The Burning Glass (41 page)

“You heard the lad,” Alasdair went on. “Minty
Rutherford’s your killer. Like as not she meant to get rid of Ciara
the same way she got rid of Wallace, exterminating pests, more or
less.”

“That’s as may be—”

“If I were you, I’d have someone making a
search of the pub dustbins for that glass bottle. Likewise the bins
at Glebe House. And the kitchens. She might have a store of
poisons, playing the Lucrezia Borgia of Stanelaw.”

“Who?” asked Delaney.

“And have a look at the rubbish bins at the
museum. She was shredding documents the day.”

“I’ll see to it,” Kallinikos said. “By the
by, you were right, Mr. Cameron. When we told Ms. Macquarrie we
knew about a hidden map she started talking. Or talking in
specifics, rather.” His footsteps receded toward the door.

“Up ’til then all we were getting was her
usual twaddle,” said Delaney. “But this map, hah, the woman’s
staked this book deal of hers on finding it, but hasn’t got a clue
where it is.”

“Oh,” Alasdair said, “I imagine she’s got a
clue.”

“Macquarrie and Bell are in custody yet. I’m
not convinced they’ve told the entire story.”

“You’ve not got the evidence to hold them
much longer, let alone the two streams of evidence you’re needing
to charge them.”

“I’ve noticed that, thank you very much.”

“So you’ve come back here looking out more
evidence, is that it?”

“Why else come back to this godforsaken
pesthole?”

A horn honked from the road. The return of
the media? A flash of light in the corner of her eye made Jean
glance around. Alasdair had turned on the flashlight and was
inspecting the vaults of the ceiling, revealing cobwebs, dirt,
chipped mortar, but no secret messages. “What of Roddy Elliot?” he
asked.

With his head tucked down into his shoulders,
his lower lip protruding, and his chest swelling, Delaney looked
like a toad in a three-piece suit. “We charged him with vandalizing
a listed monument and set him a date in court. I’ve sent Linklater
to collect the bits of the inscription. The old codger tucked them
up in his hay barn, he said, not wanting them in the house. I’ve
never seen such a prize collection of nutters as here in
Stanelaw.”

“You should get yourself out more often,
then,” Alasdair said.

Delaney shoved his glasses up the bridge of
his nose so emphatically, Jean expected his finger to go right
through his forehead. “Elliot’s swearing he never phoned Wallace.
He said they’d just rowed face to face. Why bother phoning?”

“Logan made that call, just as he took two of
Wallace’s drawings from the flat here. He missed the one in those
boxes, though. If I was compromised when you suspected Ciara, then
Logan’s compromised now Minty’s the suspect.” Alasdair directed the
flashlight into the dungeon.

Kallinikos walked back into the Laigh Hall,
Valerie in tow. That must have been her honking outside the gates.
Jean turned all the way back around, trying to read the woman’s
mood—anger in the glare of her eyes, determination in the set of
her jaw, fear in the way she held her cardigan closed, her hands on
the plackets balled into fists.

“What is it you were wanting to tell us about
Angus Rutherford?” asked Delaney.

“I could’ve told you in Kelso,” she retorted.
“But no, I’m obliged to chase you back here. I’m always coming back
here, seems like.”

“We’ve got Derek in the incident room,”
Kallinikos told her. “Mr. Cameron and Miss Fairbairn caught him
here in the castle.”

“He climbed through that window,” said Jean,
rather surprised to hear her own voice.

Valerie’s eyes kindled into a blaze. “I told
him to sit tight. I told him it was none of his business.”

“It is his business, though, isn’t it?” asked
Alasdair, and switched off the light.

“Oh for the love of . . .” Delaney exclaimed.
“Cut along, cut along, let’s do this properly. And you,
Cameron”—his forefinger targeted Alasdair like a blunt weapon—“I
expect you to behave yourself.”

“Of course, Inspector Delaney.” Alasdair
flicked off the flashlight and tucked it beneath his arm as though
sheathing a sword.

Scenting her cub, Valerie was already halfway
to the door. Kallinikos followed, her, and Delaney stumped along
third in line. Alasdair stood staring after them, one moment, two.
Then he looked over at Jean, his bland expression fracturing just a
bit, like fine, aged porcelain. “Shall we?”

