The Burning Glass (43 page)

“Thanks.” She trudged out into the free air
while Alasdair turned off the light, and mutely handed him the keys
so he could lock the door. Following him to the door of the flat,
she waited while he opened it for her and then strode off to the
incident room, all without once meeting her gaze. Somewhere above,
a dove cooed and then fell silent, as though not wanting to call
attention to itself.

The flat. Home, such as it was. Sanctuary,
not so much. Jean stepped into the living room. It was more like a
dying room, a morgue, cold and silent, illuminated by bloodless
moonlight streaming in the eastern windows and Dougie’s eyes like
eerie, reflective marbles. She shut the windows, sat down on the
couch, and warmed her hands in the cat’s soft fur, too wired to
yawn, too tired to pace.

From outside came the sounds of voices and
cars as the official tide ebbed yet again. “Good night, then,”
Alasdair said to someone. His shoes plodded up the steps. Behind
Jean’s back, the door opened and shut, a key turned in the lock,
and the flashlight snicked back into its bracket.

After a long moment, perhaps waiting for a
formal greeting, perhaps marshaling his resources, he said,
“Delaney’s sent Logan off with a flea in his ear—he’s lucky
there’re no charges against him—and Freeman to collect the two
drawings.”

“Logan admitted to making the phone call?”
Jean didn’t turn around.

“As a friendly warning, he’s saying,
intending no threats or anything of the sort.”

“Because Wallace told Minty he had proof
Ciara was right, and Minty complained to Logan about things getting
out of hand. And then she took matters into her own hands and
doctored Wallace’s dinner.”

“I doubt . . .” Alasdair said, but his voice
trailed away and left unresolved whether he meant “doubt” as in
“suspect” or “doubt” as in, well, “doubt.”

Doubt
. Uncertainty. Perhaps even
mistrust. Jean kept on stroking Dougie. Normally he’d have started
purring, but not now. Now his ears were pricked forward, his
muscles bunched, sensing her dour mood just as she could sense
Alasdair standing to attention in the darkness behind her. Her gut
coiled into a Gordian knot of doubt and desire.

The keys jangled onto the desk and he cleared
his throat. “I’d not have hurt the lad.”

“I know,” she said, and she did know. “But he
could’ve fallen in. I never thought you’d . . .”

Silence.

“Did you do it to help Ciara? To further the
course of justice? Or simply so you could tell Delaney ‘I told you
so’? Leaving the window open might border on entrapment, but
threatening that pitiful kid borders on criminal!”

Silence.

“We could’ve brought him in here and given
him tea and cookies and made friends with him. But no, Delaney
showed up, you had to make points with him.”

Alasdair emitted a long, ragged breath.

“Yeah, you ended up impressing the heck out
of Derek. He’s male, too—you’re both out there on planet Macho. I
know you’re having a hard time with the retirement and everything.
But Alasdair, don’t, please . . .” She gulped. “Don’t turn into
someone else.”

“Who am I, then?” he asked, voice very quiet,
very weary. “I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you. I’m thinking I’ve
disappointed myself.”

Oh. Well then. She should go to him and throw
her arms around him, and yet her limbs wouldn’t move.

“I’ll sleep on the couch the night.”

“Don’t be any dafter than you already are,”
she retorted. Her smile died before it could form.

After another long silence, he said, “I’m
away to bed, then.”

She waited, ducking a gaze so keen she felt
it tingling on the back of her neck, until the bathroom door
closed. Then she collected her backpack, turned on the dim light
above the kitchen stove, and filled the tea kettle. While the water
boiled, she opened the little box and considered the glass, burning
or looking, whatever, gleaming innocently on its bed of cotton.
Would Ciara’s psychometric friend be able to bring anything more to
bear on the object than his own imagination? Jean could do that for
herself.

Had Isabel been so intent on her mission for
Queen Mary—it was only the nature of the mission that was in
dispute, not its existence—that she’d never put together a
relationship, with a monk, or a Tempest, or with some wealthy
fiancé chosen by her father? Had she lived as she died, cut off
from a supporting hand?

Jean put the glass back in her bag and pulled
out her phone. Ah, a message from Miranda, short and sweet. “So
they’ve arrested Ciara, have they? If that means your story’s gone
from heritage industry feature to front page prime crime . . .
Well, do what’s best. Even if it means proving she’s innocent. And
you, you take care.”

