Jean opened and then shut her mouth. She wasn’t sure she’d actually seen anyone. Even if she had, confronting burglars was hardly her specialty. At least she was reasonably sure she hadn’t seen Lovelace’s ghost. Ghosts were as likely to hang around places where they’d been happy in life as places where they’d been traumatized, but she hadn’t felt a ghost, not here and now.
Ogilvy came bustling back, plunged through the shrubbery and over the fence, and bounded up the front steps. He stabbed a key into the lock and threw the door open. “Aha! Caught you, you filthy beggar!”
Jean heard a distant thud. Another door slamming? “He went out the back. You go through this way, I’ll run around the side.”
Without waiting to get Ogilvy’s opinion, let alone have second thoughts, Jean sprinted around the house, through a gate, and past a metal shed into a garden surrounded by a six-foot-tall woven wood fence. The area was partly paved and partly planted, provided with two bird feeders and a fruit tree. No one was there except Ogilvy bursting out of the back door. . . .
A trellis set against the fence was falling in silent slow motion, trailing morning glory tendrils. It had made a dandy ladder for an escaping burglar, but his—her?—weight had knocked it over.
Jean dragged a wooden bench over to the fence and clambered up on it. She could see only a dozen yards up the hillside, past a tumble of bracken to a wall first of rhododendron and then trees Their leaves were waving as though someone had just pushed through them. Or else they were simply waving in the wind.
She looked left, past the other houses on Beaton Terrace. Nothing. She looked right, to where a perpendicular street dead-ended on the other side of Ogilvy’s half of the house. A couple of boys stood there, preparing some feat of derring-do with a skateboard.
“One of them, I reckon,” Ogilvy wheezed as he hoisted himself up beside her. “Hello there, my lads! What do you think you’re playing at?”
Jean winced at the decibels. But he’d gotten the boys’ attention. One of them made his way closer. Before Ogilvy could make any accusations Jean asked, “Did you see anyone climb over the fence here and run away?”
The boy shrugged. “Always people out and about, didn’t see anyone in particular. You been done over?”
“We don’t know yet. Thanks.” Jean got down from the bench, offered her hand to Ogilvy, then quickly snatched it back before he took the offer of help as an insult.
He regained terra firma without tumbling onto his face. “Good idea, treat the lads with honey instead of vinegar, eh? Maybe one of them will grass up the villain.”
“If it was one of them.” An ordinary burglar or hooligan could have been taking advantage of an empty house. Still, if someone had been sufficiently motivated to kill Lovelace, breaking into his house wouldn’t be much of a stretch. The question, again, was why?
“I’ll be keeping a weather eye out in the future, no doubt about it.” Ogilvy led the way to the back door. “Look here, the pane of glass closest to the handle was bashed in. Simplicity itself.”
“Unfortunately, yes. Would you be able to tell if anything was stolen?”
“Depends, doesn’t it? The telly, yes. Small items, no. Let’s have a recce.” Ogilvy walked into the house, his feet crunching over broken glass.
If opportunity knocks, Jean told herself, answer. She followed Ogilvy into a small kitchen scented with sausage and laundry detergent. A few dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and a newspaper lay open on the table, but the room was tidy. Except that every drawer and cabinet door gaped open.
Muttering words that men of his generation didn’t say in front of a woman, Ogilvy led the way through the rest of the house. Every cabinet, every closet, every drawer had been opened. And yet a silver tea service gleamed atop the sideboard in the dining room and several ordinary British coins lay on a table by the front door.
Hard to believe Lovelace would have left all the doors and drawers open. “Did the police leave everything like this?” Jean asked from the doorway of the study.
Ogilvy shook his head. “No. They left it all ship-shape and Bristol fashion, I made sure of that before I let them go, even though they wouldn’t have me in the house as they searched.”
“Were they looking for anything in particular?”
“Clues, I expect.”
“Well, yeah,” Jean conceded. “Did they take anything away with them?”
“Not that I saw. I’d have asked for a receipt.”
“You should call them now, Mr. Ogilvy, tell them about the break-in.”
