The Burning Glass (38 page)

“I hope Val chased after Ciara,” said Jean,
“and didn’t bug out permanently.”

“If Val did a bunk, she’d take Derek,”
Alasdair said. “She left him at the cottage so he’d not go talking
to any more detectives is all.”

“If we could get him away from Valerie, or
even Zoe . . . Maybe we can leave that window in the back of the
castle open and lure him here. You know, third time’s the
charm.”

A small, concentrated flame flared in
Alasdair’s eye. “That’s bordering on entrapment.”

“I was joking,” she told him.

“I’m not joking. Not a bit of it. Here, lock
the flat, please, and open the window in the Laigh Hall.” Handing
her the keys, Alasdair strode over to the shop, hoisted the wooden
pallet, and carried it around the side of the castle whence it
came.

Okay
. Jean locked the flat, tucked the
keys into her pocket, and marched herself into the castle.

Even with the light bulb burning in the Laigh
Hall, shadows hung like bats in the vaults of the ceiling and the
corners were duskily indistinct. The south-facing windows admitted
some daylight but not what Jean would call illumination, and the
air was dense with mildew, rot, and silence. The trap door to the
pit prison was closed. Giving it a wide berth, she padded across
the flagstones to the left-hand window and with a heave and a
squeal raised the probably Victorian sash.

Below, Alasdair angled the pallet against the
side of the building. Grasping the drain pipe, he stepped up on the
wooden rack as though it was a ladder. His left hand fumbled for
and found the weathered stone windowsill. Jean set her hand on his.
“You could climb in yourself.”

“Only if something was chasing me. Derek’s no
taller than me but a good deal more limber—he’ll get in, I reckon.
If he wants to.” With a quick squeeze of her hand, he let himself
drop down to the ground and headed back around the building.

Yeah, Jean repeated silently. And if he wants
to, then what? Telling herself she could open a gallery at the
British Museum with her collection of misgivings, she turned back
to the room.

The scabrous paneling, the old door, the dark
yawn of the old fireplace still held some of their derelict charm,
some of their romance, the same way a cow’s skull was romantic,
more in symbol than in reality. She tried to imagine Gerald setting
up housekeeping here, or more likely in the rooms above, with oil
lamps and water basins and a woman from the village, a Brimberry or
a Trotter, maybe, to “do”—to cook and clean—for him. The marble
Georgian fireplace surround that was now at Glebe House would have
moderated the gloom, as would furniture and carpets.

Did Gerald sit at his desk writing about
Isabel even as her ghost played the harp? Did her slippers waft
over the ancient flooring, noiselessly, until her pale form leaned
over his shoulder? No. Ghosts couldn’t interact with the living,
although at times they seemed to respond to the presence of flesh,
blood, and voice.

Cautiously Jean peeled back a corner of her
extra sense, but did not pick up one paranormal vibe. Forward
momentum, then. She walked over to the objects in the center of the
floor. Fishing rods and accessories, tools, gardening equipment,
the telescope. A case holding an old electric typewriter. And six
cardboard boxes ranged in a semi-circle, flaps open. She settled
herself onto the floor before them, the stone so cold it sent a
shudder up her spine, and adjusted her position so the door of the
dungeon was in her line of sight.

Two boxes held clothing while a third held
domestic odds and ends. Jean folded a well-worn wool sweater,
closed an empty leather case intended for tie tacks and cufflinks,
and wiped her fingers clean of the toothpaste oozing from a
squashed tube. Anything valuable—or at least, conventionally
valuable—had already been carried away by Minty’s manicured
hands.

Exhuming the cast-off shell of Wallace’s body
seemed less of a sacrilege than going through his intimate
belongings, not just his toothpaste, but the books and papers in
the other three boxes.

A waver in the light in the entrance chamber,
and soft footsteps, and Alasdair walked into the room saying, “I’ve
told Freeman and the others that we’ve set a trap.”

“What if Derek suspects it’s a trap?”

“Not everyone’s as devious as we are,
Jean.”

She hoped Alasdair’s thin smile indicated she
was the grit that provided traction in his well-oiled mental
machinery. Grit, helpmeet, comic relief. She could play those as
well as significant other and lover. “So Delaney didn’t find
anything here?”

