The Burning Glass (10 page)

Jean stretched her neck to better see the
piece of weathered stone roughly the size of a paperback book,
carved with the letters “IC” and “J.” Years of freezing and heating
could have caused the flake to slough off of a larger piece. Or it
could have been hacked off. “Where did you find this?” she
asked.

“Upstairs. On a windowsill. On show, like.”
Jean could see something of Zoe’s father in the curves of her face,
but her gaze through the thorns of her eyelashes, first at Jean,
than back to Alasdair, held nothing of Noel’s affability.

“Give that answer another go,” said Alasdair,
his voice whetted and drawn a handsbreadth from its scabbard.
“Where did you find this?”

In other words, Jean told herself, that stone
had not been part of any windowsill displays when Alasdair did his
tour of inspection this afternoon.

Zoe’s crimson lower lip extended even
further, making a shelf. “In Isabel’s room. The Gray Lady’s
chamber. Lying on the floor. Derek trod on it.”

“Eh? What?” blurted Derek.

Zoe, obviously the brains of the operation,
elbowed him again.

“And just when did you find it?” Alasdair
asked.

A silence so long Jean could have counted
each of the quartet of breaths, Alasdair’s the slowest, Zoe’s the
fastest. Then Zoe said with a sigh, “Ten days since. The day Wally
died.”

“Were you here with a school group that
day?”

“No. I was here on my own.”

“You was with me,” Derek snorted.

Zoe’s dagger-like glance indicated that with
him around, she might just as well be alone.

“And now you’re bringing the stone back,”
Alasdair said.

“It’s bad luck, isn’t it?” exclaimed Zoe.
“The oven at the pub packed up, and my mum sliced open her hand
working for Flinty Minty, and my sister Shan’s failed her exams.
And Old Wally, Soor Ploom Logan found him dead there, in the
dungeon. The exact same day.”

“I see.” Alasdair’s tone indicated that he
did indeed see something, if not the aptness of Zoe referring to
Constable Logan as a sour plum or Minty Rutherford as flinty.

“None of that happened because you took the
stone,” Jean told the girl. “It was right to bring it back, but not
because it’s bad luck.”

Zoe didn’t react. Neither did Alasdair. Since
at the moment he was the brains of their operation, Jean said
nothing more.

Derek abandoned nonchalance for impatient
little jiggles. He probably felt he should intervene to protect the
girl, but didn’t dare. Status emergency in progress. As soon as
Alasdair let them go, Derek would find someone younger or smaller
to start a fight with, maybe even Zoe herself.

“What made you decide that this was bad luck,
then?” asked Alasdair.

Again the girl looked around for an escape,
but saw none. “It was the Macquarrie woman, wasn’t it? Poncing in
here, everyone bowing and scraping like she was the Queen herself,
and her going on about ghosts and fairies and secret codes. She’s
not half loony.”

Alasdair did not disagree.

“She says it’s a bit of gravestone, it should
be put back where it came from.”

“In the castle? Not in the chapel?” Alasdair,
by now encased in his full professional suit of armor, stared down
at the miscreant and her guilty-by-association confederate. If it
were anyone else, Jean thought, she’d swear he was enjoying making
them squirm.

“I found it in the castle,” Zoe stated.

“And you nicked it the day P.C. Logan found
Mr. Rutherford dead? What time, exactly?”

“How should I know that? Before tea-time.” By
now Zoe had shrunk so far down into her jacket she looked like a
turtle.

Tea-time being a flexible concept, Jean
assumed that the stone had left the building mid- to late
afternoon. But Wallace wasn’t found until after closing time,
seven-thirty this time of year.

“Were there many visitors that day?” Alasdair
asked.

“I wasn’t keeping count, was I? You’d best be
checking your own records for that.”

Touché
, Jean thought.

Alasdair registered no amusement. “Did you
see anyone else here?”

“A bus tour. The Mystic Scotland woman,
Macquarrie. She was hanging about the chapel whilst Wally lectured
her group here.”

“Yeh,” added Derek. “And one gent was right
upset with Wally, ticking him off good and proper, and Wally giving
as good as he got.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “They were just having a
bit of a chin-wag, is all.”

“I know an argy-bargy when I hear one,” Derek
retorted. “Heard enough of them when we was living with my dad,
didn’t I?”

