The Burning Glass (12 page)

Jean compressed her lips. Alasdair, having
guided the conversation to where he wanted it, said nothing. The
old policeman’s trick, the old reporter’s trick, letting the
subject ramble on. Assuming so collected an individual as Minty
would let herself ramble.

She at least strolled on a few more paces.
“Our Wallace’s mind was failing, too, had been for quite a while,
sadly, but he tried to keep up with his interests. One moment he’d
be on the roof with his telescope, the next he’d be poking about in
the pit prison—he feared there would be no further excavation with
the new owner. Tragic, that he should go down at last, like an
ancient oak.”

Where he had gone down was into the pit
prison. Jean didn’t look at Alasdair. She could sense him not
looking at her.

“Well then. I must be off. Tomorrow at noon,
Miss Fairbairn. And Mr. Cameron, if there’s anything I can do to
assist Protect and Survive . . .”

“I’ll not hesitate to ask,” Alasdair finished
for her.

Minty had already opened the door of the car
and levitated into the seat. “Have a good night, then.” The engine
roared, and the headlights flashed—this time Jean shielded her
eyes—and the car maneuvered out the gateway and disappeared.

So far, Ferniebank Castle hadn’t turned out
to be nearly as private as they had anticipated, had it? “Last year
this time,” she said ruefully, “you probably could have set up a
table on the main road and eaten a four-course dinner without
anyone driving by.”

“Ciara’s caused some changes here,” was all
Alasdair said, and started for the gate.

Jean told herself that maybe Ciara was just
taking advantage of changes that were already under way—the
heritage industry, New Age trends, the aging of the local
population. She crossed her arms over her chest, warding off the
increasing chill, and retreated to the front steps of the flat.

With a mighty heave and a squeal of hinges
Alasdair swung the gate shut. Again the rattle of keys, and he came
back across the courtyard, scooping up the hamper on the way. The
noisy gravel, Jean realized, made a dandy early-warning system. She
opened the door and he followed her inside.

For a moment she stood with her hand on the
doorknob, disoriented. This ordinary, even pedestrian, room
occupied a parallel universe from the hollow chambers next door. It
was a warm nest of sanity at its most dull and most comforting,
like a tuna casserole. And here she and Alasdair were alone at
last, with everything that implied.

Peeling off her jacket, Jean pried the
inscribed stone from her pocket and set it on an unoccupied lace
doily atop the bookshelf. Alasdair snapped the flashlight back into
its holder, shot a hard look at the answering machine on the desk,
and thumped the basket down on the kitchen counter.

“Don’t you trust Minty,” Jean asked, “or have
you played your cards close to your chest for so long you’re still
doing it?”

Alasdair opened the lid of the basket. “I’m
no gambler, Jean.”

“Sure you are. You simply calculate the odds
to the last decimal point. Or maybe you’re a scientist, suggesting
a hypothesis and then testing for reproducible results.”

“I’ve got no hypothesis now. Not as yet.
Still—you heard, did you, what Minty said about Wallace digging in
the pit prison?”

“Maybe that was before his knees gave out. He
was here for a long time.”

“Or maybe, like Zoe, Minty knows more than
she’s telling.”

“Does she know Wallace had a chunk of that
inscription in his pocket when he was found?”

“As next of kin, she and Angus claimed all
his belongings,” Alasdair said. “I reckon it was them cleared this
place of personal items.”

“Understandably leaving the tape in the
answering machine. You took it out, right?”

“Oh aye, it’s tucked well away in a sock. But
then, odds are whoever phoned has no idea Wallace was recording
them.”

“Was it Roddy who called? Maybe he was trying
to get Wallace to leave the neighborhood.”

“I’m thinking it was Roddy arguing with
Wallace the day he died, never mind Zoe.”

“She sure clammed up once she realized she
might have said too much.” Jean looked again at the inert bit of
stone. Then her eye moved upwards to a print of the
nineteenth-century painting of the murder of Mary Stuart’s
secretary Riccio at Holyrood, stabbed repeatedly by disaffected
nobles including a Kerr and a Douglas—and perhaps witnessed by
Isabel Sinclair. The characters were lavishly costumed and the
scene expansively acted to suit romantic-era tastes, not that it
hadn’t been genuine high drama to begin with. No wonder she’d
thought of just that event as she looked down into the dungeon.
“Minty says Zoe tells tales, but then, so do I, bimonthly in
Great Scot
.”

