The Burning Glass by Lillian Stewart Carl Page B

kept a telescope atop the tower.
Star-gazing and train-spotting and naff goings-on, such like.”
    “Astronomy has to be a frustrating hobby in
this climate,” commented Jean.
    “Was Wallace spying, then?” Alasdair
asked.
    Zoe shrugged again. “Might have been, though
there’s nothing worth spying on in a dump such as Stanelaw, let
alone Ferniebank Farm.”
    “The arsehole of creation,” added Derek.
    “It’s dead boring, but it’s all we’ve got,
save the pub,” Zoe told him tartly.
    “No accounting for tastes.” Jean strolled
over to the trap door and looked down. She saw nothing but a modern
metal ladder, its upper rails bolted to the sides of the hole,
plunging into subterranean darkness. Again she coughed. But this
time the tickle in her chest was quite literal. The musty miasma
was emanating from the dungeon. Or, more properly, from the pit
prison. A luckless offender—and offense was easy, in the Middle
Ages—would be dumped into the underground chamber and left to
reflect on his sins and/or rot while the business of daily life
went on above him. He or she would have been able to hear voices
and music, and smell the food cooking in the kitchen. Now there was
highly refined torture.
    Alasdair’s hand holding the flashlight
appeared in Jean’s peripheral vision. “Thanks.” She took the heavy
metal cylinder and flicked the switch.
    The tiny chamber below her leaped into
definition. She saw no ineradicable bloodstain, like that
supposedly marking a sixteenth-century murder in Mary Stuart’s
apartments in Holyrood Palace. No, the dungeon floor consisted of
prosaic gray dirt, broken by humps of living rock and imprinted
with the ribbed bootprints of the team that had rescued not
Wallace, but his body. The walls were the foundations of the keep,
stones of all shapes and subtle gradations of gray piled one upon
the other. Two rough steps led up to the rim of a small pit within
the larger one—the prisoner’s privy. In the opposite corner
something glinted in the light, a glass disk, it looked like, and
beside that winked an almost microscopic gold dot. Neither had been
there long enough to gather much dust.
    From her height, Jean couldn’t estimate size.
Was she seeing the lens and nosepiece from a pair of old-fashioned
round eyeglasses? Or was the glass the pane protecting the bulb of
a flashlight? Although, manifestly, not the flashlight she was
holding, which was a shiny new one. As for the gold, small as a
punctuation mark, well, it was probably part of a candy wrapper.
She sure wasn’t going to climb down and investigate.
    Imagining an electric torch dropping from
Wallace Rutherford’s ill, shaking hand, she stepped back from the
edge and switched off the light. Alasdair didn’t need any more
lamps for his third-degree.
    He was still gazing, po-faced on purpose, at
Zoe. “Why were you sneaking about the place in the dark? It’s been
open all day. I’d have let you in without paying.”
    Through his guise of utter boredom, Derek
insisted, “We was after seeing where the old bloke died is all. No
harm in that.”
    “Just having ourselves a giggle.” Zoe’s body
language conveyed nervousness, not boredom.
    Alasdair pounced. “Turn out your pockets,
Zoe.”
    Her hands stopped moving beneath the fabric.
She stared. Derek’s not terribly square jaw dropped. “How did you
know . . . ?”
    “Derek,” Zoe hissed, a remarkable feat when
his name had no sibilants in it. She yanked her hands from her
jacket pockets and displayed an MP3 player, a penlight, some
change, and a lipstick.
    “And?” Alasdair asked, extending his
hand.
    Jerkily, resentfully, she pulled out what
might have been a jumbo-sized flint flake and dropped it into
Alasdair’s outstretched palm.
    Jean stretched her neck to better see the
piece of weathered stone roughly the size of a paperback book,
carved with the letters “IC” and “J.” Years of freezing and heating
could have caused the flake to slough off of a