Yeah, Jean and Ciara were both story-dealers, if not necessarily truth-tellers. Jean opened her mouth, but anything else she could ask would lead to a discussion much too personal for this moment. She confined herself to, “Like those books on the shelf back at Ferniebank. I bet that’s why the place attracted her attention to begin with.”
The Granite Cross was impacted in cars. Alasdair coasted past the entrance to the beer garden, giving Jean the chance to ascertain that it had become media circus headquarters, heaving with people who, if they weren’t waving cameras around, were hanging onto anyone who was.
By the time Alasdair found a parking spot and they strolled back, Valerie was darting into the front door of the pub so quickly you’d think she was trying to avoid meeting them. Her cardigan was now draped over her arm, revealing a tank top and the tattoo. Jean nudged Alasdair. He nodded—yes, it was the same design as Ciara’s, something else that couldn’t be a coincidence. The two women had not met in the last month, that’s for sure, but that revelation didn’t actually rise to the level of Valerie lying to Delaney. As for Ciara calling her at the crack of dawn, well, why not? Angus’s death was big news.
The interior of the pub featured the usual eclectic assortment of tables and chairs, the out-of-date advertisements, the long bar fringed with beer taps on the bottom and glasses on the top. Liquor bottles glistened in ordered ranks before a mirror that reflected Polly Brimberry as she hustled back and forth. A television sat on a shelf in one corner, tuned to a soccer—er, football match, Jean corrected herself. A door next to the bar stood open on a block of sunshine and movement.
The room was as crowded as the garden, but contained considerably less oxygen. What air there was had already cycled through several sets of lungs and was damp and musty with scents of stale beer and cooking food, plus the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke from outside. From the shortage of prostrate bodies, Jean assumed that even if there was a poisoner making the rounds of the area, he or she wasn’t operating in the kitchen of the pub.
Alasdair pointed Jean toward a booth partially blocked by a pram, handed her the stone chip, and kept on going toward the bar. “Don’t get me anything alcoholic, I’m spaced enough already,” Jean called after him, and didn’t wait to see if he snickered agreement.
“There you are.” Rebecca set down her tea cup and waved Jean in to a landing on the opposite side of the booth.
Beside her, Michael drank deeply from his glass of dark ale and wiped a scrap of froth from his upper lip. “What’s the latest, then?”
Jean slid onto the vinyl seat and spread her hands in an extravagant gesture encompassing several gradations of puzzlement. “The evidence is piling up, but who the heck knows where any of it fits?” She reviewed the situation, from harp to nuts of the human variety, concluding, “Here’s the bit of inscription we took away from Zoe Friday night. Logan’s going to let us into the museum.”
Rebecca’s eyes glazed over and Michael’s mouth made an O, either from the amount of information or from its disorganized presentation—yeah, Jean thought, she’d barely have given herself a passing grade, a lady’s C, maybe, for simply doing the assignment.
“We’ll come with you to the museum,” Rebecca said. “I’m not sure Linda’s lungs are up to this atmosphere. And I don’t mean the ambience.” She looked into the pram, but the baby’s eyelids, transparent as peony petals, were closed, and her tiny chest rose and fell peacefully.
Alasdair zigzagged toward them, offered little Linda a smile, and slid in next to Jean. He planted two glasses wet with condensation on the table. “Here you are, lemonade.”
“Thanks,” Jean told him. “Michael, Rebecca, this is the one, the only, Alasdair Cameron.”
“At last.” Rebecca shook Alasdair’s hand across the table and passed it over to Michael, who wrung it enthusiastically.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Alasdair, and to Michael, “You’re the piper, then.”
Michael’s pipes were propped up next to him, looking like a spindly-legged creature wearing a tartan loincloth. “I’ll be tuning up directly, not so you’d take notice in this crowd.”
“We’ll all be taking notice. Why else were the great Highland pipes instruments of war, rallying the fighters over the clamor of battle? Assuming the fighters weren’t yet charging downhill, half-naked and all berserk.”
“The Camerons charging with their swords,” returned Michael with a grin, “into the gunfire of the Campbells?”
