The Burning Glass (15 page)

“The Ferniebank Clarsach. It’s been
recovered.”

“Really? Cool! We were just talking about
that. Where? When? Who took it? Why?” The door opened and Alasdair
stepped inside. Jean waved frantically, stopping him in his tracks.
He shut the door slowly, as though wondering whether he should take
cover behind it instead.

Hugh was saying, “It’s turned up at an
auction house in London. My pal Dominic works for them, evaluating
and repairing musical instruments and the like. They knocked him up
early this morning, told him to be getting himself to the office
quick smart. The clarsach was left on the doorstep in a pasteboard
box, like a clutch of kittens.”

“He recognized it immediately, then.”

“Oh aye. The description and photos and all,
they’ve been posted on the stolen art and artifact network for days
now. Dominic rang me straightaway.”

“Wow. It sounds like the person who stole it
had an attack of conscience. Or decided it was too hot to
handle.”

“Thanks to modern communications for that,”
said Hugh. “Almost makes me feel better about illegal file-sharing
and muzak.”

“The clarsach?” Alasdair asked, stepping
closer.

Jean gave him a thumbs-up, then turned her
thumb warily sideways. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Hugh answered, dragging out the word,
“Dominic’s saying it’s been disassembled. Just as well it wasn’t
carved from a single block of wood like many—it could be
dismembered without ruining it. Dominic reckons all the parts are
accounted for and it can be restored.”

“It was taken apart? Why?”

Alasdair’s brows drew together in a
frown.

“I haven’t got a clue. Neither did the
villains that vandalized it, apparently,” Hugh stated.

“Thanks for letting me know. I’ll tell . . .
Well, no, I bet Minty Rutherford was on top of the ‘need to know’
list, being director of the museum.”

“No question of that. Take care, Jean. Oh,
and I hope you’re enjoying yourselves.”

“No question of that,” she replied, hit the
“end” button, and turned to Alasdair.

“The clarsach’s turned up? Where?” Alasdair
demanded.

Swiftly Jean filled him in. However, his
frown not only didn’t yield, it became deeper, so that his eyebrows
almost shook hands over his nose.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she
went on. “If an APB for the clarsach was broadcast all over Europe,
then so was one for Angus Rutherford, with photos and everything.
So why hasn’t he turned up? In one piece, I hope, not
disassembled.”

“Plenty of places to hide a body. Or he could
be hiding himself. Like as not he has turned up, and we’ve not yet
heard. Good of your friends to be phoning and telling you—us—about
the clarsach.”

Oh.
This time she didn’t bother adding
damn.
“I’m sure P and S would have let you know.”

“Eventually, aye. But the Stanelaw Museum’s
not on my patch, is it?” Jingling Roddy’s keys, Alasdair paced over
to the bookshelf and gazed mutely at the inscribed stone, although
whether he was seeing it or the intelligence loop he was no longer
a part of, Jean couldn’t say.

“Miranda was telling me that Ciara got an
awful lot of money from somewhere last spring, though it might not
have anything to do with Ferniebank.”

“You’d not expect a woman with bats flying in
and out of her ears to be quite so canny with her money, would you
now?”

That was a rhetorical question if Jean had
ever heard one. Without beating any more dead horses—or bats—she
walked back into the kitchen and pitched the breakfast dishes into
the sink. Then she wrapped up Minty’s elegant dinner service and
packed it back in the basket. By the time she’d wrung out the
dishrag and draped it over the faucet, Alasdair’s stance had eased
and he was turning the inscribed stone over and over in his
hand.

Jean was able to stroll rather than
totter—the strained muscles were calming down—into the living room
and stroke Dougie’s smooth head. Having accomplished his night’s
work, he was now reposing on his blanket, paws tucked up and tail
tucked in. Alasdair had accomplished his night’s work to an even
higher standard, but the day’s work loomed ahead, with no catnaps
on the schedule. “So did you learn anything from Roddy?” she asked,
indicating the keys he was inserting into his pocket.

“He’s claiming he and Wallace were the best
of friends, and Wallace wanted him to have his fishing tackle.”
Alasdair’s brow was still furrowed, if now at a different angle.
“There’s tackle in the lumber room, right enough, and tools, and
Wallace’s telescope. And a stack of boxes all taped up.”

Jean didn’t suggest a box-cutting expedition,
not just yet. “People can argue a lot and still be friends. My aunt
and uncle are like that, always wrangling—I said this, no you said
that, well I meant this. It drives me nuts, but it doesn’t mean
they’re enemies.”

