The Burning Glass (30 page)

“Often enough. Sleeps in her mum’s room at
the farm instead of sharing with her sister. She and her granny,
they . . .” He paused, then concluded, “Zoe and me, we get on well
enough, even though she dresses like she’s got no home and no
family to watch out for her.”

“Like Derek Trotter dresses,” Alasdair
observed.

Roddy snorted so loudly Jean almost checked
the back of her neck for snot. “That young tearaway. Much better he
and his mum go on back south, leave us decent folk alone. He was
hanging about this morning looking for Zoe, but I’d sent her home.
A crime scene’s no place for a girl.”

“You sent Derek on his way, then?”

“I turfed him out quick as you like. Same as
I’d turf his mother out of the castle, years ago. I was caretaker
there, before Wallace and Angus and that perjink Maitland wife of
his tarted the place up. And now they’ve sold it. The love of money
is the root of all evil.”

“Is the castle evil?” Jean asked, not
bothering to agree that Minty was finicky.

“There’s aye been muckle evil in this world,
Miss Fairbairn. Murder, thievery, adultery, pridefulness, drinking,
and carousing on the Lord’s day. Mind, I have no objection to a wee
dram before dinner, but I’ve told Polly’s Noel again and again,
it’s wrong to open the pub of a Sunday. But he and Polly, they’re
wanting money, they say. For posh clothes and posh cars and
holidays. In my day we’d visit Largs and were glad of it, but no,
nowadays Zoe and Shannon, they’re obliged to go to Spain or
Florida. This world we live in. This world.”

“There’s always been murder and thievery and
the like,” Alasdair said quietly. “There’s always been folk
profiting at the expense of others. In some ways, the world’s a
better place now than it was in, say, Isabel Sinclair’s time.”

Again Roddy snorted. “Isabel.”

“That’s a bit of inscription from her
gravestone on the seat beside you,” said Jean.

“Zoe was, erm, looking at it on the Friday,”
Alasdair added.

“She was, was she?” Roddy shifted around and,
as far as Jean could tell from the corners of her eyes and the
rearview mirrors, soberly considered the plastic container with its
tea towel and chip of stone. Did his tangled gray brows rise and
then fall? Hard to tell. “Isabel was a whore,” he said at last.
“Deserved what she got. Sins will out.”

Alasdair hit the brakes again and swivelled,
his incredulous look clicking against Jean’s as it swung into the
back seat. “What?”

“Begging your pardon, madam,” Roddy said to
Jean’s stunned face. “My late wife would go on about my language,
and about Isabel as well—defending her and all, like Wallace, like
Gerald, but there’s the truth, right there on the stone for all to
see. The word ‘catin.’ It means—well, as I said. It’s French.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Jean. “You mean where that
requiescat in pace
is oddly spaced? Yeah, it looks like
‘catin,’ but what about that ‘requies’ just sort of hanging in
mid-air?”

“And why a French word in the midst of the
Latin?” Alasdair demanded.

“Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, she spoke
French, didn’t she?” Roddy sat back, his arms folded.
Two and
two make seventeen and that’s that
.

He had dirt beneath his nails, Jean saw, and
beard and hair both looked like they’d been combed with a
pitchfork. She was reminded of an Old Testament prophet, and
wondered if his ruddiness was due to alcohol after all, or to
basking in the glow of his own righteousness. Turning back around,
she shared yet another look with Alasdair. They’d thought Ciara was
making some leaps of fancy. What was Roddy making—leaps of faith?
Fancy and faith were almost two sides of the same coin, and very
often involved actual physical coinage.

“So what did Isabel get, then?” asked
Alasdair.

“Her death. The wages of sin.”

“The fire in her room, you mean?” Jean asked.
“The burning-glass and signaling her, ah, friend?”

“That’s Gerald’s version of events,
bowdlerized for the ladies—Wallace’s mother, most like, and a fine
douce woman she was. My mum was her lady’s maid. That’s why Wallace
never came forth with the truth, even in that twee bittie booklet
of his. Gerald and Wallace Rutherford, they make Angus look right
rational. Made. They’re all gone now. All gone to their
rewards.”

“And what . . . “ began Alasdair, just as
Jean asked, “Where . . .”

“Carry on,” he told her.

“Where did Gerald learn another version of
events?” she asked.

