The Blue Hackle (5 page)

Down the hill they went, and across the
bridge, first Thomson, then Jean, then Fergie. Thomson went up the
enceinte path like a mountain goat, then turned to offer Jean his
hand. Putting her feminist pride in her pocket—one casualty was
enough—she took it. But instead of steadying her up the slope, he
heaved her upward so forcefully her feet almost left the ground.
With a scramble she retrieved first her footing and then her hand,
and managed a breathless, “Thanks.”

She turned to take the blanket from Fergie,
the beam of her flashlight spattering down the craggy drop-off to
one side, her shoulder brushing the damp cold of the ancient stone
wall to the other. A shudder raised the hair on the back of her
neck. The night had stripped the old castle of its dignity. Now the
broken barricades seemed more sinister than sad, concealing icy
eyes that watched the living souls clambering past and hating them
for their warmth.

The faint blip on her paranormal radar faded
so fast she suspected it might merely have been imagination, the
dark, the scene getting to her. No time to analyze, not now.

Fergie, too, hauled himself up the path and
stopped at its summit, catching his breath. Ahead, the yellow blur
that was Thomson dropped sedately down what might have once been
stone steps, but was just as likely to be stacked bedrock.
Balancing their burdens, Jean and Fergie levered each other down
six or seven levels and across a muddy, weedy patch onto level
ground.

There was Alasdair! Or there were two circles
of light, rather, meeting, blending, parting again, emanating from
a shambling lump. Jean thought for a moment that Alasdair and Tina
were supporting Greg between them. But no, the clump wasn’t wide
enough for three. As the double figure resolved itself from the
darkness, she saw Alasdair holding flashlights in each hand, and
his right arm locked around a staggering Tina.

The last memory of warmth and light drained
through Jean’s cold feet into the unforgiving ground. There was
only one reason Alasdair, and Tina with him, would have left Greg
alone.

The flashlight beams flared and clashed. Jean
squinted. Then they settled, and she saw Tina’s face. Illuminated
from beneath, it resembled a mask of tragedy, mouth hanging open,
mascara smeared beneath empty eyes, skin like clay.

Every line of Alasdair’s features was carved
in Skye basalt. The vapor of his breath rose and blended into mist.
“Jean, Fergus. P.C.—”

“Thomson, sir. Sanjay Thomson, Kinlochroy.”
And, before Alasdair could react as Jean had to his first name,
“Where’s the injured party?”

Tina let out a moan like a collapsing
accordion and buckled. Thomson grabbed her other arm. Spasms
rippled through her body and her curls trembled.

Fergie took the blanket, threw it around her
shoulders, and pulled her into his own arms. “Come along, dear.
Let’s get you back to the house. A cup of tea will go down a treat.
Maybe a wee drop of brandy as well.”

“Greg,” Tina said in a tiny voice.

Greg. Jean felt shivery, sick, numb, and
she’d barely met the man. She could imagine—but didn’t want to—how
Tina felt.

With a quickly suppressed gulp, she took one
of Alasdair’s flashlights from his bare and therefore icy hand and
exchanged it for Fergie’s carrier bag. A thermos bottle sloshed at
its bottom, next to several plastic cups. Of course. Any emergency
situation in the British Isles could be mitigated by tea—warmth,
caffeine, and sugar. But no amount of tea was going to bring Greg
MacLeod back.

Fergie guided Tina’s stumbling feet toward
the gantlet of the enceinte path, and beyond it the oasis of new
Dunasheen. His voice, murmuring sympathies, faded into the rhythm
of the wind and waves, a rhythm much slower than Jean’s own
heart.

Alasdair introduced himself to the constable
and shook his hand. “Sanjay.”

“My grandad was stationed in India and my
granny’s from Delhi.” The constable replied just as patiently as he
had with Jean—no doubt he’d had lots of practice—and in a
return-of-serve asked, “That’s
the
Alasdair Cameron,
ex-D.C.I. at Inverness?”

“Aye, one and the same,” Alasdair replied
cautiously.

“I’ve swotted up on the Loch Arkaig and Loch
Ness investigations. Brilliant detective work, Chief Inspect—Mr.
Cameron.”

“Thank you, constable, but I was no more than
part of a team.” Alasdair’s face remained stony, although a glint
in his eye, directed toward Jean, acknowledged her role as partner
and gadfly in both of those cases as well as two others. “Let’s be
getting on with this investigation, shall we?”

