The Blue Hackle (37 page)

“No worries,” said Fergie, as blatant a
social lie as Jean had ever heard, and the door slammed.

Alasdair squared his shoulders. In his best
cool and correct voice, like dry ice, he told the Krums, “The
party’s over. If you’d be so good as to go to your room.”

Heather and Scott stared in bleary
bewilderment but for once said nothing. Steering Dakota before
them, they headed upstairs. “But Mom . . .” The child’s thin voice
receded onto the second floor.

“Tea, please, Nancy,” Alasdair ordered, and
pulled the phone from his sporran. “Mr. MacLeod, I’m Detective
Chief Inspector Alasdair Cameron, retired. Step this way,
please.”

Kenneth looked around suspiciously, but
trudged along without speaking. So did Jean, following the men to
the incident room. Behind her Diana issued further decrees: “Colin,
Rab, and I will tidy up the Great Hall whilst Nancy makes the tea.
Father . . .”

Phosphorescent computer screens glowed like
Scrooge’s ghosts between the dusty vaults and the ashy hearth of
the old kitchen. Jean sat down, if not out of the way then not
obtrusively in it. Removing her glasses, she massaged their imprint
in her nose and temples and thought,
January first. Never Day.
Ne’er Day.

Thomson’s blurry image placed the first-foot
gifts, a bottle of whisky, a tin of shortbread, a tissue-wrapped
lump of coal, on a nearby table. Luck, bad or good, was no more
than superstition, than happenstance, and yet coincidences happened
and events made tangled webs . . . She resumed her glasses in time
to see Thomson, smooth as a maitre d’, extract Kenneth’s suitcase
from a hand reddened by both sun and cold and point the man to a
chair.

Tossing his coat aside to reveal a frayed
sweater, the source of the faint wet-sheep aroma annotating his
aura of stale sweat and old fry-ups, Kenneth thumped down. “Let’s
get on with it, okay?”

Alasdair’s unhurried but intense tones into
his phone were doubtless directed at Gilnockie. “Aye, I’ll have
Thomson witness and record—she is, is she? We’ll come round the
morn, then.”

Nancy appeared with steaming mugs of tea and
the remains of the post-dinner biscuits and cheese rearranged on a
smaller plate. Whatever pleasure she’d taken in the Hogmanay games
had soured, and she considered Kenneth with a dour stare he
returned twice over. “You favor your brother, not quite two peas in
a pod, but close. You’ll have eaten, I reckon, though I might could
be heating the dinner leavings.”

“No, thanks just the same,” Kenneth replied,
even as he accepted a cup and cradled it between his hands. “I’ve
eaten airline stuff ’til my gut’s turned up. Kuala Lumpur’s the
best connection, but the tucker’s nothing but chook-food and
fruit.”

When Tormod MacLeod went out to Australia
from Skye in 1822, he traveled in a wooden cockleshell eating
half-rotten food for months on end. As recently as Jean’s parents’
generation, if you emigrated to the other side of the world, you
were gone for good, almost as though you’d died. Even if an aging
Tormod had returned to Scotland, to the dark and bloody ground of
his lost love, his journey hadn’t lasted only a few hours. But
Kenneth . . .

“Nancy,” asked Alasdair, “how do you know
what Greg looked like?”

“Ah,” she said, “well now, there was a photo
on Mrs. MacLeod’s mobile—she’s still Mrs. MacLeod, isn’t she?—she
showed me whilst we were having us a blether over breakfast,
though, come to think it, likely the photo was of you . . .” She
peered more closely at Kenneth, frowned, shook her head, and backed
toward the door. “That’s me away, then.”

Alasdair watched her until she left the room,
expression intended to be unreadable, even if to Jean it was an
open book—wheels turning, gears meshing, not a speck of rust in the
works, no matter how reluctantly activated.

“Tina told you she was Greg’s wife, did she?”
asked Kenneth.

Jean looked around. “He called her ‘the
wife.’ We assumed the rest. Sometimes you don’t ask the right
questions. Sometimes you don’t know you should be asking
questions.” Ignoring the sugar bowl and milk pitcher, she gulped at
her unsweetened black tea. The clear, hot, mildly acrid liquid
cleared away the gunk packing the crevices of her mind—rich food,
excess drink, the long, demanding day—although the shock at the
front door had already knocked some of her wits back into her.

Thomson stepped forward, punching buttons not
on his cell phone but on a tiny digital recorder. He gave the time,
place, Alasdair’s name and Kenneth’s, and placed the recorder on
the table. “Here you are, sir.”