“That’s my lot, bonny fighters but piss-poor politicians.”
Rebecca’s smile washed over Alasdair and splashed toward Jean. Ah, I see the attraction.
Alasdair lifted his glass of rich, amber fluid toward Michael, who saluted in return. “Slainte,” Alasdair said, and drank. For just a moment his perceptive gaze turned inward, no doubt tracing the path of the palliative into his stomach and thence to his aching nerves. Brewers, Jean thought, should be right up there with pharmacists.
Michael indicated the television. “Score’s tied, though Aberdeen’s having the worst of it.”
“That’s their modus operandi,” returned Alasdair, and launched into a no-doubt-intelligent discussion of the fine art of football of which Jean understood nothing. So Alasdair could do sports, too. Who knew? Smiling, she sipped her sweetened citric acid and looked around.
Derek was imitating a cockroach beside a slot machine in the far corner. Valerie, braced on the bar like a sailor hanging onto a gunwale, was expounding to Noel. The publican’s amiable expression hadn’t exactly soured since Friday, but seemed a bit askew, caught between the rock of consternation and the deep blue sea of commerce. He was wiping glasses, his gaze flitting around the room, not really listening to whatever Valerie was saying, but nodding politely even so.
Behind a cash register stood a young woman Jean thought at first glance was Zoe, if Zoe’s bottle-black hair could have gone brown overnight. But no, this girl was older, her lips pink and smiling instead of crimson and pouting, and her face was less angular, if not as full as her parents’. Shannon hurried through a swinging door and returned a moment later with two plates of food, which she deposited at a nearby table. “Your meal’s just coming,” she called to the booth, and sped away like a model along a catwalk, all lissome grace and swaying hair.
Rebecca pried the top off the plastic container and scrutinized the inscribed stone. “Is there a copy of the entire inscription in the museum?”
“If there isn’t, we have a copy of the Ancient Monuments report.” A dark wriggle in the corner of Jean’s eye turned into Zoe, her appearance today part goth, part gamin. She held two plates brimming with sandwiches and salad, and stared down at the stone chip as though it were a cobra rising up from a fakir’s basket.
After a moment, Michael said, “Those are our lunches, are they, Zoe?”
With a jerk, Zoe clattered the dishes onto the table. Lettuce flew.
Alasdair turned the plastic dish toward her. “Oh aye, this is the chipping you were returning to the castle. Tell me again where you found it, because I’m thinking it wasn’t in the castle at all.”
Her lips thinned into a red gash indented by her front teeth. She glanced over her shoulder at Valerie, who was now pushing her way toward the back door, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.
“Was it Derek’s mum telling you there’s a curse on Ferniebank?” Alasdair persisted. “Is it this stone that’s bad luck, or Ferniebank itself?”
“They’re saying Angus is dead,” Zoe replied. “Murdered, like.”
“He’s dead,” was all Alasdair would commit to. “Who else has been telling you Ferniebank’s a bad place? Your grandfather?”
Now Zoe was looking at Alasdair as though he was the cobra, her black, spiked eyelashes accentuating her dismay. “Grandad doesn’t mean any harm. He’s set in his ways is all.”
“So set in his ways,” Jean asked, “that he begrudged Wallace taking his place as caretaker?”
“Mum says Gr
andad and Wally, they used to fish together, but no more, not since the castle was opened up. All I’ve ever known is them going on at each other about the castle, the chapel, Isabel, of all things. And then the Macquarrie woman arrived, and they had rows over her as well.”
“They were rowing over her and her plans for Ferniebank the day Wallace died, were they?” Alasdair asked.
He’d asked Zoe that question before. Now, cornered, she nodded weakly. “And because my mum was taking him his meals, just like my granny did. And because me and Derek, we were hanging about there. . . . Well, Minty, she told them both to boil their heads.”
Probably not in those words, Jean thought, just as Alasdair asked, “Minty was there that day?”
“Keeping an eye on her investments, I reckon. Wallace was rabbiting about Gerald’s papers, but then that was something else he and my grandad were always going on about, barking bloody Gerald.” Seizing a bit of her old bluster, she added, “Like anyone gives a fig for that secret wisdom rubbish.”
