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

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean peered past double doors into a huge drawing room, decorated in eighteenth-century style. French windows opened onto a formal garden. Empty cups and crumpled napkins lay on tables. The wall was lined with portraits continuing the 1745 theme: Donald Cameron, the Lochiel. Lord George Murray. Flora MacDonald.

  The originals of those portraits were thoroughly accounted for. These, then, were well-done copies, oils polished with the brassy implication of age. The largest painting, though, the one over the marble mantelpiece, Jean didn’t recognize. It combined one of the famous portraits of Charlie with a colorized version of Jenny Cameron’s etching, so that the two of them appeared side by side, looking superciliously out at the viewer.

  This was where MacLyon had been haranguing the tourist group. Where they’d been singing, although rather solemnly for a pep rally. Maybe the meeting had been a memorial service for someone. Had the people come from a clan society? It could hardly have been clan MacLyon, since there had been no such animal before Rick Douglas invented it.

  Pondering the tendency of people to go overboard with their enthusiasms—identity as a state of mind—Jean walked back to the entry hall past several closed doors, none of which tempted her in the least.

  From the foot of the staircase she could hear muffled voices interspersed by the clink of dishes. Only MacSorley’s sarcasm came through clearly, in tone, not in words, overriding MacLyon’s whine. Jean thought she detected Fiona’s voice, a calm undercurrent beneath the men’s. She was certainly hearing a second woman, one with an upward inflection at the end of each short, sharp sentence that made her sound petulant but was probably only a California accent. Vanessa.

  What were they doing, synchronizing watches and getting their stories straight? Like Jean, they had to be making it up as they went along. A dead body in the house was pretty darn awkward—especially if it turned out to have been murdered. Who could possibly have anything against poor old Lovelace, coin scam or. . . . Wait a minute. Hugh said Lovelace had been arguing with some local functionary. MacSorley had not only called Lovelace a doddering old fool, he’d announced himself as a judge. Not, Jean informed herself, that an argument on New Year’s Eve meant anything in May.

  Walking past the sitting room, she peered around the angle of the hallway. The constable was standing in the shadows at its far end, in front of the larder door. He shuffled his feet and glanced at his watch. Yeah, Jean thought, I know what you mean. Let’s get a move on here. . . .

  “Oh, hello,” said a velvet voice behind her.

  She spun around with a gasp. Barely an arm’s length away stood a tall young man wearing the same kilt and jacket outfit as MacLyon, minus a brass button or two. He might have popped out of a bottle—which he was carrying with him, a liter of some obscure and therefore expensive single malt—although his having popped out of the kitchen was more likely.

  “Sorry,” he said, “didn’t mean to give you a fright.”

  Jean goggled. The man reminded her a bit of Michael Campbell-Reid, although from the way he was looking back at her looking at him he was considerably less married. She managed to say, “I’m a little jumpy. Go figure. Jean Fairbairn from Great Scot.”

  “Neil MacSorley, piper, chauffeur, gardener, general dogsbody.” He switched the bottle to his other hand, pumped hers up and down, and dropped it tingling back at her side.

  Another MacSorley. “So you’re the piper. I saw you playing when I got here.”

  “Oh aye, I play the twee old songs, ‘Over the Sea to Skye’ and the like. Rubbish, I’m thinking, but Rick’s the boss.” Neil shook back his mane of auburn hair and started to smile, then, his eyes darting down the hallway, frowned instead.

  The afterglow of that almost-smile stayed imprinted on Jean’s retina. The first smile she’d seen since she’d arrived here, it was worth waiting for, a dazzling arc of white teeth cutting crescents between his chiseled cheekbones and chiseled jaw. . . .

  Suddenly and annoyingly she was aware of what his bright blue eyes were seeing—a woman easing into middle-age as though into a cold swimming pool, who even at her best had a nonchalant attitude toward fripperies like make-up and coordinated outfits. And she was hardly at her best now. Her lip gloss was chewed, her brown hair was inside-out, her glasses rode schoolmarmishly down her nose, and the large dark eyes she thought were her best feature were slightly crossed and as intelligent as cabbage.

