The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Heard old Angus bought it last night. Just having me a look is all.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Dunno.” The boy seemed fascinated by the mud-splashed toes of his boots.

  Not just mud, Jean realized, catching a whiff of bovine manure. He’d been at Roddy’s farm, hadn’t he? With or without Zoe, or Roddy’s knowledge, for that matter? Alasdair’s nostrils flared, registering the aroma as well.

  Delaney bustled forward. “Give over, lad. You didn’t hear the news from a wee birdie.”

  Derek mumbled, “The mobile went at half past six and me mum answered. And she went, ‘Oh no, he can’t be dead.’ And she went, ‘How did it happen, then? The police have been, have they?’ And she went, ‘This makes no difference to . . .’ And she saw me standing in the door and said ‘I’ll ring you later.’ ”

  “Your mum told you that Angus was dead, is that it?” demanded Delaney.

  “Yeh.”

  “Who was she talking with?” Alasdair asked.

  “Hell if I know.” Derek said, with a curl of his lip that didn’t quite achieve a sneer, and at Alasdair’s stern look wilted into a nauseated wrinkle.

  “This is the Derek Trotter that Logan questioned about the inscription?” asked Kallinikos.

  “I don’t know nothing about that,” said the boy. “That’s what I told Soor, erm, Logan. Why’d anyone want a bit of rock like that anyway?”

  “Your friend Zoe wanted a bit of rock like that,” Jean said. “You were helping her bring it back to the castle on Friday evening, remember?”

  “What’s all this?” demanded Delaney.

  “That was Zoe,” Derek insisted. “That was Friday. I was home in bed all the Friday night, wasn’t I, not nicking no rocks. Ask me mum. She told Logan I was home in bed.”

  “And were you home in bed, then?” Alasdair asked.

  “Yeh, yeh, that’s what I’m saying!”

  “And were you home in bed last night as well?”

  “Yeh, where else would I be?” Derek’s voice rose into the treble clef.

  Alasdair glanced at Delaney. Delaney nodded, then turned to Kallinikos and jerked his head toward the corner of the castle. Kallinikos stowed his notebook and gestured to Freeman. “Come along then,” Freeman said to Derek, and pulled him down the path.

  “What’s all this?” asked Derek, in an unwitting echo of Delaney.

  “You don’t just come walking into a crime scene, lad,” Alasdair told him, “whether you’ve got a taste for death or no. You’ll be having a wee blether with Inspector Delaney here. And it’s time we were having one with your mum as well.”

  Yeah, Jean thought, she keeps turning up, too. Alasdair’s “we” was neither editorial nor imperial. Delaney might have begrudged him an inch, but he was going to go ahead and take his mile.

  Sputtering, Derek allowed himself to be guided around the corner of the building. Delaney and Kallinikos followed along behind, Delaney stumbling, Kallinikos’s hand hovering at his elbow, but not actually touching it.

  Jean and Alasdair, left in possession of the field, shared a long, contemplative look.

  Chapter Twenty

  A tentative ray of sun brushed the hillside with color, but left Alasdair and Jean enveloped in the shadow-pall of the castle. She craned to look straight up the side of the building, past the stained stone blocks and the blank apertures of windows, some softened with molding, some harsh as knife wounds. High above, the sky was becoming silver, but the hue of the castle remained gray. “Look there,” she said, and Alasdair turned to look.

  Against the back wall of the castle, beneath the easternmost window of the Laigh Hall and next to a drain pipe, lay a couple of smallish boulders. Balanced against them was what looked like a rough wooden pallet for transporting goods on a truck or rail car. “That’s how the kids were planning to get out of the castle after you locked up,” Jean said. “They could let themselves down from the window and use the drain pipe for balance. Nothing like planning ahead.”

  “That wasn’t there when I arrived,” Alasdair said. “They might have shinned into the building that way as well, though there’s no reason they didn’t slip inside whilst I was selling sweeties or carrying your things into the flat.”

