Alasdair jolted to attention, his mental equivalent of Kallinikos’s notebook and pen jotting down the particulars, his face betraying all the expression of a blank piece of paper. He opened the garden gate for Jean and she stepped through, then to the side as Ciara swept past.
Ciara’s cream-puff complexion sagged just a bit, though it was hardly curdled. The tinkle of her signature earrings seemed muted and dirge-like. She was not wearing her pink pelt, but a beaded shawl that glittered as she moved. “Poor Angus, passing before his time. He’ll be missed.”
“How’s Minty holding up?” asked Jean.
“So brave. So calm. Preparing to open the cookery school as usual this coming week. But we know that Angus’s spirit will linger on, don’t we?”
“Jeez.” Keith was inspecting his fingertips—Logan would have taken his prints as well as Ciara’s. “Most normal people—”
Ciara’s voice cut through his like a flute cutting through a drone. “The pub at two, Jean? It’s my shout. Is Alasdair still drinking whiskeys so dry they shrivel your tongue?”
Alasdair might be on a first-name basis with dry, but his tongue was anything but withered. “Why’d you phone Val Trotter at half past six this morning, Ciara?”
Keith looked around at Alasdair, the sunlight on his glasses hiding his expression.
Ciara stopped dead, then asked with an indulgent smile, “Aren’t you the clever boots?”
“Not a bit of it,” Alasdair replied. “Val told me.”
“Giving her the third degree, were you?”
“By not answering the question, you’re leaving me to make assumptions. And what I’m assuming is that you and Val are old mates.”
Say what? Jean asked herself, but for once saw good reason not to speak.
Alasdair’s supple tongue moved on. “You told the Brimberry girl to have herself the Saturday morning off just so’s you could sneak about with Angus, is that it? I don’t know what all this is in aid of, Ciara, but I’m advising you to come clean. Now.”
“Sneaking about with Angus, when everyone knew we were doing business?” Ciara’s smile broadened. “Now is no time for negativity, Alasdair. What goes round, comes round.”
“Aye, that it does. Best you remember that.” He made an about-face and headed for the building at a quick, businesslike clip.
Keith spun around, considerably less neatly, and plunged through the gate. “Let’s go, Ciara.”
But Ciara lingered, first watching Alasdair stride up the path, then turning to Jean with a sympathetic crinkle to her brow. “Over twenty years in the police force will do that to a man. Pity.”
Outside the fence, Keith was climbing into the car and starting the engine. By the time Ciara reached the passenger door, he was already starting to pull away. Was he trying to outrun the law? Jean wondered as she hurried up the path. Or trying to outrun Ciara?
She caught up with Alasdair near the door of the police annex, beside a garden bench. “I’d say that was a shot in the dark about Ciara and Val, but you never scattershoot.”
“No, that was no guess. Ciara’s got a tattoo of a harp as well, though not on her shoulder.”
Jean felt her eyes cross, visualizing where the tattoo might be, complete with the corollary of Alasdair seeing it—not that that was the issue, murder was the issue. “Yeah, Ciara and Val must not have been introduced by her uncle. At least, not as recently as Val implied. Okay, so they’re good enough mates to get the same tattoo, one that refers to Ferniebank. So what? They’ve both got an interest in Ferniebank.”
The crease between Alasdair’s brows indicated that the subject was under consideration.
“What about Keith’s muddy car?” Jean went on. “You didn’t ask him about it.”
“I’m not the investigating officer. I cannot impound the car for testing. If I’d asked him, I’d have warned him off. Logan, now, he’ll get onto Delaney . . .”
Logan appeared in the doorway, arms crossed, visage grim, his five o’clock shadow more of a ten o’clock eclipse. He’d probably been up most of the night, too. “Mr. Cameron, I’ll take your statement now. Miss Fairbairn, if you’d be so kind as to wait in the garden.”
With a sharp sideways glance at Jean, conveying everything from behave yourself to here we go again, Alasdair stepped into the office and Logan closed the door.
Jean sat down on the bench. Keith had some explaining to do, as did Ciara, but as suspects went . . . Not that anyone was walking around with blood on their hands. No gore, as Miranda had said. Poison had once been an unusual weapon in this part of the world—stabbing, bashing, hanging, and pitching over precipices all worked just fine. Jean imagined the glee when gunpowder presented yet another way of bloodily proving your point. Poison now, poison was subtle.
Shaking her head, she focused on her surroundings. For starting in such mirk and doubt, the day had become tourist-brochure perfect, the clouds lifting and contracting into big white poufs drifting in a blue sky. Bees buzzed drowsily from flower to flower, dodging plaster gnomes half-concealed in the shrubbery. She plucked a leaf from a sage plant and inhaled the fragrance.
