The Blue Hackle (27 page)

“I bet she told Nancy she was feeling better
and she’d be down for dinner just to get rid of her,” Jean
said.

“I’ll accept that wager,” said a slick male
voice.

Jean and Alasdair whirled toward the bedroom
doorway. Lionel Pritchard emerged, a smug smile attached as firmly
to his face as his moustache. He held out a piece of paper. “You’re
looking for this, I expect.”

Alasdair’s narrow-eyed glare would have
frozen anyone else in his tracks, but it slipped off Pritchard’s
smirk and shattered on the threadbare rug. He snatched the paper
from Pritchard’s hand. Jean leaned in to look.

The printed itinerary gave flight numbers and
times from Townsville through Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur to London.
Across the bottom, in black, jagged letters like motes of
Klingonese, were handwritten the words, “Here you are, Tina. The
holiday of a lifetime. Don’t worry packing your nighties, LOL. CU.
Greg.”

Laughing Out Loud. See You
. That
answered that question. Tina had said that Greg used his phone to
text, but she’d lied about recognizing the writing on the card. So
who had he written to? And had the card been enough to set the
appointment, so that his phone call was irrelevant?

Alasdair’s face petrified. Barely moving his
lips, he told Pritchard, “You wasted no time getting here, did you?
Where did you find this?”

“In the pocket of Tina’s suitcase. Or the
suitcase filled with women’s clothing and cosmetics. I know you
detectives like things to be properly witnessed.” Pritchard’s smirk
spread into a moist, wolfish grin. His other hand rose from his
side. “And this was in the man’s suitcase.”

Alasdair seized the large brown envelope from
Pritchard’s fingers. The mailing label on the outside was that of
Dunasheen Castle, addressed to Greg MacLeod on Ross River Road,
Townsville, QLD, Australia. Inside were a letter printed on
ordinary white paper and a receipt for a Hogmanay package. Jean’s
brows rose at the price—she knew she and Alasdair were getting a
deal, but what a deal it was. The least they could do was earn
their room, board, and double round of festivities by lifting the
ten-ton block of murder from Fergie’s back.

Alasdair read the letter aloud. “October
Seventeenth. My dear Mr. MacLeod, my daughter and I will be
delighted to welcome you and your wife to Dunasheen Castle for
Hogmanay. It will also be a great pleasure to display the Crusader
Coffer with an eye to your possible purchase. Safe journey.
Sincerely yours, Fergus MacDonald. P.S. Enclosed are several
business cards for your friends and business associates.”

“Crusader Coffer?” Jean repeated. “Not that
kist in the entrance hall, that’s medieval or even younger. The
chest across from our door is Middle Eastern, but it’s too new to
be crusader-era, probably not even a hundred years old.” Not that
that had stopped Scott Krum from giving it the onceover, she added
silently. And then, “Oh, Fergie means—”

Alasdair shot a warning glance across her bow
and she snapped her mouth shut on the rest of her sentence:
The
artifact that he’s been teasing us with for two days now.

Pritchard’s black eyes switched from face to
face. “Just as I told you, I didn’t write the note on the back of
that card. It was MacLeod. He had his eye on one of Fergus’s
special treasures.”

“And you nipped up here quick as may be,”
said Lesley Young from the outer door, “while Mrs. MacLeod was
likely dying on the ground outside, more concerned with saving your
own skin, eh?”

Pritchard spread his arms wide. His motion
released another wave of sweaty, musk-ox aroma. “It’s a fair
cop.”

“Here!” Young snapped her fingers as though
she was summoning a waiter, and W.P.C. McCrummin stepped up to the
door. “Take Mr. Pritchard downstairs. Have a care, he’s a slippy
one.”

“I’d never slip away from a woman in
uniform,” he said. “Orla, wasn’t it?”

McCrummin’s freckles hardened. “Come along,
sir,” she said between her teeth, and escorted Pritchard into the
hall and away.

Jean stared after him, imagining him getting
his comeuppance when Gilnockie arrested him for murder.
If,
not
when,
she corrected herself.
You had to follow the
investigation where it led.

Young grabbed for the papers in Alasdair’s
hands, saying “Police procedure, sir. Inspector Gilnockie’s asked
me to secure the scene.”

Alasdair let the papers go rather than have
them torn in half, but this time his glare hit home. Young ducked,
held the papers defensively before her chest, and retreated.

