The Blue Hackle (16 page)

“They’re having a look round, yes. And
Diana’s away to Kinlochroy for a few last-minute items for the
old-fashioned Hogmanay festivities tonight.”

He didn’t have to market to her. Jean knew
that “old-fashioned” was relative—the Scottish tourist industry was
creating traditions as fast as it could—but he was just defaulting
to his usual spiel. “When was St. Columcille’s built?”

“It was completed in 1822. The designer meant
to leave it unfinished, all the better to suggest a medieval ruin,
but the laird at the time, Norman MacDonald—Norman the Red, he was
called—he had it completed, if not quite to his original scheme.
That was seen locally as too Catholic. I suppose it’s not a proper
folly, even if we do hold weddings there.” Fergie’s smile seeped
upward.

Jean seemed to hear the whir of spinning
wheels and the clank of looms. They might not be manufacturing a
second case at all. “Rab was telling us . . .”

“Fergus!” called a peremptory male voice.

Jean and Fergie looked around to see
Pritchard gesticulating from the door.

“Now what?” Fergie asked the air. “If you’ll
excuse me, Jean . . .”

“Oh!” she exclaimed as a neuron fired,
stinging her memory. “I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’ve got a
baby crib. A baby cot. My friends from Edinburgh have to bring
their little girl. She’s just six months old, so they don’t need
anything elaborate.”

“A little girl?” Fergie’s smile swept over
his face and down his body, so that he wriggled like a delighted
puppy. “Wonderful! Tell them the lass is welcome to the family
cradle. And you, Jean, you’re welcome to my computer—it’s switched
on and booted up.”

“Fergus!” called Pritchard. “The reporters
have got at the Americans.”

With a glance toward Gilnockie and Alasdair,
Fergie started toward the door. “Thanks,” Jean called after him,
and wondered what was up with Scott and Heather, not to mention
Dakota, another little girl. It wasn’t as though they knew anything
about the case. All they knew was the laird and his daughter.

The stately home murder. Stately homicide.
Great.

The blip and whir of electronics contrasted
with the voices echoing off the vaulted ceiling and from the void
of the fireplace. The hearth still held traces of ash and bits of
charcoal from fires long dead. Supposedly ashes cleaned out of the
household fireplaces on New Year’s Eve could be read like tea
leaves, foreseeing the future. But Jean saw nothing—unless the
future was dark.

She tried visualizing Alasdair’s charcoal
gray Argyll jacket, the one he wore with his kilt for special
occasions. Like the dinner party where they’d first connected. Like
his upcoming wedding.

He took a step away from Gilnockie. “Well
then, Patrick . . .”

“I’m just joining the team at the beach—the
sunlight’s a blessing, no doubt of it—I’d be obliged if you’d come
along as well. At the back gate in five minutes, eh?” He ambled
toward the coat rack beside the outside door, stopping en route to
inspect and approve each assembled work station.

Alasdair stared after him, his expression no
doubt intended to be inscrutable. Jean drifted toward him. “For
once you’re trying to give up the police work and you can’t get rid
of it. And I was worried you’d be clashing antlers with him.”

Alasdair’s eyes narrowed in irritation, but
they were still turned toward Gilnockie.

“If you’re at the beach you can avoid Fergie.
And Diana—she’s gone to Kinlochroy, cutting through the reporters
like an icebreaker. You heard what Pritchard said about the Krums,
right?”

“I’m afraid so.” His irritated gleam shifted
to the door leading to the main house. So many fires to put out, so
little time. And his hoses and axes mothballed. Decisively, he
headed up the flight of steps, Jean matching him stride for
stride.

In the hallway, she said, “I’m going to check
out some things on Fergie’s computer. And I’ll take the phone,
please, so I can check in with the reserve troops in Edinburgh.
I’ll meet you at the old church in what? An hour? We can walk back
by the new one—which, by the way, was built in 1822.”

“I’m not surprised.” Alasdair pulled the
phone from his pocket and handed it over. “Half past eleven at the
old church,” he said, and almost managed to get away before she
caught his shake of the head and roll of the eye. But she did catch
them, and indulged in her own shake and roll at his disappearing
back.

Then a crash and a woman’s harsh shout sliced
through the silence.

Pelting into the entrance hall, Jean almost
collided with Alasdair. He stood just inside the open front
door—that was the crash, the heavy wooden panels hitting the
wall.

