The Burning Glass (31 page)

“By not answering the question, you’re
leaving me to make assumptions. And what I’m assuming is that you
and Val are old mates.”

Say what?
Jean asked herself, but for
once saw good reason not to speak.

Alasdair’s supple tongue moved on. “You told
the Brimberry girl to have herself the Saturday morning off just
so’s you could sneak about with Angus, is that it? I don’t know
what all this is in aid of, Ciara, but I’m advising you to come
clean. Now.”

“Sneaking about with Angus, when everyone
knew we were doing business?” Ciara’s smile broadened. “Now is no
time for negativity, Alasdair. What goes round, comes round.”

“Aye, that it does. Best you remember that.”
He made an about-face and headed for the building at a quick,
businesslike clip.

Keith spun around, considerably less neatly,
and plunged through the gate. “Let’s go, Ciara.”

But Ciara lingered, first watching Alasdair
stride up the path, then turning to Jean with a sympathetic crinkle
to her brow. “Over twenty years in the police force will do that to
a man. Pity.”

Outside the fence, Keith was climbing into
the car and starting the engine. By the time Ciara reached the
passenger door, he was already starting to pull away.
Was he
trying to outrun the law?
Jean wondered as she hurried up the
path.
Or trying to outrun Ciara?

She caught up with Alasdair near the door of
the police annex, beside a garden bench. “I’d say that was a shot
in the dark about Ciara and Val, but you never scattershoot.”

“No, that was no guess. Ciara’s got a tattoo
of a harp as well, though not on her shoulder.”

Jean felt her eyes cross, visualizing where
the tattoo might be, complete with the corollary of Alasdair seeing
it—not that that was the issue, murder was the issue. “Yeah, Ciara
and Val must not have been introduced by her uncle. At least, not
as recently as Val implied. Okay, so they’re good enough mates to
get the same tattoo, one that refers to Ferniebank. So what?
They’ve both got an interest in Ferniebank.”

The crease between Alasdair’s brows indicated
that the subject was under consideration.

“What about Keith’s muddy car?” Jean went on.
“You didn’t ask him about it.”

“I’m not the investigating officer. I cannot
impound the car for testing. If I’d asked him, I’d have warned him
off. Logan, now, he’ll get onto Delaney . . .”

Logan appeared in the doorway, arms crossed,
visage grim, his five o’clock shadow more of a ten o’clock eclipse.
He’d probably been up most of the night, too. “Mr. Cameron, I’ll
take your statement now. Miss Fairbairn, if you’d be so kind as to
wait in the garden.”

With a sharp sideways glance at Jean,
conveying everything from
behave yourself
to
here we go
again
, Alasdair stepped into the office and Logan closed the
door.

Jean sat down on the bench. Keith had some
explaining to do, as did Ciara, but as suspects went . . . Not that
anyone was walking around with blood on their hands. No gore, as
Miranda had said. Poison had once been an unusual weapon in this
part of the world—stabbing, bashing, hanging, and pitching over
precipices all worked just fine. Jean imagined the glee when
gunpowder presented yet another way of bloodily proving your point.
Poison now, poison was subtle.

Shaking her head, she focused on her
surroundings. For starting in such mirk and doubt, the day had
become tourist-brochure perfect, the clouds lifting and contracting
into big white poufs drifting in a blue sky. Bees buzzed drowsily
from flower to flower, dodging plaster gnomes half-concealed in the
shrubbery. She plucked a leaf from a sage plant and inhaled the
fragrance.

The “vine-covered” Mrs. Logan must be the
gardener, although Logan’s black temperament didn’t have to extend
to his thumbs. As for where the lady of the house was now, an open
window behind Jean’s back emitted the murmur of televised voices
and eight notes of a clock chiming half past the hour.
Twelve-thirty. Time flies.

Jean sat up straighter. A clock. The
Westminster chimes. So Minty’s house wasn’t the only possible site
of the anonymous phone call. Which probably wasn’t anonymous to
Wallace. A shame he didn’t record his caller’s name, but then, he
hadn’t expected to either drop dead or be done to death immediately
thereafter.

As though echoing her musings, her phone
trilled. She burrowed into her bag to find her phone had once again
worked its way to the bottom. Ah, Hugh. “Good afternoon. You’ve
heard.”

