Crows called from the top of the keep. Roddy stopped and looked up, shading his eyes with a knobbly hand. Jean thought he was going to start cawing back.
Then Alasdair brushed by her and through the front door, fully dressed, although, she assumed, still unshaven. Since he wasn’t as dark-complected as P.C. Logan, though, he didn’t appear disreputable, just casual. “Mr. Elliot,” he called.
Roddy looked around, his hooked nose leading, like an accusatory finger.
“Good morning. May I be of assistance?”
“My fishing tackle needs seeing to.” His voice was deep, his words slow, as though he was pulling each one from a bog.
Alasdair waited.
“It’s in the wee shed here.”
“You have yourself a key, then,” said Alasdair.
Lifting his hand, Roddy displayed two keys dangling from a ring looped over his middle finger. In the US, that would almost have been a rude gesture.
“There’s fishing tackle in the lumber room, aye, but it’s listed on my inventory as belonging to Wallace Rutherford.”
“He’s left it to me, hasn’t he?” Roddy was almost a head taller than Alasdair. His face was leathery, weatherbeaten, although Jean suspected that the bloodshot ruddiness of his cheeks and nose, as much as she could see of them above his scraggly gray beard, also signaled a taste for the water of life. He might look nothing whatsoever like Zoe, but the coiled, head-forward stances of grandfather and granddaughter were not dissimilar.
Alasdair drew himself up. “And why’s he done that? You were mates, were you now?”
From somewhere behind her, Jean heard the warble of “Ode to Joy.” Her cell phone. She’d never turned it off last night. She lunged for her backpack, pulled out the phone, and peered at the screen. Miranda Capaldi. “Hey, Miranda.”
“I’m not waking you, am I?” her partner’s dulcet voice asked.
“Heavens no. We’re up and about and Alasdair’s outside having words with the farmer from across the road.” She sidled back to the window. The two men had moved toward the far end of the outbuilding. Even as she watched, Roddy applied his key to a lock and pushed open a door. Both men stepped inside, out of her sight.
“Well then,” said Miranda, and paused delicately.
“No gory details,” Jean reminded her. “No gore. Not in this century, anyway.”
Miranda laughed.
“If you’re calling to tell me that Minty changed the time of her function to noon, you’re too late. The woman herself dropped by yesterday, with the sort of picnic hamper you’d expect to find at Balmoral.”
“Oh aye, that’s one reason I’m phoning. Sorry. The Puppetry show last night was a bit—distracting.”
Jean thought of several double entendres but restrained herself, not wanting to direct Miranda’s attention back to her own night’s activities.
“Also, I’ve got a bit of catnip for you. I met John Balfour—John-the-ledger-book, our accountant—for breakfast and tax strategies this morning. When I told him where you’ve gone, he said he’s strategizing for Ciara Macquarrie as well, helped organize Mystic Scotland some years since.”
Hm, Jean thought. If Alasdair had been married to Ciara before Mystic Scotland . . .
“Mind you,” Miranda went on, “he’s not at liberty to reveal all. Nor should he do.”
“You don’t want him talking about us to anyone else.”
“Quite right. Even so, when I was working on the series about the financial aspects of the tourist economy, he handed me several examples of councils giving tax relief and permissions to create tourist destinations, one of them being Stanelaw and Mystic Scotland.”
“Plus, I hear Ciara bought Ferniebank from Angus Rutherford to begin with.”
“So John was saying. Clever Angus, eh?” Miranda said. “There’s more. John hemmed and hawed, but I finally drew him out. A very large sum indeed went into Ciara’s account this last month, at least a hundred thousand pounds, I reckon.”
Jean whistled. “Did it come from Angus? Or from somewhere else?”
“Not from Angus. He and Minty went into debt to build the cooking school, I’m hearing—though not from John, mind. What I am hearing from him is that Ciara already had the backers for her health center and all before she went to Stanelaw Council, though I suppose the money could have been a late investment.”