“Papers, letters, the clarsach.” Roddy
crouched to peer through the windshield at the roofs of Glebe House
and the cooking school just rising from the fields ahead. “I’m
sorry to trouble you, but it’s gone a quarter ’til, and it’s
disrespectful to come late into the church and draw attention to
yourself.”

Alasdair lifted his foot from the brake but
didn’t press the gas pedal, so that the car crept forward at idling
speed. “Where are these papers and letters now?”

“Stanelaw Museum, like as not. Clarsach’s
been pinched, though.”

“It’s been recovered,” Jean told him. “Did
you know it has a secret compartment for messages? Is that what you
mean by Gerald learning the true story from it, that he knew about
the compartment and how Isabel used it? He actually wrote a poem
about her, you know, based on Hogg’s ‘The Queen’s Wake,’ about a
contest of harpers before Mary, Queen of Scots.”

“Another whore, Mary was. And Isabel helping
her with her plots—aye, you can learn a lot about folk from the
company they keep and the goods they hold valuable. And what they
waste their time on, poetry and all.”

Reflected in the mirror, his face was as
silent and secret as Glebe House with its curtains closed and its
driveways vacant.
Yeah
, Jean thought,
you can learn a lot
about people, poetry and all
.

So many cars were parked along the road in
front of the church that Alasdair had to ease past them. More than
one sightseer with a camera stood beside the fence, taking pictures
of the two dark, damp holes in the ground, the yawning graves of
Helen Elliot and Wallace Rutherford. Judgement Day, Jean thought,
had reached Stanelaw, and the graves were giving up their dead.

“The police,” Roddy said, his voice cold.
“They asked permission to dig up poor Helen. Have you no respect
for the dead? I replied. But the dark one with the queer name, he
said ’twas all in the interests of justice. So I agreed. There’s
scant respect for anything anymore, not for the dead, not for
justice, not for the truth.”

“Sometimes,” said Alasdair, “it seems
not.”

“I’m sorry,” Jean added.

Alasdair stopped and Roddy opened the door.
“Would you care to join me?”

The prospect was tempting, even though Jean’s
tastes in religious ritual ran more to smells and bells.

“Thank you,” said Alasdair with his best
courtly manner, “but we’ve been detailed to give statements at P.C.
Logan’s office.”

“Oh aye, I’ve been directed to do the same,
even though I know nothing. It’s been my bad luck to live at
Ferniebank is all. Thank you kindly, Mr. Cameron.” Roddy shook
hands with Alasdair, nodded dourly at Jean, then unfolded himself
from the car and strode off up the drive toward the church. A few
parishioners, for the most part about Roddy’s age, stood around the
open door. That straight figure like a conductor’s baton draped in
black, the focus of every eye, must be Minty.

Alasdair drove on, leaving Jean to look over
her shoulder until the church disappeared from sight and they were
on the outskirts of Stanelaw. “I guess we got him in as chatty a
mood as he’s ever likely to be,” she said at last. “The events of
the last month have to have shaken him up.”

“He told us quite a bit, didn’t he? What it
means, I’m still processing. Like him having been the caretaker for
the castle and chapel. Could be the Rutherfords paid him for
keeping watch on the place, income he lost when Wallace moved
in.”

“That doesn’t seem enough reason for the bad
blood between them, though it didn’t help. I think his beef with
Wallace was philosophical. Religious, if that’s not too strong a
word.”

“Too strong? He was saying that Ciara’s plans
are blasphemous.”

“Yeah, I guess making even a ‘romanish’
Catholic chapel into a spa would be desecration to someone
unenthused over contemporary attitudes. He’s probably thrilled the
way Presbyterian churches all over Scotland are being turned into
bars, restaurants, offices.”

“What was that about Isabel, then? A true
story?”

“We saw her running into the castle, a direct
contradiction of the story in Wallace’s leaflet. If she was
carrying secret messages for Mary Stuart and her supporters . .
.”

“A staunch Protestant like Roddy could well
be thinking her a traitor.”

“Politics and religion,” said Jean with a
grimace. “There’s a volatile mixture. Historically a motive for
murder, over and over again. But not here and now, surely.”

“Most murders are done either to avoid
something or to gain something, often both at once. What would
Roddy be gaining? And how did he do it? Here, Angus, stop in for a
wee dram?”