The “vine-covered” Mrs. Logan must be the gardener, although Logan’s black temperament didn’t have to extend to his thumbs. As for where the lady of the house was now, an open window behind Jean’s back emitted the murmur of televised voices and eight notes of a clock chiming half past the hour. Twelve-thirty. Time flies.
Jean sat up straighter. A clock. The Westminster chimes. So Minty’s house wasn’t the only possible site of the anonymous phone call. Which probably wasn’t anonymous to Wallace. A shame he didn’t record his caller’s name, but then, he hadn’t expected to either drop dead or be done to death immediately thereafter.
As though echoing her musings, her phone trilled. She burrowed into her bag to find her phone had once again worked its way to the bottom. Ah, Hugh. “Good afternoon. You’ve heard.”
“That I have,” Hugh replied soberly. “Poor Angus. He could be a bit befuddled at times—so can we all, come to that—but he meant well.”
“You said you met him when you were here for the museum opening in April.”
“Him and his wife and a collection of local worthies, including the woman negotiating for Ferniebank dressed in what looked to be a cross between a haystack and a chandelier. Everyone was pretending not to notice.”
Yeah, Jean told herself, money speaks loud enough to drown out even Ciara’s overly audible clothing choices, a luxury not permitted to Zoe and Derek. Had she told Hugh about Alasdair and Ciara? She wasn’t going to get into that now. “Did anyone say anything about the true story of Isabel Sinclair and the harp and . . . Well, I don’t even know what to ask, it’s all so vague.”
“Angus was saying it was time for a true story to be coming out at last, but Madam shushed him right smartly, and I cannot say whether he was referring to Isabel or the dig at Ferniebank.”
“A true story about the dig?” Jean asked, sitting up so straight her rump left the bench.
“Haven’t a clue. The other Rutherford, Wallace, he was saying he’d made quite a study of Gerald’s writings about Isabel and the Sinclairs and had urged the dig to begin with. But then, it was all idle chitchat whilst we stood about after the formalities, where I spoke a bit about the clarsach and played ‘The Keiking Glass.’ ”
“ ‘The Looking Glass?’ That’s appropriate. I feel as though I’ve fallen through one. Any moment now, a white rabbit in a waistcoat is going to burst out of the bushes and go for my throat.”
“But you’re not considering coming back to Edinburgh, are you now?” Without waiting for the answer, Hugh concluded, “If I can recall anything else said at the opening, I’ll phone.”
“Yes, please. Any time. And thanks.”
Jean tucked her phone away. Closing her eyes, she envisioned Ciara with long white ears and a pink nose. That made her smile. Now if she could just breathe deeply and relax her shoulders, which were almost embracing her own modestly extended ears.
The door of the police office flew open. Jean looked up to see Alasdair exiting the room like an iceberg aiming for the Titanic. “Your turn,” he said, forcing the words out between his teeth.
Giving a statement was an entirely different thing from taking one, wasn’t it? Especially with Logan staking out his somewhat ambivalent territory. Jean whispered, “Did you ask him about the drawings?”
“Oh aye, he took them,” replied Alasdair, not whispering at all. “He’s saying I meant for him to take them, that they’re safe as houses here, aren’t they?”
Logan stepped into the doorway and gestured Jean inside.
In the stuffy, cluttered little room, she sat where she was told to sit and accepted a cup of tea, which Logan doctored with milk from an old-fashioned glass bottle—one of Roddy’s products, no doubt, evading the draconian standards of the EU. Holding the mug between her hands to quell any gesticulatory comments, she gave her name and address and detailed the events of the night before. Just the facts, no fancies—not that fancy and fact weren’t getting harder and harder to distinguish. At least she didn’t have to offer up her fingertips. She was already, as they said, known to the police.
Logan’s thick, black eyebrows made semi-circles over his eyes, like protective arches. They didn’t move while she spoke, or when she signed her statement, or as she placed the empty mug on the corner of the desk and made her escape. He made a good foil for Minty in—what? Protecting and promoting the public welfare? Keeping up community appearances?
Alasdair was pacing the garden path, fingering a strand of lavender and exchanging mistrustful looks with a ceramic fairy posing on a ceramic toadstool. When he saw Jean, he took off for the gate so fast she had to hurry to keep up, her feet crunching on the gravel path as though walking through cornflakes. “I get the feeling,” she said, “that Logan is trying to signal he’s not intimidated by you.”
“I’m not after intimidating him.” Alasdair leaped into the driver’s seat and started the engine.
