The Burning Glass (9 page)

“Except, like so many best-laid plans, this
one went agley.”

“Isabel used a burning-glass, a lens, to
focus the sunlight onto a bit of kindling . . .”

“Well, this window faces east of north, sort
of.” Jean felt again the weight of time and grief oozing from her
neck down her back, and she stepped closer to Alasdair’s warmth,
bracing herself for the denouement of the story.

He put his free arm around her. “Although
using the embers of her own fire seems much more likely,
considering the chance of cloud. In any event, the flames got away,
blocked her escape, and she died. Suffocated by the smoke before
she could burn, I’m thinking, if that’s any comfort to you. And the
monk died soon after of some foul disease he caught tending to the
sick.”

“There’s not much comfort in that story,
Alasdair, typical or not. True or not.” Shuddering, Jean imagined
the suffocating pall of smoke, the door locked, the only window
high above the unforgiving ground. The shrieks, if not of Isabel
herself, then her family. The monk seeing the dark smoke spread
like a storm cloud before Death’s pale horse . . . The stones
behind the paneling were sooty not with age but with fire. She
coughed, her lungs turning themselves inside out, ridding
themselves of something that was no more than blistering
memory.

Alasdair embraced her shoulders, holding her
close, head bowed as though he was feeling that weight in his own
gut. Then with a sharp intake of breath, he looked up.

Jean listened. She heard again that faint
whispering or rustling, this time with what sounded like distant,
light steps. “That noise, that’s not a ghost.”

“Not a bit of it. Someone’s in the building.
Come along, quick smart!”

Alasdair seized Jean’s hand and pulled her
out of the room. Deliberate as a hunting cat, he paced down a
flight of stairs and along a corridor, then down another flight,
sweeping every room, every corner, with his light.

She’d meant that the noise was caused by a
draft or a branch tapping a window. But Alasdair had leaped nimbly
to the conclusion that the source was human, someone who was hiding
from them. He had a point. Stray pedestrian visitors would have
made themselves known by now, wouldn’t they?

She held onto his hand and concentrated on
keeping her feet, glad he knew where he was going. All the ravaged
cavities of rooms looked alike . . . Alasdair stopped dead in the
middle of the High Hall, beneath the glare of the light bulb, and
Jean caromed off his side.

His ears almost curled forward as he
listened. She retrieved her hand and held her breath. Silence. No.
Not silence. Subtle creakings from the building and the moan of the
wind outside. And a not-so-subtle thunk from one of the tall
windows.

Alasdair leaped forward into the largest
window embrasure and pivoted, turning his flashlight toward the
pitch-black slit of a cupboard cut into the thickness of the wall.
For a moment Jean, at his heels, thought she was seeing two giant
crows huddled in the narrow chamber. Then she realized she was
looking at two teenagers, their slight bodies layered in snug black
pants and shapeless jackets adorned with multiple pewter buckles,
their white faces screwed into grimaces at the sudden light.

“Right,” said Alasdair, slipping instantly
into police mode. “Come out of there. Move.”

The first one to respond was a boy, Jean
decided, judging by the prominence of his Adam’s apple, the
thickness of his eyebrows, and the six or so dark hairs on his
upper lip. The second was a girl wearing three earrings in each
ear, a slash of red lipstick, and so much black eyeliner and purple
shadow she resembled a punk raccoon. Both of them had hair blacker
than nature intended for their gene pools, his rising in startled
spikes, hers back-combed into a rat’s nest and dusted with what
Jean at first thought were bits of plaster but then realized were
little butterfly clips.

Gallantly the boy extended his hand to help
the girl step up from what must have been an earlier flooring
level. She ignored him, her hands thrust deep into the oversized
pockets of her jacket, even when she almost stumbled.

“How do you do,” Alasdair said. “I’m
Detec—Mr. Cameron. This is Miss Fairbairn. You are . . .”

The teenagers slouched carelessly, but their
eyes darted right and left, up and down, as though seeking escape
routes. “Derek,” said the boy at last.

Jean remembered the woman leaving the pub,
talking on the cell phone to her recalcitrant son. Here was the boy
himself.

“Surname?” demanded Alasdair.

“Trotter,” Derek said, trying to deepen his
voice.