“That I have,” Hugh replied soberly. “Poor
Angus. He could be a bit befuddled at times—so can we all, come to
that—but he meant well.”

“You said you met him when you were here for
the museum opening in April.”

“Him and his wife and a collection of local
worthies, including the woman negotiating for Ferniebank dressed in
what looked to be a cross between a haystack and a chandelier.
Everyone was pretending not to notice.”

Yeah, Jean told herself, money speaks loud
enough to drown out even Ciara’s overly audible clothing choices, a
luxury not permitted to Zoe and Derek. Had she told Hugh about
Alasdair and Ciara? She wasn’t going to get into that now. “Did
anyone say anything about the true story of Isabel Sinclair and the
harp and . . . Well, I don’t even know what to ask, it’s all so
vague.”

“Angus was saying it was time for a true
story to be coming out at last, but Madam shushed him right
smartly, and I cannot say whether he was referring to Isabel or the
dig at Ferniebank.”

“A true story about the dig?” Jean asked,
sitting up so straight her rump left the bench.

“Haven’t a clue. The other Rutherford,
Wallace, he was saying he’d made quite a study of Gerald’s writings
about Isabel and the Sinclairs and had urged the dig to begin with.
But then, it was all idle chitchat whilst we stood about after the
formalities, where I spoke a bit about the clarsach and played ‘The
Keiking Glass.’ ”

“ ‘The Looking Glass?’ That’s appropriate. I
feel as though I’ve fallen through one. Any moment now, a white
rabbit in a waistcoat is going to burst out of the bushes and go
for my throat.”

“But you’re not considering coming back to
Edinburgh, are you now?” Without waiting for the answer, Hugh
concluded, “If I can recall anything else said at the opening, I’ll
phone.”

“Yes, please. Any time. And thanks.”

Jean tucked her phone away. Closing her eyes,
she envisioned Ciara with long white ears and a pink nose. That
made her smile. Now if she could just breathe deeply and relax her
shoulders, which were almost embracing her own modestly extended
ears.

The door of the police office flew open. Jean
looked up to see Alasdair exiting the room like an iceberg aiming
for the
Titanic
. “Your turn,” he said, forcing the words out
between his teeth.

Giving a statement was an entirely different
thing from taking one, wasn’t it? Especially with Logan staking out
his somewhat ambivalent territory. Jean whispered, “Did you ask him
about the drawings?”

“Oh aye, he took them,” replied Alasdair, not
whispering at all. “He’s saying I meant for him to take them, that
they’re safe as houses here, aren’t they?”

Logan stepped into the doorway and gestured
Jean inside.

In the stuffy, cluttered little room, she sat
where she was told to sit and accepted a cup of tea, which Logan
doctored with milk from an old-fashioned glass bottle—one of
Roddy’s products, no doubt, evading the draconian standards of the
EU. Holding the mug between her hands to quell any gesticulatory
comments, she gave her name and address and detailed the events of
the night before. Just the facts, no fancies—not that fancy and
fact weren’t getting harder and harder to distinguish. At least she
didn’t have to offer up her fingertips. She was already, as they
said, known to the police.

Logan’s thick, black eyebrows made
semi-circles over his eyes, like protective arches. They didn’t
move while she spoke, or when she signed her statement, or as she
placed the empty mug on the corner of the desk and made her escape.
He made a good foil for Minty in—what? Protecting and promoting the
public welfare? Keeping up community appearances?

Alasdair was pacing the garden path,
fingering a strand of lavender and exchanging mistrustful looks
with a ceramic fairy posing on a ceramic toadstool. When he saw
Jean, he took off for the gate so fast she had to hurry to keep up,
her feet crunching on the gravel path as though walking through
cornflakes. “I get the feeling,” she said, “that Logan is trying to
signal he’s not intimidated by you.”

“I’m not after intimidating him.” Alasdair
leaped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

Jean slammed her door. “Yeah, well, it’s our
beliefs that make us act, not the facts, right?”

“Right.” Alasdair made a deft U-turn back
toward town.

“Here’s a fact—a factoid, a factule—for you.
Logan’s got a striking clock. Wallace’s phone call, remember? Maybe
Logan was delivering a friendly warning. Maybe Roddy phoned in a
threat while he was delivering milk.”

