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

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “I’m not a reporter like that mob in front of the police station. I do history and human-interest stuff, not headline news.”

  “George gave me your article about Hugh Munro, him being a fellow musician and all. Although comparing me to Hugh’s comparing dog food to steak.”

  “Not necessarily. The pipes are just about the one instrument Hugh doesn’t play.”

  “But he has Billy Skelton, hasn’t he? And Dougie Pincock’s played with him as well, though I’ll never make as fine a piper as Dougie.”

  “A piper’s reach needs to exceed his grasp.” Jean realized she was straining upward, shoulders back, chin up, watching Neil’s lips and tongue shape each word like a starving man might watch someone eating. She eased back down, hoping he’d think she simply had good posture. “Do you play with a band?”

  “I play with Gallowglass from time to time.”

  “They’re good,” Jean temporized, having at least heard of the group.

  “I missed out Hugh at Rick’s Hogmanay Party, more’s the pity. I was playing with Gallowglass in Dundee the night. I played with them at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year as well, a bit of piping, a bit of tech work behind the scenes. They were after asking me to join up, but one of the older chaps was jealous, talked them out of it.”

  Neil took a step closer, his height sheltering her from the chill eddies of the wind. Today he didn’t smell of whiskey but of a thankfully mild aftershave. His smile wasn’t the broad, dazzling smile of yesterday but a more subtle, intimate version, implying he didn’t waste this particular smile on just anyone. . . .

  Oh. Mentally Jean slapped her forehead. He was responding to her hormone rush, coming on to her. Wasn’t he? Was she so out of practice she was mistaking friendliness for romantic—okay, sexual—interest? With her skirt fluttering in the wind she’d probably evoked the famous image of Marilyn Monroe standing on the subway grating. She knew she had good legs. As Ben Franklin said, a woman’s decay started at the top and worked its way down. . . . Decay? she asked herself. Get a grip.

  Maybe Neil wanted her to introduce him to Hugh. If so, he was up-front about it, mentioning the article that George Lovelace, her fan, had showed him. She had to applaud his honesty. And she wasn’t going to boo his flirting. She remembered flirting, generating a little superficial friction with an attractive man. Nothing wrong with it, even now.

  Especially now, said the cynical part of her mind, when this attractive man was a member of the MacLyon household.

  Drawing herself up again, even as she dropped her lashes—flirting was like riding a bicycle, a body-memory—Jean formulated a question about the same household dynamics she been too numb to care about yesterday. And was cut off by a female voice like a police siren. “There you are!”

  Neil took an abrupt step back. “It’s my mum. Don’t let on you’re a reporter. Hates the species, she does.”

  Contracting, Jean looked around to see the Queen bearing down on them. . . . No, the woman in the coat and scarf was taller and lankier than petite Elizabeth. Her face was similar, though, every curve and sag congealed by propriety. What Jean could see of her hair was swept into a permed and sprayed helmet.

  “Charlotte MacSorley,” the woman announced. “Mrs. Kieran MacSorley. Bonnie Brae Cottage, Bunarkaig.”

  “Jean Fairbairn. I work with Miranda Capaldi at Great Scot magazine in Edinburgh.”

  Charlotte thawed abruptly. “Ah, Miranda! Lovely girl, lovely. Good friend of ours.”

  So social class trumped shady profession. Jean hid her smile. Funny though, how their good friend Miranda had barely heard of the MacSorleys.

  “This is all so dreadfully tiresome,” Charlotte went on. “Having to talk to the police as though we were common criminals. And those reporters! Like a pack of wolves waiting to rend one limb from limb on the doorstep.”

  “It’s difficult,” said Jean neutrally.

  Neil added, “A bit harder on George than on us, Mum.”

  Amen, Jean thought, and glanced gratefully up at the young man’s sober face.

  “Well now, George worked for Rick, didn’t he?” asked Charlotte. “Not that he wasn’t a perfectly pleasant old gentleman, for an English academic.”

  The he was a credit to his race was implicit in Charlotte’s tone. Her accent was the same as Kieran’s, the “proper English” pronunciation drilled into hinterlanders of their generation, so that they sounded as though they had toffee stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

  Neil’s accent was thicker, but then, he was at the age that avoided conformity at all costs. “Jean’s on her way to the police station as well.”

