The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Taken together, the suite’s rooms—living, bed, dressing, and bath complete with tub, shower, and toilet—had almost the square footage of Jean’s flat in Edinburgh. Since August she’d been sharing that space not just with her cat but with Alasdair. None of them had particularly sharp elbows, but still, independent spirits demanded room of their own. Hence their purchase of the recently vacated flat next door. Add the expense to that of combining the two dwellings into one, and neither Alasdair nor Jean had any grounds to criticize Fergie’s spending habits.

  He might be investing in his estate, but we’re investing in the state of our matrimony.

  Fergie and Diana hadn’t gone overboard fixing up this suite. While the fabrics were fresh and cheery and a brand-new clock radio sat by the bed, every surface and wall was decorated with the sort of flea-market stuff dealers called collectibles—vases and figurines, a peeling set of Walter Scott novels, stuffed birds, horse brasses, and wicker baskets.

  Likewise, the furniture was a miscellany gleaned from the recesses of the house. It ranged from a curlicued Georgian desk to a heavy Victorian wardrobe that—Jean had checked—did not open onto Narnia, to a single Louis some-teenth chair spun out of sugar and gilt that had been claimed by Dougie since neither of the humans dared sit on it.

  The little gray cat was now disguised as a tea cozy, paws and tail tucked, whiskers furled. His iridescent golden eyes watched Jean. Another criminal investigation?

  “Don’t ask,” Jean told him. She’d already answered Alasdair’s questions on the way back from the beach, despite nothing much having happened at the house in his absence. But then, like the non-barking dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, even absence was evidence.

  Feeling every year of her accumulated forty, Jean turned the back of her lap toward the electric fire whose three glowing bars were giving their all. The appliance looked like an alien crouching in the interior of the four-hundred-year-old stone fireplace. But places like Dunasheen no longer housed more servants than guests, including maids whose purpose in life was to lay coal fires and set them alight when the gentry returned from gallivanting across the moor.

  Her hands and feet tingled in the heat. Her head fizzed, thoughts rising and popping like bubbles in a flat soda—motive unknown, opportunity a very narrow window, means a knife in the dark.

  When Alasdair walked through the doorway from the bedroom, she could tell from the vertical furrow between his eyebrows that he was ticking off the same list.

  She knew his expressions, his face, and his form as well as her own. His short-cropped hair, a ripple of golden grain tipped by frost. His regular, unremarkable features, planes and angles assembled like a geometry proof, rational and elegant. His armor of reserve, claiming privacy rather than secrecy, that had once fooled her into thinking he felt no emotion. His broad shoulders, slender hips, strong hands, compacted into a relatively small frame. The angle of his head, tilted in consideration of a Fergus MacDonald painting over the mantel, and the solidity of his tread. Some men sagged into middle age. Alasdair stood all the straighter, especially when facing trouble.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well,” he returned.

  “I’ve almost had a feeling of foreboding all day, although I thought it was just the darkness. Or even wedding nerves.”

  “You’re having second thoughts, are you now?” He spoke more wearily than warily.

  “You know me. I’m down to twentieth thoughts, maybe thirtieth, not that any of them are going to make me back out. We’ve not only reserved a priest, we’ve filled out all the paperwork!”

  That drew a smile from his taut lips, restoring their curve.

  “I just want, well, dang it, I want to live happily ever after. Even though that’s an aspiration based more on hope than experience.”

  “We’ll muddle through this one, too, Jean.”

  “This one. Yeah. It’s like together we make some sort of critical mass and generate sudden death. Not just sudden death. Murders.”

  “We met because of a murder.”

  “Sure, but it’s hardly fair that someone had to die for us to meet.”

  “We’ve beaten the odds a bit, oh aye. But maybe the odds are turning the other way and we’ll soon be getting that ‘ever after,’ ‘happily’ to be defined later.”

  That drew a smile from her. She wrapped her arms around his chest and nestled her face into the angle of his shoulder. Sparring partner, best friend, lover. Betrothed.

  He held her close, the slight prickle of his jaw against her cheek, his hands still radiating cold through her sweater and into her flesh, his body humming with subtle electricity that was anything but cold.