“No reason to think something underhanded is going on here. Well, other than the usual conflict of interest or pork barreling or whatever.” Jean strolled into the kitchen and back again. “The Rutherfords got a grant from the Ancient Monuments Commission for the dig and stabilization. Protect and Survive was paying Wallace his salary. Angus and Minty probably never got much income from Ferniebank—these places cost more to maintain than they bring in. No surprise they’d finally sell up.”
“Ah, but John was telling me they’re getting a percentage of future income.”
“That’s a good move, taking profits but not liability. Assuming there are profits, although with Ciara peddling the whole occult thing along with massages and aromatherapy, there will be. Ciara and Minty are stranger bedfellows than . . .” Ciara and Alasdair, Jean finished silently.
Miranda’s throaty laugh tickled Jean’s ear. “Now I’d best be sharpening my blue pencil. One of the free-lancers has handed in an article twice as long as we’ve got space for. No rest for the weary, Saturday or no.”
Jean’s phone beeped. “No rest for the rested. I’m getting another call. Just a minute.”
“No problem. I’ve said my piece. As for you, I’m expecting a report on Minty’s newest concoctions. Cheerio.”
“Will do. Bye.” Saved by the beep. Eventually Jean would have to thrill Miranda with Ciara’s not-so-secret identity as the former Mrs. Cameron, but until then . . . She pressed buttons. “Hello?”
“Good morning, Jean.” Hugh sounded chipper, as usual. Well, it was past ten o’clock now. He was probably making good progress on his first mug of milky tea.
“Hi, Hugh. How are things back at Ramsay Garden?”
“Ah, the music, the singing, the drinking. A proper Festival ceilidh, it is.”
“Just remember to throw out the empties, please. The bottles, although there will probably be people you’ll need to throw out, too.”
“Not to worry,” Hugh said with a chuckle. “I’ve got some eye-opening news for you, although I’m thinking your eyes must already be open.”
Jean had just redirected her eyes to the window. Roddy was exiting the outbuilding empty-handed, while Alasdair locked the door. The farmer stomped through the gateway, hands clenched at his sides, upper body so stiff Jean could almost detect the bolts driven through his neck. Alasdair tossed Roddy’s keys up in the air, caught them, then strolled across to shut and lock the gate once again. Very good, Jean thought. My hero. To Hugh she said, “Sorry. What news is that?”
“The Ferniebank Clarsach. It’s been recovered.”
“Really? Cool! We were just talking about that. Where? When? Who took it? Why?” The door opened and Alasdair stepped inside. Jean waved frantically, stopping him in his tracks. He shut the door slowly, as though wondering whether he should take cover behind it instead.
Hugh was saying, “It’s turned up at an auction house in London. My pal Dominic works for them, evaluating and repairing musical instruments and the like. They knocked him up early this morning, told him to be getting himself to the office quick smart. The clarsach was left on the doorstep in a pasteboard box, like a clutch of kittens.”
“He recognized it immediately, then.”
“Oh aye. The description and photos and all, they’ve been posted on the stolen art and artifact network for days now. Dominic rang me straightaway.”
“Wow. It sounds like the person who stole it had an attack of conscience. Or decided it was too hot to handle.”
“Thanks to modern communications for that,” said Hugh. “Almost makes me feel better about illegal file-sharing and muzak.”
“The clarsach?” Alasdair asked, stepping closer.
Jean gave him a thumbs-up, then turned her thumb warily sideways. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Well,” Hugh answered, dragging out the word, “Dominic’s saying it’s been disassembled. Just as well it wasn’t carved from a single block of wood like many—it could be dismembered without ruining it. Dominic reckons all the parts are accounted for and it can be restored.”
“It was taken apart? Why?”
Alasdair’s brows drew together in a frown.
“I haven’t got a clue. Neither did the villains that vandalized it, apparently,” Hugh stated.
“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll tell . . . Well, no, I bet Minty Rutherford was on top of the ‘need to know’ list, being director of the museum.”
“No question of that. Take care, Jean. Oh, and I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.”
“No question of that,” she replied, hit the “end” button, and turned to Alasdair.
Chapter Twelve
“The clarsach’s turned up? Where?” Alasdair demanded.