“Or Roddy could be lying. He does have a wee
bittie chip on his shoulder.”

“Sure, it’s the whole status protection thing
. . .” Jean let that sentence evaporate. “What are you going to do
with that bit of inscription?”

Alasdair set it back on the doily, saw
Wallace’s drawing, unfolded it, and nodded appreciatively. “I’ll be
consulting with headquarters, to begin. And I’d like to know
whether Angus and Minty have that piece from Wallace’s pocket.”

“I can ask her. She saw us with this bit last
night.”

“Aye, she was right interested in that. Look
here.” He picked up the Ancient Monuments book from the coffee
table.

“That was on the shelf,” said Jean. “You were
looking at it last night.”

He showed her Wallace’s name written on the
flyleaf in the same neat hand as the signature on the sketch, then
opened the book. “Here are two drawings of the inscription made
last century. Note the credit lines—they were drawn by Gerald
Rutherford and owned by Angus.”

“And managed by Minty, I bet. Those must be
the drawings she was talking about, the old family ones in the
museum.” Jean took the heavy book, carried it to the window to the
right of the fireplace, and set it down on the sill. The
photographs of the drawings were murky—the original paper had
yellowed and the ink faded—but the facing page held a simplified
black and white sketch.

The small, vertical letters of the
inscription were crammed together, making them look as much like a
stylized picket fence as words. Jean squinted at them, then
defaulted to the legend beneath the main sketch:
Hic jacet isbel
sinncler que abiit anno dni MDLXIX orate p aia eius requiescat in
pace.
“ ‘Here lies Isabel Sinclair,’ ” she translated, “ ‘who
died in the year of Our Lord 1569. Pray for her soul. Rest in
peace.’ Assuming that ‘p aia’ is ‘pro anima,’ but I guess that’s a
standard contraction like ‘dni’ for ‘domini.’ The sculptor must
have run out of room, the ‘peace’ is crammed up against the
‘in’—but then, he broke ‘requiescat’ into two parts. And the ‘er’
on ‘Sinncler’ is twisted up at an angle, even though there’s plenty
of room. Is that a squiggle or a crack or what right after the
‘r’?”

“Take note of the harp at the top—the
Ferniebank Clarsach, nicely-detailed—and the cross at the bottom.”
Alasdair stepped up beside her and his hand tapped the page.

“Not the engrailed cross of the Sinclairs,
but a flatter one. Sort of an X marks the spot with splayed arms.
Didn’t Minty say the piece with the clarsach is missing? How many
other pieces are gone?”

Alasdair turned to another page in the book,
to a picture of the gravestone itself, with the legend, “Photograph
by Gerald Rutherford, 1912.”

Jean shifted so that the light wasn’t
reflecting off the page, the movement bringing her shoulder
companionably up against Alasdair’s. “This shows the inscription
complete except for the harp. Which is appropriate, I guess. It’s
hard to think of poor Isabel being played by flights of angels to
her rest.”

“Perhaps that’s why she’s still playing
herself.” Alasdair pulled a piece of paper from the book. “I found
this tucked between the pages. Wallace’s hand, again, I’d say.”

“I see.” What she saw was a copy of the
complete inscription, perhaps traced from the book, perhaps
free-handed. Dotted lines ran through this version, like roads
across a landscape, marking out half a dozen cross-hatched
segments. Jean’s forefinger tapped the paper exactly as Alasdair’s
had done last night. “These pieces that are shaded in are the ones
no longer on the gravestone, right? So most of the inscription’s
still there. But there are six pieces missing now. Five disappeared
on Wallace’s watch. The
icj
is here and Wallace’s
ac
should be accounted for. Maybe the other three pieces are in the
museum. It might be only the harp that’s actually gone AWOL.”

“Well done, Jean. That’s the way I calculated
it as well.”

“I ace the test?” She looked up at him with a
grin. “Here we are, an academic and a cop, evaluating the secondary
sources when we could just walk down to the chapel and look at the
inscription.”

“Then we’d better be getting on with it.”
Alasdair set the drawing of the inscription on the bookcase along
with the one of the dig, and pointed toward the desk clock.