  The chill lingered in his sweater and jeans, and the scent of soap with which he’d washed his hands of blood and dirt. And something else, a whiff of a rich, tropical fragrance, gardenia or lotus, maybe. “What’s that . . . oh. Tina’s perfume. You had your arm around her.”

  Gently, with a light kiss on her cheek, he extricated himself from the embrace and extended his hands toward the fire. Personal interlude over, time for work. “It took some doing convincing her to leave the scene, ’til I thought to tell her that every step she took—and she was taking more than a few, trotting to and fro wringing her hands and moaning, poor woman—was destroying a bit of the crime scene.”

  Yeah, Jean thought, I’d be moaning, too. “Could she answer any questions? Did she say anything about Greg meeting with someone at the church?”

  “She blethered on about his genealogy studies, and how foolish they were, a waste of time, energy, money. And she was saying how they’d made a gamble coming here.”

  “A gamble?”

  He shook his head. “She was not giving me context. Their holiday has likely overextended their budget.”

  “He blamed that on her shopping spree in London.” Jean’s idea of a shopping spree was a bookstore crawl from the glossy covers at Waterstone’s to the dusty, cracked bindings at an antiquarian’s. “Do they have children? Other relatives back in Australia?”

  “A son, I got that much, how he’d not be coming here to help, not with two small children. And there’s a brother as well, though I could not make out if he’s hers or Greg’s. ‘How can I tell Kenneth,’ she kept saying.”

  “Well, there’s someone who needs to be notified. Is she up to making a call?”

  “Fergie’s saying no, not just now. He’s asked Irvine to see to her. Kenneth will be hearing the bad news soon enough, I reckon.”

  As though certain the matter was well in hand, Dougie lay down his head and dozed off. Jean strolled over to her favorite feature of the room, a bay window with a padded seat running along its length. That would be a great place to sit and read on a sunny afternoon, assuming they had sunny afternoons. Now Jean could see nothing but, again, her own reflection in the glass-covered night.

  No. Through her own image, she saw the lights not of Kinlochroy but of a set of headlamps coming up Dunasheen’s driveway, past the garden wall. “They made good time.”

  “Who?” Alasdair joined her at the window.

  “The team from Portree, that’s less than an hour away, but . . . oh. Wait.”

  The headlamps slowed, made a right-angle turn, and stopped, illuminating the facade of a stone cottage. Then the lights went out. A shadowy figure moved from car to cottage, a door opened, and a window lit up.

  “That’s Lionel Pritchard, Fergie’s manager,” Alasdair said. “Leastways, that’s his cottage.”

  “Fergie said it was his day out. I guess he hasn’t heard the news or he’d come up to the house.”

  Leaving the curtains open—only a human fly would be able to see in a third-story window—Jean stepped back into the warm aura of the heater. “Greg went down to the beach right after he and Tina got here, and was alone for only twenty minutes. There’s not much chance he just happened to run into a mortal enemy. And why would a total stranger kill him? He must have known his murderer.”

  “
Or his murderer knew him.”

  “Whatever. How many people could he have known so far away from home?”

  “Dozens. More. Maybe he’s traveled here again and again. Maybe he’s in constant contact with half the folk on Skye. And just now our list of suspects includes all of them.”

  “Surely you’ll be able to eliminate most of them.”

  “I’ll not be doing it, that’s Gilnockie’s job.”

  “Sure it is.” Jean knew full well that once a detective, always a detective.

  Alasdair’s lopsided smile registered her point. “I’ll be dialing back the territorial imperative, all right?”

  “It’s not up to me,” she told him. “Patrick Gilnockie, isn’t it? He took your position when you retired last August.”

  “Oh aye. You’ve never met him.”

  “No, I haven’t. You said he was older than you, which made me wonder why he was lagging behind you in promotions. If he isn’t as bright as you, though, he wouldn’t have taken over for you.”

  “He’s sharp as a tack, no worries there, a grand detective. He was not as committed as me to the police work is all, but then, he did not burn himself out.” Alasdair didn’t have to add, like I did. Jean had been there at the slow fizzle and sudden flare of the embers.