“Yes, sir.” Thomson started off, his feet
creaking across the small stones of the shingle beach. “This way,
sir?”

“Aye, straight on.” Even as he spoke,
Alasdair’s gaze tarried on Jean’s, and the glint in his eye wavered
like a candle in a draft.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did he lose his
footing, or did a stone turn beneath his shoe, or what?”

“I’m thinking
or what.
”

Jean’s heart slumped downwards. “But how. . .
.” She’d find out soon enough.

Alasdair pulled his gloves from his pocket
and onto his hands, but not before Jean glimpsed the mottled
rust-red on his fingertips.
Bloodstained ground. The MacDonalds
and the MacLeods went at it like billy-o.

She glanced back to see the glow of Fergie’s
flashlight moving across the bridge and up the hill and then fading
away, a MacDonald now giving aid and succor to a MacLeod.

Alasdair was off after the pale shiny blur of
Thomson’s coat, so fast Jean had to hustle to keep up. No telling
what was lurking out here to pick off stragglers. And she’d be
thinking that even without Alasdair’s dire
or what.

The beam of Thomson’s flashlight swept back
and forth, from the rocky hillside with its thin skin of turf
across the beach to the waves rolling forward, falling back,
rolling forward again. “The tide’s coming in. How far above . . .
ah. There he is, poor chap.”

Three rays of light converged on a long
shape, inert as driftwood. Greg lay diagonally across the pebbles,
feet to the land, head to the sea, one arm flung out as though
reaching for something that exceeded its grasp. Just beyond his
fingertips lay the flashlight Alasdair had given him, glass broken,
bulb extinguished.

His face was turned away from the probing
lights. That, as far as Jean was concerned, was a very good thing.
And yet even her shrinking gaze discerned that below the red cloth
of his jacket glistened a smear of crimson, and a crimson thread
wove its way between the pebbles toward the lick of the waves.

Thomson set aside his first-aid kit and
squatted down to inspect the body, the physical shell of a human
soul. Alasdair hunkered down beside Thomson. Jean tucked her arms
as close to her body as she could and still train her flashlight on
the scene, but she was cold with more than the temperature. The
wind tugged at the scarf around her head and its soft wool tickled
her cheek.

“I’ve phoned Doctor Irvine,” said Thomson.
“He’ll be here soon as may be.”

“Good,” Alasdair replied. “He can do the
preliminaries. Me, I’ve phoned D.C.I. Gilnockie at Inverness
C.I.D.”

“Criminal investigation? But he fell.”

“If he fell, what did he go falling
from?”

The young man shone his flashlight right and
left, back and forth. “Oh. There’s nothing high enough just here,
is there? Did he go falling from the castle wall and crawling
away—away from the house, though, I’d be expecting him to crawl
toward it, looking out help. And if he’d died from a fall, his head
would likely be cracked open or his neck twisted round.”

Alasdair said, “Very good.”

Jean wondered if Thomson realized what high
praise he was getting, Alasdair suffering idiots and fools just
about as gladly as he suffered biting insects like the infamous
West Highland midge. She flexed her knees and took a step back,
then forward again, so as not to miss anything. So as not to show
disrespect to the dead.

“The shingle,” Alasdair went on, “is less
likely to show marks of him crawling than sand, aye, but I had me a
good look-round whilst Tina, well, whilst Tina ran to and fro, and
saw nothing. Gilnockie will order a full work-up. I’ve likely
missed a scuff mark or two in the dark, or, if we’re lucky,
footprints. In any event, I’m thinking he died where he fell—or
fell where he died, rather, just here.”

Thomson considered that a moment. Then,
gingerly, he knelt down and placed his flashlight and his cheek
almost on the pebbles, all the better to sight along the trickle of
red. “The blood’s coming from his chest. His jacket’s torn.”

“Oh aye. The wound’s in his chest, or as near
as I can tell save rolling him over. And his jacket’s not torn but
sliced.”

“A slice, is it? Could he have fallen on a
bit of flotsam or . . . He didna fall. It was no accident.”
Thomson’s eyes sparked and abruptly he sat up and back.

Alasdair waited.

“He was stabbed and the weapon carried
away.”

