shorter than Jean was, with short, almost crew-cut blond hair and a sleeveless blouse that revealed a Celtic-interlace tattoo on her bony shoulder. The long red fingernails of her right hand pressed a cell phone to her ear and those of the other hand held a lit cigarette. “Derek,” she was saying, every crow’s foot in her face clenched, “Derek, you’re not listening. I’m your mum, Derek, listen to me.” She strode off up the street.

  Derek must be a teenager, Jean thought, with a sympathetic glance at the woman’s retreating back, and entered the gate to discover a beer garden. An open doorway in the back of the pub overlooked an assortment of tables, some shaded by an arbor covered with leafy vines, some in the sun. A dozen people sat around drinking and snacking, getting a head start on happy hour. If they’d planned on having a quiet conversation, though, they were out of luck. Michael Campbell-Reid was playing his bagpipes in the far corner, the sun glinting auburn off the waving locks of his rock-star haircut, the musical tidal wave crashing against the surrounding walls.

  Jean grinned. Nothing like a set of well-tempered pipes, played by a loving hand, to stir the heart and rile the soul of the Scot. A few more minutes and the pub’s clientele would take up their butter knives and rush the English border.

  She hadn’t lived in Scotland long enough, accumulating an ultraviolet deficiency, to bake herself in the sun. Neither, manifestly, had Rebecca Campbell-Reid. She was seated in the flickering shadow of the arbor, a tea tray on the table and a baby carriage close by. Her honey-brown hair was held back from her face with a plastic clip, an accessory Michael could perhaps have used. Her features were as genial as his, if, like his, sculpted by an intelligence so quick as to be impatient.

  Rebecca called over the music, “There you are, Jean.”

  “Here I am,” Jean shouted back. She sat down in a plastic chair and peered into the pram. Two-month-old Linda was asleep, her little pink rose-petal face utterly at peace. Add a halo and wings and she would make your average Renaissance cherub look like a gremlin. Jean sat back with a smile that was fond but hardly wistful. She had learned long ago, after one very brief pregnancy, to take out her maternal impulses on other people’s children. “So she’s already used to the sound of the pipes?”

  “Passed along with the tartan DNA. If you’ll sit here with her, I’ll run inside and get you a cuppa. Or do you have time?”

  “Thanks, but no, I don’t. I need to get on out to Ferniebank.”

  “Oh, you’ll love Ferniebank.” Rebecca’s tone said, “Oh, you’ll love having a root-canal.”

  “Let me guess. The Gray Lady is based on a real ghost.”

  “So say the locals. Mind you, with the place closed and all, we’ve only peeked in through the gate, but there’s something properly uncanny about it.”

  Jean had trouble seeing uncanniness being at all proper, but then, Rebecca’s slight paranormal sensitivity picked up resonances more than actual ghosts. Jean filched a morsel of shortbread from the tea tray. “Thanks. I think. So where’s the B&B you’re minding?”

  “Just around the corner. The Reiver’s Rest. Named for the reivers who were bloody-minded power-hungry thieves taking advantage of unrest along the border. The Highlands have no monopoly on romanticization.”

  “You remember the old story about the beggar in the Border village? No one would give him the time of day, let alone a penny or a crust of bread. Finally he asked, ‘Are there no Christians here?’ And someone answered, ‘No, we’re all Armstrongs and Elliots hereabouts.’ ”

  “The Fairbairns are Armstrongs, aren’t they?” asked Rebecca with a grin.

  “Yep. One branch of my family goes straight back to this area. There’s a comment on determinism versus free will.” Jean finished her cookie. “The Reiver’s Rest. Okay.”

  “There’s a comment on the heritage business.”

  “If it weren’t for the heritage biz, I’m not sure Scotland would have a viable economy. I know Miranda and I wouldn’t. Ironic, how Alasdair’s now working for the exact industry he’s made so many snide remarks about.”

  “You need a little pragmatism in amongst the flights of fancy.”

  “That’s exactly what he’d say.”