  She murmured, “He wasn’t as likely to be committed as you. You know, institutionalized?”

  Doing her the courtesy of ignoring the bad joke, Alasdair peered out into the gloom.

  “The murder had to have been premeditated,” she told his back. “It wasn’t suicide—knives don’t get up and walk away. It wasn’t an accident—oops, I didn’t mean to kill him, I was just cleaning my knife and it went off. And I don’t see how twenty minutes could be long enough to generate a crime of passion, you know, the argument, the shoving match, the weapon drawn.”

  His reflected expression was both bemused and amused. “You’re making bricks without straw, Jean. Mind you, I’m agreeing with you, for the most part. Greg meant to meet someone at the church. Whether that someone is the murderer, or knows who the murderer is, we’ll be seeing. It’s possible he killed himself and the someone took away the knife, but without further evidence, I’m thinking there’s no need to go complicating matters any further than they already are. As for an argument, well, some arguments fester for centuries.”

  Putting rings on each other’s fingers and daggers in each other’s hearts. Yeah, she’d had to say that, hadn’t she? But free association was her specialty. So was color commentary. “There aren’t too many arguments festering on this side of the Irish Sea, not fatal ones, anyway, not any more.”

  “When we know the why,” said Alasdair, “then we’ll know the who.”

  She smiled at him saying “when” rather than “if.” “And when we know the who, then we’ll know the why.”

  “Oh aye.” He looked around and up. At first Jean thought he was again considering Fergie’s painting, an interpretation of the legend of St. Michael and the dragon. Archangel and beast were entwined in mortal and gaudy combat, silver lance against green scales, both splashed with crimson. Michael’s helmeted face might look like a canned potato and his lance like a ray gun, but Fergie’s figures had a blocky integrity, and his design was quite nice, dragon and man resembling a knotwork figure from the Book of Kells.

  But Alasdair hadn’t turned art critic; he was looking at the small, ornate clock. “It’s going on for five. Portree should be arriving soon. Gilnockie, though, he’s got a long road.”

  “Only a Brit would think that less than a hundred-and-fifty miles was a long road.” Jean visualized the route south along Loch Ness, then west past Eilean Donan Castle of a million postcards and calendars, over the Skye Bridge and across almost the entire island. “The roads are all two-lane, no single-tracks until you’re past Dunvegan, and the odds of getting behind a caravan/camper trailer or tour bus are next to nothing this time of year.”

  “In daylight and fine weather,” he replied, “you could be driving the route in maybe three, three and a half hours. In the dark and wet, well, he’ll likely be here by nine, depending on how long he’s spent assembling his team.”

  As though summoned by his words, another set of headlights flashed beyond the window. Alasdair spun around like a cat spotting a canary and Jean trotted to his side. Two vehicles materialized in the glow of lights from the house and stopped beside the Krums’ SUV that still sat in the middle of the gravel parking area.

  A patrol car and a small panel van disgorged assorted human figures, which donned reflective canary-colored jackets and fired up flashlights. The cavalry might be arriving, but from here it looked more like the circus.

  The clock on the mantel emitted a tinny, tinkly version of the Westminster chimes and struck five times. From somewhere in the house a deeper version of the same was followed by the two sonorous notes of a doorbell. “Now it’s decided to start working again,” Jean said.

  “You’re not in the hall playing footman just now.” Alasdair picked up his coat and gloves. “Portree wants guiding to the scene. You’re coming out as well, are you?”

  A spousal point to the man for asking. She replied, “Thanks, but no. I’ll see if there’s something I can do to help Fergie and Diana. Poor Fergie, the last thing he needed was a fatality. And yes, I know, the situation is a lot harder on the MacLeods.”

  Dougie was sleeping soundly. Food, drink, and sanitary facilities were available in the dressing room—he could spend his holiday in the suite, no need to get closer acquainted with the household dogs. Switching off first the electric fire and then the overhead light, Jean joined Alasdair in the hall and waited while he locked the door, then handed her an extra key. He didn’t need to point out that half the people in the house would have keys. There was a murderer afoot.