“Yeah. Let’s.” And she walked out of the
Laigh Hall, wondering if this time she really welcomed either that
we
or that
let’s
.

The courtyard was bathed in the usual sickly
light. Jean made a mental note, far down below all her other mental
notes, to suggest that Ciara replace the yard light with something
else, an elegant gas lamp held by a brass dragon, perhaps.

Beyond the courtyard, above the eastern
hills, floated a spectral full moon. Jean imagined that the whine
in her ears was Dougie Pincock playing “Bad Moon Rising” on his
bagpipes. But no, she was hearing a constable’s radio relaying the
bulletin on Minty, demoted from community booster to public enemy
number one.

They’d eaten her delicious nuptial dinner,
Jean thought as she hurried up the steps to the flat. A good thing
the woman hadn’t realized that when she offed Wallace his
replacement would be Alasdair and his—determination? Sheer bloody
nerve?

Jean pawed through the box, found the book
with Wallace’s drawing of the dig, and sped back outside and across
the courtyard to the lumber room, raised above its station into an
incident room. Kallinikos stepped away from the door so Freeman
could exit and Jean could enter.

In the tentative light of the single bulb,
the crowded faces seemed indistinct, as though they’d been swiped
with Wallace’s eraser. Derek huddled over a steaming mug. Valerie
stood over him saying, “. . . done right, telling what you saw at
the pub. Minty, was it? Aye, she was after Ciara, I reckon, not
poor old Angus.” Her lips, thin and wan without their red lipstick,
set themselves into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

This time Alasdair stood to one side of
Delaney and his tribunal table, neither guarding his back nor
breathing down his neck. Delaney stared belligerently at Jean,
maybe expecting her to whip off her bra and burn it. Staring back,
she opened the book and showed the drawing to Kallinikos, who
passed it on.

Delaney pondered it a moment, then angled it
toward Valerie. “This is you?”

“Aye,” she said. “Wally was out and about
with his sketchbook that night.”

“You were excavating at night?” asked
Alasdair.

“Well, late of a summer’s evening, after
Professor McSporran went to ground at the hotel in Kelso. Set great
store by his dinner, did the professor. Minty spoiled him with
picnic baskets and suppers at Glebe House, but that night she was
away in Edinburgh, London, I don’t know. Away.”

“Who was—” Alasdair began.

Delaney interrupted. “I’ll handle this,
Cameron. Val, you’d better send the boy outside.”

“No,” she said, and her claws pressed down on
Derek’s shoulder.

“All right then,” said Delaney. “Who was here
at Ferniebank that night?”

“Angus, Wallace, me.”

“Not your husband?”

“He wasn’t me husband, not then. He never
knew the full story.”

“Which is?” Delaney prodded.

Valerie inhaled deeply. “We opened Isabel’s
grave. That’s where we went wrong. Should have let her be, but no,
Wallace said Gerald opened her grave, she was already walking. Now
there was a loony, Gerald. Wallace, Ciara, they’re a bit off, but
not mental, not like Gerald.”

That, Jean thought, had also been Roddy’s
assessment.

“What did you find in the grave?” asked
Delaney

“Her bones, mostly. They cut her down like an
animal, you could see it. Dreadful. If the curse wasn’t on the
place already then, that’s where it began. And we found Gerald’s
poem.”

“He buried his poem with her?” Jean asked,
and averted her eyes from Delaney’s scowl to Alasdair’s quirked
lip. At least the archaeologists had science to excuse disturbing
Isabel’s grave. All Gerald had was a necrophiliac crush.

“That he did. Wrote this sick-making epic
poem about Isabel’s life and then buried it in Isabel’s grave, in a
wee medieval cist from the family store. Wallace said there was a
poet last century—century before, now—who buried his work with his
dead wife, then had second thoughts some years later and dug it up
again.”

“Cool,” said Derek.

Valerie thumped his head as though it was a
watermelon. “Leastways Isabel was already gone to bones. And Gerald
never dug up the poem.”

“Wallace knew it was there?” asked
Alasdair.

“Aye. He was after getting Gerald’s things
from the grave without the professor knowing what a loony his
grandfather was.”

Social embarrassment runs in the family, Jean
commented to herself.

“So he had me and Angus shove aside the
inscribed slab, and me drop down into the grave—I’m small, mind,
neither of them would fit. Then we replaced the slab. The professor
came along the next day and opened it up again, and I handed over
the empty chest. Wallace put it about that the poem had been
amongst Gerald’s papers.”