  “Oh, bad luck,” said Charlotte. “That common little fellow, Sawyer, trying to contradict one’s every word. Asked me again and again where I was when poor old George died, as though I couldn’t be trusted when I told him I’d been going about my errands and had barely walked in the door of my own house when Fiona rang with the dreadful news.”

  Jean wondered if Charlotte had told Sawyer about stopping by Lovelace’s house in Corpach, and if she had, what her story was.

  “Kieran went up to Glendessary House straightaway, barely had time for a wash and a brush-up. Mind you, Rick depends on Kieran. He needed his level head to sort the matter, especially with all the visitors. Bad timing, that, but there you are, we can’t arrange things to suit ourselves, can we?”

  She was not talking about arranging murders, Jean assumed.

  “Mind you, it’s Rick’s house. He can entertain as he wishes. Naturally he’s wanting his wife to serve as hostess, but. . . .” Charlotte let the implication flutter away.

  “She’ll learn,” said Neil, a grin permeating his sobriety.

  “Rick and Vanessa mean well, of course. One can hardly choose one’s parents. If one is raised in an inferior culture, one that sets an excessive value on blunt speech, well then. One can only try to assist, even if one’s efforts aren’t always appreciated.” Charlotte’s lips shriveled into a slit.

  So what had happened to send Charlotte off down the road as though the hounds of hell were barking up her tailpipe? Had she been “helping” Vanessa set up for the party until Vanessa reminded her which of them was the actual mistress of the house? Why would that mean an urgent visit to Lovelace’s house? “Perhaps we passed on the r . . .” Jean began.

  But Neil was already speaking. “We’d better be away, Mum, I’m needing the tape for my pipes, and Toby will have your car serviced by now.”

  Ah, so Toby was in town!

  “It’s marvelously fulfilling to have a talented child,” Charlotte confided to Jean. “Neil makes a good fist of everything he turns his hand to, don’t you, dear? He’s overcome so many obstacles. Does his mummy proud.”

  Neil looked up the street with an expression of long-suffering patience. This time it was Jean who hid a grin, wondering if his flirting was a way of emphasizing his manhood.

  “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Miss Fairbairn,” Charlotte went on. “Would you care to stop by Bonnie Brae Cottage for tea tomorrow afternoon? Half-past three, shall we say?”

  “Oh. Ah, thank you, I’d enjoy that,” said Jean. Far be it from her to turn down a chance to interview another witness. Or listen to one, as the case may be.

  “I’m sure we have many mutual friends in Edinburgh,” Charlotte said, stopping just short of concluding, of the better sort.

  “Thank you. I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Neil. . . .”

  “Oh aye, see you soon,” he returned, with a flicker of one set of long lashes that might have been a wink.

  Neil and Charlotte walked away past the Tourist Information Office. Her coat fluttered, exposing the pattern of her tartan skirt—more MacLyon. His attitude toward her was just solicitous enough to be mocking. The dynamics of Glendessary House, Jean thought, would have been fascinating even without the sub-text of murder and madness.

  Gritting her teeth and lowering her head, she plunged on down the street and through the re
porters corralled in the parking lot in front of the police station. “Excuse me, sorry, beg your pardon. . . .” At least one of them called her by name. Great.

  Unlike Jenny Cameron, she wasn’t known by only one pen and ink drawing. Her scandal hadn’t been invented as propaganda. How much longer before the reporters got hold of it?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jean at last escaped the police station, only to find that the wind had slackened and rain was pouring down. The reporters had probably gone to ground in the coffee bar down the street. She scurried past its plate glass window, hiding behind her umbrella.

  Now she had another statement on file with the police, signed, sealed, and this time recorded. She’d steeled herself to face Cameron, but he hadn’t appeared. It was Sawyer who’d goaded her through yesterday’s events. While Cameron had at least covered his hostility with courtesy, Sawyer seemed determined to find cracks in her testimony even if it was his hammering that put them there. Every third sentence he’d broken in with a caustic remark that, if not quite accusing her of murder, found her guilty of stupidity. By the time D.C. Gunn had at last taken her fingerprints, Jean would gladly have offered Sawyer her entire middle finger.