Beyond the tunnel of the tiny porch, on the
sun-drenched gravel of the parking area, Tina MacLeod stood braced
between two suitcases. Her spotted coat was buttoned to the throat.
Her sunglasses hid half her face, while her red lips looked like a
bloody slash across the other half. Prying them apart, she said,
“I’m leaving.”

“No, you’re not.” Lesley Young stood between
Tina and the three cars parked along the garden wall in the stance
of a soccer goalie.

“I can’t stay here. I have to leave. I have
to get away.” Tina yanked on her suitcases, but the wheels snagged
on the gravel and they toppled over.

Young seized one of the handles. “Have you no
police in Austria? Don’t you know you can’t be leaving the scene of
a crime?”

Tina pulled back. “That’s Australia, you
stupid cow.”

“Had your bags all packed, did you? Why are
you running? What are you hiding?”

Alasdair’s nostrils flared and his lips
clamped. Jean dodged as he strode out the door, then tiptoed behind
him into the brilliant light of day.

His large, capable hands grasped one
leopard-skin shoulder and one drab cloth-coated shoulder, stopping
the spontaneous tug-of-war. “That’s enough, the pair of you. Mrs.
MacLeod, if you’re wanting to see your husband, he’s in Portree.
Inspector Gilnockie can arrange transport.”

Tina threw herself away from Alasdair’s hand,
only to droop over the remaining suitcase. “That’s just it—I mean,
no, I don’t, I can’t—you don’t understand, I can’t stay here.”

“You’re guilty, are you now?” demanded
Young.

Guilty of what? Jean asked herself. Then she
felt the heel of an imaginary hand hit her in the forehead.
Oh.
Tina had gone looking for Greg. Maybe he’d been alive
when she found him.

Alasdair wrenched the second suitcase away
from Young, throwing her off balance. Even as she lurched backward,
gravel spattering, he snapped, “Sergeant, I’d recommend you
remembering police procedure. Inspector Gilnockie is expecting you
at the beach. Get on with it.”

Young stared at him, eyes blazing and then
cooling in his arctic blast.
Don’t say it,
Jean beamed
telepathically at her.
Don’t tell him he has no authority
here.

Contracting to a defensive crouch, Young
scuttled around the far end of the house just as

Sanjay Thomson came loping up the driveway, a
woman constable keeping pace with him. Both were sending dubious
glances over their shoulders.

Jean squinted toward the mass of color
seething around the wrought-iron gates at the end of the drive.
That’s right, the Krums were holding an impromptu press conference.
But Fergie and Pritchard were dealing with it. They didn’t need her
help. They didn’t even need her shivering, tooth-chattering
presence—the air was calm but so cold that the thin, liquid
sunshine barely registered on her shrinking flesh. She crossed her
arms around her sweater-clad midriff and tucked her hands into her
armpits.

“You’d not be getting away without passing
the reporters,” Alasdair told Tina. She turned, looked, and wilted
even further. He clasped her elbow, steadying her. “You,
W.P.C.—what’s your name, please?”

The female constable goggled at him from
beneath the brim of her hat, the ends of her short-cut carrot-red
hair waving at her freckled temples like antennae. “Orla McCrummin,
sir. Portree.”

She seemed to expect Alasdair to rip open the
front of his sweater and reveal a red-and-yellow,
rampant-lion-of-Scotland initial monogrammed on superhero spandex.
His reputation preceded him, thanks probably to Thomson.

His expression that of someone ignoring a bad
smell, Alasdair said, “W.P.C. McCrummin, escort Mrs. MacLeod to her
room and sit down with her.”

“Yes, sir.” McCrummin took possession of
Tina’s arm as Thomson claimed the suitcases with that usual male
grimace of,
What’s in here, bricks?

“P.C. Thomson,” said Alasdair. The youth hung
back while McCrummin gently guided Tina to the door. “Get on with
the luggage, then collect Colin Urquhart at the lighthouse and
bring him to the incident room.”

“Sir, Inspector Gilnockie was sending me to
collect Colin not an hour since, but he was not home.”

“Ah,” said Alasdair, with such a subtle
release of tension in his head and shoulders that Jean was sure
only she saw it. So the investigation was proceeding, if by steam
rather than bullet train.

“What were you saying about Colin Urquhart?”
she asked Thomson. “He’s a hermit?”

