The Blue Hackle (8 page)

He was just heading into the back corridor,
and made a U-turn at her shout. “Eh?”

“Can I have the phone, please? I need to ask
Miranda whether she’s ever heard of Greg. He’s an art dealer and
was opening a museum.”

“He’s one of her lot, is he then? Was,
rather. Sounds to be they’re not traveling on a shoestring.”
Alasdair pulled out the cell phone and handed it over. “I’ve
programmed it with Thomson’s number, if you’re needing me whilst
I’m at the scene.”

“Thanks,” she replied, and as he turned again
toward the postern gate, “Mind your step. There are a lot of rocks
out there that could work as tripping stanes. As for ghosts . .
.”

“Aye, I saw and heard Rory MacLeod plunging
into the keep half a dozen times whilst I waited with Tina. It’s
that sort of night.” A nod, a flash of a smile, and his steps faded
away down the back hall.

Oh yeah. It was that sort of night. The next
knock on the door would be Count Dracula collecting blood
samples.

The phone clutched to her breast, Jean turned
back to the staircase. Funny how twitchy she could get without her
communications slaves, not just her cell phone but her laptop
computer, when she’d managed to spend the first half of her life
without either.

No, she’d told Alasdair back in Edinburgh,
she didn’t need to haul along her computer. All she needed was her
paper notebook to jot down odds and ends. She wasn’t going to write
the article about Dunasheen on the spot. This was the time for a
celebration of the year’s end and their own beginnings, not for web
surfing or e-mailing.

There was never a good time for researching
the extinguished life of a murder victim.

Meeting Fergie at the foot of the steps, she
asked him, “Can I borrow your computer sometime? If I’d brought
mine along I wouldn’t have wanted it, but since I didn’t . . .”

“Any time. You know where my office is.” His
shoulders turned one way and his stomach the other, trying to be
two places at once. “Drinks for the guests—the Krums and you and
Alasdair—dinner—we’ll organize food for the policemen in the old
servant’s hall beyond the kitchens, that’s now the staff sitting
room in the summer, when we have folk in from the village to help
Nancy and Rab.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Seems the least we can do, in the
circumstances.”

Hosting the police, then, wasn’t what Diana
had been arguing against. “Can I help organize anything? Or I’d be
glad to sit with Tina. I promise I won’t give her any third
degrees.”
Not yet, anyway,
Jean added to herself.

“She’s in a bad way. Doctor Irvine is seeing
to her, I expect with sedatives.”

Knowing that the Krums were settling into the
Wallace suite, Jean asked, “She’s in the Mary, Queen of Scots
suite?”

“That she is, yes. I hope she’ll not think
that’s in bad taste, with Mary being widowed twice and all. Poor
woman.”

Tina, he meant, not Mary. Jean couldn’t
resist a quick, one-third degree. “Greg took off right after he
arrived, right?”

“Yes, he left just after arriving, didn’t
even stay for his tea—Tina wasn’t half upset with him for that. He
stopped just long enough to get his hat, I expect. I heard him
walking down the stairs as I went round the corner to my office. I
was there listening to a CD when you rang the bell and called
out.”

Greg hadn’t even waited long enough to get a
hat. Jean asked, “Did he say anything about knowing anyone here?
Did he ask directions to the old church?”

“If he knows anyone here, he didn’t tell me,
other than saying he’d never visited the old country before. And
no, he didn’t ask directions. I indicated the rooms in the house as
I took them up the stairs is all. You met him on the castle path
and he told you he was going to the church?”

“Yes. We think he had an appointment with
someone there.”

“That’s odd, then, I mean, him going by the
castle path.” Frowning, Fergie took a couple of steps toward the
back hall. “But the place is confusing.”

“You took the MacLeods to their room? Where
was Diana?”

“Sorry, Jean, can’t stop any longer—there’s
work needs doing.” He strode off toward the kitchen, but not before
she saw the shadow that lay on his normally affable expression
deepen to a thundercloud. What was up with him and his daughter?
What had they been, if not arguing, then having words about? And
where had she been right before sunset, anyway?

Jean looked suspiciously down the hall toward
the back door. When she and Alasdair came back to the house, the
dogs had been outside. And there’d been a wet raincoat hanging in
the cloak room. It had fallen off its hook, as though it had been
tossed there just moments earlier.