Whoa—the morning was on a collision course
with noon. Opening time. Minty’s hen party. Muttering something
about time flying and having fun, Jean fast-forwarded through her
usual rituals of clothing, cosmetics, and bedmaking, pausing only
to check the wall behind the bedposts for damage. But the
whitewashed surface was unscathed. Funny how it had never occurred
to her that they were beating time on a medieval wall. Those far
from subtle rhythms might have roused the ghost.

Eavesdropping seems to be quite the thing
around here, Jean thought as she hurried back into the living room,
although presumably the laird with his secret lug had been more
interested in gossip and schemes than in intimacies of the
flesh.

Alasdair was waiting by the door, the picnic
basket in hand. With a glance at Dougie—yes, he was asleep, as
apparently boneless as only a cat could get—Jean stepped out into
the cool, fresh breeze. Alasdair stowed the basket in the car while
she admired the play of cloud and sunlight, then led the way toward
the chapel.

The path was a ribbon of gravel undulating
between humps of fern and mossy rocks and the age-gnarled trunks of
trees that were, still, younger than the building they helped
conceal. Beneath the leafy canopy the air was more than cool, it
was chill, and heavy with the rich scent of damp earth. “I wonder
how old Isabel was?” Jean asked.

“Seventeen.” Alasdair extended his hand to
help her step past a muddy patch.

“Is her body still buried in the chapel,
beneath the gravestone?”

“I’m supposing so, though I did no more than
leaf through the book—it’s not light reading.”

“What about Ferniebank lairds buried like the
ones at Rosslyn, in full armor but without coffins? Even Zoe’s
heard that tale.”

“And it’s no more than a tale, either here or
there.”

“Well, Rosslyn’s still an operating place of
worship, no one’s going to let the archaeologists, or worse, the
conspiracy theorists, have their way with the place. In spite of—or
especially with—the recent publicity about the Templars and the
Holy Grail, not that any of that’s got so much as a toehold in—”
Jean stopped dead.

Alasdair walked on a few more steps, until
his back-of-the-head sensors realized she was no longer behind him.
He spun around. “A toehold in reality, you’re saying?”

“Well, yeah. But the cross on Isabel’s
gravestone. It’s a cross patte, a Templar cross.”

“Oh aye, Ciara was going on about that.”

“Of course.” Jean hurried on down the path.
“It’s a great story. When the pope and the king of France
discredited and murdered the Templars, a bunch of them packed up
their treasures and came here to Scotland, where Robert the Bruce
was glad to have them—he was on the outs with the pope right then
anyway. Supposedly, those Templars turned the tide for Scotland at
the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. And there might be some sort of
connection between the Templars and Scottish freemasonry.”

“That’s as may be, but the rest of the tales,
the underground societies and religious conspiracies persisting
through history, when most people cannot keep a secret for five
minutes . . .”

“Yeah, I know. One thing, though.” Jean
followed Alasdair onto the terrace just as a ray of sun shot down
between the clouds, making her feel she’d stepped into a spotlight.
Perfect timing
. “Why would Isabel be buried beneath a cross
patte? I mean, her ancestors were up to their armored necks in
Templar business, but Isabel died in 1569, two hundred and fifty
years after the Templar order was disbanded.”

“How many ways are there of forming a cross?”
Alasdair retorted. “The Nazi’s Iron Cross is the same design. Does
that mean the Sinclairs were Nazis?”

“And a swastika figure is a good-luck symbol
in Buddhism. Yeah, I know that, too. It’s just that it’s highly
entertaining to watch the storyteller waltz with the
historian.”

Alasdair snorted something under his breath,
words which Jean could fill in for herself. Now that she’d met
Ciara, she understood all the better why he’d decided to sit this
one out, thank you, and leave the floor to the less inhibited. Or
the more ignorant, as the case might be.

There was the grotto, a stone cavity with an
arched roof backed into the hillside. Jean bent over to look
inside. The holy water was contained less in a well than a pool,
fed by a stone trough clogged with an entire civilization of moss
and lichen. A trickle of water still dripped disconsolately into a
basin with the square footage of a bathtub. No doubt the afflicted
would have immersed themselves in it, with all appropriate
supplications, of course. Now the water was dark and turgid, dead
leaves floating on top and a few modern coins glimmering faintly
about twelve inches down. She was not moved to insert any body
parts into it—especially not the ones that happened to be sore
right now. Whatever sanctity the well had once had was now gone,
replaced with the less fraught concept of “good luck,” although
Jean suspected it was the believers who brought both sanctity and
luck to begin with.