  Like her physical appearance mattered now. Still, Jean drew herself up, trying to claim as much space as possible with her five feet three inches. “I came here to interview Rick—Mr. MacLyon—but he’ll have other things on his mind now. I’ll set up another appointment.”

  “Oh aye, Fiona will be seeing to that, she’s playing the personal assistant just now.” He held up the bottle. “Fancy a wee dram? Nothing like the best of the barley to put the roses back in your cheeks.”

  She had the uneasy feeling that the roses were blossoming in her cheeks just fine. “No, thank you.”

  “Then I’ll be getting on.” He tipped her a salute with the whiskey bottle and headed up the hall.

  Jean stood watching the pleats of the kilt dancing above Neil’s fully-packed calves until he’d disappeared up the staircase. Then, deflating, she walked back into the sitting room. Of all Glendessary House’s special effects, the handsome young piper was the most striking.

  Not that she cared. She wanted to get away, into the fresh air and open landscape. She wanted to travel back in time to yesterday afternoon in her office—No, Mr. Lovelace, I’m sorry, I can’t help you. . . . Or would that have made a difference? Would anything she did now make a difference?

  All she could do was wait, and wonder, and nurse the ache in her gut that was the memory of a nice old man who’d wanted her help badly enough that he’d lied to get it.

  Jean sat down on the couch, leaned her head against its back, crossed her arms protectively, and closed her eyes. If she couldn’t have what she wanted, then she could at least possess herself in patience until she could have what was available.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time a fusillade of slamming car doors roused Jean from something between nightmare and coma, the light filtering through the draperies had taken on a faint bronze sheen.

  The cavalry was here at last. The camp followers of the media would be close behind. Jean exchanged a wary glance with Jenny Cameron’s black-and-sepia eyes. She identified with Jenny, and not just because the woman was also known as Jean.

  Footsteps beat up and down the hall. Voices spoke in varying tones of authority and deference. The clock struck six. A moment later, a sharp rap, between a polite knock and a battering ram, pushed the door of the sitting room further open. Jean stood up.

  In stepped a compactly-built man. He wore a neat dark suit, buttoned, and a striped tie, knotted, the same way the police officers wore their uniforms, as identification rather than fashion statement. Behind him came a younger man in a similar suit. With his fresh face and notebook he looked like a student on his way to a class.

  The first man strode forward, extended his hand, and announced, “Detective Chief Inspector Alasdair Cameron, Northern Constabulary.”

  “Jean Fairbairn.” She offered her own hand.

  He grasped it and let it go. His fingers were cool, and so firm she felt as though he’d taken her prints as well as shaken her hand. “Miss or Mrs?”

  “If you’re being technical, I’m a Dr, a PhD. But I’ll answer to Miss or Ms, whichever.”

  “Right,” he said, underwhelmed by the essay in nomenclature. “I’m told you discovered the deceased, Miss Fairbairn.”

  “I found him, yes,” she returned, with an emphasis on “him.”

  “This is Detective Constable Gunn. If you’d be so good as to give us a statement, he’ll take it down.”

  Cameron was telling, not asking. “Yes, of course. Hello, D.C. Gunn.”

  With a polite nod, Gunn faded discreetly into a chair out of Jean’s line of sight.

/>   It was Cameron who was in her face. He might be forty, as she was, or he might be a lived-in thirty-five. The furrow between his eyebrows implied a tendency to frown, and the creases bracketing his mouth suggested a frequently clenched jaw. His dark blond hair was cut short, and would have made an amber waves of grain effect except for its gray sheen, like that of an approaching storm. The same sheen was reflected in the slate-blue eyes that gazed at her with consideration edging into suspicion.

  She drew herself up with an irritating rush of self-consciousness, again seeing what the man looking at her was seeing. But Alasdair Cameron was assessing a different potential. The uniformed constable who stepped into the room and took up a position beside the door made that very clear. Maybe instead of calling Miranda she should have called a lawyer. . . . She doubted if Cameron would appreciate a joke about Miranda rights.