“So I shall. Half a sec.” He bustled away down the stairs.
A card-carrying biblioholic, Jean wasn’t about to leave without inspecting the shelves lining the study. Her academic credentials gave her an excuse to poke around, didn’t they? Even if they didn’t, this was no time to be shy.
The shelves were filled with history books focusing on the eighteenth century, plus genealogy tracts and classic novels—no surprise there. The open doors of a cabinet revealed more books, a variety of office supplies, several photo albums, and a stack of blank paper. Beside that sat a shoe box, the lid askew. Jean peeked inside.
A muddy green beret, perfumed with the leather odor of the box, was squashed into one end. Lovelace’s commando beret? Below that five medals were jumbled loosely together, their bright-colored ribbons faded. Her father, Jean remembered, had mounted his three Korean War service medals in a frame and displayed them proudly in the living room. Historian or not, Lovelace had been less than enthralled with his own past.
She put the lid back on the box the way she’d found it and inspected the photos arranged on the walls. Among them hung a faded studio shot of a woman in the poufed and rolled hair of the forties. The same woman appeared in several other pictures, some with a similarly aging George, some alone.
Through another set of photos Jean traced the life of a younger woman, from infancy through her wedding to family groups including two children, who were in their teens in the photo that stood on Lovelace’s desk. Its frame was Mackintosh-design silver—something else the intruder didn’t steal.
The intruder might have been here for hours, with no need to do anything so gauche as throw everything into a pile on the floor. Even so, Jean and Ogilvy might have driven him away before he’d found what he was looking for. Assuming he was looking for anything in particular, that the entire search hadn’t been a fishing expedition—although, Jean told herself, a fisherman expected to turn up fish.
She glanced into the desk drawers, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Her own weren’t much tidier, filled with pens, pencils, file folders, receipts—all the odds and ends that clung to her like lint despite her new life.
The well-thumbed booklet of a metal detector lay on the window sill, beneath a shortbread tin emblazoned with a portrait of a supercilious Bonnie Prince Charlie. So Lovelace deliberately searched for artifacts, then. Nothing wrong with that, he knew the rules. He knew the rules very well indeed—that was part of the problem. It was probably part of the solution, but darned if she could see how.
Did he keep his prizes in the tin? Jean didn’t expect to find a box full of gold Louis d’Ors, but still she lifted the lid. Nope, just metal odds and ends, some rusted, some cleaned—buttons, an old key, what looked like bits of a bridle, an ornamental hinge.
She replaced the lid thinking that the room was exactly what she’d expect from a retired professor who valued paper as highly as gold. Nothing was labeled clue. Tempting as it was to open up every folder and box looking for, say, a treasure map, Jean recognized wishful thinking and kept her hands to herself.
She glanced again at the photos. The daughter was now an orphan. The children had lost a grandfather. And they had to cope not just with Lovelace’s death, but with its shocking manner. Would pinning the crime on its perpetrator bring any comfort to them? In Jean’s opinion, the pop concept of closure was much too cheap and easy.
She went back downstairs to find Og
ilvy hanging up the phone. “P.C. Walker’s on his way. He’s a level-headed chap, was here last night with the Saxon. Couldn’t get a word in edgeways, though.”
Jean pointed up the stairs. “The directions to a metal detector are lying on the window sill. Is that how Mr. Lovelace found the coin?”
“I have no idea. He showed me bits and pieces of things he turned up, but never that. He wasn’t all that keen a detectorist, if you ask me, just kept the machine in the boot of his car in the event the birds weren’t putting on a proper show.”
“His car. I saw it parked in a layby just past the gates of Glendessary House.”
“The Saxon said they’d found it there, aye.”
The car’s being there was no more a coincidence than her being there, Jean thought. She walked into the living room. The paneled walls surrounding the picture window were decorated with Audubon prints and landscape photos. Two china dogs sat on the mantelpiece. A television occupied a corner in front of some bookshelves, which held more history books, several years’ worth of digest-sized Great Scots, and an assortment of guidebooks and maps.
