The Burning Glass (39 page)

Involuntarily she looked up, but she could
see nothing. It was what she was hearing: light, quick steps pacing
overhead, and the faintest ripple of harp strings.

Alasdair stood up, his hand on his stomach,
grimacing. “Isabel, is it?”

“Yep,” Jean told him. And, falling back on
the traditional remedy for stress—no, she wasn’t running away from
a ghost, not at all—she said, “It’s past six. Let’s carry that box
of papers over to the flat and fix something to eat. We can do the
dungeon some other time.”

He nodded, more, she thought, out of
consideration for her than because he wanted to take a break. If
sheer willpower could have wrenched the entire story from either
stone or paper, he would have had them babbling away by now.

Alasdair collected the papers and
The Harp
Key
with its sketch, lifted the box, and followed Jean past the
sentry constable on the front steps, pausing only while she dragged
the heavy door closed. Inside the flat, he set the box on the
coffee table and sent a glance edged with envy toward Dougie, who
was reposing on the windowsill like a supernally calm, if furry,
little Buddha. “I’ve got the ingredients for a curry, if that suits
your taste.”

“Great, I love curry.” Jean almost added
thanks for cooking
, then thought better of it. She also
thought better of trying to help, and sat down to leaf through the
documents in the box.

Some were typed, but most were handwritten,
either in the elegant cursive of a hundred years ago or a practical
if cramped modern hand. Some were originals, some were copies. Just
as she emitted a gaping yawn, Alasdair placed a steaming cup of tea
on the table in front of her, then walked into the bedroom.

A few moments later she heard his voice
rising and falling. He returned with the Ancient Monuments book
under his arm and his phone to his ear. “Thank you just the same,
Sergeant Kallinikos,” he said, handed her the book, then inserted
his phone into his pocket.

No, there was no point in him asking Delaney
for a report on the interviews with Ciara and Keith. Jean took a
healthy swallow of the hot, sweet tea, clearing her throat of dust
and mold and a lingering hint of bitterness, and turned back to the
box.

There she found pages of notes and
chronologies taken from various books, what looked like the start
of a biography of Gerald, and some memos on genealogy. She did not
expect to find an inventory of Wallace’s papers, and was not
gratified by finding one after all. Other than a few innocuous
letters, Gerald’s writings were confined to the musty pages of the
poem. She held a couple of them up to the light, noting that the
paper was crinkled and stained, as though it had gotten damp. Well,
what didn’t get damp, in this climate?

If either Gerald or Wallace left anything
explanatory, let alone incriminating, Jean told herself, Ciara has
it now.

The snick-snick of a knife and the pungent
smell of sauteing onions signaled Alasdair’s progress in the
kitchen. Ah, she got it—cooking was something else useful he could
do. As much as she’d like to collapse onto the couch pillows, she
had to hold up her side. She opened the Ancient Monuments book,
this time noting not only Valerie’s name but also her husband Harry
Spivey’s, and paged through it.

The half of the book about the castle dealt
with flaking stone, rotting wood, leaking slates—the renovations
were little more than a desperate rearguard action against the
forces of entropy. . . . Ah. There was a photo of the pit prison,
layered with rubbish and dirt but far from inaccessible, if also
far from the stark stone chamber of today. What had Minty said
about Wallace poking about in the pit prison? Yes, Jean told
herself without enthusiasm, we do need to check the place out.

There was the photo of the skeleton she now
knew was Isabel’s, as a quick check of the list of illustrations
established. Each one of those cuts and slices had gone through
living flesh into living bone. Each had been made by a living hand
directed by a living mind, likely no more disturbed than by hewing
wood. As Alasdair said, once you solve a problem by a certain
method, it becomes easier and easier to use the same method,
terrible though it might be.

There was the photo of Isabel’s grave
inscription, complete except for the harp, no more informative than
it had been the day before. Photos of other inscribed stones
included Henry Sinclair’s, which was definitely a memorial rather
than a stone marking a burial, no surprise there.

An inventory listed bits of pottery and other
artifacts, many of which Jean had just seen in the museum. There
was no mention of the mirror, whether as Gerald’s shaving glass or
Isabel’s communications device.