  At the far side of the garden, Michael segued into a hornpipe, his long fingers springing on the chanter like the legs of a ballerina. Several people clapped in time. Rebecca’s sharp brown eyes focused over Jean’s shoulder, and Jean turned to follow her gaze through the gateway.

  A policeman was leaving the museum. His blunt, heavy features and stubbled jowls would have looked at home beneath a reiver’s steel bonnet. What he placed on his head, though, was a black cap with a checkerboard band. He opened the passenger side door of his car.

  From the museum stepped a woman with the face of a Roman matron, from her upswept dark hair stroked with silver to her deep-set eyes with their heavy lids to her jaw as smooth and hard as marble. Her turtleneck, tweed jacket, trousers, and boots fit her svelte body like kid gloves would have fit her hands. Locking the door behind her, she tucked the key and something else—a small box—into her large leather handbag. Miranda would have recognized the make and model of the bag, to say nothing of the clothes, but even fashion-impaired Jean with her canvas mini-backpack got the message: countryside chic. The woman needed only a riding crop to complete the effect.

  She seated herself in the police car as though the officer’s uniform was that of a chauffeur. Without cracking an expression, he slammed her door, paced around to the driver’s side, and drove away.

  “Araminta Rutherford.” Rebecca’s American accent, migrating further east all the time, gave a quick tickle to every “r.” “Maiden name Maitland, from Thirlestane Castle just up the way.”

  Jean wasn’t going to swoon in astonishment at that identification, although the thought of such a cool customer laboring over a hot stove did take her aback. “She has a cooking school?”

  “Oh, yes. Half the people who stay at the B&B are signed up for courses. She’s the director of the museum as well, has done a great job of keeping the local antiquities out of Edinburgh’s clutches, not that I don’t see Edinburgh’s point. You have heard about the clarsach?”

  “I’m afraid so. Did you and Michael get a chance to look at it?”

  “No. We got here Saturday and it vanished on Sunday. P.C. Logan—the Richard Nixon lookalike with Minty—answered an alarm at the museum in the wee hours of the morning. He found a window pried open and the clarsach gone, but everything else, including the Roman and medieval coins, accounted for. Michael and I flashed our credentials as museum curators and asked to look around, but Mr. Councillor Rutherford, Angus, wasn’t best pleased with our trying to push our way in and sent us packing.”

  “Two Edinburgh know-it-alls, right?” Jean asked, at the exact instant Michael stopped playing
. Her statement came out more loudly than she’d intended, hanging in the still-vibrating air like a fart after a dinner party. Wincing, she lowered her voice. “And now Angus is missing.”

  Michael strolled across the garden, graciously accepting the plaudits of his audience, and laid his pipes across the table. They deflated with a sound between a groan of weariness and a sigh of repletion. “Hullo, Jean. Come to look out the local mysterious events, eh?”

  “Stanelaw seems to be teeming with mysterious events,” she answered, without pointing out she was hardly looking for them.

  “Development,” said Rebecca. “Tourism. Money makes things happen, good or bad.”

  Michael leaned into the pram and smoothed the Black Watch tartan blanket over Linda. Then he sat down beside Rebecca. “There’s a resort, a golf course, and a water park across the river, and St. Cuthbert’s Way just beyond, and the cooking school here in Stanelaw. Now Ciara Macquarrie’s turned up with her New Age conference center and spa—excuse me, healing center—at Ferniebank.”

  “Who’d she buy the property from, anyway?” Jean asked.

  “Themselves, Councillor and Mrs. Rutherford. Angus and Minty. No surprise that Stanelaw Council granted planning permission for the renovation of the castle and a new building down by the chapel.”

  “Ah,” said Jean. “No surprise at all.”

  “The—ahem—Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland funded a dig and a bit of stabilization work in the nineties, and the Rutherfords opened the place to trippers through a management agreement with Protect and Survive. Pity the chapel was already a ruin.”

  “Pity about it all becoming just another product,” Rebecca said.

  “Without folk like the Rutherfords and Ciara Macquarrie,” said Michael, “secondary sites like Ferniebank would be piles of rubbish plowed under for car parks. Your Alasdair’s arriving just in time to organize the transition from scheduled site and listed building to money-making facility.”