Kallinikos’s pen tapped his paper with the
dot at the end of the sentence. Jean leaned back against the frame
of the door. If she stepped outside, she’d be able to see the walls
of the chapel and Isabel’s uneasy resting place. If she turned
around, she’d see the castle. But she didn’t need to look at either
to know they were there. It was like holding her hand above the
burner on a stove and feeling heat, except what she felt was
cold.

Alasdair stepped forward, a flicker in the
depths of his eyes drawing Jean erect again. Treasure found at the
dig. A chest. A treasure chest. “Was there anything else in the
chest?”

Valerie’s smile crimped at the edges. “A
small but right choice collection of jewelry.”

“Jewelry?” Delaney demanded. “Gerald’s family
jewels. Hah. No pun intended.”

“Family, aye, or so Angus kept saying.
Wallace said it was the jewelry from the harp.”

Jean felt her mouth fall open, and she shut
it with a pop. Kallinikos murmured, “Well now.”

For once, Alasdair and Delaney wore the same
expression, stunned disbelief. But Alasdair found his voice first.
“Gerald stripped the jewelry from the clarsach and buried it with
his poem. Angus was saying the jewelry belonged to the family, so
it was all right to—”

“Steal it,” Valerie said. “Wallace kept
saying there were rules, some question as to whether it was
treasure trove and all, it should go to a big museum. But Angus, he
took it, because Minty wanted herself a cooking school, and what
Minty wanted, Minty got.”

“She knows all about the jewelry, then.”

“She doesn’t miss a thing, that woman
doesn’t.”

And at the luncheon, Jean thought, I told
Minty there was a sketch of the dig in the flat. She’d excused
herself and phoned Logan, telling him to confiscate it. She knew
the truth, all right. And it was a very inconvenient truth
indeed.

Whether the Rutherfords had violated the laws
of treasure trove was a moot point. Even if the jewelry had been
family property, selling it on the open market would have drawn the
enthusiastic attentions of the National Museum, to say nothing of
Inland Revenue. “Minty and Angus sold the jewelry to repay their
debt,” said Jean, “bit by bit, if not on the black market, at least
under the counter at auction houses and to shady dealers. And Angus
was seen at a pawn shop, too.”

“Several pawn shops,” Kallinikos said.
“Peterborough, London, Dover.”

“Oh, that,” said Valerie. “He was shifting
some of Wallace’s silver cufflinks, photo frames, and such. Minty
got better money than that for the jewelry.”

“How much of that money came to you?” asked
Delaney.

Derek looked up hopefully.

Valerie looked down at her feet. “Angus paid
for me bakery in Middlesbrough and popped round with gifts for
Derek is all.”

“Did you think of blackmailing Minty?”

“I’m never that stupid.”

“But you never thought of reporting the
theft, either.”

Valerie laughed humorlessly, her narrow
cheeks puckering. “Aye, the likes of me, telling tales about Mr.
and Mrs. Councillor Rutherford. I’ve had problems enough, thank you
just the same.”

“There’s bad feeling between you and Minty
even so,” said Alasdair.

“She’ll have none of the likes of me, that’s
true, but it’s because of Derek here.”

Delaney leaned forward, out of Alasdair’s
shadow. “The Middlesbrough constabulary had your husband,
Harry—”

“Ex-husband. I should have quit him years
ago, but inertia can be right powerful.”

Jean could sympathize with that.

“. . . in for an interview,” Delaney went on.
“He’s still swearing Derek’s not his son, that your ‘posh friends’
stitched up the results of the DNA test. He knows Angus gave you
money, but he thinks it’s because Angus is Derek’s father, is that
right?”

“Old Horse Face?” Derek made a gagging sound,
but no further comments about poshery.

“Minty thought the lad was Angus’s, too, did
she?” asked Alasdair.

“She did that, aye, though there was never
more than a cuddle between us—starved for affection, the man was,
no surprise there. But Minty, what she wanted was the baby. She was
after me for months to just hand him over, so she could bring him
up proper, like. Even after the DNA test proved he was Harry’s, she
offered me money, like she could buy a human being. I deserved me
share of the money from the jewelry, right enough, but not like
that.”