“There are stories, and then there are
lies.”

Jean conceded his point with a shrug. “And
there’s missing Angus.”

“We’ve got no concrete evidence that anything
here’s wrong, save the clarsach pinched from the museum and an
answerphone message that might mean nothing at all. Like as not I’m
. . .”

“Tilting at windmills? Straining at a gnat?
Borrowing trouble? Those are my specialties.”

“Oh aye, those and bouncing off walls and
jumping to conclusions. You’re having a bad influence on me, lass.”
Focusing on the interior of the hamper, Alasdair started producing
not rabbits but a glittering array of cutlery and dishes, each item
wrapped in tissue paper.

“Yeah, right.” Jean inspected the bookcase,
noting that the bottom shelf was bare except for a garish
“Glasgow’s Miles Better” souvenir ashtray. The middle two shelves
held astronomy, botany, geology, and geography texts as well as
history and archaeology books and lots of thin bright-colored
paperbacks of legends and ghost stories. The Ancient Monuments
Commission logo, a lion and crown, was printed on the plainly bound
spine of the tallest book on the shelf. She pulled it out. With it
came a folded piece of drawing paper.

On the book’s cover was printed:
Ferniebank Castle and St. Mary’s Chapel. Excavation and
Renovation Report
. Cool! She set that on the coffee table for
later, then opened the paper to reveal a sketch of archaeologists
digging next to the chapel, in the same rough-and-ready style as
the drawings in the leaflet. Still, each face was clearly defined
with only a few pencil strokes, the youthful diggers, male and
female, and an older man crouched beside the excavation holding
what looked like a small chest. This drawing had a tiny, tidy
signature:
W.B. Rutherford
. The man had been a one-man band,
it seemed. She laid the sketch on top of the bookcase, next to the
decorative doily.

The door to the hall closet opened and Dougie
emerged, whiskers as erect as his tail. He performed a silky swirl
around Jean’s ankles, then padded purposefully into the kitchen and
sat down beside his bowls, one filled with water, one still empty.
“Yes,” Jean told him, “it’s dinnertime.”

“Long past dinnertime,” added Alasdair,
perhaps with double meaning aforethought.

Jean found the box of kitty kibble, measured
brown lumps redolent of rancid fish into Dougie’s dish, and left
him scrunching away contentedly. The only appetite he had to
satisfy tonight was one for food. Whether that made him lucky or
otherwise was not a good question, period.

Alasdair was twisting two tall candles into
their holders. His appetites were as complex as the rest of his
personality, but she’d never know it by looking at him. Even though
his face was no longer stony or icy, neither was it an open book.
He was far too good at expressionlessness—something Ciara had taken
pains to point out. Had he been applying intellectual rigor to
dangerous emotional situations all his life? Which came first, his
rational chicken or his emotional egg?

She really needed another hobby than
psychoanalyzing Alasdair. Counting the number of angels that could
dance on the head of a pin, maybe.

He tapped a champagne flute against a
translucent plate, evoking a chime. “Mrs. Rutherford does nothing
by halves. If that’s not sterling silver, bone china, and crystal,
I’ll eat the lot.”

“No need for that. Wow.” Jean pulled a
chilled bottle of champagne, wrapped in its own little fitted
quilt, out of the seemingly bottomless basket.

“Moses’s entire family has staterooms in
there,” Alasdair said, and met her laugh with a smile.

He had an appealing smile, if stiff from lack
of use. He was making a calculated effort to lighten the
proceedings, wasn’t he, maybe even to apologize for his spasm of
bad temper.
Hey
, she beamed at him,
that’s all right, I
needed to know there was a burr beneath your saddle.
Speaking
of which . . . “So what’s the latest in the Northern Constabulary
soap opera? Did Sergeant Sawyer, a.k.a. the Troll of Inverness,
finally get his just desserts?”

“Depends on how you’re defining justice. The
Chief Constable suggested he work a bit harder at being a team
player, so Sawyer asked for a transfer and now’s with the
Strathclyde Police, a thorn in some other D.C.I’s hide.”

“And D.C. Gunn?”

“He’s swotting for the exams for promotion to
sergeant. A bit prematurely, I reckon, but he’ll do well in the
long run.”

“He’s got your example before him.”

Alasdair shook his head, but said nothing
else.