“You heard a man arguing with Wallace,”
established Alasdair.

“Yeh,” said Derek. “After the day trippers
moved on.”

“No,” Zoe said at the same time, loudly.

“Do you know who it was? Was it Roddy?”

Derek looked even blanker. Zoe’s red lips
thinned. “It was never my grandad, no.”

Upstairs something tapped and then stopped.
Now
that
was a branch against a window, Jean told herself.
Wasn’t it?

Alasdair waited, but both the ashen faces in
front of him had closed down, locked up, and put out Do Not Disturb
signs. At last he drew the hearing to a close, handing Zoe back her
things but keeping the bit of carved stone. “Very well, then. Away
with you, the pair of you. And mind your manners in the future.” He
was smart enough not to add, “And don’t let me catch you here
again”. That would have been throwing down the gauntlet.

Liberated, the kids jogged briskly across the
Laigh Hall and out the entrance into the cool, fresh air. Alasdair
and Jean less herded than followed them, and stood on the steps
watching as they crunched off across the courtyard. Their shadows
made amorphous blobs in the light of the yard lamp and an oval
moon, rising luridly in the east.

It was dangerous for them to walk along the
narrow road in such dark clothes, Jean thought. “Do you need a ride
back into Stanelaw, Zoe? Derek?”

Zoe said, “No, I’m stopping with my grandad
across the road.”

“We’ve got a house just up the way. Nice and
quiet, Mum says. Dead dull.” Derek’s left hand fluttered toward the
south, past Ferniebank’s entrance gate.

After a few more steps, Zoe called back,
incongruously, “Ta, madam.” And the two figures diminished and
disappeared out the gate and into the night

A dog started barking, Roddy’s gruff voice
bellowed, and a door slammed. Jean hoped Derek wasn’t going on his
way with Jackie or Hector clamped onto his coattail.

She looked around to see Alasdair standing so
still and silent frost might just as well have gathered on his jaw
and cheekbones. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think about Zoe’s
story?”

“What were you after doing there?” he
demanded, so unexpectedly she flinched. “Playing good cop to my bad
cop, were you?”

“What? You’re not a bad cop.”
Oh
, she
thought.
Damn
. “Did you think I was butting in?”

“If I did do, it’d be too late to say so
now.”

“What it’s too late for is another
who’s
in charge here
territorial skirmish. There’s no territory to
skirmish over.”

“No, there’s not. Just the property to
protect.” His tone was cool and distant as a snow-tipped mountain
on the edge of sight, but a flash in his eyes hinted at possible
avalanches, the sort that could be triggered by a loud noise. Or
the wrong noise.

Jean opened her mouth for a snappy retort,
but found she had nothing. She reminded herself that she was inside
his battlements now. Sapping his foundations would bring down her
castle, too. Just the property to protect. Just a relationship to
survive.

Jean waited until she sensed the set of his
shoulders slowly loosening, armor thinning, ice melting. Still, his
earlier pucker of skepticism had pleated into outright suspicion—at
Zoe and her inscribed rock, she hoped, not at her. She tried, “I
didn’t have any ulterior motives for wading in. If you can call a
couple of sentences wading in. You know what they say, though,
about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“Oh aye. And there’s a fly that needs
catching. Young Miss Brimberry knows more than she’s letting on, I
reckon.”

“About Wallace? You’d be better off
questioning Derek. He’s the soft underbelly . . . I know, I know,
there’s no case, there’s no mandate to question either of them.”
She waited, but the figure beside her said nothing. “What is it
about Wallace’s death that’s got your antennae twitching,
anyway?”

“What had them twitching before Zoe’s
testimony, not to mention her exhibit?” He held up the carved
stone. “I phoned Wallace the day before he died. He was going on
about being chuffed with the sale and the renovations, how it was
time for him to retire. Again. The stairs kept him fit, with his
dicky heart and all, but his knees were too dodgy for the ladder to
the pit prison. All he’d ever do was shine the light of the torch
about. The rubbish that collected there, he’d have someone from the
town clear it away.”

Jean felt her own antennae sitting up and
taking notice. “But Logan found him in the dungeon. Did he fall in?
Or was he pushed?”

“There was not a mark on his body. The
postmortem found that his heart gave out.”

