The Blue Hackle (12 page)

“No, he inherited Dunasheen—and the title,
come to that—three years ago, and she’s been gone four, I’m
thinking. Breast cancer. Pity, that.”

“Oh yes, it is.” Jean sat back down and
leaned her elbows on the table, a casual, even sloppy, pose she’d
hesitated to assume in front of Diana. “Fergie was talking about
his Green Lady, as in a household chatelaine returning after death
to continue her domestic duties. But Dunasheen isn’t haunted by his
wife.”

“Got it in one. Dunasheen’s haunted, Fergie’s
not.” Alasdair inclined his head toward the portrait. “I’m thinking
that’s why he’s so keen on seeing ghosts.”

“On believing in the supernatural. He wants
to know that Emma’s not really gone.” The room fell silent, the
dense wooden doors and stone walls muffling any sounds. Still, Jean
lowered her voice. “I’m pretty sure I heard Seonaid MacDonald, the
Green Lady, in the drawing room, right after you went after Tina. A
kind of murmuring wail, just like in the stories.”

Alasdair nodded. “So she’s real, then, it’s
that Fergie cannot sense her. Nothing peculiar about that, not to
us, leastways.”

“But what is peculiar is that Dakota, the
little girl, was insisting she saw a ghost when they drove up the
driveway, which would have been about the same time.”

“Maybe she’s got the allergy, poor lass.”

“Or maybe she saw a person. There was a man
in black standing in the parking area about six. Pritchard yelled
at him to go away.”

“Thomson was going on about a hermit living
nearby. Sounds to be the local character. Maybe it was him.”

“Then he’s not a hermit in the traditional
sense, like the Egyptian holy men who’d take up residence on top of
a pillar in the desert, or the Celtic ones on their little
islands.”

“That’s all you heard, Pritchard seeing him
off?”

“Diana defended him, said he wasn’t causing
any harm, that he’d probably been in the village—I guess even a
monk or a misanthrope would need more food than shellfish and
seaweed—and he heard about Greg and stopped on his way home to see
the police cars. Although it seemed to me he was looking at the
house. He saw me sitting in the window and had himself a good hard
stare.”

Again Alasdair nodded, the equivalent of
clicking “save” in a computer program. “Likely the man’s the
equivalent of the village idiot, a bit of an embarrassment.”

“Mentally-challenged,” Jean corrected, albeit
with a smile.

“Aye.” Alasdair leaned on the table, too.
Between them, down the expanse of snowy linen, paraded six small
sculptures of tree trunks. Eyes, noses, and mouths were sunk deep
into the wrinkles of the bark, and branches bearing the leaves of
different kinds of trees made stylized crowns, reminding Jean of
Tolkien’s tree-people, the ents. Except hollows in these sculptures
held tea lights, still flaming, if somewhat wanly in their puddles
of wax.

Jean wondered if Diana would have preferred
classical silver or brass candlesticks, whether Fergie’s taste for
fantasy was a source of conflict.

“Still,” Alasdair said, “he might could have
seen or heard something near the beach. I’ll have a word with
Thomson and Fergie as well.”

Who? Oh. The man in black watching the house.
Jean dropped her voice into a harsh whisper of her own. “There’s
something else. Alasdair, did you notice that one of those
regimental dirks hanging in the entrance hall is missing? Just the
knife, not the sheath.”

“Is it now?” Whatever trace of post-prandial
satisfaction had softened his expression vanished like sunlit sky
behind a thunderstorm, and his eyes and mouth hardened with the
implications. He looked at his watch again.

A familiar brittle jingle echoed from the
pantry. Through the door came Nancy Finlay pushing the serving
cart, now furnished with several bottles and a coffee carafe
emitting a delectable vapor. Her gray hair was set in waves solid
as cement curbs, revealing rhinestone earrings. Her watery gray
eyes were edged with blue shadow and her lips gleamed with red
lipstick that, Jean saw as she spoke, also edged her front teeth.
“Fergus bid me bring your coffee and drinks here. He said you’d be
having yourselves a wee bit blether about the murdered man, may he
rest in peace. Though that’s not likely, not with him being done to
death afore his time. We had no such goings-on in the old laird’s
day. It’s like being transported back in time, no stranger safe and
families going at it . . .”

Like billy-o,
Greg had said.

“Thank you, Nancy.” Fergie reappeared on her
heels and took possession of the cart. “An excellent dinner,
despite the distractions.”