  “Well, at least you’ve found the postern gate. One of them, anyway. This path is another one, isn’t it?” The trail zigged past a giant boulder, zagged into the trees that here pressed close to the back of the keep, and faded into shadow and tangled undergrowth. The trees grew all the way up to the perimeter wall—Jean caught a glimpse of squared stone, dank and dark, between the gnarled brown-green trunks. Back in medieval days no castellan would have let cover for enemies accumulate so close to his defenses. Tomorrow Alasdair would be out here with a chainsaw.

  “I’m not so sure.” He climbed several paces up the path, disappeared beneath the overhanging branches, and a moment later returned. “The track runs up to the broken corner I recorded on the Friday, where the two stretches of wall have each settled away from the other and one’s caved in a bit. It’d be a good scramble to get over, but not impossible, not at all.”

  “Well, okay, that’s fine for kids, but did Angus and the flashlight-person get in the same way?”

  “On the plans, the wall’s three sides of a rough rectangle and the river’s the fourth. I’m guessing the wall stops short of the river nowadays, and you can walk round its end.”

  “Someone could always have taken a boat across the river.”

  “Let’s have us a look at the wall before we begin searching dockyards and boathouses, eh?” Deadpan of face but nimble of foot, he walked down the path, then kept on going down the hillside. “I should have had a look at those wall-ends on the Friday. Certainly yesterday.”

  “You didn’t have a reason to look at them until yesterday afternoon, and then you were busy.” Jean fell in behind him, then against him as, sure enough, she slipped.

  Alasdair took her hand and together they picked their way down the slope, treacherous with lichen, root, and concealed stone, not to mention massive black slugs like crawling chunks of licorice. The last step was the worst, down from a flattish rock at least two feet above the riverbank. Hanging onto Alasdair, Jean lowered herself to the swath of gravel edging the river, and in spite of herself gasped.

  “I was joking about spraining yourself,” Alasdair said.

  “It’s just, well, you know—I haven’t, in a long time—kind of out of condition . . .” Dammit, the heat was rushing to her face, and he was the last person she needed to be blushing in front of.

  But his grimace was contrite, not amused. “I’m sorry, lass. I should have taken it easy, minded my manners.”

  “Your manners are excellent. Practice makes perfect and everything.”

  His contrition leavened by a chuckle, Alasdair eased her across the gravel as though she were a soap bubble that would explode in his hands.

  The river burbled along, humping up at and then spilling around rocks that in the strengthening sunlight emitted the glister of tarnished silver. The trees on the opposite bank seemed to stretch and straighten their limbs toward the warmth. Jean turned and looked up at Ferniebank, even more stern and forbidding from below, and tried to imagine the place as Ciara’s healing center, serving up New Age vaporings and Minty’s fine cuisine. She couldn’t see the future for the past, though, which in her mind’s eye gathered around the castle like ominous wreaths of shadow.

  Alasdair picked his way over the rocks and pebbles toward where the end of the perimeter wall emerged from the trees. Yes, it was undercut by water and age so that its squared stones lay in disarray, making a rough and ready causeway half-overgrown by waving weeds and the sort of moss that didn’t gather on rolling stones. “No one’s come in that way—not a plant’s been disturbed.”

  “Let’s have a look at the opposite end. It’s closer to the chapel. And to the town, for that matter.”

  Together they strolled toward the tumbled rocks wher
e the chapel terrace had subsided. One of the crime-scene technicians was braced atop them like a space-suited gargoyle, scooping a teaspoon of yellowish muck into a plastic bag. “What’s that?” asked Alasdair.

  “Spewins. Someone was leaning over the railing there like they were spewing over the side of a boat. Last night, by the looks of it.”

  Well, Jean thought, sharing a glance with Alasdair, heart attack victims will vomit. The tech added that bag to a bigger one sitting beside him, one that already held bits of detritus—a cigarette butt stained with red lipstick, a soft-drink can, a . . . “There’s another one of those little earring stars,” Jean said. “I saw Ciara at the railing here Friday afternoon.”

  Alasdair peered at the bag. “Like Tinkerbelle and her fairy dust, isn’t she? All right if we walk past here?”

  “Around by the water, I’ve done that area.” The tech stood aside.

