The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1)

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean stretched her cramped shoulders, thought longingly of that nice hot cup of tea, then reminded herself that if it had been a while since she’d eaten lunch, it had also been a while since she’d used a rest room. She opened the door and looked out into the corridor. Not a soul was in sight. In the distance a man was speaking, by his cadences American, by his tone exhorting his team to win one for the Gipper. What? Did MacLyon stage corporate retreats?

  Leaving her laptop perched on a coffee table, signaling her immediate return, she headed down the hall away from the entrance. The kitchen would be in the back of the house, and where there was plumbing there might be a bathroom. A toilet, as the Brits candidly said.

  All the doors were closed. With a grimace of embarrassment, Jean walked along, turning the handles. She found the dining room, its long table set with sparkling crystal and china. The kitchen, an electric kettle steaming gently next to a tea tray. A drying room, wooden racks draped with coats, boots lined up beneath. No bathroom. No Fiona to ask.

  Now the piper was playing “The Flowers o’ the Forest.” The tune alone of that old lament would bring tears to a stone. When you factored in the words, all about brave men going off to battle and never coming back, that song was to funerals here what “Amazing Grace” was back home. The chill that coursed down her back this time stemmed from her own emotional imagination.

  Around a corner, the hallway ended in three more doors. The center one was a sturdy wooden number—an exit, probably. To its left Jean found what would once have been a gun room but was now a small office. File cabinets, fishing tackle, and tennis rackets shared space with shelves piled with electronic paraphernalia.

  She turned the frosty knob on the last door. It opened smoothly and silently into a large room almost as dark as a cave, floored in stark cement. Louvered windows admitted a dank draft but little light. Hooks the size of dinner plates hung from the rafters, attached to ropes and pulleys anchored along the walls. Two sets of antlers bristled on a bench next to the door. The faint smell of decay made Jean wrinkle her nose. This was the game larder, where the laird kept his freshly-killed grouse and venison. . . . In the far corner, something swung gently in the draft, rope creaking.

  This wasn’t hunting season, Jean told herself. And the shape in the shadows wasn’t that of a deer.

  The faraway voices were all chattering brightly now. The sound faded in and out as though she turned a volume knob up and down. The pipes skreeled, but nowhere near as loudly as her brain. Her stomach clenched. The shape was an optical illusion. Please let it be an optical illusion.

  She already knew, though, that it was no such thing. Groping alongside the door, she found a light switch and pushed at it blindly.

  The dangling man’s head was tilted to one side, as though delicately averting his gaze. But there was nothing delicate about his face, slightly swollen and ash-pink, his tongue a purplish bulge between blue lips, his eyes slits showing flat, ghastly whites. He wore a no-nonsense tweed suit. An ivory-handled walking stick lay on the cement several feet away. So did a pair of glasses.

  George Lovelace. Unrecognizable. Perfectly recognizable.

  An electric charge shot from the crown of Jean’s head to the tips of her toes, scalding her nerves, drawing sweat to the surface of her skin. For one long, paralyzed, moment all she could think of was a line from a Wolfstone album: . . . like dead soldiers make no sound.

  Then she turned and ran.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ohgodohgodohgod. . . . Jean hurtled down the corridor and almost collided with Fiona, who was walking toward the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry. . . .” Jean asked herself why the hell was she apologizing? For being the bearer of bad news? “I was looking for the rest room. The bathroom. The loo. And I found someone—someone dead.”

  “Well then,” said Fiona. She went on into the kitchen and emerged a moment later carrying the tea tray. Without clattering a single dish, she took into the sitting room and set it down on the coffee table.

  Ohgod. . . . Jean remembered she had a cell phone. Swinging her bag around and unzipping it, she said, “I’ll call an ambulance.” The police, her mind corrected, it was too late for an ambulance.

  Fiona’s uncanny eyes were focused far beyond Jean’s face. “I’ll tell Rick, shall I?”

  Jean glanced down at her hand holding her phone, noting with an odd detachment that it was trembling. Lovelace couldn’t be helped by speed. Or by a debate over manorial protocol. He was dead. Very dead. “Yeah, you do that.”