As superfluous as Thomson’s kit, Jean offered
no comments aloud. Silently, though, she said to the constable,
Go ahead, change that passive voice to active—someone stabbed
him, someone carried away the weapon. It was
. . .

“A murder? Here? On my patch?” Thomson’s
voice swooped to a higher register. Then his body seemed to grow
heavier and more compact, and his voice sank again, finding its
specific gravity. “Well then. Visitor or local makes never mind, we
canna have murders, now, can we? What are you thinking happened,
sir?”

Jean read Alasdair’s nod as a repeat of her
own
Good lad
. Tucking her flashlight beneath her arm, she
reached into the carrier bag for the thermos.

“He was alone no more than twenty minutes,”
Alasdair said. “From the time we saw him on the battlement—and he
did not fall, he let himself down carefully—to the time we met Tina
was no more than fifteen. And it was perhaps five more minutes
before we heard her scream.”

“How long did you talk to Ian at the office?”
Jean poured tea into a plastic cup, the warmth searing through her
gloves, and handed it to Alasdair.

“Ah, ta. Twelve minutes, according to my
phone.”

Jean poured Thomson a cup as well. Steam
coiled upward in the glow of the flashlight.

“Thank you kindly, madam. Mr. MacLeod here,
he was after seeing the old ruined church, you were saying?”

“So he was telling us,” Alasdair answered
over the edge of the cup. “He had no time to get there, though.
Likely he never even reached the wee promontory. He met up with
someone else and they did not stand about talking. One, maybe two
thrusts, and the killer was off along the beach and past the
church. Whether he then circled round the estate to Kinlochroy or
went on along the coastline—well, we’ll leave the
evidence-gathering for the C.I.D.”

Thomson was looking more starstruck by the
moment, his tea forgotten, steam dissipating, in his hand. He
dragged his gaze away from Alasdair’s face to his surroundings. “If
the killer had come away along the path, you’d have seen him. By
sea, well, it’s a rough night.”

You could tell, Jean thought, what a
landlubber she was. The concept of water as highway hadn’t occurred
to her. And yet there was a reason the formal entrance of the new
castle faced the loch. Passable roads were late coming, here. The
early peoples of this area hadn’t felt they were on the rim of
civilization at all, when such a broad highway connected them to
the world.

“What’s further up the coastline to the
north?” Jean asked. “More beaches? Or cliffs?”

“Cliffs,” replied Thomson. “No proper
beaches, and no proper roads save the one leading to Keppoch Point
and the lighthouse. The works are automated, but there’s a hermit
lives there. Or so folk are saying of him. I’m thinking he just
prefers the company of the birds and the sea creatures. No harm in
that.”

“Usually not, no.” Alasdair drained his
cup.

Jean envisioned the beautifully drawn map of
Dunasheen Estate posted on the website. The house or new castle and
its dependent buildings lay to the west of Loch Roy, south of the
old castle on its islet. The extensive garden with its smaller
segments lay on the sheltered southwest side of the house,
otherwise there would have been nothing but gorse and heather
lining the forest walk leading to the new—newer, newish—church.
Whereas the old church was outside the walls, almost outside the
estate entirely, northwest of the house.

Light flashed in the corner of Jean’s eye and
she looked around. Two beams of radiance preceded two humanoid
blobs down the hill and onto the bridge. They didn’t indicate the
Scene of Crimes Officer, unfortunately—more likely the blobs were
Rab Finlay and the doctor. Instead of pouring herself a cup of tea,
she screwed the top back on the thermos.

What had Greg said? Oh yes. “He said
something about having time for a squint at the old castle. I
thought he meant having time before it got dark.”

“But what if he had an appointment with
someone at the church?” asked Alasdair.

Two minds, one thought. Go figure. “If that
person wasn’t the murderer, then maybe he or she saw
something.”

“Aye,” said Thomson.

“And look here,” Alasdair went on. “He fell
with his head a wee bit closer to the castle, as though he was
turning and going back to it. Or as though he was trying to escape
his killer. And yet he was stabbed in front, not in back. Could be
he turned about to strike out with his torch.”

Thomson nodded, remembered his tea, and
swallowed it in one audible gulp. Jean collected the cups. Yeah,
the female ran the refreshment services, but it wasn’t as though
she had anything more to contribute, not right now, anyway.