Jean didn’t waste her breath pointing out
that Gilnockie would just as soon have Alasdair inside as outside
the scene. With a grimace she didn’t care if Young interpreted as a
smile or not, she backpedaled toward the door and down the hall, up
the stairs and to their own room, feeling Alasdair’s chilly breath
on the back of her neck the entire way.

Again he unlocked the door, door-locking
being a nicety that hadn’t occurred to McCrummin as she ran out of
the Queen suite. But another distaff police person was on Jean’s
mind. “How dare Young throw your own line about police procedure
back in your face? Does she have the social skills of a turnip or
what?”

“Law enforcement’s not about social skills,”
Alasdair returned.

“The heck it isn’t! What about catching more
flies with honey and all that?”

“Is that how I went catching you, then, with
honey? I do not think so.”

“You caught me with something like whisky,
sharp at first, but smooth going down.”

“Right.” Alasdair opened the door and stood
with his hand on the old-fashioned latch, the crevice between his
eyebrows closer to a crevasse. “Greg wrote the card. Likely he sent
it to the killer.”

“Who then put the card in Diana’s pocket?
Why? To implicate her? To implicate Colin?”

He growled, “Assuming Diana herself’s not
implicated.”

“Yes, let’s assume that,” Jean told him. “And
what the hell is up with Fergie and this Crusader Coffer . . .” She
suddenly saw past Alasdair into the sitting room. Bits of white and
blue fluff lay on the rug, drifting in the sneaky little drafts
playing along the floor. “That’s right. Dougie.”

Alasdair looked around. “Oh aye, your
moggie’s made a mess of something. Feathers?”

“I bet he killed one of those stuffed birds.”
Jean followed the trail into the bedroom. “Funny, though, the
feather bits are only the two colors . . . oh boy.”

They’d had a visitor at some point over the
last couple of hours, one who had probably placed on top of the bed
the dusty old hat box that was now lying beside it, surrounded by
macerated blue and white feathers.

“Dougie?” Jean called. “Here, kitty,
kitty!”

Of the two rounded lumps beneath the bed,
one, she saw, was a cracked commode, called in her part of the
world a thunder jug. The other lump opened its golden eyes.
You
rang?

That white bit at the tasseled edge of the
rug wasn’t a bit of feather but a business card. She picked it up.
Fergus MacDonald and Diana MacDonald
. . . She flipped it
over. “‘I found them. Here you are. F.M.’ Fergie found what?”

Alasdair knelt beside the hatbox, shoving
aside a striped lid and streamers of torn tissue paper. “A mouse
once gnawed himself a wee hole here, after a nesting place. He left
enough scent to attract Dougie’s attentions. And then . . . aha.
Here we are.” He held up two tam o’shanters, their badges
tarnished, their hackles reduced to fragile spines.

“Dougie!” Jean exclaimed. “Those are Fergie’s
bonnets!”

“One Cameron Highlanders—that’s Fergie Mor’s.
My dad’s is identical. The other is Royal Scots. Pontius Pilate’s
guard, Fergie’s fond of saying. It’s this chap’s dirk killed Greg.
That’s why Fergie looked them out—he’s taken to heart that bit
about not knowing what’s important. . . . What’s this?” Alasdair
probed delicately at the interior of one bonnet, producing a
crinkle and a musty smell.

Pressing up against his side, Jean saw that
the band of the bonnet was lined with newspaper, a deep
yellowish-brown with decay. “Nothing like a do-it-yourself repair
job.”

Alasdair managed to pull one edge of the
paper from behind the sweat-stained band without it disintegrating
in his hand. It was the top of a page, the name of the newspaper
making a faint track like an antediluvian fossil’s:
Townsville
Bulletin
. Just below Jean could barely make out the beginning
of a headline. “Australian troops advance . . .”

She looked at Alasdair just as he looked at
her, wild surmise flying from mind to mind and back like a
boomerang. Jean said, “We’ve got to take that photo down from the
dining room wall and see if the dirk guy’s name is on the back. No,
you don’t know what’s important, and by this time . . .”

“I’m thinking there’s nothing that’s not to
do with the murder.”

Hastily they gathered up the remains of the
hackles, piled them, the bonnets, the scrap of newspaper, and the
tissue back into the box. They affixed the lid and shut the lot in
the wardrobe. “Get your coat,” Alasdair said, “and we’ll have a
look at the photo on our way out. Respecting you, my lad,
scolding’s no good, is it?”