“Ah, it’s nowt but plain food with a bit
extra.” She wiped her hands on the ruffled apron she wore over a
flour-dusted double-knit pantsuit. “I made a plate for young
Sanjay. A scraggy lad like him needs more than sandwiches. Di could
do with building up as well, and both American lasses, mother and
daughter. Good to see you’re not after slimming yourself to a
skeleton, Jean.”

Jean managed to squeak, “Thank you.” Nancy
meant that as a compliment.

“I’ve sent Rab with a tray for that poor Mrs.
MacLeod,” Nancy went on. “The doctor’s saying she’s agreed to try a
wee bit dinner. She’s not half demented, puir lass, but then, so
we’d all be.”

“Quite right,” said Fergie. And, as the hall
door opened, “Ah, here’s the doctor just now.”

Nancy stood like a Hebridean Colossus of
Rhodes while Irvine greeted everyone. Half a head taller and twice
as broad, she made him look like a leprechaun. “Sit yourself down,
Doctor,” she said at last. “I’ll be along straightaway with your
dinner.”

“Thank you kindly,” Irvine replied, “but no
need. I’d just had myself tea and a sandwich when Sanjay rang.”

“Your loss, then.” Nancy strode back toward
the pantry and into the swinging door, which didn’t swing.

From its other side came Rab’s bellow. “Have
a care, woman.”

“Have a care yourself,” retorted Nancy, and
this time managed to push her way through the door. Their competing
voices dwindled into the kitchen.

Sitting himself down in what had been
Dakota’s chair, next to Alasdair, Irvine ran his hand up his high
forehead and across his hair. It was white as thistledown and the
same texture—he succeeded not in smoothing it down but in fluffing
it up.

“How is Tina getting on?” Alasdair asked.
“Gilnockie and his team will have questions that need answering
soon as may be.”

“She’s responding well to a mild dose of
sedative,” replied Irvine. “I’m hoping she’s eating Nancy’s lovely
meal, but when I left her she was making phone calls.”

“To Australia? On my phone?” Fergie asked.
And, quickly, “She’s welcome to do so.”

“No, she’s got herself a phone. Here’s your
camera back again, Alasdair, was it? Young Sanjay’s telling me
you’re by way of being a famous detective.”

“Alasdair, aye,” was all he would admit to.
Ducking Jean’s acerbic glance, he accepted the camera, switched it
on, and started viewing the photos on the playing card–sized
screen. His face frosted over as Irvine made brief but explicit
remarks about body parts.

Fergie turned one way and busied himself with
bone china cups and crystal glasses. Jean turned the other way and
busied herself by inspecting the pictures lining the walls. The
chandelier suspended from a gorgeous knotwork plaster ceiling made
this the brightest room in the house, except for the kitchen with
its industrial lighting, and she could easily make out a theme.

Perhaps building on the adage that an army
marched on its stomach, Fergie had chosen to line the dining room
with the history of the Scottish fighting man. Prints and etchings
in various stages of dilapidation portrayed Norse berserkers,
medieval crusaders, swords for hire in myriad countries including
Russia, while red-jacketed and bekilted soldiers plied their
business in Revolutionary Virginia, below the Sphinx, beside the
walls of Lucknow. Black and white photographs showed soldiers
swathed in the uniforms of Victorian empire, wearing bearskin hats,
pith helmets, or—Jean turned completely around—the flat metal
helmets of World Wars I and II. Above the sideboard, the photos
tapered away, just as the Scottish regiments had recently been
trimmed down and consolidated to much gnashing of teeth and
clashing of verbal claymores. And yet they were still serving, as a
small color snapshot of several men in modern desert gear
testified.

Jean leaned sideways to better see a black
and white photo beside the sideboard. There, again, were Allan
Cameron and Fergus Mor, this time with a third uniformed man. The
hackle on his tam o’shanter appeared to be white, indicating a
different regiment.

Fergie dealt out the coffee. “Liqueur as
well?”

“Sure, thanks,” Jean told him, adding to
herself,
maybe the alcohol will cancel out the caffeine.
Although she was expecting to get no sleep tonight anyway—and not
for the reason she’d originally anticipated. “Fergie, who’s the
third man in that photo?”

