The Burning Glass (4 page)

Hugh mimed the curves of the harp, no more
than three feet tall, then played invisible strings. “A pity, that.
A seven-hundred-year-old clarsach’s not the sort of thing most
thieves would want, even if one of the Sinclairs played it for
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, and another for Mary Stuart, Queen
of Scots, two centuries on. Even if those stories are nothing more
than legend.”

“Ah, but you know how I feel about legends.”
Like tonguing a sore tooth, she asked, “Was the councillor who
asked you to play the clarsach named Angus Rutherford?”

“That he was. Long, lanky chap with a face
like the Queen of Faerie’s milk-white steed and a wife holding the
whip-hand. But you’ll be meeting up with the pair of them this
weekend, I expect.”

“I doubt it.
The Scotsman
says Angus
went missing in Brussels. Funny how Stanelaw becomes a hotbed of
intrigue just as the developers move in.” She let “just as Alasdair
and I move in” twist gently in the breeze.

Hugh’s smile was annotated by a firm nod. He
patted his T-shirt, evoking the events at Loch Ness in June. “No
problem, Jean. You’ve got D.C.I. Cameron on the premises.”

“Except he officially retired from the police
last week.” Gavin and Hugh both meant well, but neither of them
seemed to think she could fend for herself. “Now Alasdair’s making
security arrangements for properties managed by Protect and
Survive. Castles, abbeys, stately homes. Conservation areas. Local
museums, too, I bet, but apparently not the one in Stanelaw.”

“You’ve barely seen the man since June.
You’ve earned yourself a bit of peace and quiet.”

“
He
has.” She’d sensed when she first
met Alasdair that he was burned out, and therefore pushing himself
harder and harder. When she discovered he’d turned in his own
partner for corruption and the man subsequently committed suicide,
she realized he’d been burning for a long time. All she could do
for him was suggest, at first gently, then with the offer of a new
job, that he move on. Now she sent up a prayer to whatever
hard-bitten being passed for Alasdair’s guardian angel that this
career would not be fraught with life-and-death matters, the
unfortunate caretaker and the old lady notwithstanding.

Judging by the sympathetic gleam in Hugh’s
eye, she was looking like a human version of Dougie’s pincushion
effect. But he picked up his guitar and his fiddle without further
comment. “I’m away then. Have a good honeym . . . er, holiday. I’ll
be looking out for you and Alasdair both soon.”

“Well, yeah.” Alasdair had sold his house in
Inverness and put his belongings into storage, and was going to
stay at Ferniebank until he found a new caretaker. Which might take
longer than he’d intended, now. And then . . . Well, she could
almost see P and S headquarters on George Street from her living
room. Her flat wasn’t too small for two if they were on good
terms.

Even that McMansion in Dallas hadn’t been
large enough, at the end. She and Brad had staked out their
individual territories, occasionally meeting in the kitchen like
strangers at Starbucks. Jean had no idea where Alasdair had lived
his married life. He only ever mentioned his marriage in the same
way a cancer survivor mentioned his excised tumor. Jean didn’t even
know his ex-wife’s name.

Her flat was small. Stanelaw was small.
Scotland was a small country. One where you had to make your peace
with the past, because that past was never really gone.

Hugh was already several paces away, laughing
back over his shoulder.

“Can I drop you off anywhere?” Jean
called.

“I’ll get there faster on Shanks’s pony.
Cheers.” He made it across the courtyard in time to join the conga
line of costumed dancers snaking its way up Ramsay Lane.

With her own laugh, Jean turned to her car.
Once more unto the breach
, she told herself, and then
remembered that line ended with something about filling a wall with
dead bodies. Never mind. Wishing she had eyes in the back of her
head, she inched out onto the narrow medieval street and into what
was less the flow of traffic than the curdle.

By the time Jean pulled into the small, shady
parking lot beside the Granite Cross, she’d caught her breath,
soothed her nerves, and committed herself to her fate. Which had
more than once proved to be a jokester, but then, she and Alasdair
had more than once proved to be fighters.

In the back seat, Dougie was sound asleep,
his tail wrapped around his paws. The contents of the ice chest
beside him were presumably still chilled. As Jean had hoped, the
air here was cooler and fresher than that in the city—if scented
faintly with aroma of cow. She’d leave the windows cracked and make
her visit a quick one, she assured herself, and climbed out of the
car.

