The Burning Glass (26 page)

“I guess the clothes and the telescope and
the fishing gear actually belong to Minty now, through Angus, but
what about the drawings that were taken from the flat? Are they
Minty’s, too, or do they belong to P and S?”

“There’s a fine point for you. I wonder if
she’d bother arguing it, now. Why?”

“The thief didn’t take those drawings because
of their artistry. He took them because they were Wallace’s. They
must reveal something.”

“You’ll sprain yourself, jumping to
conclusions like that.”

“Come on, Alasdair. Wallace’s antiquarian
interests and the inscription and the occult stuff has to have some
role in all this. Why was Angus’s body found at the chapel,
huh?”

“That’s where he was standing when he fell
over. Same reason Wallace’s body was found in the dungeon, like as
not.”

“Wallace had to have climbed down to the
dungeon, for whatever reason, but maybe Angus was dragged to the
chapel.”

“Have you ever tried dragging a body? A
bittie woman like you’d be right heavy to pull along, and Angus was
a big man. Almost broke my back just rolling him over.”

“So he got himself there, and someone either
watched him die, or came along and found him dead, and panicked and
dropped the flashlight. Someone who got in and out without passing
go and collecting two hundred dollars.”

He smiled at that. “Without passing through
the courtyard. Oh aye, it’s a fine iron gate, but it’s only
stopping law-abiding folk.” Alasdair picked up the last box.

“So as law-abiding folk, you’re going to get
permission to search that box.”

“I’ll have a word with Delaney. Until then,
we’ve got enough to be going on with.” He turned toward the
castle.

“Kind of depends on where we’re going,
doesn’t it?” Grabbing a fishing rod, Jean followed him out into the
courtyard. “The door of the flat’s not locked. You’ve got the
keys.”

He stopped, letting her catch up with him.
“They’re in my front trouser pocket.”

She reached into his pocket and groped for
the keys. From the corner of her eye she saw the constable tug the
gate open again and a car entering. There were the keys on their
ring, warm from their proximity to Alasdair’s body. Straightening,
she looked around to see Inspector Delaney and Sergeant Kallinikos
climbing out of the car. Delaney’s grin indicated that Jean and
Alasdair’s pose was the funniest thing he’d seen since the last
Benny Hill comedy. Kallinikos gazed upwards, trading dark stare for
dark stare with the crows.

Jean turned her back on them and counted
through the keys until Alasdair said, voice bland as pudding, “That
one. Good morning, Delaney. Sergeant.”

Still toting the fishing rod, she locked the
door of the flat and considered writing an article on the varieties
and uses of British locking mechanisms, a topic she was getting
more experience with than she could ever have anticipated.

Behind her, Delaney’s soft Edinburgh accent,
less mouth-filling than Alasdair’s West Highland diction, replied,
“What’s good about it? By the time we’d knocked up an innkeeper in
Kelso and got rooms, it was time to turn round and come back out
here. God, I hate these small towns. Like desert islands, they are,
with the natives making fire from flint and tinder.”

“Or from burning-glasses,” said Jean under
her breath. Yeah, you set a fire and it gets away from you—story of
the human race . . . That’s right, Minty had the burning-glass from
the museum.

“I’m native to Fort William, myself,”
Alasdair was saying. “Grand place, if never so small as Stanelaw.
Unless you’re thinking it’s Kelso that’s the wee peasant village
and Stanelaw’s no more than something to scrape off the bottom of
your shoe.”

Snorting with either amusement or a hairball,
Delaney crunched toward the lumber room.

Jean tucked the keys into her own pocket and
fell into step beside Alasdair. “And where are you from, Sergeant?”
she asked Kallinikos as she passed.

“Glesga,” he returned, giving “Glasgow” the
local pronunciation so emphatically it had to be deliberate. He
added, probably because he was used to adding, “My grandparents
left a small shipyard in Greece for a big one along the Clyde.”

“Me, I only got here a few months ago,” Jean
called back to him, and followed Alasdair into the castle.

Either the place smelled a bit better today,
or her nose knew what to expect. The small room just inside the
door seemed less dark and gloomy, if hardly cheerful with its stark
walls and gaping doorways, one into a closet-sized guard chamber
and the other into Keith’s garderobe. In the Laigh Hall, the
constable peered out one of the windows. “A lad’s scrambling down
the brae behind the building.”

