The Burning Glass (23 page)

“Jean? Duncan’s telling me the second act’s
begun. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m all right.”

“Then ring me the morn. We’re having a wee
dram with one of Ciara’s investors after the show.”

Right now Jean didn’t give a rat’s ass about
Ciara and her financial accomplishments. But she would tomorrow.
“Thanks.”

“You and Alasdair, have a care.”

“We’re not in dang—” Who had just been
searching the apartment for an intruder? “Thanks,” Jean said again,
and switched off the phone.

For what seemed an hour she sat, curved like
the clarsach, feeling as though a cold, lead-lined shawl was draped
around her shoulders. Alasdair’s voice echoed from the living room,
rough and low, reporting the situation to P and S. Confessing his
sins, with no hope of absolution, not yet.

She was also hearing ghostly steps from
above.
What do you have to do with this, Isabel Sinclair? Did
you put something into motion all those years ago? Is that why
you’re still running away in terror? And what about you, Wallace?
Did you stir something up? Or is Alasdair right, and it’s Ciara’s
fault?

The unearthly steps became fainter and
fainter and died away. Alasdair’s voice stopped but his footsteps
continued. Those steps did not leave Jean heavy, chilled, and dull.
She sat up, hearing her own limbs creaking, then stood up and
stretched.

He’d returned her embrace without hesitation.
He’d asked her for tea. They’d agreed to try a relationship, and
while no one had actually uttered the words “for better or for
worse,” surely they were implicit. Hiding under the couch with
Dougie was cheating.

Jean walked into the living room. Alasdair
looked around. His expression wavered, like bedrock seen through
running water, then solidified again. “Giving Miranda the scoop,
were you?”

“
Great Scot
isn’t a tabloid, I wasn’t
. . . Oh. Sorry.”

He turned back to the window. “Never
mind.”

If he’d wanted to talk, to speculate, she’d
have talked. He didn’t. If he had, she’d have thought the
apocalypse was near.

She sat at the kitchen table and tried to
read the tea leaves in the bottom of her cold cup, but unless her
future involved wet mulch, she had no clue. Alasdair prowled from
the window to the right of the door to the window to the left of
the door and back again. Outside, the mist thickened, so that
moisture dripped from the eaves onto the courtyard, the repetitive
plink-plink echoing the tick of the clock as it inched past
midnight. Water torture. Time dilation. Relativity in action.

The room grew colder as Jean’s adrenaline
ebbed into chill. She was about to switch on the electric fire when
another car arrived, and a second behind it, and then a third. Like
flashbulbs, the headlights bleached Alasdair’s stern face, then
were gone. “At long bloody last!” he exclaimed. Outside, doors
slammed. Voices spoke in curt phrases. The gravel fractured beneath
multiple feet.

“It takes a lot longer from this side of the
crime scene,” Jean said.

“So it seems,” replied Alasdair.

Jean claimed a place at the other window and
watched human figures in their reflective coats vanish into and
appear out of the mist while lights danced on the dim strands that
were the tree branches and on the density that was the perimeter
wall.

Alasdair provided technical commentary—the
scene of crimes officer, the medical examiner, all the omnium
gatherum of officialdom. “Ah, that’s Gary Delaney. He’s been down
to view the body.”

“You know Delaney already?”

“We’ve met.” The acid tone of his voice did
not bode well, as though anything here did. Valerie might have a
point about the place being cursed. Once again Jean cast her gaze
upwards, but the shadows on the other side of the wall did not
speak.

Alasdair wrenched the door open, admitting a
chill, gasoline-tinged breath into the flat. He catapulted himself
down the steps, only to be intercepted by the Hawick constable, who
was unaware he was risking dismemberment. This time Alasdair batted
the man aside as he would bat away a midge and strode over to two
men in conversation by the path. Their bodies were silhouetted
against a nebulous glow rising from behind the trees. Jean knew
that was the luminescence of floodlights set up at the chapel, but
she couldn’t help but feel aliens had landed.

Jean watched Alasdair shake hands with a
heavyset figure, then with a slender one taller than them both.
Strain as she might, she couldn’t hear what they were saying. Their
body language, rigidly formal, told her nothing, although she found
it encouraging when Delaney gave the Hawick constable, who had
tailed Alasdair across the yard, a down-boy signal.