“He’s saying he found nothing. Of course, he
didn’t know what he was looking for. Nor do we, come to that.”
Alasdair knelt down beside her and helped her stack the books
neatly on the floor. “Well, well, well. I’ll not be fainting in
amazement at those.”

“Ancient mysteries, secret landscapes, hidden
bloodlines, and underground history books going back to Watkins’
Old Straight Track
. The Templars. The Shroud.
The
Passover Plot
.”

“You’ve got a few of these yourself.”
Alasdair’s forefinger nudged a book whose cover featured the word
“conspiracy” in blood-red letters.

“These are the books that were on that bottom
shelf in the flat, the one that’s empty now. Minty was embarrassed
to leave them out, bestseller or no bestseller.” Jean held a
dog-eared copy of the novel Miranda kept mis-naming beside her
head, copying the cryptic smile of the Mona Lisa on its cover.

“Was Wallace reading this sort of thing B.C.,
before Ciara?”

“Oh yeah, some of these books date back to
well before the nineties. See?” Jean picked up the conspiracy book
and opened it to the flyleaf, which was stamped, “W. Rutherford, 12
Bruce Terrace, Kelso.” “Throw Gerald’s stuff into the mix, and I
bet Hugh’s right, it was Wallace who pressed Angus and Minty to fix
up Ferniebank. And that produced Ciara, drawn like a bee to
honey.”

“Bees are attracted to foxgloves as
well.”

She glanced sharply at him, but his face was
solemn, revealing nothing but interest in a spiral-bound book of
drawing paper. Each page was filled with sketches of the castle and
the chapel. They were amateurish, yes, labored rather than fluid,
and yet they were more than Minty’s “adequate.”

Jean picked up a large, flat book on the
history of the clarsach. “
The Harp Key
. This is straight
history and musicology . . . Oh, cool.” The flyleaf of the book
held another sketch of the excavation, this one of a woman sitting
on the edge of a narrow trench, a trowel in one hand, a small
peaked chest on her lap. Jean made out Valerie’s fox-like features,
then studied the chest. “That’s in the museum, isn’t it? A medieval
money-box.”

“I’m thinking the same box is in the sketch
Logan pinched, only there it’s Angus holding it. Perhaps. I only
saw the man for a moment, and didn’t know who he was.”

“Coincidence?” Jean asked, but Alasdair
wouldn’t commit himself to an answer. Setting the book aside, she
picked up an accordion folder that emitted a peculiar earthy smell.
Inside was tucked a sheaf of yellowed and crinkled papers, each
one, she saw as she fanned them, covered with lines of ornate but
faded handwriting. She turned one toward the light and read, “. . .
late, late in the gloaming, Isabel came hame.”

“Is that Gerald’s poem, then?”

“Ciara said reading it’s like treading
treacle. I’ll take her word for that, if not for everything.” Jean
stacked the folder on top of the sketch book.

“Have a look at these.” Alasdair opened
another folder. “We’ve got star charts, road maps, maps of
Roxburghshire, maps of Scotland. Here’s one with your Harp
Line.”

“It’s not my Harp Line,” Jean said, taking
that one from his hand. The paper was scabbed with multiple
erasures, the ghosts of earlier lines still showing through. “Ciara
said something about the music of the harp revealing the map to
where the relics are hidden.”

“Her book is fiction, is it?”

“Yeah, but she doesn’t intend it to be.” Jean
frowned, trying to remember Ciara’s exact words. “If y’all had just
held off arresting her for a few more minutes I might have had it
out of her, whether she’s really got some sort of map or whether
she’s just using that ‘if x is two then y is blue’ logic to assume
that there is one.”

Still expressionless, Alasdair took back the
battered page of sketch paper and tucked it into the folder with
the others. “Wallace might have made up the whole thing, and
convinced her there was a map. Or perhaps he was thinking Gerald
had hidden a map somewhere. Inside the harp? Is that why it was
stolen, because Minty would never have stood for taking it
apart?”

“That must be it, it’s just a matter of who .
. .” A light bulb considerably brighter than the one hanging from
the ceiling went off above Jean’s head. She bounced to her knees
and fixed Alasdair with a manic gaze and quivering finger. “Aha!
That’s it!”

He recoiled. “Eh?”