Another hobbit name, Jean thought, if coming
from a goblin-child. The poor kid probably suffered for that.
Teenagers could make taunts out of names a lot less tempting than
“Trotter.”

“Stanelaw lad, are you?” Alasdair asked.

“I am now, sod it all. Me mum and me, we’ve
just moved house to be near her relations. Coulda had relations in
London, but no, they’re either here or in
Middles-bleedin’-brough.”

Middlesbrough? No wonder Jean detected an
accent originating in the rust belt of the English Midlands. “Has
your father moved here, too?”

“He’s done a runner, hasn’t he? Walked
out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jean said.

“Rotter like him? Past time to see the back
of him, mum says.”

Ouch,
Jean thought. No wonder the
boy’s tone was so bitter.

With a grim nod, Alasdair turned to the girl.
“And you?”

“Zoe Brimberry,” she replied, her crimson
lips pouting.

“You’re Noel’s daughter. You work at the
Reiver’s Rest,” said Jean. The girl no doubt cleaned up nicely and
didn’t leave black fingerprints on the linen and tea cups.

“A couple hours a day, aye,” Zoe said.

“Well then,” said Alasdair, “as a local lass
you’re knowing the castle’s closed just now.”

“We was having us a look at where that old
bloke bought it—” Derek began.

Zoe jabbed him with her elbow, still without
removing her hands from her jacket pockets.

“Where Mr. Wallace Rutherford died? The place
has been locked up, hasn’t it? No one giving tours ’til muggins
here arrived.” Alasdair wasn’t any taller than the couple, but he
had mastered the feline ploy of making himself look bigger, and the
kids bowed in front of him like miscreants before the bench. After
a long pause for effect, he turned toward the door. “Come along
now. Hop it.”

Derek and Zoe started off across the floor at
a fast clip, their boots thudding, then caught themselves and
slowed to a devil-may-care saunter behind Alasdair’s marching pace.
Smiling with something between amusement and sympathy—she’d been
that young, once, and that desperate for a persona—Jean brought up
the rear and even remembered to turn out the light.

But when she walked into the Laigh Hall she
frowned, confused. The front door should have been on her right,
not on her left. Maybe the rooms and passages had shifted around
after they passed and even now waited, just outside the corners of
her eyes, poised to slip sideways . . . No. Alasdair had merely led
Jean and the teenagers down a second staircase.

Now Zoe and Derek were craning eagerly as
Alasdair bent over a patch of stone flags in the deeply shadowed
corner of the room next to the entrance. He grasped a metal ring
the circumference of a dinner plate and pulled.

The wooden planks of a trap door swung
upwards with a tooth-scouring screech. Alasdair laid it down
gently. “There you are. The death chamber. It’s closed to the
public. But you know all about it, don’t you now, Zoe?”

“Aye,” the girl admitted, while Derek leaned
precariously over to peer into the depths.

Alasdair reached out, plucked the boy back
from the brink, and set him down a pace or two away. His gaze never
left Zoe’s face. “Mr. Rutherford showed you round the place, did
he?”

“Every year the school has a day out here.
Not the water park, no. This old place. And there’s Wally, handing
out leaflets, selling sweeties, telling the same old, same old
stories. The healing well. The lairds buried in their armor. The
Gray Lady, Isabel’s ghost.”

“Lies, the lot of them,” Derek muttered.

“Lies?” repeated Jean. “Stories aren’t
necessarily lies. Of course, they’re not necessarily the truth,
either.”

Rolling his eyes, the boy assumed a pose
obviously meant to be nonchalant but that ended up simply
sloppy.

“Mr. Rutherford,” Alasdair enunciated. “Your
folk knew him, didn’t they, Zoe?”

The black fabric covering Zoe’s pockets
writhed. She must be clenching and unclenching her hands. “He’d
come drinking at the pub. And my granny and my mum, they’d bring
him hot meals and stay for a blether, with him living on his own
and all.”

“He wasn’t so much on his own. Your
grandparents, the Elliots, live just across the road.”

“What of it? My grandad, he said Wally was a
nutter and spying on him. Said he expected Granny to look after him
as well as doing her own work. And then he said he killed her.”

Derek had apparently heard all this before—he
didn’t react. Jean, though, repeated, “Killed her?”

