The Burning Glass

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Watch the house,” Delaney replied. “If she leaves, follow her. Get on to Edinburgh for a search warrant. Don’t put her wind up just yet, though. Patience, that’s the ticket.”

  Alasdair cleared his throat, a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snicker.

  Outside, D.C. Linklater was pulling a sturdy, flat box from the rear seat of the second car. P.C. Logan rushed around from the driver’s side and took the opposite end. Walking crabwise, they carried the box into the incident room and set it on Delaney’s table, causing a domino effect as people moved aside. Derek saw his chance and slipped out into the courtyard.

  Jean found herself wedged against Alasdair, his cold, hard forearm angled across her back. She leaned away, toward the dozen or so pieces of inscription from Isabel’s grave that lay jumbled together in a jigsaw puzzle. The flakes and dust knocked from their edges sprinkled the bottom of the box like pale cinnamon. The reddish sandstone had not only been easier to carve than the local gray whinstone, a volcanic rock, perhaps Isabel’s family had chosen its color as a reproof to her murderers.

  Jean imagined the pieces reassembled—that one against that one, and the bits from the museum fitting in along the edge. The er of Sinncler bent upwards because of a nodule in the sandstone, and the requies was separated from the catin for the same reason. And that really was a crack in the stone, not an “m.” The inscription wasn’t a secret code. It was a memorial, a souvenir of death. Perhaps Isabel’s family had chosen the cross patte in honor of their Templar ancestors. Perhaps they meant it to signify that Isabel, too, had been a warrior.

  X marks the spot. Hic jacet . . . She didn’t realize she was speaking until she heard her own voice. “Here lies Isabel Sinclair who died in the year of Our Lord 1569. Pray for her soul. Rest in peace.”

  “Rest in peace,” said Valerie. “I’m thinking not. Not a bit of it.”

  Logan looked around, targeting Valerie with an antagonistic gaze.

  Linklater rolled his shoulders. “Roddy Elliot, I reckon he could lift a cow. That’s no light load, even piled into a gunny sack.”

  Jean imagined Roddy standing beside the chapel, waiting until the lights in the flat went out. Waiting until she and Alasdair were otherwise occupied and wouldn’t hear the tap of chisel on stone. He had justified his act to himself. Most people could justify their acts to themselves. “Keep the dust,” she said. “A skilled restorer can make a sort of glue from it and use it to put everything back together. Well, except for the harp. That’s long gone.”

  “Roddy didn’t chuck the pieces into the river,” said Alasdair, “thanks for small mercies.”

  Valerie sidled toward the door. “I’d not be using Roddy’s name and the word ‘mercy’ in the same sentence. He was always out and about spreading his gloom and doom, but now, going on about his dog poisoned and Helen murdered—was it from him, do you think, that she got the idea?”

  “Macquarrie got the idea to poison Angus, you mean?” Logan asked.

  “P.C. Logan,” said Delaney, “when you took Mrs. Rutherford’s statement the Saturday, did you take her fingerprints as well?”

  Logan’s dark features shriveled like a prune. “Why should I have done?”

  “Because,” Delaney told him, “it was your duty. Now look what’s happened . . .”

  Alasdair’s arm pressed against Jean’s back. Retrieving the flashlight, he urged her on out the door behind Valerie and Derek. After the crowded little room with its lingering odors of machine oil and paint, the outside air was cold on her bare arms, raising goose pimples.

  Linklater followed, and Kallinikos shut the door on Delaney’s pompous voice. “You’ll be obliged to make new statements,” he told Derek and Valerie both. “Kelso, the morn.”

  “What of Ciara?” asked Valerie. “And Keith, come to that. He’s a bit naff, but a decent enough sort even so.”

  “They’ll be released as soon as may be.”

  Jean surveyed the courtyard, the cars, the constables, ill-met by sallow lamplight and pallid moonlight. She looked up at the castle, at the glow of reddish, orange, golden light in the window of Isabel’s room. Of all the people in the courtyard, only she and Alasdair could see that. His face tilted toward that phantom light, away from Jean’s gaze.

  She turned to Valerie. “The burning-glass isn’t listed in the Ancient Monuments report. Minty says it was Gerald’s shaving mirror.”