  Jean and Alasdair didn’t need a trail of breadcrumbs or a ball of string to find their way. In the course of their heritage-industry duties, they’d learned how to navigate this sort of pile, from artifact to artwork to antique. You passed the tapestry depicting the Irish myth of Grainne, Fionn, and Diarmuid—faded threads telling a soap-operatic tale of passion, jealousy, and death. You turned left at the sculpture of a goblin holding a functioning if dim light bulb. You turned right at the suit of armor with a pink handbag slung over one steel gauntlet and a pink feather boa looped across its breastplate. You went straight ahead past the mock-Tiffany stained-glass window depicting a mermaid that Fergie had rescued from a biscuit factory scheduled for demolition.

  On their arrival yesterday, he had given Jean and Alasdair a more comprehensive tour than usual, since they were friends—and prospective sponsors—of the family. Despite its faint smell of mildew, Dunasheen was indeed a fairy-tale castle, a fabulous warren of a place. Some areas were beautifully fitted out, fabrics brushed, wood gleaming. Others were still works in progress or works never undertaken. The place was romantic, oh yes, and mysterious, although “mysterious” was not a word Jean planned to use in her article for Great Scot. Assuming an article was still viable, now.

  Alasdair strode on ahead, the floor emitting a series of squeaks and creaks beneath his tread, and stopped beneath the arch leading onto the turnpike stair. He cast a jaundiced look at the sprig of mistletoe dangling from the light fixture. No, it wasn’t a good time to put the provocative vegetation to use.

  Voices echoed up the spiral staircase, Diana’s dulcet tones saying, “. . . I don’t believe we should be doing that, in the circumstances.”

  “We’ve got no choice. It’s part and parcel of the plan,” Fergie said, his mild tones whetted.

  Alasdair looked at Jean. Jean looked at Alasdair. Plan? Fergie’s ploy to exchange security advice and favorable publicity in return for a wedding? Or his plan to reveal another marketing gambit along with their private viewing of Dunasheen’s most famous artifact, the Fairy Flagon?

  “As you wish—” began Diana.

  “It’s not my wish, we agreed—”

  “Very good,”
she stated, her voice sharpened to a gingersnap. Light steps went down the stairs to the first floor and faded away.

  No need to point out to either Diana or Fergie that a murder on the doorstep did have a tendency to make the best-laid plans gang agley. No need to let them know they’d been overheard.

  After a discreet pause, Jean and Alasdair started down the staircase. “Mind the tripping stane halfway along,” he reminded her, “the one Fergie was going on about.”

  Oops. Jean grabbed for the handrail, a stiffened rope strung through giant metal eyelets, and placed her feet even more carefully on the long, slightly dished steps like misshapen slices of stone pie. There it was. One of the treads was half the height of the others, designed to trip up a charging attacker and let a defender get the drop on him.

  Just as they had the first times she’d gone up and down and up again, her five-and-a-half senses detected a chill gathered in that spot, a different sort of chill than that of the draft sliding invisibly up the shaft. This time, instead of pushing through the spot, she stopped.

  The back of her neck puckered at a ripple of emotional energy, at the catch between her shoulder blades and the weight on her shoulders that signaled a leak from the next dimension. “Do you feel that?”

  “Oh aye,” said Alasdair, his presence at her back mitigating the chilly creep of her flesh. “There’s a wee bit ghostie just here, not near as strong as some, though.”

  “Fergie said a guest told him he was pushed by invisible hands here.”

  “He tripped himself up. I’ve never yet sensed a ghost could push. As I’ve told Fergie . . .”

  Fergie looked around the curve of the stair, ponytail lank, brow corrugated. Reseating his glasses on his nose and forcing his sagging jowls into a smile, he completed Alasdair’s statement. “Ghosts are no more than recordings, not quite video, not quite audio, another sense entirely.”

  Oops again. Unlike Diana, Fergie hadn’t gone on his way. As for his words—Jean rounded on Alasdair. “You told him you’re allergic to ghosts? I thought that was your best-kept secret.”