An elderly photo album lay on the coffee table. Jean opened it. Ah, photos from World War II, beginning with a group of soldiers lined up in front of—yes, that was Glendessary House, looking like the “before” photo in a home improvement ad. It had been in fairly bad shape even before the fire.
The next page of the album held more black and white photos, this time of soldiers and tanks and Greco-Roman ruins. There was Lovelace, his face fresh and clean with the years pared away, looking about sixteen. Looking alive. . . . Jean stifled the image that rose into her mind. “He served in the Italian campaign?”
“Aye, that he did. Decorated for bravery, I understand, but he almost never talked about the war. Some chaps down at the British Legion will go on as though they’ve had no life since, but not George. A tragic time, was all he’d say. Too many losses. If he talked about the past at all, he talked about his childhood—very nostalgic about that, he was.”
No kidding. “Did you and Mr. Lovelace meet during the war?”
“Oh no, no, we didn’t meet until he let this house. Fourteen years,” Ogilvy said sadly. “Happy days, happy days. I just wish. . . .”
Jean completed his thought, since it was so similar to her own. “You wish you could help find his killer? I’d like to help, too.”
“I told the police what I know, but that’s precious little. Saw George drive away about one. Then a silver MG pulled up to the curb, oh, it was just past two, I’m thinking. I’ve seen it there before, belongs to that MacSorley chap who sold Glendessary House to MacLyon to begin with—have to answer for that, won’t he?” Ogilvy tried to chuckle, but the sound came out as more of a tsk, tsk.
“Kieran MacSorley owned Glendessary House?”
“The ruins of it, yes, been in the family for donkey’s years, or so he says.”
“And Kieran was here yesterday afternoon just past two?”
“No, it was Charlotte, his wife, who chapped at George’s door and then went away looking like she was sucking sour plums.”
“I see,” Jean said, although all she saw was another name being added to the cast of characters. Charlotte MacSorley must be the driver who’d almost run Jean off the road in her hurry to get here. . . . Well no, she might always drive like a bat out of hell. She must have handed the car over to Kieran right after she left Corpach, apparently in some disgust at Lovelace’s absence. Why?
That word was starting to resemble one of those little yapping dogs, why yi yi yi. She asked cautiously, “Was Mr. Lovelace a friend of the MacSorleys?”
“Said once he was in the army with Kieran’s dad is all. Don’t think they were friends, no, not so much as they simply had something in common.”
“Was it MacSorley who introduced him to MacLyon?”
“That was the way of it, aye. Have to answer to that as well.”
Jean closed the photo album thoughtfully. In her childhood she’d thought World War II was fought in black and white. To commandos like Lovelace crawling through the heather in a darkness as much metaphor as real, the world really had been sketched in shades of gray. But then, all wars were fought in shades of gray, Charlie’s war, World War II, that Technicolor disaster of Jean’s older siblings’ generation, Vietnam. The question was—wait for it—why? If Lovelace didn’t want to dwell on the war, why did he keep the album out on the coffee table?
Feeling as though her brain were being pummeled, Jean glanced out the window and saw a police car pull up in front of the house. By the time Ogilvy ushered her through the tiny vestibule and onto the front step, a constable was coming up the walk. He nodded to Ogilvy and turned an inquisitive look on Jean. “Jean Fairbairn,” Ogilvy explained. “She’s a friend of George’s, was working with him on an article for her magazine. Miss Fairbairn, P.C. Walker.”
“Good to meet you,” said the young man. “What’s all this, a burglar, you say, Mr. Ogilvy?”
Jean glanced at her watch. She had just enough time to check with base camp in Edinburgh before her interview at the police station. “I need to be going,” she told Ogilvy. “May I come back and talk to you again sometime?”
“Please,” Ogilvy said. “Come for tea, no one makes a finer Dundee cake than Mildred.”
“Thank you.” Jean went out to her car, and with a last searching glance at the open but uncommunicative door of the house, drove away.