  “Gerald kept it in a velvet pouch, Wallace was saying. Like a relic.”

  Jean felt but not did not meet Alasdair’s gaze. Gerald must have taken it out of Isabel’s grave—Ciara had implied as much. Maybe she was right about it being a signal device. Even a stopped clock was right twice a day.

  “Good night, sir,” Derek said to Alasdair as Valerie bundled him into her car. The constables cleared a way through the watchers at the gates. Kallinikos returned to the incident room, where Delaney was still bullying Logan. Not that Logan didn’t deserve it.

  Jean found herself standing with Alasdair in a clearing in the activity. She would have asked now what? except she knew now what. “Wallace. The dungeon.”

  “Oh aye.” Slapping the flashlight across the palm of his opposite hand, Alasdair strode toward the front door of the castle.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Laigh Hall was still shadowy, and even colder than it had been earlier. Jean shut the window. Then, squaring her shoulders, she joined Alasdair at the rim of the dungeon. “Hold the torch,” he said, once again pressing its barrel into her hand.

  She held the flashlight, shining it first on the ladder at his feet as he climbed down, then around the tiny chamber. Stone, dust, a small black creepie-crawlie just vanishing into a crevice. No more shiny objects. No neon signs flashing “This is it!” Or even defining “it,” for that matter. When Alasdair reached up, she lay down on her stomach to hand him the light.

  The stone against her breast was gritty, and not just cold but damp, centuries of dark, chill winter days filtering up into her flesh and then into her bones in a physical equivalent of her psychic reaction to the paranormal. She felt as though she was sinking into the stone, the walls closing in, the stench filling her lungs like black water. . . .

  “Jean,” said Alasdair, so sharply she realized he’d already said her name once. “Here.”

  She grabbed the flashlight and forced herself to a sitting position. “Nothing?”

  “Sod-all. What Wallace was on about—well, it’s easy to say he was mad, but even madness often has a logic to it.” Alasdair dragged himself up the ladder, coughed and cleared his throat, and dropped the trap door with a resounding crash that echoed into the empty chambers above.

  What would it have sounded like, Jean asked herself, if Derek had fallen into the pit prison? The question sat in the pit of her stomach like a bowling ball.

  “Mr. Cameron?” W.P.C. Blackhall stood in the main doorway. “D.I. Delaney—”

  “I’m just coming.” Alasdair reached a cold, gritty hand, the same hand that had held Derek at the brink, down for Jean’s hand and hauled her to her feet. She couldn’t read his expression—in fact, he was doing a superb job of not having one.

  “Thanks.” She trudged out into the free air while Alasdair turned off the light, and mutely handed him the keys so he could lock the door. Following him to the door of the flat, she waited while he opened it for her and then strode off to the incident room, all without once meeting her gaze. Somewhere above, a dove cooed and then fell silent, as though not wanting to call attention to itself.

  The flat. Home, such as it was. Sanctuary, not so much. Jean stepped into the living room. It was more like a dying room, a morgue, cold and silent, illuminated by bloodless moonlight streaming in the eastern windows and Dougie’s eyes like eerie, reflective marbles. She shut the windows, sat down on the couch, and warmed her hands in the cat’s soft fur, too wired to yawn, too tired to pace.

  From outside came the sounds of voices and cars as the official tide ebbed yet again. �
�Good night, then,” Alasdair said to someone. His shoes plodded up the steps. Behind Jean’s back, the door opened and shut, a key turned in the lock, and the flashlight snicked back into its bracket.

  After a long moment, perhaps waiting for a formal greeting, perhaps marshaling his resources, he said, “Delaney’s sent Logan off with a flea in his ear—he’s lucky there’re no charges against him—and Freeman to collect the two drawings.”

  “Logan admitted to making the phone call?” Jean didn’t turn around.

  “As a friendly warning, he’s saying, intending no threats or anything of the sort.”

  “Because Wallace told Minty he had proof Ciara was right, and Minty complained to Logan about things getting out of hand. And then she took matters into her own hands and doctored Wallace’s dinner.”

  “I doubt . . .” Alasdair said, but his voice trailed away and left unresolved whether he meant “doubt” as in “suspect” or “doubt” as in, well, “doubt.”