Okay
, Jean told herself, they’d
covered all the important topics except one, and this was
emphatically the wrong time to open the Pandora’s box of Ciara. She
pulled a thick beige envelope from beneath the lid of the
basket.

The stationery was the same as her invitation
to Minty’s culinary function—oh, it wasn’t just that the
handwriting was idiosyncratic, Jean was holding the card upside
down. She flipped it over and read: “ ‘Quail’s eggs in a Parma ham
nest. Salmon in sorrel beurre blanc with roasted vegetable
couscous. Gooseberry and elderflower fool with shortbread biscuit.’
I hope the fool is a dish, not an editorial comment.”

“It’s mushy fruit with cream, I’m thinking.”
Alasdair lit the candles—Minty had even included a book of
matches—while Jean sorted the aromatic contents of several
insulated plastic containers onto the dishes. Similar containers
were stacked in the cupboard, weren’t they? Wallace had probably
been happy to play beta tester for Minty’s preparations, conveyed
to his doorstep via Helen and Polly.

Despite her dig at their unmarried status,
Stanelaw’s Martha Stewart had provided the compleat honeymoon
repast, lacking only a gypsy violinist tuning up in the courtyard.
That couldn’t be a coincidence, either. Minty had put one and one
together from comments made by Ciara or the Campbell-Reids, or
Alasdair himself.

Judging by the wry curl developing in his
brows, he was thinking the same thing. He reached for the bottle,
saying, “I’m surprised Minty didn’t send oysters as well.”

The man could actually do comedy if he set
his mind to it. “Heavens no,” Jean replied. “August doesn’t have an
‘r’ in it.”

He popped the cork from the champagne bottle,
the small explosion making Dougie’s ears twitch, and filled each
flute with sparkling liquid the color of straw spun into gold.

She took one from his hand and held it up. A
couple of high-flying droplets landed on her glasses, making little
prismatic UFOs. “To, er, Ferniebank.”

“To us, Jean.” He tapped her flute with his
and set it to his lips. His look over its rim, the tiny reflection
of the candle flames thawing the blue depths of his eyes, made her
face flush even before she drank. If she’d ever doubted that the
man was versatile enough to do romance, too—however cynically she
might define that word—they evaporated like the champagne. And that
was so dry it was more effervescence than liquid, teasing her
tongue and throat with the subtle flavor of grape.

Ignoring his blanket, Dougie retired to the
couch to apply his pink tongue to his anatomy until his gray fur
was even sleeker. Outside, the sound of the wind in the trees
reminded Jean of the rhythm of waves on the shore, advancing,
retreating, advancing a bit farther. She sat down beside Alasdair
and tried a bite of her glorified ham-and-egg appetizer. The mix of
firm and soft textures filled her mouth. Suddenly she was
starving.

There was no need to make idle chitchat, not
now. Silently, companionably, they ate. Salt and sweet, brine and
earth, sharp and mellow, the flavors warmed first Jean’s mouth,
then her stomach, then radiated outward until her fingertips and
toes tingled. She had always suspected Alasdair had a sensual side,
if deeply buried beneath layers of police canteen bangers and mash,
and sure enough, he tasted and sipped as though assessing each
savory molecule for its full potential. Maybe his toes were
tingling, too.

He lifted the bottle of champagne to refill
their glasses. But she was already balanced on that knife’s edge
between sober and tipsy, tingling but not yet numb. “No thank you,”
she murmured, and Alasdair put the bottle down without topping off
his own glass.

There was a protocol to this kind of event,
after all. Not just the food, not just the champagne, but the
lingering looks and the fingertips barely touching between the rims
of the plates and then slowly, entwining. Jean wasn’t only picking
up on the prickle of his energy field, she was getting the snap,
crackle, and pop as well. Funny, she’d thought she knew what
foreplay was, but even their meal at the Witchery had not melted
her down this effectively.

The dessert might or might not be just, let
alone foolish, but it was delicious, a fruit puree whipped with
cream, delicate and rich at once, and buttery shortbread dissolving
on her tongue. The set of Alasdair’s jaw eased at last, and his
lips relaxed into their graceful and yet masculine curve, like
gothic tracery. When an almost microscopic bit of the fool clung to
the corner of his mouth, Jean wiped it off not with the corner of
her linen napkin but with her fingertip, and then pressed the sweet
morsel against her own lips.