Jean slammed her door. “Yeah, well, it’s our beliefs that make us act, not the facts, right?”
“Right.” Alasdair made a deft U-turn back toward town.
“Here’s a fact—a factoid, a factule—for you. Logan’s got a striking clock. Wallace’s phone call, remember? Maybe Logan was delivering a friendly warning. Maybe Roddy phoned in a threat while he was delivering milk.”
“Circumstantial evidence,” said Alasdair predictably. “Though either is possible, aye.”
Jean came about on another tack. “Hugh called. He was at the museum when it opened last April. He thought Angus said something about the dig having a true story, although he could have been talking about Isabel. Either way, Minty shut him up fast. And Wallace was saying the dig was his idea. That’s not what Minty told us, was it? Didn’t she say she’d organized the dig to give Wallace a job after he retired and to clean up the neighborhood?”
“That she did, though her taking credit’s not surprising. Neither is hearing there’s something peculiar about the dig, when there’s something peculiar about Ferniebank from riverbank to cap house.” Alasdair stopped at the intersection with the main road and glanced into the back seat—yes, the plastic container was still there, not that they had left the car unobserved. “Logan said he’d come by presently and unlock the museum, so’s we can leave the chipping.”
“Good. Maybe the museum will give us the Grand Unified Theory of motivation or something.”
There was the shop again, this time with Valerie herself walking off down the sidewalk. Maybe she was on her way to the pub. Great. Let’s have a convention. “Ciara has the tattoo of a harp?” Jean couldn’t help asking.
“She didn’t have it when we were married. I saw it the last time I saw her, six, seven years since.” The corner of his mouth tucked itself into a wry smile—Jean wasn’t fooling him, but then, she never could. “It’s high on her hip. She was wearing a short blouse and low-riding jeans on a warm day. When she bent over to fetch her phone from her bag, I noticed it. I thought it had something to do with Mystic Scotland, that’s what she was blethering about at the time.”
Oh, Jean thought. “What was she doing before Mystic Scotland? When she was with you?”
“Working for a company that published tourist brochures, postcards, those little books of ghost stories, and the like. Not so far from what you’re doing, if the truth be told.”
Yeah, Jean and Ciara were both story-dealers, if not necessarily truth-tellers. Jean opened her mouth, but anything else she could ask would lead to a discussion much too personal for this moment. She confined herself to, “Like those books on the shelf back at Ferniebank. I bet that’s why the place attracted her attention to begin with.”
The Granite Cross was impacted in cars. Alasdair coasted past the entrance to the beer garden, giving Jean the chance to ascertain that it had become media circus headquarters, heaving with people who, if they weren’t waving cameras around, were hanging onto anyone who was.
By the time Alasdair found a parking spot and they strolled back, Valerie was darting into the front door of the pub so quickly you’d think she was trying to avoid meeting them. Her cardigan was now draped over her arm, revealing a tank top and the tattoo. Jean nudged Alasdair. He nodded—yes, it was the same design as Ciara’s, something else that couldn’t be a coincidence. The two women had not met in the last month, that’s for sure, but that revelation didn’t actually rise to the level of Valerie lying to Delaney. As for Ciara calling her at the crack of dawn, well, why not? Angus’s death was big news.
The interior of the pub featured the usual eclectic assortment of tables and chairs, the out-of-date advertisements, the long bar fringed with beer taps on the bottom and glasses on the top. Liquor bottles glistened in ordered ranks before a mirror that reflected Polly Brimberry as she hustled back and forth. A television sat on a shelf in one corner, tuned to a soccer—er, football match, Jean corrected herself. A door next to the bar stood open on a block of sunshine and movement.
The room was as crowded as the garden, but contained considerably less oxygen. What air there was had already cycled through several sets of lungs and was damp and musty with scents of stale beer and cooking food, plus the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke from outside. From the shortage of prostrate bodies, Jean assumed that even if there was a poisoner making the rounds of the area, he or she wasn’t operating in the kitchen of the pub.
Alasdair pointed Jean toward a booth partially blocked by a pram, handed her the stone chip, and kept on going toward the bar. “Don’t get me anything alcoholic, I’m spaced enough already,” Jean called after him, and didn’t wait to see if he snickered agreement.
“There you are.” Rebecca set down her tea cup and waved Jean in to a landing on the opposite side of the booth.
Beside her, Michael drank deeply from his glass of dark ale and wiped a scrap of froth from his upper lip. “What’s the latest, then?”
