The Burning Glass (37 page)

Again pipe music sounded from the garden,
this time the bittersweet melody of “Dark Island.” Jean wished she
could pick Alasdair up and carry him away to one of the Outer
Hebrides. But then, he’d fight his way back here if he had to swim.
She set her hand on his shoulder. She could have played his tendons
like the strings of a harp. “Alasdair?”

His hands clenched and loosened. He shut his
eyes and opened them. His jaw worked. “Jean.”

“I take it the results of the toxicology
tests came in?”

“Oh aye.”

The police worked fast, then, their wonders
to perform. “Angus and Wallace, Delaney said. What about
Helen?”

“Helen died of natural causes. Heart failure.
But the men . . .” Alasdair turned his back to the street. His face
was a desert island composed of nothing beyond fire and ice. “Heart
failure as well, but brought on by a dirty great dose of glycoside.
Scrophulariacae. Digitalis purpurea
. Foxglove.”

“Foxglove,” Jean repeated. “But lots of
people take digitalis as a medicine. It can work differently in the
elderly. Therapeutic overdoses aren’t uncommon.”

“Wallace was taking another medication, not
digitalis. Angus was not taking anything.”

“I see.”

“When I was a lad in Fort William, we
believed that poking a finger into a foxglove bell would kill you.
It’s common knowledge it’s a poison. It’s readily available and
fast-working. Angus had his dose at the dinner here. There were
bread and herbs in the vomit by the chapel wall, and Noel says he
served focaccia amongst other dishes, though Angus likely got his
dose in the dessert or the coffee, else he’d have dropped just
there at the pub. Wallace got his dose in his dinner as well. One
that someone brought to him.”

Jean asked the unavoidable question. “Why
arrest Ciara?”

“Those wee stars from her earrings, the
chapel, the pit prison, one actually clinging to Angus’s clothing.
It’s like she was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.”

“That doesn’t even rise to the level of
circumstantial evidence.”

“The torch in the well. Her fingerprints were
on it. Her hair was on Angus’s cap. There was well-scum on that
pink jacket of hers. The mud on Keith’s car matches that from the
layby.”

“That still doesn’t mean either Ciara or
Keith killed him. They were having their differences, but . . .”
Alasdair didn’t know the full wretched excess of Ciara’s plans, did
he?

His hard, uncompromising eyes focused beyond
Jean, beyond the pub, beyond the town. “I told Gary he was moving
too fast. She’d never have thought to leave the area. But no, she
had means, she had opportunity. He’s thinking he can intimidate her
into revealing a motive. Good luck to him. Arguing with Ciara’s
like punching a marshmallow. You’ll just knacker yourself, and
she’ll never feel a thing.”

And here I am, Jean thought, teaching myself
to fight back. She removed her hand from his shoulder, not quite
worried that he hadn’t shaken her away, not quite grateful. “Did
she do it?”

That he hesitated before answering told her
at least part of what she wanted to know. At last he said, “No. She
didn’t do it. She’s not got it in her. Nor has she a motive, not
that I can see.”

“What is the killer’s motive, then?”

“Something doing with Ferniebank, has to be.
There’s always a reason for murder, if only in the killer’s own
mind.” The harsh lines of his eyebrows and lips eased, if
microscopically. “Delaney’s left no more than a skeleton crew at
Ferniebank, if you’ll pardon the expression, and yet it’s
Ferniebank that’s the point of the exercise. Let’s get on with
it.”

Alasdair started off down the street so fast,
Jean had to almost run to keep up. Get on with what? she wondered.
And answered,
the job
. Free-lance knight errantry. Among all
the other issues, there was now a maiden—er, a matron in
distress.

He opened the car door for Jean, climbed in,
and started the engine. In edgy but not uncompanionable silence, he
drove up the High Street and out of town.

A few brushstrokes of purple-pink on the
hills betrayed the presence of late foxglove blooms. The leaves
would still be there, though, even if the flowers had passed. You
could dry the leaves, you could soak them, you could add a pinch
here and a dram there. . . .

The church stood deserted, no sexton digging
another grave beside the two that still gaped. The Glebe lay still
and silent. Behind it hunkered the cooking school, with all its
dishes and implements and little bottles of spice. “It’s easy
enough to put poison into someone’s food,” Jean said. “And they’re
all working with food.”