  “Sit down, please,” he said, quiet, measured, matter-of-fact.

  With no ceremony to stand on—without much of a leg to stand on, either—Jean sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

  Unbuttoning his coat, Cameron chose the same chair MacLyon had. He started from almost the same point. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  I’m trying to figure that out myself. “I’m part-owner of and writer for Great Scot magazine. I had an appointment to interview Rick MacLyon at three o’clock this afternoon. I got here an hour early.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d hoped to stop and talk to George Lovelace on the way, although I probably hadn’t allowed enough time for much of a conversation. He didn’t answer his phone when I called, so I came on out here. The housekeeper asked me to wait.”

  “Why, then, were you having a wander round the house?”

  She’d probably get past all this only to discover she’d developed a psychosomatic bladder disorder. “I was looking for the toilet. No one was around to ask, so I just walked down the hall, opening doors until I got to the end. And there he was. George Lovelace.”

  “You recognized the body as Lovelace?”

  “Oh yes.” She forced herself to loosen the knot that was her intertwined fingers.

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Hardly at all. We only met yesterday, at my office in Edinburgh.”

  “Why was he there?”

  “He brought me a gold coin he’d found around here. He wouldn’t say exactly where.”

  “A gold coin,” Cameron repeated.

  “He and I both figured that the coin came from Bonnie Prince Charlie’s missing hoard.”

  “Oh aye? A bit of a treasure, is it?”

  “The hoard might be more than a bit, if it’s still there after all these years. A historical treasure as well as a monetary one.”

  “Why did he bring you the coin?”

  “He said he wanted me to help him have it declared treasure trove so he could sell it. He said he needed the money. He said I could do an article for the magazine as long as I didn’t name names or places. He said he didn’t want to set off a gold rush. I saw his point. I still do.”

  If Cameron caught her meaning—that full disclosure wouldn’t necessarily serve the public—he showed no sign of it. He asked his question again, this time with a different inflection. “Why did he come to you?”

  “Because he liked my articles in Great Scot, especially the one in this month’s issue about Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

  “You took him on because he flattered you, is that it?”

  Jean tightened her teeth and loosened them again. She’d done nothing wrong. “In a way, yes. And I was very curious about the coin.”

  “Who else knows about it?”

  “So far as I know, only the experts at the Museum of Scotland. I took it over to them yesterday afternoon.”

  “It’s genuine, then?”

  “Yes. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the people at the Museum told me Lovelace had brought them another artifact last year. He knew all about the laws of treasure trove. He didn’t need me to intervene.”

  Cameron blinked. She swore that was the first time he’d blinked since he walked in the room. “Why was he after lying to you, then?”

  “That’s exactly what I was going to ask him today.”

  “And?” Cameron prodded, as if he’d sensed with some sort of police ESP that there was an “and.”

  “Someone, a woman, called my flat last night and told me to stay away from Lovelace, that he was trouble. I have no idea who it was, but then, I’m not hard to find. I called the number back again. No one answered.”

  “You haven’t got caller ID?”

  “I thought an answering machine would cover everything. I was wrong.”

  Cameron didn’t comment on her negligence. “What else was Lovelace on about?”

  “He reminisced about his days training as a commando in this area and how he watches birds, that sort of thing. I was sure there was more going on with the coin than he was telling me. In fact, he told me there was something I should know but then cut himself off, saying he shouldn’t tell tales out of school or words to that effect. I figured he was just embarrassed to need money, at least until I found out he was scamming me.”

  The detective’s eyes released Jean’s—she slumped slightly, then caught herself—and turned to the portrait of MacLyon in full panoply of kilt, plaid, and silver-trimmed Prince Charlie coatee. The outfit was gaudy, yes, but much more attractive than a tuxedo for a formal occasion.

  If Cameron had been from New York, he’d probably have said something about chutzpah. “Cheek,” he said instead. “Another victim of charlieoverthewaterism, I reckon.”