So someone, presumably the murderer, wanted something Lovelace had. The coin? Some other symbolic loaded gun? Had they found it? Jean looked toward the humped peak of Ben Nevis, now concealed by charcoal-colored cloud. The same cloud was thickening overhead, blotting out the sunlight and the colors of the landscape.
Yeah, she thought, the plot is thickening. She could feel it coagulating in her stomach right along with the bacon fat from her breakfast. But she wasn’t going to be making jokes, no matter how mordant, to D.C.I. Cameron.
CHAPTER TEN
Jean liked Fort William’s unpretentious, down-home main drag, the shops and restaurants lining its pedestrian mall intended as much for locals in search of laundry detergent as tourists looking for hiking and climbing gear. And souvenirs. One shop window displayed throbbing-tenor versions of Neil’s twee old songs alongside contemporary-traditional fusion music like Hugh’s. Another was stacked with candy, cakes, and shortbread in red tartan tins like the one on Lovelace’s window sill.
Some of the tins were decorated with the famous Victorian painting of Charlie bowing over a simpering Flora MacDonald’s hand, good myth making good business. There were no tins with pictures of Jenny Cameron, neither her truth nor her myth as appealing as Flora’s traditional female role—although, like Jean herself, Rick MacLyon was obviously a fan.
She scurried into the hotel, up the stairs, and into her room. Telling herself that Hugh should be up and about by this time, she plumped down on the bed and punched his number into her phone. Surely today she wouldn’t be the first off the mark with the bad news.
“Hello!”
“Hugh, it’s Jean. Have you heard what happened out here?”
“Oh aye, that I have, the poor old man done to death in the American billionaire’s castle.”
“That poor old man is the military man from Orpington, George Lovelace. The one I mentioned the other night. He came to my office Monday. Yesterday I found his body.”
Hugh made a sound that was both sickened and sympathetic. “Well now, that’s a turn-up. Is that why I’ve got a message from the police on my machine?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid they’re checking up on me. And what you told me about the Hogmanay party and Lovelace arguing with MacSorley and all of that. At least I’m assuming Lovelace was arguing with a guy named Kieran MacSorley.”
“Looks like he’s wearing a fake plastic nose and moustache, does he? Scornful voice, sharp elbows?”
“That’s him. Did you hear what he and Lovelace were saying?”
�
��No, they were hissing like snakes, not wanting anyone to overhear but not willing to concede the point, either. All I heard was the military chap saying, ‘That’s not the way of it at all.’ Then the MacLyon lassie, Vanessa, got between them. Right keen on hushing them up, she was, like she was scairt they’d say something they shouldn’t.”
“Did you hear anything she said?”
“Oh aye, that I did. She couldn’t be bothered to lower her voice, but then, there’d been drink a-plenty, and she wasn’t half pissed.”
“Pissed drunk, like you’d say, or pissed angry, like we’d say?”
“Both. She was saying, ‘It’s bad enough out here in the boonies without you two butting heads all the time,’ when that red-haired housekeeper cut her off short. Lovelace walked away like a kicked dog, head hanging. MacSorley, though, he ponced off as though the stramach was all Lovelace’s fault.”
“Hmmm. So Mrs. MacLyon has issues with her location.” Jean filed that away.
“Is MacSorley a suspect in the murder, then?”
“No, he wasn’t at the house when Lovelace was killed. A group of people was, though. They were all done up in kilts and plaids and—now that I think about it, some of them were wearing Prince Charlie’s white ribbon rose. The white cockade of the Jacobites.”
“Ah, the Bonnie Prince,” said Hugh. “We’ve got some fine music from the Forty-five, but music doesn’t justify suffering. Charlie was just one more aristocrat never realizing that respect is what you earn, not what you’re owed. Tells you something about the Scottish psyche that we’d make a hero out of a git like Charles Edward Stuart.”
Jean smiled. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard Hugh fulminating about what Cameron called charlieoverthewaterism. “If he’d won you’d be—excuse the pun—singing a different tune.” Ignoring Hugh’s groan, she went on, “You said there was a group of serious-faced people at the Hogmanay party.”
The Secret Portrait (A Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery Book 1) Page 9