“Circumstantial evidence,” said Alasdair
predictably. “Though either is possible, aye.”

Jean came about on another tack. “Hugh
called. He was at the museum when it opened last April. He thought
Angus said something about the dig having a true story, although he
could have been talking about Isabel. Either way, Minty shut him up
fast. And Wallace was saying the dig was his idea. That’s not what
Minty told us, was it? Didn’t she say she’d organized the dig to
give Wallace a job after he retired and to clean up the
neighborhood?”

“That she did, though her taking credit’s not
surprising. Neither is hearing there’s something peculiar about the
dig, when there’s something peculiar about Ferniebank from
riverbank to cap house.” Alasdair stopped at the intersection with
the main road and glanced into the back seat—yes, the plastic
container was still there, not that they had left the car
unobserved. “Logan said he’d come by presently and unlock the
museum, so’s we can leave the chipping.”

“Good. Maybe the museum will give us the
Grand Unified Theory of motivation or something.”

There was the shop again, this time with
Valerie herself walking off down the sidewalk. Maybe she was on her
way to the pub.
Great. Let’s have a convention
. “Ciara has
the tattoo of a harp?” Jean couldn’t help asking.

“She didn’t have it when we were married. I
saw it the last time I saw her, six, seven years since.” The corner
of his mouth tucked itself into a wry smile—Jean wasn’t fooling
him, but then, she never could. “It’s high on her hip. She was
wearing a short blouse and low-riding jeans on a warm day. When she
bent over to fetch her phone from her bag, I noticed it. I thought
it had something to do with Mystic Scotland, that’s what she was
blethering about at the time.”

Oh,
Jean thought. “What was she doing
before Mystic Scotland? When she was with you?”

“Working for a company that published tourist
brochures, postcards, those little books of ghost stories, and the
like. Not so far from what you’re doing, if the truth be told.”

Yeah, Jean and Ciara were both story-dealers,
if not necessarily truth-tellers. Jean opened her mouth, but
anything else she could ask would lead to a discussion much too
personal for this moment. She confined herself to, “Like those
books on the shelf back at Ferniebank. I bet that’s why the place
attracted her attention to begin with.”

The Granite Cross was impacted in cars.
Alasdair coasted past the entrance to the beer garden, giving Jean
the chance to ascertain that it had become media circus
headquarters, heaving with people who, if they weren’t waving
cameras around, were hanging onto anyone who was.

By the time Alasdair found a parking spot and
they strolled back, Valerie was darting into the front door of the
pub so quickly you’d think she was trying to avoid meeting them.
Her cardigan was now draped over her arm, revealing a tank top and
the tattoo. Jean nudged Alasdair. He nodded—yes, it was the same
design as Ciara’s, something else that couldn’t be a coincidence.
The two women had not met in the last month, that’s for sure, but
that revelation didn’t actually rise to the level of Valerie lying
to Delaney. As for Ciara calling her at the crack of dawn, well,
why not? Angus’s death was big news.

The interior of the pub featured the usual
eclectic assortment of tables and chairs, the out-of-date
advertisements, the long bar fringed with beer taps on the bottom
and glasses on the top. Liquor bottles glistened in ordered ranks
before a mirror that reflected Polly Brimberry as she hustled back
and forth. A television sat on a shelf in one corner, tuned to a
soccer—er, football match, Jean corrected herself. A door next to
the bar stood open on a block of sunshine and movement.

The room was as crowded as the garden, but
contained considerably less oxygen. What air there was had already
cycled through several sets of lungs and was damp and musty with
scents of stale beer and cooking food, plus the occasional whiff of
cigarette smoke from outside. From the shortage of prostrate
bodies, Jean assumed that even if there was a poisoner making the
rounds of the area, he or she wasn’t operating in the kitchen of
the pub.

Alasdair pointed Jean toward a booth
partially blocked by a pram, handed her the stone chip, and kept on
going toward the bar. “Don’t get me anything alcoholic, I’m spaced
enough already,” Jean called after him, and didn’t wait to see if
he snickered agreement.

“There you are.” Rebecca set down her tea cup
and waved Jean in to a landing on the opposite side of the
booth.

Beside her, Michael drank deeply from his
glass of dark ale and wiped a scrap of froth from his upper lip.
“What’s the latest, then?”