You do, when it’s filtered through Valerie and Derek, thought Jean.
“Someone does,” Alasdair said. “Val Trotter, perhaps? Wallace, certainly. Maybe even your granny. Was that what she had in common with Wallace, a taste for secret wisdom rubbish?”
Zoe cast another look over her shoulder to where her mother and Shannon were replenishing a rack of snack bags. When she turned back to the table, her words spilled out in a stream of diphthongs so compressed that Jean had to strain to make them out. “Grandad says we’re obliged to respect the graves, even the romanish ones, but there was that piece of rock in his dresser. After that, everything went wrong. There’s Grandad going on about the wages of sin being death, and it’s sinful to steal, isn’t it? So I went to put the stone back.”
“Last I heard,” said Alasdair, “lying’s a sin as well.”
“You cannot blame me for helping out my grandad.”
Rebecca’s brown eyes and Michael’s blue hadn’t blinked, Jean noted. They were chewing their food very slowly and quietly, pretending to be invisible but not pretending not to listen.
“You meant to protect your grandad by returning the inscription,” Alasdair said, his soft burr barely intelligible above the noise. “Protect him from supernatural agencies if not from the secular ones. What about Derek, then? Did you mean to protect him as well?”
“He’s not done anything,” Zoe protested. “He’s thick as a board, but he means well.”
There was a lot of well-meaning going around, thought Jean.
“Right.” Alasdair tapped his glass on the table like a judge tapping his gavel. “Thank you. Detective Inspector Delaney will be having a word with you and your family.”
Beneath her ashy makeup, Zoe went even whiter. “I don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. We’ve got sod-all to do with, with . . .”
When she didn’t finish her sentence, Alasdair said, “The police will be deciding that.”
An eddy in the throng was Polly, plodding along wearily, her apron stained with food, her hair matted to the sweat on her forehead. Nothing about her was sharp except her voice. “Zoe, there’s work needs doing in the kitchen. The focaccia’ll not be baking itself.”
“The focaccia’s Minty’s idea, let her cook it,” said Zoe, but still she retreated from the table as fast as her thick-soled, Frankenstein-design shoes could carry her.
That must be what she’d smelled the other day and interpreted as pizza, Jean thought. Focaccia was one of Valerie’s specialties, wasn’t it? The days when British pubs served nothing more than permutations of pork and potatoes were long gone, not that she’d found one that had a serious grasp of, say, nachos or fajitas.
“Well done,” Michael told Alasdair with a nod of approval.
Rebecca leaned across the table and confided in a stage whisper, “He’s good, Jean.”
“I know,” Jean said, but refrained from suspending herself from Alasdair’s shoulder and fluttering her lashes adoringly.
He made a scoffing noise deep in his throat and washed it down with beer. “Time to have Delaney ask Roddy a few questions about the theft of the inscription.”
“Roddy’s definitions of desecration seeming a bit fluid,” Jean summarized.
A lull in the conversational buzz signaled Logan, his uniform cutting a swathe toward their table. From across the demilitarized zone of the pram he announced, “Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn, Mrs. Rutherford wants a word at the museum.”
Jean almost choked on her lemonade. Minty?
“Minty?” asked Rebecca.
Having his priorities straight, Alasdair drained his glass before gathering up the inscribed rock and sliding out of the booth. “Well then, Jean, we’ve been summoned.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Pleased that he hadn’t said, “Watson, the game is afoot,” Jean gathered up her bag and her notebook and scrambled to her feet.
Michael said, “We’ll come across to the museum soon as we eat.”
Logan was already walking away, not looking to see if anyone was following him. Jean gave her friends a thumbs-up, go-for-it sign and with Alasdair accompanied the constable out of the pub. He didn’t look both ways when he crossed the street. His uniform must have magical traffic-repelling qualities.
Jean braced herself for a cascade of newspeople to burst from the beer garden—a cop, people seen at Ferniebank, something must be happening—but no one appeared. A glance through the gateway showed her why. Ciara was holding court beneath the arbor, Keith skulking in the shadow to one side, clutching a pint of beer. A wisp of smoke coiled around her, oozing from Pandora’s box, perhaps, or leaking from the genie’s bottle. “. . . the great secret of Ferniebank,” she was saying, “. . . a press conference when construction begins on September thirteenth.”