“Your grandfather said Wallace killed your
granny?” Alasdair established. “What happened?”

“They found her lying in the road, dead, not
three weeks since.”

“Was she hit by a car?”

“Not a mark on her. Heart gave out. My
grandad’s saying she was always rushing to and fro, dancing
attendance on Wally. So down she went, all alone, with no one to
help her, and she died.”

Alasdair glanced at Jean, who could only cock
her eyebrows back at him. No, Ferniebank didn’t seem to be a
particularly healthy place for the elderly.
These things come in
threes
. “That’s stretching it a bit, then,” he told Zoe, “to be
saying Wallace killed her.”

The girl shrugged. Derek gazed raptly at his
boots.

“What’s this about Wallace spying?” Alasdair
prodded.

“He kept a telescope atop the tower.
Star-gazing and train-spotting and naff goings-on, such like.”

“Astronomy has to be a frustrating hobby in
this climate,” commented Jean.

“Was Wallace spying, then?” Alasdair
asked.

Zoe shrugged again. “Might have been, though
there’s nothing worth spying on in a dump such as Stanelaw, let
alone Ferniebank Farm.”

“The arsehole of creation,” added Derek.

“It’s dead boring, but it’s all we’ve got,
save the pub,” Zoe told him tartly.

“No accounting for tastes.” Jean strolled
over to the trap door and looked down. She saw nothing but a modern
metal ladder, its upper rails bolted to the sides of the hole,
plunging into subterranean darkness. Again she coughed. But this
time the tickle in her chest was quite literal. The musty miasma
was emanating from the dungeon. Or, more properly, from the pit
prison. A luckless offender—and offense was easy, in the Middle
Ages—would be dumped into the underground chamber and left to
reflect on his sins and/or rot while the business of daily life
went on above him. He or she would have been able to hear voices
and music, and smell the food cooking in the kitchen. Now there was
highly refined torture.

Alasdair’s hand holding the flashlight
appeared in Jean’s peripheral vision. “Thanks.” She took the heavy
metal cylinder and flicked the switch.

The tiny chamber below her leaped into
definition. She saw no ineradicable bloodstain, like that
supposedly marking a sixteenth-century murder in Mary Stuart’s
apartments in Holyrood Palace. No, the dungeon floor consisted of
prosaic gray dirt, broken by humps of living rock and imprinted
with the ribbed bootprints of the team that had rescued not
Wallace, but his body. The walls were the foundations of the keep,
stones of all shapes and subtle gradations of gray piled one upon
the other. Two rough steps led up to the rim of a small pit within
the larger one—the prisoner’s privy. In the opposite corner
something glinted in the light, a glass disk, it looked like, and
beside that winked an almost microscopic gold dot. Neither had been
there long enough to gather much dust.

From her height, Jean couldn’t estimate size.
Was she seeing the lens and nosepiece from a pair of old-fashioned
round eyeglasses? Or was the glass the pane protecting the bulb of
a flashlight? Although, manifestly, not the flashlight she was
holding, which was a shiny new one. As for the gold, small as a
punctuation mark, well, it was probably part of a candy wrapper.
She sure wasn’t going to climb down and investigate.

Imagining an electric torch dropping from
Wallace Rutherford’s ill, shaking hand, she stepped back from the
edge and switched off the light. Alasdair didn’t need any more
lamps for his third-degree.

He was still gazing, po-faced on purpose, at
Zoe. “Why were you sneaking about the place in the dark? It’s been
open all day. I’d have let you in without paying.”

Through his guise of utter boredom, Derek
insisted, “We was after seeing where the old bloke died is all. No
harm in that.”

“Just having ourselves a giggle.” Zoe’s body
language conveyed nervousness, not boredom.

Alasdair pounced. “Turn out your pockets,
Zoe.”

Her hands stopped moving beneath the fabric.
She stared. Derek’s not terribly square jaw dropped. “How did you
know . . . ?”

“Derek,” Zoe hissed, a remarkable feat when
his name had no sibilants in it. She yanked her hands from her
jacket pockets and displayed an MP3 player, a penlight, some
change, and a lipstick.

“And?” Alasdair asked, extending his
hand.

Jerkily, resentfully, she pulled out what
might have been a jumbo-sized flint flake and dropped it into
Alasdair’s outstretched palm.