Alasdair signaled the sentry constable to open the gate and release their sortie. Jean didn’t try to shield her face with her reporter’s notebook. She was only a member of the third estate by default, not by temperament. Rubbing her special status with the investigation in the faces of this ravening crew brought her down to their . . . But they were only doing their jobs in a competitive business. Like Delaney was doing his, in a business that had its own competitions.
At least now the cameras, the microphones, the shouting mouths and darting eyes, weren’t on her case like they’d been during the academic scandal in her past. Judging by Alasdair’s fissured lips, he was resisting a similar memory. He jockeyed the car through the journalistic scrum with neither curse nor comment, and accelerated toward Stanelaw, only to slow at the layby at the end of the perimeter wall.
A faint, muddy track led into the woods, now closed off with police tape that looked incongruously cheerful, like party streamers looped from tree to tree. “If you drove far down that track,” Jean said, “you’d need a tow truck on stand by.”
“No need to drive far, just pull into the trees and walk down to the end of the wall. In any event, Gary’s folk found no car. Angus either legged it from town or from Glebe House, if he’d gone back there.”
“Or flashlight-person could have driven him out here, then made his, her, its getaway.”
“Aye.” Just as Alasdair picked up speed past Ferniebank Farm, a tall figure leaped through the gate and raised an arm the size of a leg of lamb in the universal gesture of Halt!
Alasdair hit the brakes, throwing Jean forward into the seat belt. Her hand pressing her heart back into her chest, she looked around to see that the imperious figure was neither the ghost of Hamlet’s father nor of Angus roaming in broad daylight.
Roddy Elliot opened the back door of the car and pleated himself into the interior. He was dressed in his Sunday best, a rusty suit and a striped tie hanging askew. “If you’d not object to driving me to the kirk, Mr. Cameron, I’d be willing to overlook the matter of the fishing tackle. I’ve left it a bit late to walk. Those reporters were on my doorstep like crows after carrion. Had to offer to set the dogs on them.”
“Ah, well.” Alasdair swallowed, probably repositioning his own heart. He accelerated again, if only a little. “Certainly, Mr. Elliot. When are services?”
“Noon.” Each slow word in Roddy’s deep voice sounded like the toll of a bell. “Normally I’d not hold with such foolishness as that new female minister, but I’m thinking that the word of the Lord can withstand the voice it’s delivered in, no matter how dainty.”
The wisest fool in Christendom, Jean thought. She extended her hand around the headrest. “Hello, Mr. Elliot. I’m Jean Fairbairn.”
Doubtfully, he took her small, soft hand in his huge, calloused one and released it. “How do you do. A relation of the Fairbairns of Selkirk, by any chance?”
“Not that I know of, no, but my great-grandfather did come from Stow, near Galashiels.”
“But you’re a Yank, like that Keith Bell chap.”
“Yes.” Jean wasn’t sure if that was something he expected her to apologize for, so she used it as an excuse to ask, “Have you seen Keith and Ms. Macquarrie’s plans for Ferniebank?”
“My daughter was showing me a folder with drawings,” Roddy answered.
One beat, two. “What did you think of them?” prodded Alasdair.
“Madness, the lot of it. The Rutherfords would have done better to tear the place down and sell the stone. Muckle good stone in those buildings, but little else save treachery and sorrow.”
Treachery, Jean repeated silently. “I hear Wallace enjoyed researching the history of the area.”
“Wallace was a nutter, like that Macquarrie female, spying, blaspheming—” He stopped dead, then added, “But he was a grand fisherman, for all that.”
Jean didn’t expect him to expand his comments to include Wallace’s supposed role in Helen’s death, and sure enough he didn’t.
“Have you had the police as well this morning?” Alasdair’s mild tone emphasized the “as well,” claiming a brotherhood that didn’t strictly exist.
“That I have. That dark chap with the queer name, polite enough, but I had to put him in his place when he started in with questions that were none of his business.”
“Questions about Angus?” Jean asked.
“With them finding the man dead at the old romanish chapel, and me hearing someone legging it up the road, I reckon looking for clues was his business.” Roddy’s bemused tone indicated that a clue was some exotic species of butterfly.
No one corrected his “them.” Slowing down so far an arthritic snail could have outpaced them, Alasdair said, “Your granddaughter Zoe was visiting the castle Friday. Does she stop with you often?”
“Often enough. Sleeps in her mum’s room at the farm instead of sharing with her sister. She and her granny, they . . .” He paused, then concluded, “Zoe and me, we get on well enough, even though she dresses like she’s got no home and no family to watch out for her.”
“Like Derek Trotter dresses,” Alasdair observed.
Roddy snorted so loudly Jean almost checked the back of her neck for snot. “That young tearaway. Much better he and his mum go on back south, leave us decent folk alone. He was hanging about this morning looking for Zoe, but I’d sent her home. A crime scene’s no place for a girl.”
“You sent Derek on his way, then?”
“I turfed him out quick as you like. Same as I’d turf his mother out of the castle, years ago. I was caretaker there, before Wallace and Angus and that perjink Maitland wife of his tarted the place up. And now they’ve sold it. The love of money is the root of all evil.”