Stanelaw was an attractive town. Its main
street was lined with one- and two-story buildings, some covered in
white-painted stucco, others revealing walls of local gray stone. A
shop, a tea room, a hardware store, and other commercial
establishments proclaimed the viability of the community. Down the
occasional side street, Jean glimpsed modern houses. Beyond them,
the countryside was tamed into farm plots of green and gold,
bunched around the steep-sided hill, or law, that had probably
given the place its name. Above, the vault of the sky shone clear
and blue as Alasdair’s eyes.

This was a much gentler land geologically
than the crag, moor, and loch of the Highlands. But the Borders
were no gentler historically. For centuries the region had been
macerated between the jaws of Scotland and England, debatable lands
supporting debatable folk, hardy souls who lived as much by
plundering as by farming and herding. The myth of the miserly
Scotsman had begun here, where no possession and no person was free
of threat. Jean took a second look at the house across the street
from the pub, obviously one of the oldest in town, its thick walls
and small windows proclaiming it as much fortress as home.

Several steps led up to its front door and a
sign reading, “Stanelaw Museum, Home of the Ferniebank Clarsach.”
On the door itself, a notice added, “Closed. Please Call Again.”
Was it coincidence that a police car was parked half on the
sidewalk in front of the building, or was the local plod dusting
for fingerprints? Again, Jean assumed, since the theft was old news
by now.

She turned toward the pub. Hanging baskets of
flowers softened its stern stone facade. A signboard read “The
Granite Cross,” the words arching above a painted knight bearing a
black shield with, sure enough, the white engrailed, or
scallop-edged, cross of the Sinclairs. That family had ridden the
storm of centuries of Scottish history, but were popularly known
today for building Rosslyn Chapel just outside Edinburgh in Roslin
village, confusingly enough.

A burst of pipe music diverted Jean to a side
entrance, a gate in a stone wall. A woman was just leaving. She was
even shorter than Jean was, with short, almost crew-cut blond hair
and a sleeveless blouse that revealed a Celtic-interlace tattoo on
her bony shoulder. The long red fingernails of her right hand
pressed a cell phone to her ear and those of the other hand held a
lit cigarette. “Derek,” she was saying, every crow’s foot in her
face clenched, “Derek, you’re not listening. I’m your mum, Derek,
listen to me.” She strode off up the street.

Derek must be a teenager, Jean thought, with
a sympathetic glance at the woman’s retreating back, and entered
the gate to discover a beer garden. An open doorway in the back of
the pub overlooked an assortment of tables, some shaded by an arbor
covered with leafy vines, some in the sun. A dozen people sat
around drinking and snacking, getting a head start on happy hour.
If they’d planned on having a quiet conversation, though, they were
out of luck. Michael Campbell-Reid was playing his bagpipes in the
far corner, the sun glinting auburn off the waving locks of his
rock-star haircut, the musical tidal wave crashing against the
surrounding walls.

Jean grinned. Nothing like a set of
well-tempered pipes, played by a loving hand, to stir the heart and
rile the soul of the Scot. A few more minutes and the pub’s
clientele would take up their butter knives and rush the English
border.

She hadn’t lived in Scotland long enough,
accumulating an ultraviolet deficiency, to bake herself in the sun.
Neither, manifestly, had Rebecca Campbell-Reid. She was seated in
the flickering shadow of the arbor, a tea tray on the table and a
baby carriage close by. Her honey-brown hair was held back from her
face with a plastic clip, an accessory Michael could perhaps have
used. Her features were as genial as his, if, like his, sculpted by
an intelligence so quick as to be impatient.

Rebecca called over the music, “There you
are, Jean.”

“Here I am,” Jean shouted back. She sat down
in a plastic chair and peered into the pram. Two-month-old Linda
was asleep, her little pink rose-petal face utterly at peace. Add a
halo and wings and she would make your average Renaissance cherub
look like a gremlin. Jean sat back with a smile that was fond but
hardly wistful. She had learned long ago, after one very brief
pregnancy, to take out her maternal impulses on other people’s
children. “So she’s already used to the sound of the pipes?”