  “Carry on,” Alasdair told him with a jaunty salute, and again he helped Jean balance across the rocks and onto the riverbank. She could have handled herself just fine, but she might as well give him the satisfaction of being the protective male—assuming he didn’t step over that fine line between protecting and patronizing her.

  An easy stroll along a wide, flat gravel terrace, and they reached a belt of trees less dense than the one behind the castle. Beyond them the stone of the perimeter wall gleamed in a fitful ray of sun, then faded into leafy shade. Alasdair plunged ahead, pebbles skittering. “Look at this!” Like the end of the first wall, this one had collapsed. Unlike the first, the stones had fallen so that a track as clear and dry as any garden path ran between wall and water. “The property’s a Swiss cheese.”

  Ducking the twigs that grasped at her hair, Jean turned and looked toward the chapel. On this side the hillside was gentler, and the gravel riverbank segued into the field with the weed-choked worked stone that she had contemplated yesterday morning, pre inscription and relationship crisis. Several faint trails coiled around and through the field like preliminary sketches for an interlace pattern. At its top half a dozen constables and technicians were forming a line, preparing to leave no stone or leaf unturned.

  At the bottom of the field, just where one path splayed out onto the gravel, lay a puddle. In the moist black dirt around it were impressed a mishmash of footprints, one perfectly preserved dead center. “Look here,” Jean called. “That’s one big foot. Angus?”

  In an instant, Alasdair was crouching over the muddy patch. “I reckon so. He was wearing shoes with thick rubber soles in a waffle pattern, caked with mud. I had time to take notice.”

  Alasdair, waiting alone in the tremulous darkness beside Angus’s body. It hadn’t taken long before Logan got there. It had taken longer for the next constable to arrive. “Did you and Logan talk about anything while you were waiting?”

  “He identified Angus is all. When he told me to get myself back to the castle and I refused, he didn’t go on about it.”

  “I’m just glad you didn’t leave him alone with the body, especially since he wanted you to.”

  “He was just claiming his territory, I reckon. But you never know, with those drawings missing and all. There’re several partial prints here as well, more work for the techs.” Alasdair waved at the officer in charge of the sweep and then discreetly retired along the riverbank. “Let’s go back the way we came, so as not to disturb the ground.”

  Jean, at his heels, resisted the temptation to say, “Yes, Kemo Sabe.” This was his show. This was his vocation. She was the sidekick. The helpmeet . . . Well, he kept saying “we.” That was a concession of sorts.

  She accepted Alasdair’s solicitous if distracted hand back up the hillside to the courtyard, telling herself she couldn’t worry about him being out of the loop and then feel miffed when he got back into it. Or she could, actually, being all too good at holding two opposing ideas in her mind at the same time, and quite aware that a foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds.

  A van stood close to the outbuilding, several people unloading equipment for the incident room. Cords and cables already curled from its door into that of the shop. Two men disappeared into the castle with Wallace’s telescope and the rest of the tools and fishing gear. Derek had vanished. Either Delaney had taken him back to town, or he had Kallinikos rigging up the third degree inside. Alasdair sent a constable around the building to collect the wooden pallet, then headed toward the door of the incident room, a spring in his step and a glint in his eye, single-tasking.

  No, she was not responsible for his moods, bright, grim, or indifferent. Jean peeled away from his wake and unlocked the door of the flat. Coffee. Tea was all well and good, but when the going got challenging, the challenged needed coffee.

  She started the coffeepot, yawned, and unlimbered her cell phone. It was late enough to start some investigations of her own, . . . Ah. She already had a message.

  Michael’s voice spoke from the tiny speaker. “I’m right sorry I said that deaths come in threes. I know I didna bring poor old Angus down personally, but, well, ring us when you have the chance.”

  Jean had the chance. By the time she wrapped her chilled fingers around an aromatic cup of caffeinated acids, she’d already given Rebecca chapter and verse, pausing between each while Rebecca repeated them to Michael. In the background, water rushed and cutlery clanged, since it was just past breakfast time in civilized places like the Reiver’s Rest.