“Is the castle evil?” Jean asked, not bothering to agree that Minty was finicky.
“There’s aye been muckle evil in this world, Miss Fairbairn. Murder, thievery, adultery, pridefulness, drinking, and carousing on the Lord’s day. Mind, I have no objection to a wee dram before dinner, but I’ve told Polly’s Noel again and again, it’s wrong to open the pub of a Sunday. But he and Polly, they’re wanting money, they say. For posh clothes and posh cars and holidays. In my day we’d visit Largs and were glad of it, but no, nowadays Zoe and Shannon, they’re obliged to go to Spain or Florida. This world we live in. This world.”
“There’s always been murder and thievery and the like,” Alasdair said quietly. “There’s always been folk profiting at the expense of others. In some ways, the world’s a better place now than it was in, say, Isabel Sinclair’s time.”
Again Roddy snorted. “Isabel.”
“That’s a bit of inscription from her gravestone on the seat beside you,” said Jean.
“Zoe was, erm, looking at it on the Friday,” Alasdair added.
“She was, was she?” Roddy shifted around and, as far as Jean could tell from the corners of her eyes and the rearview mirrors, soberly considered the plastic container with its tea towel and chip of stone. Did his tangled gray brows rise and then fall? Hard to tell. “Isabel was a whore,” he said at last. “Deserved what she got. Sins will out.”
Alasdair hit the brakes again and swivelled, his incredulous look clicking against Jean’s as it swung into the back seat. “What?”
“Begging your pardon, madam,” Roddy said to Jean’s stunned face. “My late wife would go on about my language, and about Isabel as well—defending her and all, like Wallace, like Gerald, but there’s the truth, right there on the stone for all to see. The word ‘catin.’ It means—well, as I said. It’s French.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Jean. “You mean where that requiescat in pace is oddly spaced? Yeah, it looks like ‘catin,’ but what about that ‘requies’ just sort of hanging in mid-air?”
“And why a French word in the midst of the Latin?” Alasdair demanded.
“Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, she spoke French, didn’t she?” Roddy sat back, his arms folded. Two and two make seventeen and that’s that.
He had dirt beneath his nails, Jean saw, and beard and hair both looked like they’d been combed with a pitchfork. She was reminded of an Old Testament prophet, and wondered if his ruddiness was due to alcohol after all, or to basking in the glow of his own righteousness. Turning back around, she shared yet another look with Alasdair. They’d thought Ciara was making some leaps of fancy. What was Roddy making—leaps of faith? Fancy and faith were almost two sides of the same coin, and very often involved actual physical coinage.
“So what did Isabel get, then?” asked Alasdair.
“Her death. The wages of sin.”
“The fire in her room, you mean?” Jean asked. “The burning-glass and signaling her, ah, friend?”
“That’s Gerald’s version of events, bowdlerized for the ladies—Wallace’s mother, most like, and a fine douce woman she was. My mum was her lady’s maid. That’s why Wallace never came forth with the truth, even in that twee bittie booklet of his. Gerald and Wallace Rutherford, they make Angus look right rational. Made. They’re all gone now. All gone to their rewards.”
“And what . . . “ began Alasdair, just as Jean asked, “Where . . .”
“Carry on,” he told her.
“Where did Gerald learn another version of events?” she asked.
“Papers, letters, the clarsach.” Roddy crouched to peer through the windshield at the roofs of Glebe House and the cooking school just rising from the fields ahead. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but it’s gone a quarter ’til, and it’s disrespectful to come late into the church and draw attention to yourself.”
Alasdair lifted his foot from the brake but didn’t press the gas pedal, so that the car crept forward at idling speed. “Where are these papers and letters now?”
“Stanelaw Museum, like as not. Clarsach’s been pinched, though.”
“It’s been recovered,” Jean told him. “Did you know it has a secret compartment for messages? Is that what you mean by Gerald learning the true story from it, that he knew about the compartment and how Isabel used it? He actually wrote a poem about her, you know, based on Hogg’s ‘The Queen’s Wake,’ about a contest of harpers before Mary, Queen of Scots.”
“Another whore, Mary was. And Isabel helping her with her plots—aye, you can learn a lot about folk from the company they keep and the goods they hold valuable. And what they waste their time on, poetry and all.”
Reflected in the mirror, his face was as silent and secret as Glebe House with its curtains closed and its driveways vacant. Yeah, Jean thought, you can learn a lot about people, poetry and all.
So many cars were parked along the road in front of the church that Alasdair had to ease past them. More than one sightseer with a camera stood beside the fence, taking pictures of the two dark, damp holes in the ground, the yawning graves of Helen Elliot and Wallace Rutherford. Judgement Day, Jean thought, had reached Stanelaw, and the graves were giving up their dead.
“The police,” Roddy said, his voice cold. “They asked permission to dig up poor Helen. Have you no respect for the dead? I replied. But the dark one with the queer name, he said ’twas all in the interests of justice. So I agreed. There’s scant respect for anything anymore, not for the dead, not for justice, not for the truth.”