“Ciara got a big advance because so many of
these books”—Jean’s expansive gesture took in the entire pile—“are
basically stuck together with moonshine and chewing gum, but she
has proof! Or she convinced the publisher she has proof, because
Wallace thought he had proof, because something Gerald said
convinced him there was proof. Even if it’s a chart of Nova Scotia
and Cape Cod from Henry the Navigator’s day, 1400 or so, that would
be a heck of a discovery. And blazingly controversial. Not that I
have a dog in that hunt, Columbus has nothing to fear from me.”

She was hyperventilating. She plunked back
down on the floor—whoa, a splash of cold, just not on the face—and
caught her breath.

“But there’s no proof, is there?” Alasdair’s
nod was so firm he could have driven nails with his chin. “Anyone
else would be a wee bit nervy by this time, but Ciara, well, she
owns the place, she can take it apart at her leisure. If it’s meant
to happen, it’ll happen, she used to say.”

“That’s all well and good, but most people
will start pushing toward what they want to happen. Like snatching
the harp, which Ciara doesn’t own and couldn’t take apart at her
leisure. Just think . . .” Jean was trying to think, but her
thoughts were spinning around and rising and falling like carousel
horses. If she could grab the gold ring—slowly, she told herself,
logically. “The local people are divided into three camps. Ciara’s
allies, which is a list that’s growing short, now that Wallace and
Angus have been, er, erased. Maybe Helen was on that list too.”

“It’s not a safe place to be, then, though
Val’s still alive and well.”

“In spite of the tattoo, she could actually
be on the second list, the people who are gritting their teeth and
going along because of the money involved. Like Minty and the
Brimberrys, more or less. And then there’s Roddy Elliot, hurling
his verbal thunderbolts.”

Alasdair wiggled one of the fishing rods so
that the metal bits jangled. “Did he stop by here the Saturday
morning intending to search for the map amongst Wallace’s things .
. . Listen to me, I’m assuming there is a map.”

“It doesn’t matter whether there’s one or not
. . .”

“So long as folk think there is,” Alasdair
concluded wearily. “Roddy could’ve had him a look at the lumber
room any time since Wallace died, with no overzealous caretaker
turfing him out, but he just now heard about the map. Or the book,
at the least.”

“Ciara herself told me she told Shannon about
it Friday afternoon. Shannon told Zoe and Zoe told Roddy—she was
staying with him Friday night.”

“That’s why Zoe herself was sneaking about.
And why Roddy scalped the inscription that same night. But what of
Angus in the chapel the next night?”

“It’s where he was standing when he went
down, yeah, but why he was standing there? It could be something as
simple as losing his cap or whatever when he was there earlier in
the morning and going back to get it. Or maybe he was heading for
the lumber room to look for the map, too.”

“He could have looked it out at his leisure
after the work began here. Or waited ’til she gave it him.”
Alasdair’s lips thinned to a fissure of frustration.

“If Angus had been with someone when the
poison took effect, he might have reached a doctor, a hospital . .
.” Jean didn’t need to finish her sentence. Ferniebank had claimed
another life. She glanced at the trap door, half expecting to see
skeletal fingers from below feeling around its edge. “So we’re back
for the umpteenth time to why was Wallace standing in the pit
prison when he went down. Looking for the quasi-mythical map, with
his telescope lens to magnify—something? Hiding the bit of
inscription? Was he reacting to that phone call? Roddy could have
made the call while he was dropping off a bottle of milk at Logan’s
house. He’d already had a fight with Wallace earlier the same
day.”

“Or Logan himself made the call, as a
friendly warning of things getting out of hand in the
community.”

“How good a look did you take around the
dungeon when you got the lens and the star?” Jean asked, crawling
to her feet and taking a cautious step or two toward the trap
door.

“I had me a look round, right enough, but
what was there to look for?” Not at all cautious, Alasdair outpaced
her and threw back the trap. The dank, moldy breath that wafted
upwards really should have included wraiths of mist. He knelt at
the edge and peered downward, Jean craning over his shoulder. She
could see only the top foot or so of the ladder, plunging downward
into impenetrable darkness. “Wasn’t I saying on the Friday I’d not
be coming in here without a flashlight? I’ll fetch it from the
flat.”

Jean took two long paces back. If Alasdair
wanted her to, she’d climb down into the dungeon. And stand there
with her skin crawling while he looked for whatever there was to
look for . . . Her skin was crawling now, frissons of chill
trickling along her arms and down the back of her neck, dragging
her skin downward so she felt as though she was clothed in
lead.