“Passed along with the tartan DNA. If you’ll
sit here with her, I’ll run inside and get you a cuppa. Or do you
have time?”

“Thanks, but no, I don’t. I need to get on
out to Ferniebank.”

“Oh, you’ll love Ferniebank.” Rebecca’s tone
said, “Oh, you’ll love having a root-canal.”

“Let me guess. The Gray Lady is based on a
real ghost.”

“So say the locals. Mind you, with the place
closed and all, we’ve only peeked in through the gate, but there’s
something properly uncanny about it.”

Jean had trouble seeing uncanniness being at
all proper, but then, Rebecca’s slight paranormal sensitivity
picked up resonances more than actual ghosts. Jean filched a morsel
of shortbread from the tea tray. “Thanks. I think. So where’s the
B&B you’re minding?”

“Just around the corner. The Reiver’s Rest.
Named for the reivers who were bloody-minded power-hungry thieves
taking advantage of unrest along the border. The Highlands have no
monopoly on romanticization.”

“You remember the old story about the beggar
in the Border village? No one would give him the time of day, let
alone a penny or a crust of bread. Finally he asked, ‘Are there no
Christians here?’ And someone answered, ‘No, we’re all Armstrongs
and Elliots hereabouts.’ ”

“The Fairbairns are Armstrongs, aren’t they?”
asked Rebecca with a grin.

“Yep. One branch of my family goes straight
back to this area. There’s a comment on determinism versus free
will.” Jean finished her cookie. “The Reiver’s Rest. Okay.”

“There’s a comment on the heritage
business.”

“If it weren’t for the heritage biz, I’m not
sure Scotland would have a viable economy. I know Miranda and I
wouldn’t. Ironic, how Alasdair’s now working for the exact industry
he’s made so many snide remarks about.”

“You need a little pragmatism in amongst the
flights of fancy.”

“That’s exactly what he’d say.”

At the far side of the garden, Michael segued
into a hornpipe, his long fingers springing on the chanter like the
legs of a ballerina. Several people clapped in time. Rebecca’s
sharp brown eyes focused over Jean’s shoulder, and Jean turned to
follow her gaze through the gateway.

A policeman was leaving the museum. His
blunt, heavy features and stubbled jowls would have looked at home
beneath a reiver’s steel bonnet. What he placed on his head,
though, was a black cap with a checkerboard band. He opened the
passenger side door of his car.

From the museum stepped a woman with the face
of a Roman matron, from her upswept dark hair stroked with silver
to her deep-set eyes with their heavy lids to her jaw as smooth and
hard as marble. Her turtleneck, tweed jacket, trousers, and boots
fit her svelte body like kid gloves would have fit her hands.
Locking the door behind her, she tucked the key and something
else—a small box—into her large leather handbag. Miranda would have
recognized the make and model of the bag, to say nothing of the
clothes, but even fashion-impaired Jean with her canvas
mini-backpack got the message: countryside chic. The woman needed
only a riding crop to complete the effect.

She seated herself in the police car as
though the officer’s uniform was that of a chauffeur. Without
cracking an expression, he slammed her door, paced around to the
driver’s side, and drove away.

“Araminta Rutherford.” Rebecca’s American
accent, migrating further east all the time, gave a quick tickle to
every “r.” “Maiden name Maitland, from Thirlestane Castle just up
the way.”

Jean wasn’t going to swoon in astonishment at
that identification, although the thought of such a cool customer
laboring over a hot stove did take her aback. “She has a cooking
school?”

“Oh, yes. Half the people who stay at the
B&B are signed up for courses. She’s the director of the museum
as well, has done a great job of keeping the local antiquities out
of Edinburgh’s clutches, not that I don’t see Edinburgh’s point.
You have heard about the clarsach?”

“I’m afraid so. Did you and Michael get a
chance to look at it?”

“No. We got here Saturday and it vanished on
Sunday. P.C. Logan—the Richard Nixon lookalike with Minty—answered
an alarm at the museum in the wee hours of the morning. He found a
window pried open and the clarsach gone, but everything else,
including the Roman and medieval coins, accounted for. Michael and
I flashed our credentials as museum curators and asked to look
around, but Mr. Councillor Rutherford, Angus, wasn’t best pleased
with our trying to push our way in and sent us packing.”