“Sometimes,” said Alasdair, “it seems not.”
“I’m sorry,” Jean added.
Alasdair stopped and Roddy opened the door. “Would you care to join me?”
The prospect was tempting, even though Jean’s tastes in religious ritual ran more to smells and bells.
“Thank you,” said Alasdair with his best courtly manner, “but we’ve been detailed to give statements at P.C. Logan’s office.”
“Oh aye, I’ve been directed to do the same, even though I know nothing. It’s been my bad luck to live at Ferniebank is all. Thank you kindly, Mr. Cameron.” Roddy shook hands with Alasdair, nodded dourly at Jean, then unfolded himself from the car and strode off up the drive toward the church. A few parishioners, for the most part about Roddy’s age, stood around the open door. That straight figure like a conductor’s baton draped in black, the focus of every eye, must be Minty.
Alasdair drove on, leaving Jean to look over her shoulder until the church disappeared from sight and they were on the outskirts of Stanelaw. “I guess we got him in as chatty a mood as he’s ever likely to be,” she said at last. “The events of the last month have to have shaken him up.”
“He told us quite a bit, didn’t he? What it means, I’m still processing. Like him having been the caretaker for the castle and chapel. Could be the Rutherfords paid him for keeping watch on the place, income he lost when Wallace moved in.”
“That doesn’t seem enough reason for the bad blood between them, though it didn’t help. I think his beef with Wallace was philosophical. Religious, if that’s not too strong a word.”
“Too strong? He was saying that Ciara’s plans are blasphemous.”
“Yeah, I guess making even a ‘romanish’ Catholic chapel into a spa would be desecration to someone unenthused over contemporary attitudes. He’s probably thrilled the way Presbyterian churches all over Scotland are being turned into bars, restaurants, offices.”
“What was that about Isabel, then? A true story?”
“We saw her running into the castle, a direct contradiction of the story in Wallace’s leaflet. If she was carrying secret messages for Mary Stuart and her supporters . . .”
“A staunch Protestant like Roddy could well be thinking her a traitor.”
“Politics and religion,” said Jean with a grimace. “There’s a volatile mixture. Historically a motive for murder, over and over again. But not here and now, surely.”
“Most murders are done either to avoid something or to gain something, often both at once. What would Roddy be gaining? And how did he do it? Here, Angus, stop in for a wee dram?”
“So you’ve decided Angus’s death was a murder?”
“Just for the sake of argument.” Alasdair turned the car down a side street. The shop on the corner must be the one belonging to Valerie’s uncle.
“Roddy might have a drink with Angus, but with Wallace? And would he kill his own wife?” Jean shook her head, trying to settle the careening thoughts into one pattern, any pattern, but they spun all the faster, out of control, spitting up flotsam. “Maybe Roddy chipped away the inscription—you know, preventing the whore’s grave from becoming a tourist attraction.”
“I was thinking that myself,” said Alasdair.
“Of course you were,” Jean told him. “So did Roddy really want Wallace’s fishing things?”
“I expect so—waste not, want not. But there might be something in those boxes as well.”
“I heard people in the Laigh Hall earlier. Did Minty give the go-ahead to search the boxes?”
“She said something to Delaney about doing whatever needed doing at Ferniebank, which he took as carte blanche. We’ll have ourselves a squint this evening.”
“In the meantime, we have another reason to get to the museum, to see what the story is with Isabel.”
“Assuming it’s relevant to the case.” Alasdair stopped behind a nondescript brown car parked in front of a cottage that fit Rebecca’s description of “vine-covered,” to the point that windows and doors peered through oblong holes in the growth that had probably been achieved with industrial-strength pruning shears. Flowers of every hue rioted in the front garden. A square pebbledash addition to one side looked like the proverbial sore thumb, even with its blue sign reading “Police.” It was more of a police room than a police station.
“What isn’t relevant to the case? Like Valerie’s tattoo—oh, you don’t know about that, do you? I saw her coming out of the pub on Friday. She has a tattoo of a harp on her shoulder.”
Alasdair switched off the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition, and turned to stare, eyes bright, brows at full alert. “Eh?”
“It could be coincidence, but we already have enough of those. She grew up here and was at the Ferniebank dig.”
“The Ferniebank Clarsach. No coincidence, no.” Alasdair jangled the keys pensively, then climbed out, locked the doors—and froze, staring at the car in front of them.
Jean walked to his side and saw what he was looking at. The brown finish of the car was splashed with dried mud, and the tires were caked with it. “Whoa,” Jean said. “I recognize that car.”
Alasdair used the all-purpose syllable again. “Eh?”
“Keith was driving it at Minty’s house yesterday. And it wasn’t muddy then, because Ciara was talking to Valerie, and her car was muddy.”
The door of the police annex opened. Keith Bell slipped through the aperture, seeming no more solid than a tendril of smoke. Then Ciara stepped around the corner of the building like an ambulatory rose bush, despite her flowing fabrics and rainbow shades just as insubstantial.