Swiftly Jean filled him in. However, his frown not only didn’t yield, it became deeper, so that his eyebrows almost shook hands over his nose.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she went on. “If an APB for the clarsach was broadcast all over Europe, then so was one for Angus Rutherford, with photos and everything. So why hasn’t he turned up? In one piece, I hope, not disassembled.”
“Plenty of places to hide a body. Or he could be hiding himself. Like as not he has turned up, and we’ve not yet heard. Good of your friends to be phoning and telling you—us—about the clarsach.”
Oh. This time she didn’t bother adding damn. “I’m sure P and S would have let you know.”
“Eventually, aye. But the Stanelaw Museum’s not on my patch, is it?” Jingling Roddy’s keys, Alasdair paced over to the bookshelf and gazed mutely at the inscribed stone, although whether he was seeing it or the intelligence loop he was no longer a part of, Jean couldn’t say.
“Miranda was telling me that Ciara got an awful lot of money from somewhere last spring, though it might not have anything to do with Ferniebank.”
“You’d not expect a woman with bats flying in and out of her ears to be quite so canny with her money, would you now?”
That was a rhetorical question if Jean had ever heard one. Without beating any more dead horses—or bats—she walked back into the kitchen and pitched the breakfast dishes into the sink. Then she wrapped up Minty’s elegant dinner service and packed it back in the basket. By the time she’d wrung out the dishrag and draped it over the faucet, Alasdair’s stance had eased and he was turning the inscribed stone over and over in his hand.
Jean was able to stroll rather than totter—the strained muscles were calming down—into the living room and stroke Dougie’s smooth head. Having accomplished his night’s work, he was now reposing on his blanket, paws tucked up and tail tucked in. Alasdair had accomplished his night’s work to an even higher standard, but the day’s work loomed ahead, with no catnaps on the schedule. “So did you learn anything from Roddy?” she asked, indicating the keys he was inserting into his pocket.
“He’s claiming he and Wallace were the best of friends, and Wallace wanted him to have his fishing tackle.” Alasdair’s brow was still furrowed, if now at a different angle. “There’s tackle in the lumber room, right enough, and tools, and Wallace’s telescope. And a stack of boxes all taped up.”
Jean didn’t suggest a box-cutting expedition, not just yet. “People can argue a lot and still be friends. My aunt and uncle are like that, always wrangling—I said this, no you said that, well I meant this. It drives me nuts, but it doesn’t mean they’re enemies.”
“Or Roddy could be lying. He does have a wee bittie chip on his shoulder.”
“Sure, it’s the whole status protection thing . . .” Jean let that sentence evaporate. “What are you going to do with that bit of inscription?”
Alasdair set it back on the doily, saw Wallace’s drawing, unfolded it, and nodded appreciatively. “I’ll be consulting with headquarters, to begin. And I’d like to know whether Angus and Minty have that piece from Wallace’s pocket.”
“I can ask her. She saw us with this bit last night.”
“Aye, she was right interested in that. Look here.” He picked up the Ancient Monuments book from the coffee table.
“That was on the shelf,” said Jean. “You were looking at it last night.”
He showed her Wallace’s name written on the flyleaf in the same neat hand as the signature on the sketch, then opened the book. “Here are two drawings of the inscription made last century. Note the credit lines—they were drawn by Gerald Rutherford and owned by Angus.”
“And managed by Minty, I bet. Those must be the drawings she was talking about, the old family ones in the museum.” Jean took the heavy book, carried it to the window to the right of the fireplace, and set it down on the sill. The photographs of the drawings were murky—the original paper had yellowed and the ink faded—but the facing page held a simplified black and white sketch.
The small, vertical letters of the inscription were crammed together, making them look as much like a stylized picket fence as words. Jean squinted at them, then defaulted to the legend beneath the main sketch: Hic jacet isbel sinncler que abiit anno dni MDLXIX orate p aia eius requiescat in pace. “ ‘Here lies Isabel Sinclair,’ ” she translated, “ ‘who died in the year of Our Lord 1569. Pray for her soul. Rest in peace.’ Assuming that ‘p aia’ is ‘pro anima,’ but I guess that’s a standard contraction like ‘dni’ for ‘domini.’ The sculptor must have run out of room, the ‘peace’ is crammed up against the ‘in’—but then, he broke ‘requiescat’ into two parts. And the ‘er’ on ‘Sinncler’ is twisted up at an angle, even though there’s plenty of room. Is that a squiggle or a crack or what right after the ‘r’?”
