The Burning Glass (32 page)

Jean slid onto the vinyl seat and spread her
hands in an extravagant gesture encompassing several gradations of
puzzlement. “The evidence is piling up, but who the heck knows
where any of it fits?” She reviewed the situation, from harp to
nuts of the human variety, concluding, “Here’s the bit of
inscription we took away from Zoe Friday night. Logan’s going to
let us into the museum.”

Rebecca’s eyes glazed over and Michael’s
mouth made an O, either from the amount of information or from its
disorganized presentation—yeah, Jean thought, she’d barely have
given herself a passing grade, a lady’s C, maybe, for simply doing
the assignment.

“We’ll come with you to the museum,” Rebecca
said. “I’m not sure Linda’s lungs are up to this atmosphere. And I
don’t mean the ambience.” She looked into the pram, but the baby’s
eyelids, transparent as peony petals, were closed, and her tiny
chest rose and fell peacefully.

Alasdair zigzagged toward them, offered
little Linda a smile, and slid in next to Jean. He planted two
glasses wet with condensation on the table. “Here you are,
lemonade.”

“Thanks,” Jean told him. “Michael, Rebecca,
this is the one, the only, Alasdair Cameron.”

“At last.” Rebecca shook Alasdair’s hand
across the table and passed it over to Michael, who wrung it
enthusiastically.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Alasdair, and to
Michael, “You’re the piper, then.”

Michael’s pipes were propped up next to him,
looking like a spindly-legged creature wearing a tartan loincloth.
“I’ll be tuning up directly, not so you’d take notice in this
crowd.”

“We’ll all be taking notice. Why else were
the great Highland pipes instruments of war, rallying the fighters
over the clamor of battle? Assuming the fighters weren’t yet
charging downhill, half-naked and all berserk.”

“The Camerons charging with their swords,”
returned Michael with a grin, “into the gunfire of the
Campbells?”

“That’s my lot, bonny fighters but piss-poor
politicians.”

Rebecca’s smile washed over Alasdair and
splashed toward Jean.
Ah, I see the attraction
.

Alasdair lifted his glass of rich, amber
fluid toward Michael, who saluted in return. “
Slainte
,”
Alasdair said, and drank. For just a moment his perceptive gaze
turned inward, no doubt tracing the path of the palliative into his
stomach and thence to his aching nerves. Brewers, Jean thought,
should be right up there with pharmacists.

Michael indicated the television. “Score’s
tied, though Aberdeen’s having the worst of it.”

“That’s their
modus operandi
,”
returned Alasdair, and launched into a no-doubt-intelligent
discussion of the fine art of football of which Jean understood
nothing. So Alasdair could do sports, too. Who knew? Smiling, she
sipped her sweetened citric acid and looked around.

Derek was imitating a cockroach beside a slot
machine in the far corner. Valerie, braced on the bar like a sailor
hanging onto a gunwale, was expounding to Noel. The publican’s
amiable expression hadn’t exactly soured since Friday, but seemed a
bit askew, caught between the rock of consternation and the deep
blue sea of commerce. He was wiping glasses, his gaze flitting
around the room, not really listening to whatever Valerie was
saying, but nodding politely even so.

Behind a cash register stood a young woman
Jean thought at first glance was Zoe, if Zoe’s bottle-black hair
could have gone brown overnight. But no, this girl was older, her
lips pink and smiling instead of crimson and pouting, and her face
was less angular, if not as full as her parents’. Shannon hurried
through a swinging door and returned a moment later with two plates
of food, which she deposited at a nearby table. “Your meal’s just
coming,” she called to the booth, and sped away like a model along
a catwalk, all lissome grace and swaying hair.

Rebecca pried the top off the plastic
container and scrutinized the inscribed stone. “Is there a copy of
the entire inscription in the museum?”

“If there isn’t, we have a copy of the
Ancient Monuments report.” A dark wriggle in the corner of Jean’s
eye turned into Zoe, her appearance today part goth, part gamin.
She held two plates brimming with sandwiches and salad, and stared
down at the stone chip as though it were a cobra rising up from a
fakir’s basket.

After a moment, Michael said, “Those are our
lunches, are they, Zoe?”

With a jerk, Zoe clattered the dishes onto
the table. Lettuce flew.

Alasdair turned the plastic dish toward her.
“Oh aye, this is the chipping you were returning to the castle.
Tell me again where you found it, because I’m thinking it wasn’t in
the castle at all.”