  “That’s a pretty mild disease,” Jean said, suppressing her appreciative but inappropriate smile. “There’s as much a market for Scotland’s heritage as for Scotland’s oil, and at least most of the income from the heritage stays here.”

  Cameron looked back at her, his stony face not even remotely appreciative. “When you’ve been stripped of everything else, reduced to selling your own past, a bit of honesty wouldn’t go amiss. There’s heritage, and then there’s tripe.”

  “Heritage is often more opinion than fact,” Jean told him, and told herself, I don’t need to debate definitions of honesty with this guy.

  “From America, are you?” he went on.

  “The United States, yes.”

  “Why come here?”

  “I’ve spent so much time here over the last twenty years I thought it would be cheaper just to move.”

  “You’re a citizen, then.”

  “No. Not yet, anyway. Just a resident alien.”

  “No need to get carried away with one’s enthusiasms, is there?” he returned. Jean couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. Odd, how he’d echoed her opinion of MacLyon’s trappings.

  The constable at the door suddenly stepped aside, letting another man into the room. This one looked like a Viking gone to seed, broad shoulders and heavy chest slumping downward beneath a freshly pressed suit that had been cut for the body of ten years ago. His face was encircled by blond hair, top and bottom, combed back from his broad forehead and trimmed around a jaw like an anvil. “Chief Inspector,” he said, in a bass rumble of a voice.

  “Miss Fairbairn, Detective Sergeant Sawyer,” said Cameron.

  “Hello,” Jean said, and bit her tongue before she made some remark about no fair piling on, there was only one of her.

  Sawyer handed a clear plastic bag to Cameron. Cameron held it up in front of her face. It contained the receipt she’d given Lovelace for the coin. “This was in Lovelace’s pocket. Do you recognize it?”

  “Yes, I do. I gave it to him yesterday.”

  “And this?” He turned the bag so she could see the back of the paper. On it was written, in a fine calligraphic hand, “Two p.m. Tuesday.”

  Jean shook her head. “Lovelace must have written that.”

  “When you made an appointment with him?” demanded Sawyer.

  “I didn’t make
any appointments with him. He put that receipt in his pocket, I told him I’d get back to him, and he left to catch his train. If he wrote on that paper, he did it after he left my office.”

  Cameron contemplated the evidence. “How are you getting on?”

  Jean almost answered, “How do you think I’m getting on?” before she realized he was talking to his sergeant. Again she flexed her fingers and, while she was it, her jaw.

  “We’ve made the photos and the video. The lads are lowering the body down now, the locals having had enough sense to leave it as it was.” Sawyer shot a narrow glance at Jean, probably wondering whether she was going to have the vapors if he expanded on any physical details.

  But even when she found the body, the physical details in and of themselves hadn’t upset her. They were more sad than anything else. Here was a polite old man who had been stripped of his dignity. It was little consolation that he was beyond the humiliation at the color photos and the video and the black and white, not to mention what was going to happen to him on a medical examiner’s table.

  “Rigor’s just now setting in,” Sawyer went on. “Body’s cooling, but then, that’s a cool room. Meant to be, isn’t it? You found him at two-thirty, then, Miss Fairbairn?”

  “Maybe a little before. I’m not sure.”

  “He might’ve died at just on two. Even later.”

  “I got here at two,” said Jean. “At least, the clock was striking. . . . ”

  “So then,” Sawyer said with some relish, “he died at the exact time he wrote on the back of your receipt.”

  She’d known she was a suspect all along. She had to be one, it was standard procedure. But only now did she really feel the suspicion, like the tickle of cold steel between her shoulder blades. Taking a deep but not exactly calming breath, she tried a neutral, “I thought time of death was always uncertain.”

  “So it is,” Cameron agreed, probably more to get the facts straight than to reassure Jean.

  “Even so, we’ve got a right small window this time round.” Sawyer took the bag back from Cameron but he was still looking at Jean, his sandy eyebrows set in something between distaste and distrust.