What was she trying to do, pin something on
Diana?

Jean turned toward the staircase and jumped.
Diana stood on the bottom step, her complexion no longer flushed
but a dewy ivory-pink. “Hullo, Jean,” she said, but her cornflower
blue eyes were fixed on something over Jean’s shoulder.

They’d heard her go down the turnpike stair.
She must have gone back up one of the secondary flights while
making her appointed rounds. “Hi,” Jean said, and to head off the
flush she felt mounting into her own cheeks, “Sorry about
everything that’s happened today. That’s still happening.”

“No need to apologize,” Diana told her. “None
of it’s your doing.”

“Well no, it isn’t.”

“Do you mean to join in tonight? None of this
is the Krums’ doing, either, and they’re expecting their Hogmanay
activities as per the posted schedule.”

“Yes, I’ll join in. Alasdair’s going to try
and make it to dinner.”

“Perhaps you could assist Father in
entertaining the Krums, then?”

As in, divert their attention from the
murder? “Sure,” Jean said, “assuming anyone will think my
blathering is entertaining.”

She hadn’t been fishing for a compliment, and
sure enough she didn’t reel one in. “Thank you. Drinks in the
library at half-past-six, dinner at half-past-seven. Also, I’m sure
we’ll soon be getting more attention from the media than we’d like,
and to that end I’ve asked our manager, Mr. Pritchard, to close the
main gates. You’re media yourself, now . . .” Diana paused
delicately, her porcelain brow creased ever so slightly.

“I’ve never yet written about one of the
investigations I’ve been involved in. I do history, travel,
legends. Seeing is believing and believing is seeing—you know, how
people act on what they perceive, not on what actually exists. The
Loch Ness monster, the Bible imagery at Rosslyn chapel, that sort
of thing.”

“Your articles are—illuminating. We
appreciate your doing one about Dunasheen.” Diana didn’t need to
add anything along the lines of,
as long as it doesn’t mention
the murder
. “And Alasdair’s attention to security matters as
well, most helpful.”

“Alasdair and I appreciate the holiday and
the wedding.”

Only now did Diana’s gaze focus on Jean, if
less on her face than on her apparel. Her full, soft lips stretched
in a pained smile, she said, “There’s no need to dress for dinner,”
and she wafted away down the back hall.

Jean glanced down at her oversized sweater
and wilted jeans, getting the message, and started toward the
stairs thinking that in order to produce Diana, Fergie must have
crossed himself with a Dresden figurine. She’d have to ask Alasdair
for the particulars of the late Mrs. MacDonald. All Jean knew was
that she had been an Englishwoman, and that Diana had been raised
in the Home Counties while Fergie manufactured soap bubbles in the
advertising and public relations industries. An English childhood
explained a lot . . .

Wait a minute
. Jean made a quick
about-face. Why had Diana been looking so intently at the wall
opposite the staircase? Had she seen a mouse?

Jean saw a large brass-bound wooden chest,
like a treasure chest, what the Scots called a kist. On it sat a
small cast of Michelangelo’s
David,
loinclothed with a
paisley-pattern silk tie, and a scarlet poinsettia dusted with
glitter.

On the wall hung a couple of targes, small
studded shields, set atop crossed claymores like the skulls and
bones on a pirate flag. The leather sheaths of two officer’s
regimental dirks, complete with tiny pockets for a small knife and
fork. A fat-bladed Gurkha knife. A tier of basket-hilted swords and
a wheel of pistols.

Jean had once read that an oath made on the
hilt of a dirk was as binding as one made on a Bible. But she
doubted if any the displayed weapons were genuine—they more likely
came from the Scottish equivalent of the factory Greg had owned in
Australia, and had rolled off an assembly line beside plush Nessies
and plastic bagpipes.

However—she stepped closer, the better to see
in the less-than-glaring light—the swords did have a certain
patina, the targes had been battered around, and the sheath of the
dirk on the right was . . .

Empty.

No. Oh no
.

Her breath turned to feathers, like those of
a dove caught by a hawk, and lodged in her throat. Leaping forward,
she seized the sheath between thumb and forefinger and shook it, as
though the eighteen-inch blade had somehow become invisible.