And here they came, shedding their
fluorescent jackets. Jean stepped back from the doorway. Alasdair
ushered the two men inside and shut the door. “Inspector Delaney
and Sergeant Kallinikos, my—ah—er, Jean Fairbairn.”

“Hello,” Jean said.

“Good evening. Morning. Whatever in hell it
is.” Delaney briefly grasped her cold fingertips in his damp hand.
With his tie loose and askew and his glasses riding down his
protuberance of a nose, he looked more like a rumpled and rotund
academic than a police detective. But while Delaney’s gaze might be
half-obscured by eyebrows like wooly caterpillars, ones that had
crawled out of a sagging shock of dark hair streaked with gray, it
was a gaze as shrewd as any she’d ever encountered. Alasdair’s
“ah-er” hadn’t fooled him one bit, but then, why should it? Here
she was and here he was, shacked up together.

The sergeant, now. Oh my. The tea leaves
should have foretold meeting a tall, dark, handsome stranger. With
a sprinkling of stone dust, the man could have walked into the
British Museum and assumed a pose among the Elgin Marbles. Neither
his plain dark suit nor the severe trim of his black hair could
conceal the classical perfection of his face and body, marred
only—to Jean’s hypersensitive eye—by soft, rounded lips.

“How do you do,” Kallinikos said. The gaze of
his dark eyes glanced off Jean’s rather than meeting it, and darted
around the room. His handshake was a quick catch and release. In
one long graceful step he was standing by the desk, a notebook and
pen in his hand.

“Well then,” said Alasdair to Delaney. “P.C.
Logan’s identified the victim, and—”

“You’re telling me Rutherford was here this
morning? Recognized him, did you?”

“No. We’d never met. Jean here recognized him
from his photos.”

“Got that good a look at him, did you?”
Delaney asked Jean.

“Well, yes.”

“You’ve got a good eye to link the man with
his photo.”

“He had a distinctive appearance,” Jean said,
although she knew as well as any cop the unreliability of
eyewitnesses.

Kallinikos used the end of his pen to flip
the top off the cardboard box.

“Who else saw him, then?” asked Delaney.

“Everyone on the mini-bus. He was having,
well, words, with Ciara Macquarrie, the tour director.”

Delaney targeted Alasdair again. “This
Macquarrie, she’s your ex-wife, is she?”

“Aye, that she is,” Alasdair answered without
elaboration.

So Delaney already knew about Ciara
,
Jean thought, either from Logan or from his previous—meeting?
professional relationship?—with Alasdair.

Soundlessly, Kallinikos opened Ciara’s folder
and paged through the papers.

“And now you’re working for Protect and
Survive?”

“That I am. Chief of security.”

“And here’s me thinking you were on the fast
track, superintendent before the age of fifty, eh? But no. The
laurels, they got too heavy, I reckon.”

Thumbscrews would not have gotten an
expression out of Alasdair now. Jean swayed toward him, but he
didn’t need her to step protectively closer.

He’d introduced Delaney as “inspector,” not
“chief inspector,” his own former rank. The rank he’d held for less
than two years, after he’d been promoted for honesty and courage up
to, if not beyond, the call of duty. For arresting his own partner
for corruption. Another reward like that and he’d have gnawed off
his own foot to escape.

Alasdair’s reputation had indeed preceded
him, as Noel Brimberry pointed out. But Alasdair wasn’t the issue.
Jean redirected the agenda. “How did Angus die?”

“Not a mark on him, is there?” Alasdair added
quickly.

“Not a one. He was not forcibly drowned, or
so it seems just now. The M.E.’s muttering in his beard about heart
attacks. That might have killed him. He might have fallen
unconscious into the water and then drowned. If so, the postmortem
will find water in his lungs.”

“Someone was there with him,” stated
Alasdair.

“Because you saw the light of the torch
moving about, you’re saying?”

Jean caught the emphasis on “you’re saying.”
And Delaney had hinted it wasn’t Angus she’d seen this morning at
all.
Crap
.

Alasdair squared both his shoulders and his
jaw, catching the same implication. Guilty until proved innocent,
if not of criminal behavior, then of slipshod testimony. Been
there, done that, Jean thought wearily. Except this time Alasdair
was in the dock beside her.