“Minty’s school, the pub, Roddy’s dairy,
Valerie and her bakery,” said Alasdair. “Her uncle and his shop,
come to that.”

“Did you hear Zoe telling Noel that Valerie
took off right after the police did?”

“Aye, I did that.”

“Didn’t she ask you yesterday whether there
was going to be any more digging at Ferniebank before Ciara took
over?”

“A question that now seems a bit more than
idle curiosity. I’ll have one of the Ferniebank constables bring
her in—like as not they’re still thinking I’m
persona
grata
.”

“Delaney . . .”

“Bugger Delaney.” Alasdair’s jaw was set in
concrete, his hands gripped the wheel as though it was Delaney’s
throat, and yet his breathing had slowed to its normal watchful
pattern. He wasn’t speeding or cutting corners. The drive, Jean
hypothesized, was a contemplative exercise.

She said, “Ciara’s taken courses at Minty’s
school. She’s been staying at the Glebe all month. It would be easy
enough to get into the kitchens, prepare the poison, sneak it into
Angus’s food. Especially since she planned the dinner to begin
with. Sorry.”

“We’re obliged to consider all the
possibilities.”

“Then don’t you have to consider the spouse?
Would Minty have a motive to kill her husband? I sure wouldn’t want
to get on her bad side. How many years has she been dissing
Valerie, do you think?”

“I’m wondering why Val got up her nose to
begin with.”

“For refusing to suck up to her, maybe? Noel
was saying something about those who tug their forelocks for a
living, and that’s him and his family and Logan—well, Roddy and Zoe
aren’t exactly with the program. Maybe one of the peasants got fed
up and poisoned Angus, although you’d think Minty would be the
target. I mean, why go for the adjutant when you can get the
general?”

“Maybe Minty was the target. That’s the
disadvantage of poison, getting it into your intended victim. But
then, the advantage of poison is that it gives you a grand alibi.
Most poisoners are only caught when they do it again and then
again.”

“You suspected Wallace was poisoned—heavens,
you suspected Helen was poisoned—but no one investigated until
Angus went down.”

“Exactly. Once someone solves a problem by,
say, embezzling, they’ll solve the next problem the same way, not
stopping when they’re ahead. Ciara’s always overdoing, and yet . .
.”

There was Ferniebank Farm, showing no signs
of life, human, canine, or bovine. Roddy, too, had a date with
Delaney. And there were probably detectives drying dishes in the
pub kitchen, all the better to hurl questions at a passing
Brimberry. “The killer was trying to solve the problem of
Ferniebank. But what problem is that? Wallace wasn’t trying to stop
the sale or anything. He told you himself he was happy about it.
And it’s too late for Angus to renege on the sale or retract the
planning permission. Ciara was saying they could all vanish and the
conference center would go through as planned, it’s all set.”

“Is it now?” Alasdair stopped in front of the
closed gates of the castle. The tarpaulin covering the gate
twitched and P.C. Freeman peered through the iron bars. But no, the
media mob hadn’t hared back this way. Yet.

With its usual creak, the gate swung open.
Alasdair maneuvered the car into the courtyard, brought it to a
halt beneath the eaves of the trees, and slammed the door behind
him so emphatically that crows squawked and a detective glanced out
of the incident room.

Freeman started to push the gate shut. In two
economical gestures, Alasdair stopped him and summoned a second
constable from the front steps of the castle. “. . . wee house,
Gillyflower Cottage . . .” That’s right, he’d been there when
Valerie gave her address to Delaney the first time around.

Jean waited beside the car, looking around as
curiously as though she’d never seen Ferniebank before. The castle
hid its secrets behind the gray precipice of its facade. The chapel
hid its secrets behind the whispering leaves of the trees. Maybe
Roddy was right, and the place should be torn down and sold for
stone. And the grounds sown with salt, for good measure. Would
Isabel’s ghost still run, then, over land ruined not by nature but
the passions of man?

Freeman climbed into his patrol car, drove
through the gate, and headed south. The other constable took over
his post at the gate. With a mini-smile of satisfaction, Alasdair
returned to Jean. “All right then. What else was Ciara saying?”