Jean slid onto the vinyl seat and spread her hands in an extravagant gesture encompassing several gradations of puzzlement. “The evidence is piling up, but who the heck knows where any of it fits?” She reviewed the situation, from harp to nuts of the human variety, concluding, “Here’s the bit of inscription we took away from Zoe Friday night. Logan’s going to let us into the museum.”
Rebecca’s eyes glazed over and Michael’s mouth made an O, either from the amount of information or from its disorganized presentation—yeah, Jean thought, she’d barely have given herself a passing grade, a lady’s C, maybe, for simply doing the assignment.
“We’ll come with you to the museum,” Rebecca said. “I’m not sure Linda’s lungs are up to this atmosphere. And I don’t mean the ambience.” She looked into the pram, but the baby’s eyelids, transparent as peony petals, were closed, and her tiny chest rose and fell peacefully.
Alasdair zigzagged toward them, offered little Linda a smile, and slid in next to Jean. He planted two glasses wet with condensation on the table. “Here you are, lemonade.”
“Thanks,” Jean told him. “Michael, Rebecca, this is the one, the only, Alasdair Cameron.”
“At last.” Rebecca shook Alasdair’s hand across the table and passed it over to Michael, who wrung it enthusiastically.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Alasdair, and to Michael, “You’re the piper, then.”
Michael’s pipes were propped up next to him, looking like a spindly-legged creature wearing a tartan loincloth. “I’ll be tuning up directly, not so you’d take notice in this crowd.”
“We’ll all be taking notice. Why else were the great Highland pipes instruments of war, rallying the fighters over the clamor of battle? Assuming the fighters weren’t yet charging downhill, half-naked and all berserk.”
“The Camerons charging with their swords,” returned Michael with a grin, “into the gunfire of the Campbells?”
“That’s my lot, bonny fighters but piss-poor politicians.”
Rebecca’s smile washed over Alasdair and splashed toward Jean. Ah, I see the attraction.
Alasdair lifted his glass of rich, amber fluid toward Michael, who saluted in return. “Slainte,” Alasdair said, and drank. For just a moment his perceptive gaze turned inward, no doubt tracing the path of the palliative into his stomach and thence to his aching nerves. Brewers, Jean thought, should be right up there with pharmacists.
Michael indicated the television. “Score’s tied, though Aberdeen’s having the worst of it.”
“That’s their modus operandi,” returned Alasdair, and launched into a no-doubt-intelligent discussion of the fine art of football of which Jean understood nothing. So Alasdair could do sports, too. Who knew? Smiling, she sipped her sweetened citric acid and looked around.
Derek was imitating a cockroach beside a slot machine in the far corner. Valerie, braced on the bar like a sailor hanging onto a gunwale, was expounding to Noel. The publican’s amiable expression hadn’t exactly soured since Friday, but seemed a bit askew, caught between the rock of consternation and the deep blue sea of commerce. He was wiping glasses, his gaze flitting around the room, not really listening to whatever Valerie was saying, but nodding politely even so.
Behind a cash register stood a young woman Jean thought at first glance was Zoe, if Zoe’s bottle-black hair could have gone brown overnight. But no, this girl was older, her lips pink and smiling instead of crimson and pouting, and her face was less angular, if not as full as her parents’. Shannon hurried through a swinging door and returned a moment later with two plates of food, which she deposited at a nearby table. “Your meal’s just coming,” she called to the booth, and sped away like a model along a catwalk, all lissome grace and swaying hair.
Rebecca pried the top off the plastic container and scrutinized the inscribed stone. “Is there a copy of the entire inscription in the museum?”
“If there isn’t, we have a copy of the Ancient Monuments report.” A dark wriggle in the corner of Jean’s eye turned into Zoe, her appearance today part goth, part gamin. She held two plates brimming with sandwiches and salad, and stared down at the stone chip as though it were a cobra rising up from a fakir’s basket.
After a moment, Michael said, “Those are our lunches, are they, Zoe?”
With a jerk, Zoe clattered the dishes onto the table. Lettuce flew.
Alasdair turned the plastic dish toward her. “Oh aye, this is the chipping you were returning to the castle. Tell me again where you found it, because I’m thinking it wasn’t in the castle at all.”
Her lips thinned into a red gash indented by her front teeth. She glanced over her shoulder at Valerie, who was now pushing her way toward the back door, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.
“Was it Derek’s mum telling you there’s a curse on Ferniebank?” Alasdair persisted. “Is it this stone that’s bad luck, or Ferniebank itself?”
“They’re saying Angus is dead,” Zoe replied. “Murdered, like.”
“He’s dead,” was all Alasdair would commit to. “Who else has been telling you Ferniebank’s a bad place? Your grandfather?”