  The housekeeper was already pacing deliberately away. Jean jammed the phone back into her bag and followed, only to find herself standing alone in the entry while Fiona disappeared down another corridor. Ohgodohgodohgod. . . .

  She spun around in a circle, looking for an escape route, maybe. Maybe for coherence. She saw the weapons. The trophies. The clock. A couple of landscape prints. A large striped cat looking through the balusters of the staircase—no, it was gone, not leaving even a smile behind.

  Inhale. Exhale. Her entire body was trembling. Her brain was transmitting bursts of static. The pipes segued into “Lord Lovat’s Lament,” each note slicing Jean’s nerves like a razor blade. The chattering voices stopped abruptly. George Lovelace was hanging from a meat hook. Oh. My. God.

  A door in an alcove off the entry was marked with a brass plaque reading, “Toilet.” There, something she could do. Jean hurried toward it.

  By the time she’d flushed and washed and splashed cold water on a bloodless face with wide eyes that didn’t seem to be her own, she was hearing footsteps and voices. She emerged to see Rick MacLyon ushering maybe twenty men and women decked with bits of tartanalia out the front door. “Thank you so much for coming. Sorry, important business, can’t be put off. . . .” Two of the women curtsied to him and a man bowed over his hand instead of shaking it. He really was playing the laird of the castle, wasn’t he?

  With a solid thud MacLyon shut the door and turned to Jean. He was wearing the equivalent of a business suit—a kilt, a plain leather sporran, a tweed jacket, a blue tie. In person his hair was as pale as his complexion, its fine mousy strands slicked back from his high forehead. His large, square glasses reflected the light, making Jean feel as though she was staring at twin monitors waiting for a download.

  The police are going to want to talk to all those people, her mind said, and added, Please tell me someone has called the police. She heard her voice saying thinly but politely, “I’m Jean Fairbairn from Great Scot.”

  “Oh yeah. The interview. You got here early. So what’s this about someone dead in the game larder?”

  To Jean’s Scot-adapted ears, MacLyon’s American accent sounded like the whine of a chain saw. Her own seemed even flatter. “Just that. There’s a man hanging from a hook in the game larder. Dead.”

  “I’ll take a look. You go sit down.” MacLyon walked off down the hall.

  Jean stared after him. Had she said anything to Fiona about the game larder? She couldn’t remember. She knew darn well she hadn’t mentioned it to Rick. Game larder. Hook. Nice old gentleman.

  She plodded back into the sitting room. The air was cold and heavy, like the proverbial wet blanket draped around her shoulders. She would almost have welcomed pins and needles. But all she felt was the chill of the leather couch when she sat down on its edge. She poured herself a cup of tea, doctored it with milk and sugar, and managed to get it to her mouth by holding it in both hands. Her stomach shimmied at the first sip, then steadied. Ah, yes. Milky sweetness to wash away the smell of decay. Warmth to ease the horror. Caffeine to—well, she was already wired. Oh God.

  Outside the bus started up, and with a rumble and a clash of gears drove away. The pipes stopped on a startled squeal. George Lovelace was hanging from a hook like a slab of meat. Her anonymous phone caller had gotten it backwards—pursuing Lovelace’s story hadn’t made trouble for Jean but for Lovelace himself. . . . She jerked upright, tea splashing onto her skirt. No. Oh no. Her
following his story didn’t have anything to do with his—suicide. Surely it was suicide, not. . . . Murder.

  Yes, rumors of treasure produced villains. But if Lovelace knew where the coins were hidden, why kill him? Why hang him? Why?

  The word beat in Jean’s mind like her pulse hammered in her throat. At least the tea was warming her up. She poured herself another cup and forced down a gingersnap from the assortment of cookies on the tray. The clock in the front hall struck three.

  Before the last vibration of the chimes had quite died away, Jean heard footsteps coming from far down the corridor, slow, heavy steps that reminded her of Lovelace’s steps on the turnpike stair. They drew closer and closer and stopped just outside. The door was hung in British fashion, opening into the room instead of against the wall, hiding the corridor from her cautious gaze.