Jean groaned, but steeled herself to the
task. By the time he unlocked the door of the flat and waved her
inside, she’d not so much led him through Ciara’s maze, with its
illogical branches and dead ends, as gotten him lost with her.

He stood in the doorway, less stunned, Jean
estimated, than resigned. Then he ran his hand through his hair and
down the back of his neck, as though wiping away cobwebs, and shut
the door. “The glass, Mary’s letter, the harp, Gerald’s papers and
all—where’s your chain of custody? Where’s your provenance? And
Edward Tempest sounds to be the hero of a bodice-ripper
romance.”

“A family of Catholics named Tempest lived in
Yorkshire—they probably were involved in the 1569 rebellion,
although whether there was an Edward here . . . ” Jean shrugged.
“Ciara’s version of the occult fantasies that are going around is
barely ten percent original, if that much. There are Sinclairs
pontificating at this very moment about their loyalty to the Stuart
cause and secret Catholicism and the Holy Grail. Even the
sculptures being musical notes—I’ve heard something similar about
Rosslyn. Religion as puzzle rather than as dogma is quite the fad
these days. As for historical veracity—who cares?”

“Ciara’s share is that the Scottish monarchs
conspired with the Templars to send the Magdalen’s relics to
America, is that it?”

“I’m not even sure that’s original. It’s the
Ferniebank angle that’s new. And there’s no telling how much of
that is Wallace’s, let alone Gerald’s. Minty was right, this sort
of thing takes on a life of its own.”

“And Ciara’s sprung this on one and all in
just the last two days?”

“Apparently so,” Jean said. “What I’m really
wondering is why one more book on all of this stuff got such a big
advance from a publisher. I mean, okay, Ciara’s got writing
credentials, but she’d have to have something special . . .”

Alasdair’s eyes were taking on the
thousand-yard stare of the combat veteran, although his version was
closer to a thousand-year stare.

“Well,” Jean concluded, “she’s either a
superb charlatan, a nut case, or a businesswoman giving the
customers what they want.”

“All three, I reckon, though she’s not aware
of the first.”

“And there I was talking to Miranda just the
other day about marketing belief systems. Myth as . . . Well,
there’s nothing wrong with myth
per se
.”

“The danger comes in hiding from the fact
that they’re myths.” Having issued his manifesto, Alasdair strode
on down the hall toward the bedroom.

Amen to that
, Jean thought, and then,
with a blink and a breath, noticed how dark and dreary the flat
seemed after the bright sunlight and soft breezes outside. She
could still smell the soup they’d reheated for lunch. And Dougie
had made an aromatic deposit in his litter box, which was as good
an editorial comment as any on the present situation.

She dumped her bag and started opening
windows, so that the fresh air, the rustle of the trees, and the
rush of the river filtered inside. She cleaned the litter box and
located the culprit, who was asleep in the center of the bed with
his tail draped over his nose like a furry gas mask.

Alasdair had changed into jeans and a T-shirt
reading “Real Men Wear Kilts.” “I’m for having a wee keek at
Wallace’s boxes. I reckon Ciara’s got his copies of Gerald’s
papers, and everyone else in the area’s had time to pick them over,
but still, there might be something interesting there.”

And it’s something to do, Jean concluded. No
question of stopping for a rest, even though his face was showing
the strain, his mouth stretched taut as a twisted rope. “Be right
with you,” she told him, and didn’t so much change her clothes as
gird her loins with denim and a
Great Scot
T-shirt. What she
told herself was that something had to give soon. Just as long as
it wasn’t Alasdair.

Jean stepped out of the flat to find Alasdair
standing with Freeman while the other constable pushed the gate
shut yet again. “. . . no car there,” the young man was saying, his
freckles sliding downward in dismay. “I chapped at the door and
shouted. I’m thinking the lad was playing silly beggars, going from
window to window, though it could have been the breeze blowing the
curtains.”

“It was the lad,” said Alasdair, “hiding out
whilst his mum chases off to Kelso.”

“Shall I go back?”

“No, we’ve got no warrant to flush him out.
Thank you just the same. Have yourself a cuppa.”

“Thank you, sir.” Freeman strolled over to
the incident room.