Alasdair dumped his box next to five other
boxes. “Come along then, Freeman, let’s have him in.” The two men
hurried back out the entrance.

Jean laid the fishing rod across the boxes,
then walked over to the blocked-off door. She eyed first the small
pawprints in the dust at its base, then the expanse of broken
paneling beside it—that patch there, that must be covering the
spyhole. The hair stirred on the back of her neck and her shoulders
puckered.

Never mind
. She sprinted off behind
the men, wondering whether she’d ever stay alone in the flat, and
if that would bother her. Wallace had slept there, year after year,
behind a door that led nowhere, and Gerald had lived in the castle
itself. . . . She popped out of the entrance to see Alasdair
leading the charge with not just Constable Freeman at his heels,
but Kallinikos as well.

The three men double-timed it through the gap
between the flat and the shop and around the corner of the
building. A fraction later, Delaney stepped out of the lumber room,
mouth open to give orders. It hung open as he looked around for his
vanished minion.

Jean trotted past and into the gap, rejecting
her impulse to say something about heading them off at the pass.
She contented herself with a tally-ho gesture and a terse,
“Trespasser.”

She hung a right onto a water-pitted path
that snaked through the bracken and around tumbled stones, close
beside the moss-plastered foundation blocks of the castle and
beneath the windows of the flat. She slackened her pace—to her
left, the slope fell steeply away toward the river. If she tripped
over a root or slipped in the mud and fell, she’d have to be
rescued, not a good use of police resources.

Kallinikos, running like an antelope,
disappeared around the far corner. By the time Jean got there
herself, running more like a tortoise, the chase scene had ended
close beneath the steep stone escarpment of the castle. P.C.
Freeman stood upslope from Derek, blocking his retreat along the
muddy path. Alasdair was doing his looming routine again, helped by
his position also higher up the incline. Kallinikos had his
notebook out and pen primed.

Jean caught her breath. Behind her, Delaney
stumbled around the corner and stood puffing, barely managing to
pant, “What the hell’s all this, Cameron!”

Alasdair indicated the teenager. “I’ve warned
him off once already. But he keeps turning up, like a bad
penny.”

In his oversized black garb, Derek looked
small and pale as a grub. He muttered something about bent coppers
and tried a flanking movement. Alasdair’s large, capable hand
pulled him back and delivered him to Freeman, who grasped his upper
arm.

“Derek Trotter,” Alasdair told Kallinikos,
who dutifully wrote the name down. And to Derek himself he said,
“Out and about right early, aren’t we now?”

“Heard old Angus bought it last night. Just
having me a look is all.”

“Who told you that?”

“Dunno.” The boy seemed fascinated by the
mud-splashed toes of his boots.

Not just mud, Jean realized, catching a whiff
of bovine manure. He’d been at Roddy’s farm, hadn’t he? With or
without Zoe, or Roddy’s knowledge, for that matter? Alasdair’s
nostrils flared, registering the aroma as well.

Delaney bustled forward. “Give over, lad. You
didn’t hear the news from a wee birdie.”

Derek mumbled, “The mobile went at half past
six and me mum answered. And she went, ‘Oh no, he can’t be dead.’
And she went, ‘How did it happen, then? The police have been, have
they?’ And she went, ‘This makes no difference to . . .’ And she
saw me standing in the door and said ‘I’ll ring you later.’ ”

“Your mum told you that Angus was dead, is
that it?” demanded Delaney.

“Yeh.”

“Who was she talking with?” Alasdair
asked.

“Hell if I know.” Derek said, with a curl of
his lip that didn’t quite achieve a sneer, and at Alasdair’s stern
look wilted into a nauseated wrinkle.

“This is the Derek Trotter that Logan
questioned about the inscription?” asked Kallinikos.

“I don’t know nothing about that,” said the
boy. “That’s what I told Soor, erm, Logan. Why’d anyone want a bit
of rock like that anyway?”

“Your friend Zoe wanted a bit of rock like
that,” Jean said. “You were helping her bring it back to the castle
on Friday evening, remember?”

“What’s all this?” demanded Delaney.

“That was Zoe,” Derek insisted. “That was
Friday. I was home in bed all the Friday night, wasn’t I, not
nicking no rocks. Ask me mum. She told Logan I was home in
bed.”