Do what was best. Take care.
Right
.
Jean poured hot water over a bag of herbal tea—chamomile and
passionflower, like that was going to help her sleep. Cup in hand,
she peered out the window. A solitary patrol car sat inside the
gate. Light shone from the half-closed door of the incident room.
O. Hawick tramped across the gravel, seeming to savor the grinding
crunch of each step, like a conqueror treading the skulls of the
fallen.

In the moonlight, the leafy passage leading
to the chapel was as densely-shadowed as a tunnel. . . . No, a wisp
of light stirred in its depths, and Isabel ran noiselessly toward
the castle. She passed by Hawick so closely she’d have taken off
his hat if she’d been corporeal. He kept on walking.

Shuddering, Jean clutched the mug of tea
between her icy hands and turned away from the window.
Now
what?
she asked herself again, but this time she had no answer.
She drank her tea and went to bed, and lay beside Alasdair’s back,
carefully not touching him. She could tell by the way his breath
caught at the ripple of harp strings from above that he was
awake.

The musical notes drifted through the night,
rising, falling. Maybe if she listened carefully enough, she’d hear
the clink of the jewelry, given to generations of harpers or placed
on the clarsach as status symbols by Isabel’s own family. And
perhaps she’d hear an echo from the secret chamber, the place of
incriminating messages.

She dozed and woke and dozed again, and
wandered through museums where fissures opened in reddish stone,
and the stones rained down on display cases, smashing the glass
into discs. Roddy lumbered down the high street pushing a cow in a
pram. Minty upended a glass bottle, pouring a dark liquid onto the
street until a black pool gathered silently around the foundations
of Ferniebank. . . .

Jean opened her eyes to see the curtains
illuminated by daylight. Birds sang, free of uncertainty. Alasdair
was wrapped up in the duvet, as though he and it had spent the
night wrestling for dominance, leaving her only the edge. That was
only one reason she was chilled to the bone. At the foot of the bed
Dougie curled into a tight ball, a cushion with ears, one of which
twitched as she rose and dressed. In the bathroom she made the
mistake of looking at herself in the mirror. Compared to the face
that looked back, her passport photo was a glamor shot.

She made tea, fed the cat, and watched him
play with a stray bit of kibble—bat, pounce, bat, pounce. Then she
set a box of Weetabix on the table along with bowls and spoons.

Outside, the morning was brightening into
another beautiful, clear, sunny day. The leaves of the trees and
the hoods of the cars glistened with dew. A constable stood in the
doorway of the incident room eating something out of a plastic
wrapper.

Alasdair emerged from the hallway and headed
straight to the teapot. Milk, tea, sugar. A long swallow and the
fog lifted from his eyes. “Ah. Jean. Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

They sat at the table, drinking their tea and
eating their cereal. Slowly she detected the beginnings of coherent
thought, faint as the traces of atomic particles, both on his face
and in her mind. But with the return of coherent thought came the
return of doubt and confusion. Alasdair, who meant well. Wallace,
who meant well. Angus, who meant well. Ciara, who meant well.

And see ye not that braid, braid road

That lies across the lily leven?

That is the path of wickedness

Though some call it the path to heaven.

The broad, broad road, she translated. The
path of good intentions. Well, Minty had intended to do good for
herself, that was for sure.

The phone on the desk emitted its double
bleat. In one leap Alasdair had the phone off its cradle.
“Ferniebank. Cameron. Ah, Gary.”

Jean cleared the table, trying to guess from
half of the conversation what was happening. A glass bottle.
Toxicology tests. Glebe House. Ciara.

Alasdair hung up the phone. “They’ve found a
wee spice bottle with traces of
Digitalis purpurea
in the
dustbin behind the pub. Derek stopped in on his way to school and
identified it. They’ve also found strips of rag paper with oak gall
ink in the dustbin behind the museum. Gerald’s account of burying
the chest with the poem and the jewels, I reckon.”

“Yeah, Minty would be even more eager to hide
their origins than to establish the Rutherfords as models of
propriety.” Jean envisioned a clutch of bunny-suited crime-scene
techs digging through dumpsters by flashlight, bathed in stale beer
and rotten vegetables, ruing their choice of professions. “What was
that about Ciara?”