“Take note of the harp at the top—the Ferniebank Clarsach, nicely-detailed—and the cross at the bottom.” Alasdair stepped up beside her and his hand tapped the page.
“Not the engrailed cross of the Sinclairs, but a flatter one. Sort of an X marks the spot with splayed arms. Didn’t Minty say the piece with the clarsach is missing? How many other pieces are gone?”
Alasdair turned to another page in the book, to a picture of the gravestone itself, with the legend, “Photograph by Gerald Rutherford, 1912.”
Jean shifted so that the light wasn’t reflecting off the page, the movement bringing her shoulder companionably up against Alasdair’s. “This shows the inscription complete except for the harp. Which is appropriate, I guess. It’s hard to think of poor Isabel being played by flights of angels to her rest.”
“Perhaps that’s why she’s still playing herself.” Alasdair pulled a piece of paper from the book. “I found this tucked between the pages. Wallace’s hand, again, I’d say.”
“I see.” What she saw was a copy of the complete inscription, perhaps traced from the book, perhaps free-handed. Dotted lines ran through this version, like roads across a landscape, marking out half a dozen cross-hatched segments. Jean’s forefinger tapped the paper exactly as Alasdair’s had done last night. “These pieces that are shaded in are the ones no longer on the gravestone, right? So most of the inscription’s still there. But there are six pieces missing now. Five disappeared on Wallace’s watch. The icj is here and Wallace’s ac should be accounted for. Maybe the other three pieces are in the museum. It might be only the harp that’s actually gone AWOL.”
“Well done, Jean. That’s the way I calculated it as well.”
“I ace the test?” She looked up at him with a grin. “Here we are, an academic and a cop, evaluating the secondary sources when we could just walk down to the chapel and look at the inscription.”
“Then we’d better be getting on with it.” Alasdair set the drawing of the inscription on the bookcase along with the one of the dig, and pointed
toward the desk clock.
Whoa—the morning was on a collision course with noon. Opening time. Minty’s hen party. Muttering something about time flying and having fun, Jean fast-forwarded through her usual rituals of clothing, cosmetics, and bedmaking, pausing only to check the wall behind the bedposts for damage. But the whitewashed surface was unscathed. Funny how it had never occurred to her that they were beating time on a medieval wall. Those far from subtle rhythms might have roused the ghost.
Eavesdropping seems to be quite the thing around here, Jean thought as she hurried back into the living room, although presumably the laird with his secret lug had been more interested in gossip and schemes than in intimacies of the flesh.
Alasdair was waiting by the door, the picnic basket in hand. With a glance at Dougie—yes, he was asleep, as apparently boneless as only a cat could get—Jean stepped out into the cool, fresh breeze. Alasdair stowed the basket in the car while she admired the play of cloud and sunlight, then led the way toward the chapel.
The path was a ribbon of gravel undulating between humps of fern and mossy rocks and the age-gnarled trunks of trees that were, still, younger than the building they helped conceal. Beneath the leafy canopy the air was more than cool, it was chill, and heavy with the rich scent of damp earth. “I wonder how old Isabel was?” Jean asked.
“Seventeen.” Alasdair extended his hand to help her step past a muddy patch.
“Is her body still buried in the chapel, beneath the gravestone?”
“I’m supposing so, though I did no more than leaf through the book—it’s not light reading.”
“What about Ferniebank lairds buried like the ones at Rosslyn, in full armor but without coffins? Even Zoe’s heard that tale.”
“And it’s no more than a tale, either here or there.”
“Well, Rosslyn’s still an operating place of worship, no one’s going to let the archaeologists, or worse, the conspiracy theorists, have their way with the place. In spite of—or especially with—the recent publicity about the Templars and the Holy Grail, not that any of that’s got so much as a toehold in—” Jean stopped dead.
The Burning Glass Page 11