The carved pommel of the remaining knife was
topped with a cairngorm, the smoky quartz glowing sullenly below a
fine web of scratches. The silver fittings of both sheaths were
discolored by tarnish, and the leather was worn. Had one dirk
belonged to Fergie Mor and the other to Allan Cameron?

It didn’t matter where the blades had been.
What mattered was where one had gone.

Jean managed to suck first one, then another
fuzzy breath into her chest. Alasdair had programmed Thomson’s
number into the phone. But he wouldn’t yet have made it to where
Thomson was standing guard. And if he had, what good would it do
telling him about a missing knife, when he already knew that a
knife had killed Greg MacLeod? When the first thing he’d do upon
arriving at the scene was set Portree—handy collective noun,
that—to searching for the murder weapon?

If the murder weapon had come from inside the
castle, that would cut Alasdair’s list of suspects down to just a
few names.

Not, Jean assured herself, that the missing
dirk was the murder weapon. The sheath could have been empty for
years—she sure couldn’t testify one way or the other. Fergie,
though, would know all about it. He would have a perfectly logical
explanation.

So why,
asked the nagging little voice
of the devil’s advocate in Jean’s head,
had Diana been staring
at the vacancy?
Coolly, unflappably, keeping up appearances
very nicely, yes, but taking note of something off, something
wrong, when already things had gone badly wrong.

She’d tell Alasdair about the missing
weapon—and missing Diana—at dinner, before Gilnockie arrived with a
full scene-of-crimes team. A team that could search for
fingerprints on the silver fittings and on the leather itself.
Where she’d just left her own.

Stamping irritably at first the tile floor
and then the stone treads, Jean trekked back up the stairs. She
plunged through the chilly ripple of sensation without stopping to
analyze whether it was malice or melancholy, those being two
emotions often attached to lingering souls.

Greg hadn’t wanted to play a character in a
ghost story himself, and he wasn’t necessarily doing so. Still,
spirits often lingered hoping for justice, even vengeance. And
that, Jean thought, was where she and Alasdair came in. Not just as
seekers of truth, justice, and the legal way, but also as layers of
ghosts. Normally she loathed the excuse, “Because we can.” But when
it came to laying ghosts, both real and figurative, those that
could, had a responsibility to do.

Real ghosts
. Maybe that was an
oxymoron.

She stepped back into the Charlie suite,
switched on a cute but faint table lamp, and sat down on the tartan
cushion lining the window seat.

The tiny screen of the phone displayed a
Missed Call notification. Ah, Rebecca Campbell-Reid, the distaff
half of good friends in Edinburgh, had left a message just about
the time Alasdair was dealing with a distraught Tina. Either he
hadn’t heard the phone ring or he’d ignored it. Good for him. There
were times Jean wondered just who was the slave, the phone or its
owner.

Rebecca’s voice mail was delivered in a
good-natured American voice whose accent had been moving eastward
ever since she’d married Michael, Scot and proud of it. “We’re
still on for the wedding, bagpipes and all, no worries there. We’ll
be obliged to bring Linda, though. The child minder’s got the flu,
drat and double drat. So much for that child-free interlude. Can
you ask the MacDonalds if they’ve got a cot? If not, we’ll rig
something up. At least the bairn’s not crawling yet. Gotta go,
emergency meeting over a collar that’s turned out to be a
fake.”

Jean eyed the now mute face of the phone.
She’d have to tell Michael and Rebecca about the death at
Dunasheen, although she could spare them the ramifications until
the official team had sifted through them.

The Campbell-Reids had been, if not helping
hands, then peripheral nerves at all four of team Cameron and
Fairbairn’s earlier cases. Investigations. Things. As historians
and employees of the National Museum of Scotland and Holyrood
Palace, respectively, their knowledge of and connections to the
art, artifacts, and antiquities business had proved invaluable.

They’d given Jean and Alasdair a hard time
about Fergie and his Flagon, no matter how much she insisted it had
been old Lord Dunasheen, Fergie’s uncle, who claimed the alabaster
cup was an artifact of the world beneath, or beyond, or even
inside, wherever supernatural beings came from. And now . . . well,
Alasdair was right, she was operating with only a wisp or two of
straw. She’d check with the Campbell-Reids once she had a brick or
two, not to mention a crib for the baby.