Her lips thinned into a red gash indented by
her front teeth. She glanced over her shoulder at Valerie, who was
now pushing her way toward the back door, drink in one hand,
cigarette in the other.

“Was it Derek’s mum telling you there’s a
curse on Ferniebank?” Alasdair persisted. “Is it this stone that’s
bad luck, or Ferniebank itself?”

“They’re saying Angus is dead,” Zoe replied.
“Murdered, like.”

“He’s dead,” was all Alasdair would commit
to. “Who else has been telling you Ferniebank’s a bad place? Your
grandfather?”

Now Zoe was looking at Alasdair as though he
was the cobra, her black, spiked eyelashes accentuating her dismay.
“Grandad doesn’t mean any harm. He’s set in his ways is all.”

“So set in his ways,” Jean asked, “that he
begrudged Wallace taking his place as caretaker?”

“Mum says Grandad and Wally, they used to
fish together, but no more, not since the castle was opened up. All
I’ve ever known is them going on at each other about the castle,
the chapel, Isabel, of all things. And then the Macquarrie woman
arrived, and they had rows over her as well.”

“They were rowing over her and her plans for
Ferniebank the day Wallace died, were they?” Alasdair asked.

He’d asked Zoe that question before. Now,
cornered, she nodded weakly. “And because my mum was taking him his
meals, just like my granny did. And because me and Derek, we were
hanging about there. . . . Well, Minty, she told them both to boil
their heads.”

Probably not in those words, Jean thought,
just as Alasdair asked, “Minty was there that day?”

“Keeping an eye on her investments, I reckon.
Wallace was rabbiting about Gerald’s papers, but then that was
something else he and my grandad were always going on about,
barking bloody Gerald.” Seizing a bit of her old bluster, she
added, “Like anyone gives a fig for that secret wisdom
rubbish.”

You do, when it’s filtered through Valerie
and Derek, thought Jean.

“Someone does,” Alasdair said. “Val Trotter,
perhaps? Wallace, certainly. Maybe even your granny. Was that what
she had in common with Wallace, a taste for secret wisdom
rubbish?”

Zoe cast another look over her shoulder to
where her mother and Shannon were replenishing a rack of snack
bags. When she turned back to the table, her words spilled out in a
stream of diphthongs so compressed that Jean had to strain to make
them out. “Grandad says we’re obliged to respect the graves, even
the romanish ones, but there was that piece of rock in his dresser.
After that, everything went wrong. There’s Grandad going on about
the wages of sin being death, and it’s sinful to steal, isn’t it?
So I went to put the stone back.”

“Last I heard,” said Alasdair, “lying’s a sin
as well.”

“You cannot blame me for helping out my
grandad.”

Rebecca’s brown eyes and Michael’s blue
hadn’t blinked, Jean noted. They were chewing their food very
slowly and quietly, pretending to be invisible but not pretending
not to listen.

“You meant to protect your grandad by
returning the inscription,” Alasdair said, his soft burr barely
intelligible above the noise. “Protect him from supernatural
agencies if not from the secular ones. What about Derek, then? Did
you mean to protect him as well?”

“He’s not done anything,” Zoe protested.
“He’s thick as a board, but he means well.”

There was a lot of well-meaning going around,
thought Jean.

“Right.” Alasdair tapped his glass on the
table like a judge tapping his gavel. “Thank you. Detective
Inspector Delaney will be having a word with you and your
family.”

Beneath her ashy makeup, Zoe went even
whiter. “I don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. We’ve got
sod-all to do with, with . . .”

When she didn’t finish her sentence, Alasdair
said, “The police will be deciding that.”

An eddy in the throng was Polly, plodding
along wearily, her apron stained with food, her hair matted to the
sweat on her forehead. Nothing about her was sharp except her
voice. “Zoe, there’s work needs doing in the kitchen. The
focaccia’ll not be baking itself.”

“The focaccia’s Minty’s idea, let her cook
it,” said Zoe, but still she retreated from the table as fast as
her thick-soled, Frankenstein-design shoes could carry her.

That must be what she’d smelled the other day
and interpreted as pizza, Jean thought. Focaccia was one of
Valerie’s specialties, wasn’t it? The days when British pubs served
nothing more than permutations of pork and potatoes were long gone,
not that she’d found one that had a serious grasp of, say, nachos
or fajitas.