Kallinikos, head tilted to the side, used his
pen to probe inside Alasdair’s P and S envelope. She and Alasdair
were getting a similar probe. Maybe if she tried to act more like a
gracious hostess than a frazzled witness, let alone a suspect . . .
“Please, sit down.”

“Thank you kindly. A cup of tea would be
lovely,” said Delaney.

Okay
. Jean started toward the
kitchen.

Delaney went on, “Sit yourself on the sofa,
Cameron,” stumped over to Dougie’s chair, and dropped down onto the
furry blanket before Jean could warn him away. Not that his suit
wasn’t already dusted with lint and crumbs.

She looked at Kallinikos. He could speak.
He’d said four whole words earlier. But now he strolled to the
bookshelf and inspected the inscribed stone chip without comment,
leaving Jean to deduce he’d like a cup of tea, too. Sending the
woman to make tea was a way to divide and conquer the witnesses,
although if Delaney had really felt the need to interview her and
Alasdair separately, he’d have taken one of them outside.
Suspecting them was a necessary formality. Fair enough. As she’d
learned when Alasdair was facing her rather than standing beside
her, the more you cooperated, the faster the ordeal was over, like
getting that root canal.

Mouth crimped into a tight line—so this was
how the other half lived—Alasdair sat down on the sofa. Dougie
squirted out the far end and made for the bedroom, paws
pattering.

“What was that, a giant rat?” Delaney
demanded.

Kallinikos said without looking around, “Cat.
Domestic short hair. Gray with yellow eyes.”

Jean put the kettle on. Food might lower the
nervous tension meter. She found a package of crumpets in the bread
box, and split and buttered them as quietly as she could, her ears
rotated backwards.

Delaney asked, “What’s all this about other
suspicious deaths?”

“Helen Elliot, who lived at Ferniebank Farm
across the road, was found dead without a mark on her,” Alasdair
replied. “The inquest ruled heart disease. Then Wallace Rutherford,
the caretaker here at the castle, was found dead without a mark on
him. The inquest ruled heart disease. And now Angus Rutherford.
Three similar deaths in three weeks. It’s getting a bit repetitive,
isn’t it now?”

“Were any of these people suffering from
heart disease?” Kallinikos sat down in the desk chair and applied
pen to notebook.

“So I’m hearing, for Helen and Wallace, at
the least,” Alasdair answered.

“Their hearts stopped and they died,” said
Delaney. “Seems simple enough.”

“Everyone dies when their heart stops. It’s
why the heart stops, that’s the question.”

“What are you suggesting, Cameron?”

Jean looked around.
Wait for it
. .
.

“Poison,” Alasdair said. “Drug overdose.
Something of that nature. Murder, in other words. If the death
seems ordinary, so that the M.E.’s not extending the postmortem to
toxicology tests, the murderer gets clean away. Until he does it
again. And again.”

Delaney shoved his glasses up the bridge of
his nose. “This Wallace chap, and the woman. Had they any
enemies?”

“I never met Mrs. Elliot at all, and only
ever spoke with Wallace on the phone. But he was telling me then
that his knees were too dodgy for him to be climbing down the
ladder into the pit prison, yet that’s where Logan found him. And
there’s the answerphone tape.”

“Ah, that. Where’s that now?”

“Inside a sock in the dresser.” Alasdair
started to stand.

Delaney waved him down and his sergeant up.
Kallinikos paced down the hall. The bedroom light came on. Drawers
opened and shut. Jean tried not to think about a stranger’s hands,
no matter how nicely sculpted, going through her things. The flat
as sanctuary. Right.

Like a siren, the kettle began to whine and
then shriek. She poured steaming water into the pot, popped the
crumpets into the toaster oven, and assembled crockery and
condiments.

The light in the bedroom went off and
Kallinikos returned with the tape, which he inserted into the
answering machine. He handed the entire unit to Delaney, holding
the cord out of the way like a waiter standing ready with a napkin.
Delaney pressed buttons. An electronically fuzzed voice, speaking
over a sound like a brief peal of deep-throated wind chimes or like
large bottles knocking together, filled the room: “. . . can be
right dangerous, meddling in matters that are of no concern to you.
Mind, you’re an old man and on your own. Mind what happened to
Helen.”