“Heart gave out. Not a mark on his body. Same
with Helen Elliot. There’s an echo here, and not a pleasant
one.”

“That there is.”

“Maybe Wallace had some compelling reason to
get himself down into the pit prison, and it was too much for him.
Although if he was used to doing the stairs, that doesn’t seem
likely.” Jean looked accusingly at the blank, even secretive face
of the castle. “Did you see what looked like the glass from his
flashlight down there, as though he dropped it?”

“I’ll be fetching that up. No reason, I
suppose, but still . . .” Alasdair stopped.

“But still?”

“The answerphone on the desk. I was setting
it up with my own particulars, and found the last part of a
conversation saved. I’m thinking Wallace set the machine to record,
to preserve the evidence.”

Jean’s antennae became positively stiff with
interest. “Evidence?”

“A man’s hushed voice telling him that
meddling with things that didn’t concern him might be dangerous. To
remember he was an old man, and on his own. To remember what
happened to Helen. Wallace replied with a version of ‘do your
worst’ and the other party rang off.”

“Whew. I don’t blame you for being
suspicious. Was that a friendly warning? A hostile threat? Or a bad
joke? What ‘things’ were they were talking about? And what about
Helen, anyway? Just that she died alone, if not mysteriously?” Jean
shook her head. “If Wallace was anything like us, a call like that
would be the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of a
bull.”

“Oh aye,” Alasdair agreed. “According to the
date and time stamp—and that’s set accurately—the recording was
made the morning of the day he died. Of natural causes.”

“There are ways of killing people that don’t
leave a mark, or much of one, anyway, but if the medical examiner
thinks everything is routine, he’s not going to look for those, is
he?”

“Got it in one.”

“Or are we just sensitized to murder cases,
and building one, maybe two, out of nothing here? I mean, we’d have
to have a killer with a motive, and means, and opportunity.”

“Motive, that’s the sticking point,” Alasdair
replied, without gagging on her repeated “we.” He tilted his head
to look up at the battlements, blunted teeth against the pale
sky.

Jean followed his gaze. That high window,
that would be Isabel’s. “So Zoe sneaked that inscription out past
Wallace the day he died. I’d have second thoughts about keeping it,
too, after that. What I wonder is why she took it to begin
with.”

“A good question. We’ve got too many good
questions.”

“So what else is new?” She took the bit of
stone from Alasdair’s hand and held it up to the collision of light
and shadow. At first it seemed warm from his clasp, then chilled.
She thought of Ciara Macquarrie strolling around as though—well,
she did own the place, from leaky roof to shattered inscriptions.
Was she independently wealthy? The one thing Alasdair had ever said
about her was that he was not paying her alimony, not that any
alimony a policeman could provide would buy more than a doll’s
house.

“Ciara’s right,” Jean said. “This is a piece
from a gravestone.
Hic jacet
is Latin for ‘here lies,’ as in
‘here is buried,’ not ‘here someone isn’t telling the truth.’
Hic jacet
someone. Not Wallace.”

That elicited a fissure of a smile. “It’s
from Isabel’s grave. A second bit of that inscription was found in
Wallace’s pocket, the
ac
, fittingly enough.”

“In his pocket?”

Alasdair made a tight gesture that from
anyone else would have been a flail of frustration. “Gary Delaney
at Lothian and Borders Police sent me the report of the inquest, it
being a matter of public record and all. The ruling was that
Wallace was elderly, he had a heart condition, he died. Slam the
file. Close the case. I’m guessing the inquest on Helen Elliot
ruled the same.”

“But the answering machine tape is evidence
that Wallace’s case shouldn’t be closed. And there’s a connection
between the two deaths, sort of.”

“I left a message on Delaney’s voice mail
soon as I found the recording, but he didn’t ring me back. Why
should he have done?”

That was a rhetorical question, but Jean
answered anyway. “Because it’s not your case. Any more than the
theft of the clarsach is your case.”

“And because I’m a civilian now.”

A glimmer of light rose above Jean’s eastern
horizon. That was it. Despite protesting he had no regrets,
Alasdair was feeling left out, unwanted. His status emergency was a
lot more complex than Derek’s. So was his reaction. “Alasdair, you
didn’t quit your job for me. You didn’t even quit it because of me,
not really. I’m just the catalyst.”