“Well done,” Michael told Alasdair with a nod
of approval.

Rebecca leaned across the table and confided
in a stage whisper, “He’s good, Jean.”

“I know,” Jean said, but refrained from
suspending herself from Alasdair’s shoulder and fluttering her
lashes adoringly.

He made a scoffing noise deep in his throat
and washed it down with beer. “Time to have Delaney ask Roddy a few
questions about the theft of the inscription.”

“Roddy’s definitions of desecration seeming a
bit fluid,” Jean summarized.

A lull in the conversational buzz signaled
Logan, his uniform cutting a swathe toward their table. From across
the demilitarized zone of the pram he announced, “Mr. Cameron, Miss
Fairbairn, Mrs. Rutherford wants a word at the museum.”

Jean almost choked on her lemonade.
Minty?

“Minty?” asked Rebecca.

Having his priorities straight, Alasdair
drained his glass before gathering up the inscribed rock and
sliding out of the booth. “Well then, Jean, we’ve been
summoned.”

Pleased that he hadn’t said, “Watson, the
game is afoot,” Jean gathered up her bag and her notebook and
scrambled to her feet.

Michael said, “We’ll come across to the
museum soon as we eat.”

Logan was already walking away, not looking
to see if anyone was following him. Jean gave her friends a
thumbs-up, go-for-it sign and with Alasdair accompanied the
constable out of the pub. He didn’t look both ways when he crossed
the street. His uniform must have magical traffic-repelling
qualities.

Jean braced herself for a cascade of
newspeople to burst from the beer garden—a cop, people seen at
Ferniebank, something must be happening—but no one appeared. A
glance through the gateway showed her why. Ciara was holding court
beneath the arbor, Keith skulking in the shadow to one side,
clutching a pint of beer. A wisp of smoke coiled around her, oozing
from Pandora’s box, perhaps, or leaking from the genie’s bottle. “.
. . the great secret of Ferniebank,” she was saying, “. . . a press
conference when construction begins on September thirteenth.”

Alasdair quickened his pace, lapping Logan,
and only stopped when they were on the steps of the museum and
Ciara’s soprano had faded into the background murmur. Logan opened
the door and both men stepped aside, leaving Jean to lead the way.
Misplaced chivalry, she thought. She’d get picked off first.

The cool, dim entrance hall was equipped with
a reception desk and a rack of pamphlets and books. Jean spotted
several issues of
Great Scot
nestled next to the sort of
booklets Ciara had once written. Beyond them, display cases held
the ephemera of lives long gone—tools, tea cups, Granny’s paisley
shawl. A staircase was cordoned off by a rope dangling a sign
reading “Private,” and a wide doorway opened to one side.

The sunlight winked out as Logan shut the
door behind them without coming inside himself. “Duties elsewhere,”
said Alasdair, his voice loud in the hush of the building. “Crowd
control and the like.”

“Minty?” Jean called, and started toward the
doorway, the floor creaking. The air seemed rich as brandy or port,
with old paper, stale crumbs, pressed flowers, a soupçon of
mothball—the bouquet less of age than of memory.

From the room ahead came a long squeal, and
light flooded out into the foyer. Jean halted, Alasdair warm and
solid at her back. Minty was shoving the old wooden shutters back
into the window embrasure. In a silky, black suit tailored to her
slender body, black stockings, and black pumps, she looked like a
stylish raven. The indistinct shapes of exhibits and wall-mounted
boxes loomed out of the shadows behind her, their glass panes
reflecting eerie smears of sunlight. “Thank you for coming.” Her
voice, well-modulated as always, was stretched into a higher
register. “P.C. Logan tells me you found Angus’s body.”

“We’re very sorry for your loss,” said
Jean.

Minty inclined her head graciously.

Alasdair asked in his most respectful but
need-to-know tone, “Did Angus return home at all?”

“Of course he did. Really, reporting him
missing, how unnecessary and embarrassing.”

Reporting his return to the police was
apparently just as unnecessary, Jean thought.

“Did he say anything that might cast light on
his . . .” Alasdair paused delicately.

“Death? He was not in good spirits, I’m
afraid. Quite put out with Ciara’s plans for Ferniebank. But I was
able to calm him before she herself returned to Glebe House and
invited us to dinner at the Granite Cross. Quite civilized of her,
considering.”