“Of a sort. He comes into the village now and
again, but mostly keeps to himself. Some folk say he’s a layabout,
a toe rag, that he’s squatting in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage.
But he’s paying rent to the lighthouse board, so Kinlochroy
council’s got no reason to move him on. And he’s not asking anyone
for money, he’s got some sort of assistance, being
ex-military.”

“Ex-military,” Alasdair repeated. “Fergie was
saying he’s got a tendency to violence.”

“Posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor
Irvine’s saying. Aye, Colin caused a wee bit stramash at the pub in
November. Rab Finlay and Lionel Pritchard and two of the older
chaps, pensioners, they were taking the mickey by saying soldiers
nowadays have it easy, hot meals and the like. He’s not a bad sort.
He had a rum go in Iraq is all.”

“What’s his relationship with Diana
MacDonald?” asked Jean.

“She’s kind to him. She’s always had a good
heart, has Diana.”

“What’s your relationship with Diana?”
Alasdair asked.

“Friends,” Thomson said with a quick smile.
“We played together when she visited here as a child.”

Yes, Jean thought, the local constable was
the best source of information on a community. The trouble was, the
local constable was still a member of the community.

“Inspector Gilnockie has not yet interviewed
her, has he?” asked Alasdair.

“She’s not had time to sit herself down with
him, no.”

“Thank you. Mrs. MacLeod’s in the Queen of
Scots suite.” Alasdair stood still, very still, as Thomson walked
into the house and hung a left toward the stairs.

Jean considered the glacial ridges in
Alasdair’s face, all the thicker for the frustration bubbling
beneath. She ventured, “Well?”

“Aye?” asked Alasdair, and then, “You’ll
catch your death, Jean, outside without a coat.”

“You’re not wearing one either,” she said,
and led the way back into the house. She shut the door, asking,
“Who threw the door open? D.S. Young?”

Alasdair was halfway to the back hall. “Aye.
Tina closed it carefully, I reckon. She almost got away.”

“But you’re right, she wouldn’t have made it
past the reporters. They’d have alerted Thomson and McCrummin, like
the geese that alerted the sentries in Rome, whenever it was. I’d
say poor Tina, but, damn it, Young has a point, no matter how
clumsily she expressed it.”

His smile was thin as a blade but vanished
before it was fully drawn. “It’s only now occurred to you that Tina
might have killed Greg herself?”

That figured, it had never occurred to
Alasdair that their own wedding might be in jeopardy, just that
spouses killed spouses. “Yes, it’s only now occurred to me.
Cynicism is your occupational hazard.”

“And rose-colored glasses are yours.”

“Right,” she said, expelling the “t” like a
micro-missile. “Someone erased the phone’s memory. Yeah, Gilnockie
can get records from Greg’s provider, but that will take time, and
doesn’t change the fact that if it wasn’t Greg who altered the
memory, it was Tina, and she lied about it. If Tina killed him
herself, she would have had the knife with her when we saw her, but
. . .”

“Why? Oh aye, why?” Alasdair stepped back.
“Jean, I’d better be getting onto Gilnockie.”

“Yeah, you go on.” Of all the places where
Jean would have liked to be a fly on the wall, Alasdair’s next
conversation with Gilnockie just went to the top of the list.
Nevertheless, she could only see ghosts, not practice astral
projection.

Around the corner and back down the hall
beneath a plush toy moose’s head, and she was in Fergie’s office.
She was tempted to lock the door, but this wasn’t her sanctuary, it
was his. Who else’s could it be, with its collection of books,
artwork, and gimcracks jumbled together like the contents of Ali
Baba’s den and scented with potpourri and mildew?

An orange Ganesh, the multi-armed Hindu
elephant god, sat atop a bookshelf stacked two and three deep with
books and magazines. A tooled-leather copy of
Gulliver’s
Travels
supported a framed illustration from
Peter Pan
and a paperback on the Shroud of Turin. From a crystal block
sprouted a letter opener shaped like Excalibur. A copy of the
Kildalton Cross from Islay, ancient homeland of the MacDonalds,
hung above a CD changer stacked with albums of New Age music,
Bollywood scores, and chanting monks. Next to that sat a portable
telephone on its base, one dating all the way back to the last
century—ancient, in electronic years.

Several of Fergie’s own works-in-progress
were propped in a corner, the top piece a sketch of the old castle
as it had once been, smoke eddying and flags flying above a
medieval galley pulled up on the beach.