  If Glendessary House hadn’t already had a ghost, it might well have one now. Violent deaths left shock waves in space and time, waves that people cursed with a sixth sense might intercept. And yet she was no longer shivering, no longer prickling. The room was cool and the air oppressive, but she could account for the squirming sensation in her stomach and the pucker at the back of her neck without resorting to the paranormal.

  When Rick MacLyon burst into the room, Jean wasn’t at all startled. He threw himself into an armchair, his kilt billowing upward and giving her a glimpse of thin white thighs. He’d paused outside the door to collect himself, to put back on his captain of industry face. That was all.

  He looked up at his own portrait, then at the etching of Jenny Cameron on one side and the paintings of Charlie on the other. “Fairbairn,” he said.

  For a moment Jean didn’t recognize the word. “What? Oh—ah—yes, that’s my name.”

  “Maiden or married?”

  “Maiden.”

  MacLyon’s head swiveled toward her. Behind his glasses, his eyes were a muddy brown, opaque as the peat-stained waters of Loch Ness, which never give up their dead. “Fairbairn is one of the septs of Clan Armstrong.”

  “Being Borderers, the Armstrongs weren’t exactly a clan.”

  “Are you related to Nick Fairbairn of Fordel?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “When did your family emigrate to the U.S.?”

  “At the turn of the last century.” She wanted to ask, Who’s doing the interview here, anyway? Not to mention, Who cares about an interview, under the circumstances? And she answered herself. I do. The first thing you do after a mysterious death is hold interviews.

  “My wife is a MacDonald. Descended from the Lords of the Isles. The MacDonalds were first on the scene at Glenfinnan, when the Bonnie Prince raised the flag of his Cause. MacDonalds helped him escape. The name MacDonald means courage, poetry, tragedy, betrayal.”

  Jean bit her tongue before she added, and hamburgers. She picked up her laptop and flipped open the lid. “I take it the police are on their way?” she asked while the machine booted up.

  “Yeah, sure,” said MacLyon. “Fiona took care of it. No problem.”

  Well yes, he did have a problem, but there was no need to rub it in. Jean was trying to think of a lead-off question that was not some variation on, Do you have many murders out here? when she heard a muffled electronic trill, the first seven notes of “Scotland the Brave”.

  MacLyon groped in his sporran and produced a cell phone. “Yeah? Yeah, Vanessa. Yeah, he is. Okay. I’m on my way.” With an impatient snort, he switched off the phone, leaped up, and left the room.

  Jean blinked. Vanessa was Rick’s wife. She’d just heard the bad news. Was she in the house or had someone called her and told her?

  MacLyon’s footsteps receded up the staircase. Vanessa was at home, then. How many more people were tucked away in various nooks and pantries? A place this size would need a staff, at least some of whom probably lived in. But the house was quiet as a—go ahead, Jean told herself—quiet as a tomb.

  No, a male voice was speaking in the distance. Even though she couldn’t hear the words she could tell by their rhythm that this man was Scottish. Fiona’s cool voice replied. A telephone chirped. A door shut. Jean saw the shape in the shadows, twisting in the chill draft. Hung out to dry. Why?

  With a long, shuddering inhalation that was almost a sob, she thumped the laptop onto the coffee table, walked over to the window, and peered out into the courtyard. The sun shone. Leaves danced. A gull squawked. It wasn’t right that the universe was moving imperturbably on while George Lovelace was not only dead but stripped of dignity and purpose.

  A low silver car roared up the drive and screeched to a halt. That looked like the sports car that had almost blown her off the road in the Dark Mile, not that she’d seen much more of it than a metallic blur.

  A tall man in an impeccably tailored suit, all knees and elbows and belligerent moustache, scrambled from the car and strode toward the house. The front door opened and Fiona’s voice said something unintelligible. “What’s all this in aid of? Dead? Who’s dead?” demanded a man’s voice in one of those Anglo-Scots accents that sounded like it originated not in the vocal cords but at the front teeth.