  Doubt. Uncertainty. Perhaps even mistrust. Jean kept on stroking Dougie. Normally he’d have started purring, but not now. Now his ears were pricked forward, his muscles bunched, sensing her dour mood just as she could sense Alasdair standing to attention in the darkness behind her. Her gut coiled into a Gordian knot of doubt and desire.

  The keys jangled onto the desk and he cleared his throat. “I’d not have hurt the lad.”

  “I know,” she said, and she did know. “But he could’ve fallen in. I never thought you’d . . .”

  Silence.

  “Did you do it to help Ciara? To further the course of justice? Or simply so you could tell Delaney ‘I told you so’? Leaving the window open might border on entrapment, but threatening that pitiful kid borders on criminal!”

  Silence.

  “We could’ve brought him in here and given him tea and cookies and made friends with him. But no, Delaney showed up, you had to make points with him.”

  Alasdair emitted a long, ragged breath.

  “Yeah, you ended up impressing the heck out of Derek. He’s male, too—you’re both out there on planet Macho. I know you’re having a hard time with the retirement and everything. But Alasdair, don’t, please . . .” She gulped. “Don’t turn into someone else.”

  “Who am I, then?” he asked, voice very quiet, very weary. “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m thinking I’ve disappointed myself.”

  Oh. Well then. She should go to him and throw her arms around him, and yet her limbs wouldn’t move.

  “I’ll sleep on the couch the night.”

  “Don’t be any dafter than you already are,” she retorted. Her smile died before it could form.

  After another long silence, he said, “I’m away to bed, then.”

  She waited, ducking a gaze so keen she felt it tingling on the back of her neck, until the bathroom door closed. Then she collected her backpack, turned on the dim light above the kitchen stove, and filled the tea kettle. While the water boiled, she opened the little box and considered the glass, burning or looking, whatever, gleaming innocently on its bed of cotton. Would Ciara’s psychometric friend be able to bring anything more to bear on the object than his own imagination? Jean could do that for herself.

  Had Isabel been so intent on her mission for Queen Mary—it was only the nature of the mission that was in dispute, not its existence—that she’d never put together a relationship, with a monk, or a Tempest, or with some wealthy fiancé chosen by her father? Had she lived as she died, cut off from a supporting hand?

  Jean put the glass back in her bag and pulled out her phone. Ah, a message from Miranda, short and sweet. “So they’ve arrested Ciara, have they? If that means your story’s gone from heritage industry feature to front page prime crime . . . Well, do what’s best. Even if it means proving she’s innocent. And you, you take care.”

  Do what was best. Take care. Right. Jean poured hot water over a bag of herbal tea—chamomile and passionflower, like that was going to help her sleep. Cup in hand, she peered out the window. A solitary patrol car sat inside the gate. Light shone from the half-closed door of the incident room. O. Hawick tramped across the gravel, seeming to savor the grinding crunch of each step, like a conqueror treading the skulls of the fallen.

  In the moonlight, the leafy passage leading to the chapel was as densely-shadowed as a tunnel. . . . No, a wisp of light stirred in its depths, and Isabel ran noiselessly toward the castle. She passed by Hawick so closely she’d have taken off his hat if she’d been corporeal. He kept on walking.

  Shuddering, Jean clutched the mug of tea between her icy hands and turned away from the window. Now what? she asked herself again, but this time she had no answer. She drank her tea and went to bed, and lay beside Alasdair’s back, carefully not touching him. She could tell by the way his breath caught at the ripple of harp strings from above that he was awake.

  The musical notes drifted through the night, rising, falling. Maybe if she listened carefully enough, she’d hear the clink of the jewelry, given to generations of harpers or placed on the clarsach as status symbols by Isabel’s own family. And perhaps she’d hear an echo from the secret chamber, the place of incriminating messages.

  She dozed and woke and dozed again, and wandered through museums where fissures opened in reddish stone, and the stones rained down on display cases, smashing the glass into discs. Roddy lumbered down the high street pushing a cow in a pram. Minty upended a glass bottle, pouring a dark liquid onto the street until a black pool gathered silently around the foundations of Ferniebank. . . .