Alasdair quickened his pace, lapping Logan, and only stopped when they were on the steps of the museum and Ciara’s soprano had faded into the background murmur. Logan opened the door and both men stepped aside, leaving Jean to lead the way. Misplaced chivalry, she thought. She’d get picked off first.
The cool, dim entrance hall was equipped with a reception desk and a rack of pamphlets and books. Jean spotted several issues of Great Scot nestled next to the sort of booklets Ciara had once written. Beyond them, display cases held the ephemera of lives long gone—tools, tea cups, Granny’s paisley shawl. A staircase was cordoned off by a rope dangling a sign reading “Private,” and a wide doorway opened to one side.
The sunlight winked out as Logan shut the door behind them without coming inside himself. “Duties elsewhere,” said Alasdair, his voice loud in the hush of the building. “Crowd control and the like.”
“Minty?” Jean called, and started toward the doorway, the floor creaking. The air seemed rich as brandy or port, with old paper, stale crumbs, pressed flowers, a soupçon of mothball—the bouquet less of age than of memory.
From the room ahead came a long squeal, and light flooded out into the foyer. Jean halted, Alasdair warm and solid at her back. Minty was shoving the old wooden shutters back into the window embrasure. In a silky, black suit tailored to her slender body, black stockings, and black pumps, she looked like a stylish raven. The indistinct shapes of exhibits and wall-mounted boxes loomed out of the shadows behind her, their glass panes reflecting eerie smears of sunlight. “Thank you for coming.” Her voice, well-modulated as always, was stretched into a higher register. “P.C. Logan tells me you found Angus’s body.”
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” said Jean.
Minty inclined her head graciously.
Alasdair asked in his most respectful but need-to-know tone, “Did Angus return home at all?”
“Of course he did. Really, reporting him missing, how unnecessary and embarrassing.”
Reporting his return to the police was apparently just as unnecessary, Jean thought.
“Did he say anything that might cast light on his . . .” Alasdair paused delicately.
&
nbsp; “Death? He was not in good spirits, I’m afraid. Quite put out with Ciara’s plans for Ferniebank. But I was able to calm him before she herself returned to Glebe House and invited us to dinner at the Granite Cross. Quite civilized of her, considering.”
Considering what? Which part of Ciara’s plans, Jean wondered, were she and Angus discussing in the van yesterday morning, before Minty knew he was back? Something as mundane as the local authority’s consent for alteration of the property? Or something esoteric?
“Was anyone else at dinner with you?” Alasdair asked.
“Keith, Noel, and Polly, who had Valerie Trotter working in the kitchen. The woman is doing her best, I suppose. As for that lad of hers, well, he was hanging about.” The light streaming through the window drew harsh shadows on Minty’s deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and pursed lips, no longer glistening peach but colorless. She looked as though she’d been pinched in a vise, no surprise there.
Turning the sharp angle of her shoulder toward Alasdair, she reached to a bank of switches on the wall and flicked each one. First the ceiling light, and then the lights in the display cases quivered on. “This museum is Angus and Uncle Wallace’s legacy. The story of Stanelaw and Ferniebank and their roles in the history not just of Scotland, but of Britain.”
“The Sinclairs made the equivalent of headlines for several hundred years,” Jean said. “They still are, in some circles. How else would Ciara get a book contract for something called The Secret Code of the St. Clairs?”
“How, indeed? Popular culture makes fools of us all these days. What a tawdry, vulgar world we live in.” Minty’s back, all that Jean could see of her, would have made a ramrod look slumped.
Jean shrugged her shoulders, Alasdair his brows. Okay, so that had been a shot in the dark. And it proved that Ciara hadn’t hidden her book from Minty—not that Mrs. Councillor Rutherford was happy about it. Funny how Roddy and Minty, each from his or her perspective, saw something so similar. “Roddy Elliot was saying that Ciara’s plans for Ferniebank are blasphemy.”
The Burning Glass Page 24