  “I don’t even know who to consider as suspects,” Jean concluded. “The Ferniebank Fourteen, probably—you know, Ciara, Keith, Minty, Derek, Zoe, and their families and pets.”

  “Keith turned up for breakfast as usual,” said Rebecca, “and inhaled the lot without even chewing, so far as I could tell.”

  “God knows where he puts his sausages and bacon,” said Michael. “He’s looking like he’s not had a proper meal since the millennium.”

  “And then,” Rebecca went on, somewhat more loudly, “he left. As usual again.”

  “In the Mystic Scotland van?”

  “No, in that brown car he was sharing with Ciara yesterday.”

  “Did he know about Angus?”

  “He must have, someone had turned on the TV. Not that he said anything to us. He put his cell phone down just next to his plate, waiting for a call, but he didn’t get one.”

  “Ciara’s stopping at Glebe House?” asked Michael faintly. “She’ll be with Minty, then.”

  “Minty.” Jean imagined Minty reacting to Logan’s appearing with the bad news, her alabaster face immobile, her hands clasping each other because there was no other for them to clasp. Or was there? Did Angus go home at all yesterday? “I don’t guess you’ve heard anything about the message in the clarsach. Sounds like a Nancy Drew title, doesn’t it?”

  “Not yet,” said Rebecca. “It’ll be tomorrow, Monday, a working day, before we get a full analysis. All we’ve heard is that the paper’s authentic to the time period.”

  “Well, thanks anyway. If anyone drops by with a confession, or even just a coherent explanation, let me know, okay? I’m still planning to meet Ciara at the pub this afternoon, so I’ll see you then.”

  “Good luck,” said Rebecca, echoed by Michael’s, “Keep your pecker up.”

  Not a problem, Jean told herself with a lopsided smile.

  A vehicle drove into the courtyard. Cup in one hand and phone in the other, she used her forearm to shove the curtain aside. The sentry constable was closing the gate on a surge of camerapeople. A police car—it might or might not be Logan’s, they all looked alike—rolled to a stop. To the accompaniment of clicking lenses, the door opened and Valerie Trotter got out, escorted by a female constable.

  Thinking that it was about time the police got in touch with their feminine side, Jean turned back to the phone and punched Miranda’s number, hoping her partner hadn’t had such a late night that she was still asleep, whether alone or accompanied.

  “Good morning to you, Jean,” said Miranda, as chipper as though
she’d been up and about for hours, no doubt doing good works. “I don’t suppose you and Alasdair have solved the murder just yet. Or is it a murder?”

  “We—the cops et al.—are assuming it is,” Jean replied. “Alasdair’s baying along the trail.”

  “Talked himself into the case, did he? Well done, Alasdair!”

  “The D.I. in charge is crotchety, but he’s no idiot. And the sergeant’s a gem. You should see him, third-generation Scot, a statue by Praxiteles raised Clydeside.”

  “Oooh, lovely. Mind that you don’t overdose on male pheromones.”

  “I’m getting quite enough already, thank you. So what do you have for me?”

  “You’ll never guess where Ciara’s—get this now—one quarter of a million dollars came from.”

  “Dollars, not pounds? What’s she doing, cornering the international love bead market?”

  “Not a bit of it. She’s trafficking in the same things as you. Stories. What were you on about last night, sacred geometry? Well, as they say, there’s nothing sacred. Ciara’s just signed a contract with a New York publisher to write a book. The Secret Code of the St Clairs, it’s titled. Tied in to that Leonardo Key business, eh? And it’s a business, an entire industry, last I looked.”

  The neurons in Jean’s brain squealed like tires trying to keep the road. She felt her knees buckle and drop her into the desk chair. “Ciara’s got a contract for a book? A novel or nonfiction?”

  “My source didn’t say. Not much difference between fact and fiction, these days.”

  “I don’t think there ever was, not really.” Jean looked down at Ciara’s press kit, the folder innocuous as the envelope concealing a letter bomb. “She’s marketing the secret history of Ferniebank. So what does she think she’s got here that’s worth such a healthy advance? Can the woman even write, for that matter? Maybe Wallace was going to do that while Ciara stood behind the reception desk and counted her pounds and pence.”