“And were you home in bed, then?” Alasdair
asked.

“Yeh, yeh, that’s what I’m saying!”

“And were you home in bed last night as
well?”

“Yeh, where else would I be?” Derek’s voice
rose into the treble clef.

Alasdair glanced at Delaney. Delaney nodded,
then turned to Kallinikos and jerked his head toward the corner of
the castle. Kallinikos stowed his notebook and gestured to Freeman.
“Come along then,” Freeman said to Derek, and pulled him down the
path.

“What’s all this?” asked Derek, in an
unwitting echo of Delaney.

“You don’t just come walking into a crime
scene, lad,” Alasdair told him, “whether you’ve got a taste for
death or no. You’ll be having a wee blether with Inspector Delaney
here. And it’s time we were having one with your mum as well.”

Yeah
, Jean thought,
she keeps
turning up, too
. Alasdair’s “we” was neither editorial nor
imperial. Delaney might have begrudged him an inch, but he was
going to go ahead and take his mile.

Sputtering, Derek allowed himself to be
guided around the corner of the building. Delaney and Kallinikos
followed along behind, Delaney stumbling, Kallinikos’s hand
hovering at his elbow, but not actually touching it.

Jean and Alasdair, left in possession of the
field, shared a long, contemplative look.

A tentative ray of sun brushed the hillside
with color, but left Alasdair and Jean enveloped in the shadow-pall
of the castle. She craned to look straight up the side of the
building, past the stained stone blocks and the blank apertures of
windows, some softened with molding, some harsh as knife wounds.
High above, the sky was becoming silver, but the hue of the castle
remained gray. “Look there,” she said, and Alasdair turned to
look.

Against the back wall of the castle, beneath
the easternmost window of the Laigh Hall and next to a drain pipe,
lay a couple of smallish boulders. Balanced against them was what
looked like a rough wooden pallet for transporting goods on a truck
or rail car. “That’s how the kids were planning to get out of the
castle after you locked up,” Jean said. “They could let themselves
down from the window and use the drain pipe for balance. Nothing
like planning ahead.”

“That wasn’t there when I arrived,” Alasdair
said. “They might have shinned into the building that way as well,
though there’s no reason they didn’t slip inside whilst I was
selling sweeties or carrying your things into the flat.”

“Well, at least you’ve found the postern
gate. One of them, anyway. This path is another one, isn’t it?” The
trail zigged past a giant boulder, zagged into the trees that here
pressed close to the back of the keep, and faded into shadow and
tangled undergrowth. The trees grew all the way up to the perimeter
wall—Jean caught a glimpse of squared stone, dank and dark, between
the gnarled brown-green trunks. Back in medieval days no castellan
would have let cover for enemies accumulate so close to his
defenses. Tomorrow Alasdair would be out here with a chainsaw.

“I’m not so sure.” He climbed several paces
up the path, disappeared beneath the overhanging branches, and a
moment later returned. “The track runs up to the broken corner I
recorded on the Friday, where the two stretches of wall have each
settled away from the other and one’s caved in a bit. It’d be a
good scramble to get over, but not impossible, not at all.”

“Well, okay, that’s fine for kids, but did
Angus and the flashlight-person get in the same way?”

“On the plans, the wall’s three sides of a
rough rectangle and the river’s the fourth. I’m guessing the wall
stops short of the river nowadays, and you can walk round its
end.”

“Someone could always have taken a boat
across the river.”

“Let’s have us a look at the wall before we
begin searching dockyards and boathouses, eh?” Deadpan of face but
nimble of foot, he walked down the path, then kept on going down
the hillside. “I should have had a look at those wall-ends on the
Friday. Certainly yesterday.”

“You didn’t have a reason to look at them
until yesterday afternoon, and then you were busy.” Jean fell in
behind him, then against him as, sure enough, she slipped.

Alasdair took her hand and together they
picked their way down the slope, treacherous with lichen, root, and
concealed stone, not to mention massive black slugs like crawling
chunks of licorice. The last step was the worst, down from a
flattish rock at least two feet above the riverbank. Hanging onto
Alasdair, Jean lowered herself to the swath of gravel edging the
river, and in spite of herself gasped.