“She and Keith are free to go.” Alasdair
started back toward the bedroom. “Gary’s after interviewing Minty
at half past nine. He’s thinking if a cascade of sorts arrives on
her doorstep before she knows she’s suspected, she’ll not have time
to work up a response.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.” Jean followed him,
spread the duvet over the bed, and started pulling clothes from the
wardrobe. “So Delaney wants enough of a show of force he’s actually
including you in the interview.”

“You’re invited as well. He’s thinking you’ll
be there in any event, he might as well save face by pretending he
wants you.” Alasdair shook out his sweater. It was a blue sweater,
lighter than police navy blue, darker than his eyes. His eyes that
rested on dark circles like smudges of ash, rimmed by tiny creases.
His eyes that were turned on her, waiting patiently as a cop on a
stakeout for the suspect to emerge. He wasn’t pretending
anything.

All she could do was press her hands against
his chest, feeling the cool cotton of his T-shirt and the firm
flesh beneath grow warm to her touch. “So who’s going to apologize
to whom?”

“I’m apologizing to you,” he returned, and
his lips brushed her forehead. “We’ll talk later. Just now, we’ve
got work to do.”

“Yes, we do.” Jean dressed and applied makeup
—what did you wear for a confrontation with a killer, anyway?—and
followed Alasdair’s voice to the front steps of the flat, where he
was just putting away his cell phone. Crows called from the
battlements.
A murder of crows
, she thought.
An
unkindness of ravens. A reive of Rutherfords
.

Just as P.C. Freeman opened the gate for
Alasdair’s car, Jean’s phone rang. Miranda, already at work on a
Monday morning? No. The screen read “Michael Campbell-Reid.”
Neither he nor Rebecca knew anything about the latest
spine-tingling episode, did they? “Hi, Michael.”

Alasdair eased through the gateway and onto
the road, which was free of newspeople—they were probably still
staking out Ciara’s wild goose in Kelso.

“Good morning, Jean,” Michael said. “I’m
hearing amazing things about the investigation.”

“You are? Who’s your mole?”

“He’s closer than you think. Alasdair. He’s
just asked Rebecca if there’s room at the inn for Ciara as well as
Keith.”

Jean glanced at Alasdair. “Ciara? The
B&B?”

“I reckon she’s still in danger at Glebe
House,” he said, “whether Minty’s arrested or not.”

Roddy Elliot paced across his farmyard, his
dogs at his heels, his hands clenched at his sides, top-heavy, like
a battering ram with feet. Who dares meddle with me, demanded his
posture, in the immortal words of the motto of Scotland. Alasdair
put the pedal to the metal.

Envisioning Minty injecting Ciara’s
toothpaste with foxglove, Jean turned back to the phone. “You can
put Keith and Ciara in the same room, if you have to.”

“That’s the lay of the land, is it? And I use
the word ‘lay’ advisedly,” Michael added with a chuckle. “In the
meantime, I’ve got news from the museum.”

Stanelaw Museum? Had there been another
break-in? Perhaps Angus’s ghost was angry, unlike his living
personality. . . . Oh! “About that scrap of paper in the secret
compartment of the harp?”

“Aye,” Michael said. “The documents boffins
had it out over the weekend, but no joy. Or very little, in any
event.”

“It’s not a sliver of Mary Stuart’s laundry
list?”

“Not so they could tell. It’s not words at
all, but a strip off the edge of a sketch, part of a grid, a bit of
an arc, and what’s likely a drip of ink. The entire drawing might
have been a bairn’s game.”

“Or a map?” asked Jean. Alasdair looked over
at her.

“If the paper and ink weren’t authentic
sixteenth-century, I’d say it was meant to be a power pylon. As it
is, it’s anyone’s guess. Coming just now,” Michael shouted away
from the phone, and told Jean, “I’m obliged to play the good host.
You and Alasdair, you’re owing us a full explanation soon as may
be.”

“We’re just hoping we’ll have explanations to
make. Thanks.” Snapping her phone shut, she told Alasdair, “The
paper inside the harp, it’s the edge of a grid pattern and an ink
blot. Make of it what you will.”

“Angus made nothing of it, or he’d have had
it out.”

“Therefore, a scrap of paper wasn’t what he
was looking for.”