  When she told him what she’d learned, from burglars to pollen, he’d said brusquely, “We’re quite capable of doing our own research. You, you keep well out of it.” Which sounded a lot like the warning from the mysterious female voice on the phone. But now that Jean actually saw a good reason to stay out of it, she was in it up to her neck—an expression that had taken on a whole new meaning.

  She sped around the corner into Cameron Square and halted beside the wall of the Museum. There she caught her breath, rotated her shoulders, and stroked her nerves, which were bristling like the fur on an upset Dougie’s spine.

  Like the psalmist searching for help, Jean lifted her eyes to the hills. To the northeast, the vee between the mountains that was the Great Glen was clotted with mist, leaving only the lowest slopes exposed. Ditto to the southwest, where the Glen opened out toward the sea. There, the mist and clouds were thinning out, their individual shapes teased from the mass by a hint of sun, gray on gray like designs in smoked glass.

  She lowered her eyes to the town. Fort William had once been An Ghearasdan, a military garrison. Now the old fort was only a few cropped stone walls between the loch and the massed parking lots of the Safeway, the McDonalds, and the train station. The original houses had huddled close beside the loch. Now the newer streets looped freely up the steep slopes behind, white houses strung like Christmas lights against the green.

  Inhaling the tang of peat smoke that hung on the air like incense in a cathedral, Jean thought, yes, a little perspective helped. Eventually today’s headlines would become yesterday’s cautionary tale. Neither railing at fate nor cussing out the constabulary would make it happen any faster. Keeping on would.

  Rainwater gurgled through the gutters of the Museum, one of the oldest buildings in town. Its outer door stood invitingly open, the lights inside shedding a soft glow into the gloom. Yesterday’s cautionary tales weren’t exactly safe and soothing—especially not here, where the myth warriors fought many a pitched battle—but still she ducked inside.

  She paid her admission to the elderly lady at the front desk, handed over her umbrella, and plunged into the recesses of the building. For one precious half-hour she lost herself in contemplation of arrowheads, broken pots, stuffed birds, farming implements, medals, and memento mori from too many wars. The sonorous tick of an old clock provided as much allegory as background noise.

  Finally, lured up the stairs by portraits of Charlie’s feckless relatives, Jean came to the room dedicated to Jacobite memorabilia. After a long look out the window into the square—still raining—she turned to the display case holding the famous secret portrait of Charlie. To the unenlightened eye it appeared to be a smear of colored paint on a wooden tray. You had to look into a shiny silver cylinder, placed at just the right point on the tray, to see a reflection of Charlie’s smug features.

  Everything was a matter of perspective. Relationships. Murder investigations. . . . A second reflection moved in the gleaming surface of the cylinder. The wooden floor creaked. Jean’s shoulder blades tingled. She turned around to see D.C.I. Cameron standing several paces away, his blue eyes cold and hard as ice. He said, with about as much warmth, “Good afternoon. I was walking past the Museum and saw you looking out the window.”

  Damn! She should have known better than to break cover when predators were on the prowl. What were they doing, tag-teaming her? Just when she did not want to be jerked back to reality—no pun on the word “jerk” intended. But there was no help for it. Jean managed a civil if strained, “Hello.”

  “Clever picture,” said Cameron. “Art by way of optical illusion. The cylinder distorts the already distorted picture and reverts it to normal. A double negative making a positive. Two wrongs making a right.”

  Well, she was always up for a discussion of history. “This one’s less art than political statement. After the Forty-five, it was illegal for any household to display a portrait of Charles Edward Stuart. Just like it was illegal to play the pipes or wear the kilt. Some of the milder aspects of the English ethnic cleansing policy.”

  “Charlie was no Scot. His mother was a Polish princess named Sobieski. His grandmother was Italian. His great-grandmother was French. He’d never set foot in Scotland, but still had the bloody cheek to say ‘I am come home.’”

  “Maybe home is where the heart is.”