Alasdair added milk and sugar to his tea,
drank, and only then turned to Kenneth. “P.C. Thomson will have
told you that Tina’s in hospital in Portree. She fell from her
bedroom window whilst climbing out, she was that anxious to leave
the house. She suffered a broken arm and a concussion. Inspector
Gilnockie’s just telling me she’s sensible again. We’ll be
interviewing her tomorrow morn. You’re welcome to drive with us,
though I reckon you’ve got a car.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a car. Flew to Inverness and
hired one.” Kenneth looked anywhere but at Alasdair’s face—around
the room, up, down, sideways.

Alasdair cut to the chase. “Greg and your
wife ran away together.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t settle, either of them. I
thought she was settled okay with the kids, but then they grew up
and left home and she went all restless again. And Greg’d go from
scheme to scheme like he was pure grifter. Dunvegan—that’s our
place, cane farm, been in the family three generations—that was
never good enough for him. A bit of a spiv, I’m afraid, even if
he’s my brother. Was my brother.”

“Did he ever speak of your ancestor, Tormod
MacLeod?”

“The stonemason? Yeah, that was one of Greg’s
crappy ideas, tracing the family back to Skye and finding Tormod’s
grave—the bloke came back here as an old man, but there’s no grave
registered. What the hell does stuff like that matter? Look ahead,
I say, never mind about what’s left behind.”

You could never look ahead to a fresh, new
future unstained by the past, Jean thought. Even Greg and Kenneth’s
grandfather had named his farm after Skye’s Dunvegan, MacLeod
Central.

“Greg’s six years younger than me. He’s been
a thorn in my hide all his life. I had to look after him when our
dad died in Korea. Now that he’s done more than well for himself,
he’s acting like he has to look after me.” Kenneth gazed so
intently at the fireplace that Jean glanced around. But nothing
moved in the cavernous darkness. He was still avoiding the keen
blue gaze of his questioner.

Who summarized, “Greg was restless, as was
Tina.”

“Tina,” Kenneth said, and Jean could almost
see her materializing on the hearth. “She left me a letter, said
she wasn’t getting any younger and if she was ever going to run
mad, now was the time. Said she was sorry it had to be Greg. I
reckon, though, that keeping it all in the family’s not such a bad
thing. You know what you’re getting, then. You know what you’re
losing.”

“Were you surprised learning there was
something between them?” Thomson asked.

Kenneth thrust his cup toward Jean.
Oh.
He wanted her to refill it. That told her something
about his relationship with Tina right there. But without comment,
she poured.

“Ta,” he said. “Greg always flirted with her.
He’d flirt with anything in skirts. She knew that, but she’d still
flirt back. And now this. He was away again, he was always away
somewhere, business, pleasure, all one to him. This time when he
asked her to go along, she said yes. Probably surprised the hell
out of him. Probably surprised her that he’d take her. But he
showed her a good time, I’m sure of that. An eye for detail, and
too clever by half, that’s Greg. That was Greg.”

“You never had a good relationship with your
brother?” asked Alasdair.

“It wasn’t a bad one. We’re just not—well, we
look alike is all. Tina likes to say one of us was left on Mum’s
doorstep by fairies, that we’re not actually related. We are,
though. Greg and Tina knew how I’d feel about them spitting the
dummy, but they did it anyway.”

“Spitting the dummy?” Thomson asked.

“Yanking the pin. Getting sick of it
all.”

“How are you feeling, then,” asked Alasdair.
“Angry? Jealous?”

“Goes without saying, mate. How’d you feel if
your . . . sorry, didn’t catch the name, missus.”

He assumed she wouldn’t be there if she
weren’t connected to Alasdair. For once, an assumption was right.
“Jean Fairbairn,” she answered.

With a thin, lopsided smile of apology toward
her, Alasdair went on, “So you followed Greg and Tina here.
Why?”

“To bring her home, like I said. Now she’s
had her fling, I thought she might settle down.”

“Were you planning on taking Greg back as
well?”

Kenneth’s face creased as though straining to
see something not quite in focus. “I just want things back how they
were. Tina’s got her shoes and her artsy-fartsy projects, but she’s
a good mum to the kids and the grandkids. I’ve seen families break
up because one or two people played the fool. I don’t want
that.”

“You can’t have things back the way they
were. Greg’s dead.” Now it was Alasdair who sounded like Nancy and
her fatalistic retorts to Rab’s nostalgia.