  Jean opened her eyes to see the curtains illuminated by daylight. Birds sang, free of uncertainty. Alasdair was wrapped up in the duvet, as though he and it had spent the night wrestling for dominance, leaving her only the edge. That was only one reason she was chilled to the bone. At the foot of the bed Dougie curled into a tight ball, a cushion with ears, one of which twitched as she rose and dressed. In the bathroom she made the mistake of looking at herself in the mirror. Compared to the face that looked back, her passport photo was a glamor shot.

  She made tea, fed the cat, and watched him play with a stray bit of kibble—bat, pounce, bat, pounce. Then she set a box of Weetabix on the table along with bowls and spoons.

  Outside, the morning was brightening into another beautiful, clear, sunny day. The leaves of the trees and the hoods of the cars glistened with dew. A constable stood in the doorway of the incident room eating something out of a plastic wrapper.

  Alasdair emerged from the hallway and headed straight to the teapot. Milk, tea, sugar. A long swallow and the fog lifted from his eyes. “Ah. Jean. Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  They sat at the table, drinking their tea and eating their cereal. Slowly she detected the beginnings of coherent thought, faint as the traces of atomic particles, both on his face and in her mind. But with the return of coherent thought came the return of doubt and confusion. Alasdair, who meant well. Wallace, who meant well. Angus, who meant well. Ciara, who meant well.

  And see ye not that braid, braid road

  That lies across the lily leven?

  That is the path of wickedness

  Though some call it the path to heaven.

  The broad, broad road, she translated. The path of good intentions. Well, Minty had intended to do good for herself, that was for sure.

  The phone on the desk emitted its double bleat. In one leap Alasdair had the phone off its cradle. “Ferniebank. Cameron. Ah, Gary.”

  Jean cleared the table, trying to guess from half of the conversation what was happening. A glass bottle. Toxicology tests. Glebe House. Ciara.

  Alasdair hung up the phone. “They’ve found a wee spice bottle with traces of Digitalis purpurea in the dustbin behind the pub. Derek stopped in on his way to school and identified it. They’ve also found strips of rag paper with oak gall ink in the dustbin behind the museum. Gerald’s account of burying the chest with the poem and the jewels, I reckon.”

  “Yeah,
Minty would be even more eager to hide their origins than to establish the Rutherfords as models of propriety.” Jean envisioned a clutch of bunny-suited crime-scene techs digging through dumpsters by flashlight, bathed in stale beer and rotten vegetables, ruing their choice of professions. “What was that about Ciara?”

  “She and Keith are free to go.” Alasdair started back toward the bedroom. “Gary’s after interviewing Minty at half past nine. He’s thinking if a cascade of sorts arrives on her doorstep before she knows she’s suspected, she’ll not have time to work up a response.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.” Jean followed him, spread the duvet over the bed, and started pulling clothes from the wardrobe. “So Delaney wants enough of a show of force he’s actually including you in the interview.”

  “You’re invited as well. He’s thinking you’ll be there in any event, he might as well save face by pretending he wants you.” Alasdair shook out his sweater. It was a blue sweater, lighter than police navy blue, darker than his eyes. His eyes that rested on dark circles like smudges of ash, rimmed by tiny creases. His eyes that were turned on her, waiting patiently as a cop on a stakeout for the suspect to emerge. He wasn’t pretending anything.

  All she could do was press her hands against his chest, feeling the cool cotton of his T-shirt and the firm flesh beneath grow warm to her touch. “So who’s going to apologize to whom?”

  “I’m apologizing to you,” he returned, and his lips brushed her forehead. “We’ll talk later. Just now, we’ve got work to do.”

  “Yes, we do.” Jean dressed and applied makeup —what did you wear for a confrontation with a killer, anyway?—and followed Alasdair’s voice to the front steps of the flat, where he was just putting away his cell phone. Crows called from the battlements. A murder of crows, she thought. An unkindness of ravens. A reive of Rutherfords.

  Just as P.C. Freeman opened the gate for Alasdair’s car, Jean’s phone rang. Miranda, already at work on a Monday morning? No. The screen read “Michael Campbell-Reid.” Neither he nor Rebecca knew anything about the latest spine-tingling episode, did they? “Hi, Michael.”