  “Charlie’s only contribution is to the tourist industry, tripe selling better than truth.”

  “And your business is truth?”

  He considered the secret portrait. “Making a search for the truth.”

  Yes, the man was historically literate. But then, Jean knew a lot of hard-assed historians. They’d come down to drink at the faculty club watering hole, and if you were spry enough you could get off the odd pot shot from the shelter of the academic grove. “So you have to prove you haven’t been taken in by a legend, is that it?”

  “By nostalgia for a world that’s never existed. William Wallace, Rob Roy, Charlie’s great-great-grandmother Mary—they’re none of them what Hollywood and the Tourist Board make them out to be.”

  “Mary, Queen of Scots, was Charlie’s great-great-great grandmother.”

  He didn’t so much as blink.

  “If your point,” Jean went on, “is that history, like truth, is filtered through people’s emotions, I agree.”

  “You writing your papers and your articles, then, you should be admitting the truth when you hear it. That life in these airts was no tartan fantasy but was nasty, brutish, and short. That regiments of Scots fought for the English against Charlie. That Scots have a long, bloody history of committing atrocities themselves.”

  He knew she’d both published and perished because he’d checked up on her, the same way she’d been checking up on Lovelace and MacLyon and the MacSorleys. Check. “The sentimental old stories don’t excuse atrocities any more than they diminish heroism. They don’t hurt anything.”

  “They dilute the truth into pap. Legends. Romance. Fantasy.”

  She expected him to add, bah, humbug. What, he’d been dragged into this Museum so many times as a child he’d developed an allergy? Or did his frigid disposition find sentiment offensive? It would be easier just to agree with him, but taking the easy way out seemed like cheating. “Fantasy is the revenge for reality. It’s not a disease, it’s an antidote.”

  “Is it now?” He lowered his head but didn’t start pawing the floor.

  “Some true believers are like alcoholics, yes. But most of us don’t have to believe a fantasy to find meaning in it. Most of us don’t use myth to justify terrorism. A good story helps us transcend our own lives.” Realizing Cameron hadn’t raised his voice one decibel, Jean moderated her tone. “Do you think MacLyon’s case of charlieoverthewaterism has something to do with the murder?”
/>   “I’m after seeing the entire picture.”

  “That’s what I’m after, too.”

  “We’re needing to have a blether, then, you and me.”

  “Listen, I just put in two long, weary hours at the police station with D.S. Sawyer treating me like something between a clown and a criminal.”

  Cameron’s mouth twitched, but she couldn’t tell if he was smiling or grimacing at Sawyer’s behavior. “Not at the station, nothing formal.”

  “Okay.” Jean told him. “Fine. I have nothing to hide. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Who’s saying you have done?”

  As much as she wanted to retort, You have, you and your pal Sawyer, she held her tongue and headed toward the stairs. Two more anamorphic paintings in another case displayed naked women with rolls of creamy flesh that today wouldn’t be pornography but studies in body image. Perspective, yes.

  She clumped down the staircase and retrieved her umbrella. A policeman was trained to be mistrustful. Free-floating cynicism was an occupational hazard. Even so, she had to ask Cameron as he expressionlessly held the door for her, “Why keep after me?”

  “Maybe I’m needing someone with a bit of historical expertise to help me move that cylinder about.”

  Like historians weren’t a dime a dozen, or a penny a pound, whatever. If all he wanted was expertise in charlieoverthewaterism, one of the Museum people would do just fine. But Lovelace hadn’t come to any of them for help. And none of them had found his dead body. Cameron was smart, no doubt about it. Whether he had a wider perspective than his sergeant remained to be seen.

  Jean stepped outside, umbrella at the ready. The rain had slowed to a mizzle—part mist, part drizzle. Two paces behind, she followed Cameron across the square into a steamy cafe. Its garish plastic tables and chairs blurred as her glasses fogged up. Before she could dive into her bag for a tissue, a handkerchief appeared in her peripheral vision, offered by Cameron’s sturdy hand. It wasn’t exactly Raleigh’s doublet spread across a puddle, but she accepted the gesture as she assumed it was intended, with a thank-you and a mop at her lenses.