A spicy aroma wafted into her nose and mouth.
She inhaled, an extra brain cell ticked over, and she realized that
there was no mention in the inventory of the money chest, either,
the one that Wallace had drawn not once but twice, and that was now
in the museum.

Frowning, she turned back to the photo of
Isabel’s skeleton and looked at the one beside it. It showed the
area of the grave just inside the collapsed corner of the coffin.
No, she hadn’t imagined it—the clear imprint of something small and
square lay next to the ghastly, hacked shoulder-bone. “Alasdair,
that chest in Wallace’s drawings. The one in the museum. It’s not
listed in the inventory, but there’s a mark of something just that
size in Isabel’s grave.”

He looked around from setting cutlery out on
the table. “An oversight? Or a deliberate omission?”

“A dig sixteen years ago wouldn’t have been
recorded as punctiliously as one today, and the director of this
one wasn’t known for attention to detail—which is why he got the
job at such a minor site, I bet. But losing track of a broken pot
is one thing, simply not mentioning a nice little chest like that
is another. There has to be some significance to Wallace drawing
that chest. . . .” The thought, whatever it had been, spun through
her mind and vanished.

Alasdair beckoned her to the table. “We’re
thinking too hard, lass. Come and eat.”

Dougie leaped down off the windowsill, giving
Jean a view of the lengthening shadows outside, and trotted into
the kitchen, tail erect, whiskers alert. Her taut facial muscles
cracked into a smile as Alasdair gravely dispensed kibble and fresh
water, and indulged in a stroke of Dougie’s velvet-furred head. The
men in my life, she thought. They had a lot in common, not least by
complicating the life she’d intended to simplify.

Sitting down, she eyed the reddish-brown
curry and rice appreciatively. Alasdair had even opened a small
container of plain yogurt and prepared a salad, slices of various
vegetables garnished with the green commas of watercress. After one
bite of tongue-searing heat, Jean reached for the yogurt and added
a generous spoonful. “Delicious. You have talents I never
suspected.”

Alasdair mashed rice and sauce onto the back
of his fork. “Cooking’s no great talent. It’s simply following
directions.”

“Brad could have burned water,” Jean said,
without making any comparisons that included the word
“meticulous.”

Dougie wandered over and sat down beside the
table, looking upwards expectantly. “No way,” Jean told him. With a
shrug of his whiskers—
I didn’t want your nasty food
anyway
—he trotted over to the couch, where he began licking
himself down.

After few more bites that cleared her sinuses
and hopefully her brain, Jean asked, “So what did you get out of
Kallinikos? Is Delaney still holding Keith and Ciara?”

“That he is, with solicitors dancing
attendance. Keith’s the more helpful of the two. Seems Angus was
keen on getting here to Ferniebank straightaway after the dinner,
so Keith drove him to the layby and even lent him Ciara’s torch.
Then he waited on the track, and waited, and waited, and when Angus
never returned, found him lying next to the well, dead.”

“That makes sense. Keith panicked, waved his
flashlight around, and ran. Roddy heard his car speeding away. Poor
Keith. He was probably a lot more scared of Minty than he was of
Ciara, and didn’t want to be the one to report Angus dead.”

“Keith is saying the flashlight in the well
had Ciara’s prints on it because it was hers. He prodded Angus’s
body, so his hands were wet, and he wiped them on the pink jacket
she’d left in the car. Angus’s cap likely picked up some of Ciara’s
hair in the van that morning. Keith’s not testifying against Ciara,
mind, but he’s not taking a bullet for her, either.”

Jean said, “Ciara told me she and Keith are
sleeping together.”

“So he was telling Kallinikos.” Alasdair
shook his head. “Poor Keith, indeed, though like as not he was
thinking he struck lucky.”

“Where, then, was Ciara all the time Keith
and Angus were here? WithVal?”

“I’m guessing so, though all Val’s saying is
that she has information about Angus.”

“She is there in Kelso, then.”

“Aye, but Delaney’s not interviewed her as
yet.” Alasdair speared a morsel of meat.

“And Ciara’s not talking?”