Now Zoe was looking at Alasdair as though he was the cobra, her black, spiked eyelashes accentuating her dismay. “Grandad doesn’t mean any harm. He’s set in his ways is all.”
“So set in his ways,” Jean asked, “that he begrudged Wallace taking his place as caretaker?”
“Mum says Grandad and Wally, they used to fish together, but no more, not since the castle was opened up. All I’ve ever known is them going on at each other about the castle, the chapel, Isabel, of all things. And then the Macquarrie woman arrived, and they had rows over her as well.”
“They were rowing over her and her plans for Ferniebank the day Wallace died, were they?” Alasdair asked.
He’d asked Zoe that question before. Now, cornered, she nodded weakly. “And because my mum was taking him his meals, just like my granny did. And because me and Derek, we were hanging about there. . . . Well, Minty, she told them both to boil their heads.”
Probably not in those words, Jean thought, just as Alasdair asked, “Minty was there that day?”
“Keeping an eye on her investments, I reckon. Wallace was rabbiting about Gerald’s papers, but then that was something else he and my grandad were always going on about, barking bloody Gerald.” Seizing a bit of her old bluster, she added, “Like anyone gives a fig for that secret wisdom rubbish.”
You do, when it’s filtered through Valerie and Derek, thought Jean.
“Someone does,” Alasdair said. “Val Trotter, perhaps? Wallace, certainly. Maybe even your granny. Was that what she had in common with Wallace, a taste for secret wisdom rubbish?”
Zoe cast another look over her shoulder to where her mother and Shannon were replenishing a rack of snack bags. When she turned back to the table, her words spilled out in a stream of diphthongs so compressed that Jean had to strain to make them out. “Grandad says we’re obliged to respect the graves, even the romanish ones, but there was that piece of rock in his dresser. After that, everything went wrong. There’s Grandad going on about the wages of sin being death, and it’s sinful to steal, isn’t it? So I went to put the stone back.”
“Last I heard,” said Alasdair, “lying’s a sin as well.”
“You cannot blame me for helping out my grandad.”
Rebecca’s brown eyes and Michael’s blue hadn’t blinked, Jean noted. They were chewing their food very slowly and quietly, pretending to be invisible but not pretending not to listen.
“You meant to protect your grandad by returning the inscription,” Alasdair said, his soft burr barely intelligible above the noise. “Protect him from supernatural agencies if not from the secular ones. What about Derek, then? Did you mean to protect him as well?”
“He’s not done anything,” Zoe protested. “He’s thick as a board, but he means well.”
There was a lot of well-meaning going around, thought Jean.
“Right.” Alasdair tapped his glass on the table like a judge tapping his gavel. “Thank you. Detective Inspector Delaney will be having a word with you and your family.”
Beneath her ashy makeup, Zoe went even whiter. “I don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. We’ve got sod-all to do with, with . . .”
When she didn’t finish her sentence, Alasdair said, “The police will be deciding that.”
An eddy in the throng was Polly, plodding along wearily, her apron stained with food, her hair matted to the sweat on her forehead. Nothing about her was sharp except her voice. “Zoe, there’s work needs doing in the kitchen. The focaccia’ll not be baking itself.”
“The focaccia’s Minty’s idea, let her cook it,” said Zoe, but still she retreated from the table as fast as her thick-soled, Frankenstein-design shoes could carry her.
That must be what she’d smelled the other day and interpreted as pizza, Jean thought. Focaccia was one of Valerie’s specialties, wasn’t it? The days when British pubs served nothing more than permutations of pork and potatoes were long gone, not that she’d found one that had a serious grasp of, say, nachos or fajitas.
“Well done,” Michael told Alasdair with a nod of approval.
Rebecca leaned across the table and confided in a stage whisper, “He’s good, Jean.”
“I know,” Jean said, but refrained from suspending herself from Alasdair’s shoulder and fluttering her lashes adoringly.
He made a scoffing noise deep in his throat and washed it down with beer. “Time to have Delaney ask Roddy a few questions about the theft of the inscription.”
“Roddy’s definitions of desecration seeming a bit fluid,” Jean summarized.
A lull in the conversational buzz signaled Logan, his uniform cutting a swathe toward their table. From across the demilitarized zone of the pram he announced, “Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn, Mrs. Rutherford wants a word at the museum.”
Jean almost choked on her lemonade. Minty?
“Minty?” asked Rebecca.
Having his priorities straight, Alasdair drained his glass before gathering up the inscribed rock and sliding out of the booth. “Well then, Jean, we’ve been summoned.”