  Fiona murmured something else. Steps came down the staircase. MacLyon’s monotone spoke. The new voice returned. “Lovelace? That doddering old fool?”

  “Cool it,” MacLyon snapped. Out of respect for the deceased or because a witness was lurking in the sitting room?

  Fiona, MacLyon, and the stranger walked past the door and down the hall. Somewhere in the distance the young Scots voice spoke. After no more than two minutes, the blended steps came back up the hall and faded into the distant reaches of the house.

  All right then. Jean sat down and pulled out her own cell phone.

  “Miranda Capaldi,” said her partner’s throaty voice.

  “Hi. It’s Jean. I’m at Glendessary House.”

  “Are you then? Have you met the MacLyon of that ilk yet?”

  Any other time Jean would have laughed. Now she said, “Rick MacLyon’s pretensions aren’t even remotely the issue. I found George Lovelace. Dead. And not by accident, either. Suicide or even murder.”

  The air between Lochaber and Edinburgh rang hollowly. Then Miranda exclaimed, “Oh my God! How dreadful! What—who—why. . . .”

  Even though she had the grace to emphasize her shock, still Jean could hear the oooh! undertone. If Miranda’s grand story turned into a murder mystery, she’d be as gratified as she was horrified, even though contemporary murders, at least, were outside Great Scot’s history-and-tourism territory.

  “I have no idea what happened,” Jean said. “It’s going to take a while for even the local cop to get here, let alone any crime investigation people. They’re going to want to interview me, not vice versa. You’re just going to have to sit tight.”

  “I could be ringing Ian at The Scotsman. . . .”

  “Miranda, please, just let the news percolate out on its own. This is no time to get the scoop and lose your reputation. Or mine, especially.”

  “Oh aye. You’re right, as always. But I’ll be putting together Lovelace’s biographical facts, even so. Keep your pecker up,” Miranda finished, which made Jean smile, if wanly.

  Just as she switched off the phone, she heard another car drive into the courtyard. In an instant, she was back at the window. The car’s blue Celtic-interlace logo and the legend “Northern Constabulary” glowed inspiringly. From it climbed a constable, who settled his cap on his head and marched toward the front door, which again opened without a knock or a ring.

  At last. . . . Well, it only seemed like half an Ice Age since she’d found the body. Jean looked out of the sitting room door in time to see Fiona hand the constable off to MacLyon and the man from the sports car, who bellowed, “MacSorley, Kieran MacSorley, by way of being the local judge. Frightful business, simply frightful. This way, step lively now.” He hustled the officer down the hall.

  MacLyon looked at Fiona. “Great timing,” he said.

  “Couldn’
t be helped,” she returned. They followed the two men around the corner.

  No one took notice of Jean. She was starting to feel like Typhoid Mary. She should yell down the hall, “It’s not my fault,” except she was anything but sure that it wasn’t. And what had MacLyon meant about timing, anyway? Like any time was good for a murder?

  Jean was still standing in the doorway when Fiona came back around the corner. Without so much as blinking the woman said, “The tea and biscuits were all right for you, then?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Fiona had no nerves, that’s all there was to it. She was already so fair—not anemic, fair—it was hard to tell if she’d even gone pale. Jean wished there were some way she could trade bodies with her, however briefly, like taking a weekend vacation. “The constable’s from the closest station, Spean Bridge, right?”

  “Aye, that he is.” Fiona walked on by.

  Jean slunk back into the sitting room but didn’t close the door. Footsteps walked down the hall. One set went up the staircase, another went out the front door. From her post at the window she saw the constable get in his car and hold a long, serious conversation with someone invisible—headquarters, probably. She didn’t need to read his lips to know that he was saying, “Fort William, we have a problem. Send back-up.”

  While Jean’s outer adult was dutifully standing and waiting, her inner child was squirming and whimpering. Movement, that’s what she needed, although running up and down beating her breast was not an option.

  The entry hall was deserted. So was the staircase, and so was a corridor running in the opposite direction from the one leading to the game larder. This corridor was longer and wider, lined with bits of furniture and prints in gilded frames. Each rectangle of glass glinted in the light shining through the one open doorway.