“So you’ve decided Angus’s death was a
murder?”

“Just for the sake of argument.” Alasdair
turned the car down a side street. The shop on the corner must be
the one belonging to Valerie’s uncle.

“Roddy might have a drink with Angus, but
with Wallace? And would he kill his own wife?” Jean shook her head,
trying to settle the careening thoughts into one pattern, any
pattern, but they spun all the faster, out of control, spitting up
flotsam. “Maybe Roddy chipped away the inscription—you know,
preventing the whore’s grave from becoming a tourist
attraction.”

“I was thinking that myself,” said
Alasdair.

“Of course you were,” Jean told him. “So did
Roddy really want Wallace’s fishing things?”

“I expect so—waste not, want not. But there
might be something in those boxes as well.”

“I heard people in the Laigh Hall earlier.
Did Minty give the go-ahead to search the boxes?”

“She said something to Delaney about doing
whatever needed doing at Ferniebank, which he took as
carte
blanche
. We’ll have ourselves a squint this evening.”

“In the meantime, we have another reason to
get to the museum, to see what the story is with Isabel.”

“Assuming it’s relevant to the case.”
Alasdair stopped behind a nondescript brown car parked in front of
a cottage that fit Rebecca’s description of “vine-covered,” to the
point that windows and doors peered through oblong holes in the
growth that had probably been achieved with industrial-strength
pruning shears. Flowers of every hue rioted in the front garden. A
square pebbledash addition to one side looked like the proverbial
sore thumb, even with its blue sign reading “Police.” It was more
of a police room than a police station.

“What isn’t relevant to the case? Like
Valerie’s tattoo—oh, you don’t know about that, do you? I saw her
coming out of the pub on Friday. She has a tattoo of a harp on her
shoulder.”

Alasdair switched off the engine, pulled the
keys from the ignition, and turned to stare, eyes bright, brows at
full alert. “Eh?”

“It could be coincidence, but we already have
enough of those. She grew up here and was at the Ferniebank
dig.”

“The Ferniebank Clarsach. No coincidence,
no.” Alasdair jangled the keys pensively, then climbed out, locked
the doors—and froze, staring at the car in front of them.

Jean walked to his side and saw what he was
looking at. The brown finish of the car was splashed with dried
mud, and the tires were caked with it. “Whoa,” Jean said. “I
recognize that car.”

Alasdair used the all-purpose syllable again.
“Eh?”

“Keith was driving it at Minty’s house
yesterday. And it wasn’t muddy then, because Ciara was talking to
Valerie, and her car
was
muddy.”

The door of the police annex opened. Keith
Bell slipped through the aperture, seeming no more solid than a
tendril of smoke. Then Ciara stepped around the corner of the
building like an ambulatory rose bush, despite her flowing fabrics
and rainbow shades just as insubstantial.

Alasdair jolted to attention, his mental
equivalent of Kallinikos’s notebook and pen jotting down the
particulars, his face betraying all the expression of a blank piece
of paper. He opened the garden gate for Jean and she stepped
through, then to the side as Ciara swept past.

Ciara’s cream-puff complexion sagged just a
bit, though it was hardly curdled. The tinkle of her signature
earrings seemed muted and dirge-like. She was not wearing her pink
pelt, but a beaded shawl that glittered as she moved. “Poor Angus,
passing before his time. He’ll be missed.”

“How’s Minty holding up?” asked Jean.

“So brave. So calm. Preparing to open the
cookery school as usual this coming week. But we know that Angus’s
spirit will linger on, don’t we?”

“Jeez.” Keith was inspecting his
fingertips—Logan would have taken his prints as well as Ciara’s.
“Most normal people—”

Ciara’s voice cut through his like a flute
cutting through a drone. “The pub at two, Jean? It’s my shout. Is
Alasdair still drinking whiskeys so dry they shrivel your
tongue?”

Alasdair might be on a first-name basis with
dry, but his tongue was anything but withered. “Why’d you phone Val
Trotter at half past six this morning, Ciara?”

Keith looked around at Alasdair, the sunlight
on his glasses hiding his expression.

Ciara stopped dead, then asked with an
indulgent smile, “Aren’t you the clever boots?”

“Not a bit of it,” Alasdair replied. “Val
told me.”

“Giving her the third degree, were you?”