Jean stepped out of the flat to find Alasdair standing with Freeman while the other constable pushed the gate shut yet again. “. . . no car there,” the young man was saying, his freckles sliding downward in dismay. “I chapped at the door and shouted. I’m thinking the lad was playing silly beggars, going from window to window, though it could have been the breeze blowing the curtains.”
“It was the lad,” said Alasdair, “hiding out whilst his mum chases off to Kelso.”
“Shall I go back?”
“No, we’ve got no warrant to flush him out. Thank you just the same. Have yourself a cuppa.”
“Thank you, sir.” Freeman strolled over to the incident room.
“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.
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.