“Oh, she’s talking, she’s just not telling
Gary what he’s wanting to hear.”

And he probably wasn’t asking what Alasdair
would have asked, either. Outside someone crunched across the
gravel and said, “Grand evening, eh?”

So it seemed—Jean saw clear burnished golden
light reflected in the window glass. A car started up and the gate
opened and shut. The detective must have locked up the incident
room and gone on his way, either to Kelso to join in the
interview-go-round or in search of sustenance more substantial than
tea and biscuits.

Alasdair was forking food into his mouth as
though he was stoking a furnace rather than enjoying a meal. The
curry brought some color to his face—usually very fair, it had been
downright pale with anger and worry for almost twenty-four hours
now. Forty-eight hours, ever since Ciara had appeared, unbidden,
unwanted, but irrevocably a part of the scene.

They must have married when he was very
young, maybe even in his twenties. He’d been another creature
entirely from the hard-bitten paladin Jean knew. . . . Well, of
course. He and Ciara had to have been different creatures for them
to get together. For them, Jean amended severely, to fall in love.
“You and Ciara grew apart. That’s obvious. But how on earth did you
ever get together?”

He looked up, his startled blue glare almost
knocking her back into her chair.

She screwed her face into an apologetic
grimace. “I know, it’s that annoying female habit of wanting to
talk about things. Like the virtual pink elephant in the middle of
our mutual space.”

His gaze dropped back to his plate. “You’re
distracting me from being closed out of the case, is that it?”

“Well, ah . . .” She hadn’t thought of
that.

With a quick, dry laugh, he said, “We met
when I pulled her back from the street in Inverness. She was
photographing the Flora MacDonald monument, and almost stepped out
in front of a car. I’d gone from police constable to detective the
year before, but still had the instincts.”

She’d seen a photo of Alasdair as a young
constable. Ah, men in uniform!

“That she was blethering on about Flora and
the Bonnie Prince should have warned me off, but no, here was a
bonny lass well up on her history and legend, one who wasn’t scairt
of seeing ghosties.”

“And you were scared of seeing ghosts?”

“Of talking about them. Here’s me, aged six,
telling my teacher and classmates I’d seen soldiers from the old
fort walking past the library and the ski shop. Not my finest
hour.”

“Yeah. I had moments like that, too.” She
chased the last morsel of sweet yellow pepper across her plate.
“How long were you and Ciara together?”

“A year or so. Married for ten, mind you, but
together for only the one.”

“Disillusionment must have set in pretty
quickly.”

“Oh aye, that it did. You said once that
fantasy was like alcohol, and some people alcoholics. That’s Ciara.
And not a mote of genuine—ESP, whatever you’re calling it.”

“I see now why you have that ‘bah, humbug’
attitude about the romance of myth and all that. She sensitized you
to it.”

“I’ve never had a taste for rubbish,” he
stated. “Ciara’s swung a good distance to her side and I’ve swung a
good distance to mine. If I’m shocked at what she’s become, I
daresay she’s shocked at what I’ve become.”

Jean had had a few moments of shock herself
recently. But then, getting to know Alasdair was like excavating a
complex archaeological site—no matter how many layers she pared
away, there was always something else to learn. “Thanks for
explaining. I’d wondered. I mean, you’ve never struck me as a man
who could be led by his gonads.”

“Well now, don’t discount that aspect of it
entirely.” With an expression wry as a pickle, Alasdair scooted
back from the table and started collecting the dishes.

Smiling, Jean headed for the sink and turned
on the hot water. “It’s not fair that Brad and Ciara are doing much
better than we are now.”

“Ah, but we’re the ones seeing dead folk.”
Balancing their empty plates in one hand, Alasdair opened the
window curtain with the other and peered out. At that instant the
sunlight faded from gold to silver as the sun dropped behind the
western hills.

Jean eyed the leftover curry and rice, and
found a plastic container in the cabinet large enough to hold both.
“Did Delaney take any of these to test for poison?”

“A few, and good luck to him, now that he
knows what he’s looking for.” Alasdair set the plates down in the
sink. “No worries, I only prepared the food we brought
ourselves.”