Dougie blinked and yawned.

“What a mighty hunter,” said Jean. “You went
after a mouse and landed two birds.”

The clock in the sitting room struck
two-thirty as they walked out the door, leading Jean to ponder
relativity, how the last twenty-four hours had lasted a week,
whereas her average day at the office lasted about five
minutes.

And there was some sort of spectral
relativity as well, she thought when they stepped past the tripping
stane on the turnpike stair. She was getting so used to walking
through Seonaid’s paranormal resonance that she no longer noticed
it any more than she noticed the pink feather boa on the suit of
armor or the mistletoe hanging from the archway.

The ground floor was eerily quiet,
considering the number of people who were tucked away in various
corners of the house. The dining room table was set with the
tree-people candlesticks ranged along a boxwood garland, and with
all the surgically gleaming cutlery and gold-rimmed dishes and
crystal of a posh, traditional party. Now each side of the table
sported three chairs. Rab and Nancy had taken Tina at her word,
then, and set a place for her too.

Jean looked toward the swinging door into the
pantry. It shivered a bit, leaking bits of dialog, Rab’s gruff lilt
rising and falling in counterpoint to what sounded like Clint
Eastwood’s gruffer drawl.

Alasdair lifted the photo of the three
soldiers down from the wall, and, using the tip of the corkscrew
lying ready on the sideboard, pried off the backing. He and Jean
touched heads over the faded words written on the back in a
mashed-thistle hand similar to Fergie’s own.

Allan Cameron, Fergus MacDonald, Kenneth
MacLeod. 1944.

Jean closed her eyes and opened them again,
but the words didn’t change. “Kenneth MacLeod.”

“So it says.” Alasdair’s sturdy forefinger
touched the letters as though to make sure. “Greg’s brother’s name
is Kenneth.”

“Well yeah, but a lot of people are named
MacLeod. Michael Campbell-Reid told me once that there are so many
little boys here on Skye named Donnie MacLeod that teachers assign
them middle initials according to when they enrolled. Donnie A.
MacLeod, Donnie B. MacLeod, you know.”

“We’re past finding coincidences.” He turned
the photo over. The yellowed face of his own father looked up at
him, gaze even, mouth firm—Allan had been the beta model of
Alasdair’s Ice Prince. But Alasdair was focused on Kenneth. “This
chap’s the right age to be Greg’s father.”

“Kenneth senior, sure. But wouldn’t an Aussie
join one of the Anzac regiments?”

“Fergie’s saying his dad and Kenneth were at
school together. He likely joined up here.”

“So in the thirties young Aussies were sent
‘home,’ for some extra polish? I bet Kenneth was tickled to meet
someone from his family’s ancestral stomping grounds.” Beneath the
photographic tarnish, Kenneth’s blunt, square face, compressed in a
frown, revealed nothing more than a vague similarity to Greg. “If
this is Greg’s father, then he wasn’t just getting newspapers from
home, he obviously went back and engendered at least two kids. How
old was Greg, do you know? Over sixty? Didn’t Fergie say this
Kenneth was killed in the war?”

“Which war? I’m thinking the Royal Scots
served in Korea as well.”

“Ah, yeah, that would do it.”

From the kitchen came the sound of gunshots
and sirens and a whirring that was probably a food processor. The
aroma of onions sizzling in butter wafted through the air and
Jean’s mouth watered.

Unmoved—impressive, how men could disconnect
stomach from brain—Alasdair tucked the disassembled frame into the
sideboard and started for the door. The delectable odor followed
them down the hall to the incident room, where Gilnockie and Young
were, judging by her frustrated and his aloof expressions, still
struggling to climb the greased pole of Pritchard. Instead of
joining in, Alasdair beckoned Gilnockie to the door.

Gilnockie turned the photo over and back
again while Alasdair explained, and at last summarized in his own
words, “So the man might have been killed with his own father’s
dirk? That’s no coincidence, that’s a bit personal.”

Murder is always personal
. But Jean
knew what Gilnockie meant, clan feuds, arguments festering for
centuries. “We already know that Greg came here for more than
genealogical research.”

“And Tina will not be answering questions,
not just yet,” concluded Alasdair. “What’s her condition?”