“Yeah. Tina phoned and said he was dead. Said
he’d been murdered, though I kept hoping that was just her usual
carry-on.” Kenneth’s sigh of weariness seemed to well up from his
toes. He rested his elbow on the table and his face on his hand
with its ragged cuticles and dirty nails. Muffled, he concluded,
“I’d just phoned him. He said they’d got to Dunasheen and he was
off to meet someone over a deal. Said part of it would interest me.
I wasn’t interested in much he did, I’ll say that. Except for Tina,
of course. Said he’d phone back, we’d have a talk, work things out.
Suppose he never had time.”

Alasdair’s deceptively cool gaze met Jean’s.
Greg had been talking to his brother outside the courtyard. Civil
wars, clan feuds—brother against brother could be the worst sort of
conflict.

“Did you know your father’s old regimental
dirk was here at Dunasheen?” Alasdair asked.

Kenneth shook his head, letting his hand fall
heavily away from his face. “I’d seen it in photos of him, but
that’s all we had of him, old photos.”

“His bonnet’s here as well,” said Alasdair.
“His regimental hat, a tam o’shanter, a beret.”

Kenneth didn’t reply. But then, Jean thought,
he’d said himself he didn’t care about souvenirs of the dead. All
he wanted was peace, quiet, and to tend his sugar cane Down Under.
Not that she knew Down Under—red dirt, and eucalyptus trees, and
the unrelenting sun that had taken its toll of his . . .

Lower face. His forehead was several shades
paler. So were the tops of his ears. The classic image of the
Australian outdoorsman or soldier included a wide-brimmed hat.

Jean sat up straight. Not all webs were
tangled. A quick slash of Alasdair’s favorite weapon, Occam’s
razor—the concept that the simplest explanation was the true
one—cut away many a knot. Why should there be two men, both a
stranger and Kenneth? Maybe there was only one, the murderer, whose
motive was jealousy and revenge, never mind his mild words.

She glanced down at Kenneth’s suitcase, then
up at Alasdair, drawing his gaze back to her.
Hat
, she
mouthed, and mimed the shape of a broad brim around her head.

He nodded in grim comprehension. “Ask Fergie
to stop in, would you please, Thomson? And Nancy.”

Nancy? thought Jean.

Thomson handed the task off to McCrummin and
returned to his position beside the table. Alasdair turned back to
Kenneth. “Mr. MacLeod, I could be getting myself a warrant to check
over your luggage, but we’d moving things on if you’d agree without
a fuss.”

Again Kenneth rubbed his hand over his face.
“Go on then, mate.”

As bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as
ever—nothing like a police classroom on his own doorstep—Thomson
leaped on the suitcase, spun it around, flipped it open. Resting on
top, stuffed with wadded garments, was a floppy, wide-brimmed
canvas hat, sun-faded, sweat-stained, dust-sprinkled.

Thomson’s nod held an element of surprise.
Placing the hat on the table, he delved further into the suitcase
and turned up a used brown envelope, Kenneth’s address cancelled
out with a stroke of a pen. From inside he drew a printout of
Fergie’s map on the Dunasheen website.

“Your passport, please?” Alasdair asked.

Reaching into his shirt pocket, Kenneth
produced the navy blue booklet of a passport and handed it
over.

“Thank you.” Alasdair flipped it open. “You
arrived at Heathrow airport December the twenty-eighth, did you?
When Mrs. MacLeod rang you with the news of her husb—of Greg’s
death, you were already in the U.K. Just because the phone’s got an
Australian number’s not meaning the phone’s in Australia.”

Kenneth’s bloodshot eyes stared dully
ahead.

“P.C. Thomson,” said Alasdair, “I reckon
Lachie from the Co-op’s still out and about, with Hogmanay and all.
If you’d go asking him if he’s met this man before . . .”

“But Lachie said the man was a Londoner,”
Thomson protested.

“I once told a couple of my nephews,” Jean
said, “that a cartoon koala bear was speaking Cockney, the accent
of London’s East Enders. Then I realized my mistake. A koala,
Australia, duh. Lachie didn’t have that much of a clue. He heard
the flat vowels, the twang, and gathered the man wasn’t a local,
but then assumed he was from the south of Hadrian’s Wall, not south
of the equator.”

Fergie marched down the steps into the room.
“Alasdair? Sanjay?”

“Sanjay?” Kenneth echoed faintly.

Alasdair asked Fergie, “The man you saw
walking through the kitchen yard, the one you thought was Greg. Was
he wearing a coat like this?” He pointed to Kenneth’s bulbous coat,
a drab, dark, gray-green polyester shiny with cheap waterproofing.
Dropped suddenly into winter, Kenneth might have bought the first
coat he’d come to in the first shop he passed in the U.K.