“A chap my father was at school with. I don’t
know his name. They met again during or after the war, I believe.
Suffice it to say, whilst my father and Alasdair’s enlisted in the
Cameron Highlanders, this chap signed on with the Royal Scots.”

“The oldest of the Scottish regiments.”

“It is that. They claim they were Pontius
Pilate’s guard, appropriately enough, and say they’d never have
fallen asleep whilst guarding Jesus’s tomb.”

“I always thought the way the Roman guards
fell asleep was divine intervention,” said Jean. “Why
‘appropriately enough’?”

“Because Pontius Pilate was born in Scotland,
at Fortingall in Perthshire. Pilate’s father was sent out as an
ambassador after Caesar’s invasion of Britain and married a Pictish
chief’s daughter.”

“That’s a great story, but as history, the
dates don’t add up.”

“That’s as may be,” Fergie conceded, “but
then, history’s all in the interpretation.”

Jean didn’t try to deny that—she made her
living affirming it.

Fergie set a small glass brimming with golden
liquid in front of her, then doled out the same to Alasdair and
Irvine. “Supposedly there was an inscription with Pilate’s name
here at Dunasheen some years ago, brought back by a crusader or a
soldier, who knows? But it’s long gone.”

“That’s a shame. The only other inscription
with his name on it only turned up in the 1960s, I think it was,
and that’s not complete.”

“Ta.” Alasdair arranged cup and glass in
formation—by the right, drink!—and sent Fergie a sharp look from
beneath his brows. “My dad’s regimental dirk’s hanging in my mum’s
sitting room in Fort William. The two dirks in your entrance hall,
are those the ones belonging to your dad and the other chap?”

“Yes, they are. A fine set, aren’t they now,
two regimental dirks, complete to the last detail. The fittings
need a polish, I’m afraid, but running Dunasheen’s a rear-guard
action against decay. What’s a bit of tarnish when . . .” Fergie
let his sentence trail off.

Jean could fill in several possible endings,
but assumed that “. . . when one of the dirks murdered a man”
wasn’t among them. So then, either Fergie didn’t know one was
missing, or he was covering up its loss.
Great.

She stirred cream into her coffee, turning
the black liquid into brown, and caught a black look from Alasdair
that cream wouldn’t mitigate. She bounced his look back.
I don’t
want Fergie to be implicated, either!

And she hadn’t even mentioned Diana being
late on the scene to greet the Krums.

Irvine was still manipulating the camera.
“Grand photos of the old castle.”

“Those are for Jean’s magazine article about
Dunasheen.” With a shrug in her direction, Alasdair turned back to
the camera. He didn’t speculate whether the article was still on
track. It had probably never occurred to him to speculate if the
wedding was still on track. His blond shot with gray head almost
bumped into the cumulous cloud of Irvine’s. “Well now, that’s
interesting.”

“What?” Jean asked.

“Greg MacLeod,” said Alasdair. “Jean, did you
notice him having his hand to his ear as he stepped out the
gate?”

“No.” She half-rose from her chair, leaned
across the table, grasped Alasdair’s cold hand, and angled it so
that the pattern of smudges on the camera display resolved
themselves into an image. Dusk, Dunasheen, and a man in a red
jacket, with, yes, his hand to his ear. “I bet he’s talking on a
cell phone. No reason we’d notice that.”

Alasdair pulled the camera back and peered at
the picture, but even though there were times Jean suspected he had
x-ray vision, he wasn’t capable of blowing up the photo.

“I don’t understand,” said Fergie, “why the
man talking on the phone is important.”

“You never know what’s important,” Jean told
him.

“This may not be important at all,” Alasdair
said. “But Thomson was telling me and Portree that he turned out
Greg’s every pocket and found the usual, a wallet, money—proving
robbery’s not the motive, by the way—but no phone.”

“Tina must have taken it while she was alone
with him,” Jean said. “That’s no big deal, maybe they had only the
one—heck, we only have the one—and she knew she’d have to call home
with the news. That’s what she’s doing now, didn’t you say,
Doctor?”

Alasdair overrode Irvine’s mumble of
agreement. “When I reached her, she was trotting to and fro
wringing her hands, as near to incoherent as makes no difference.
All I could make out was something about having to tell
Kenneth.”

Irvine added, “Kenneth is Greg’s brother, I
caught that much. Every time she started to calm herself, she’d
work back round to his name and off she’d go again.”

“Kenneth MacLeod,” Fergie repeated.