The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Kept from most folk,” said Alasdair. “I’ve told you.”

  “No, you showed me.”

  “I was no more than twelve at the time I showed Fergie,” Alasdair explained. “I was not aiming to show anyone anything, but I’d not yet learned what you’re calling the great stone face routine.”

  Fergie’s face slipped into a reminiscent smile. “We were standing in a passageway at Stirling Castle, Alasdair watching someone walk by who wasn’t there, half buckled with the weight of his own sight. That was my reward for agreeing to look after such a young lad, and me graduated from university and engaged to be married. Not the first time Alasdair’s knocked me back a step or two.”

  Alasdair’s expression was far from stony, if less than enthusiastic.

  “But I never picked up a thing,” Fergie went on. “When it comes to the supernatural, I’m tone-deaf, color-blind, and numb, more’s the pity. There are some say that Dunasheen has a guardian spirit, the ghost of my ancestress Seonaid MacDonald, the Green Lady. Some say Rory MacLeod falls from the old castle tower, again and again. You couldn’t prove either by me.”

  Jean wasn’t sure whether to boggle more over the image of Alasdair as a child or of Fergie actually wanting to sense ghosts.

  Fergie’s smile reversed back into a worried frown. “I was coming to tell you that the cops from Portree have gone round the back and are waiting at the courtyard gate.”

  “Thank you kindly, Fergie. I’ll try getting back for dinner.” With a stylized salute, two fingers to the end of his eyebrow, Alasdair walked on down.

  Skipping the issue of whether Alasdair had told Fergie about her own allergy, she offered their host a consolatory smile—I know how you feel, believe me, I know—and plowed ahead. “Do you happen to know what Greg MacLeod’s occupation was?”

  “He told me he’d recently sold a factory manufacturing tourist paraphernalia, soft toy kangaroos, T-shirts, didgeridoos. He said something about investments in property, and how he’s dealing in art and starting up a museum of religion, an antipodean version of the one by Glasgow Cathedral. There’re brochures from the Glasgow museum in his and Tina’s room, I saw them when I brought her back to the house.”

  “The St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art. I love the place, and not just because it was one of my first articles for Great Scot . . . Hold that thought. Be right back. Alasdair! Wait up!” Jean galloped on down the stairs and into the entrance hall.

  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.

  Chapter Six

  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.�
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  “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.
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  On the gilded chair, Dougie’s ears pricked forward, then back again. Jean, too, heard a faint crunch of gravel. She looked through the window to see a figure muffled in a yellow raincoat walking swiftly away from Lionel Pritchard’s cottage and down the drive. Shutting the gates, as Diana had directed, would discourage the reporters. But with the pleasant village of Kinlochroy providing food, drink, and sanitary facilities, they would roost for a while, if only to justify being called away from their Hogmanay celebrations.

  Jean reminded herself just as she had reminded Diana that she was a journalist, not a reporter. Either way, she needed to check with base camp. Michael and Rebecca were valuable references and moral support, but Miranda Capaldi was both Jean’s partner and her employer in the travel-and-history magazine, roles that Miranda balanced as gracefully as a fine Royal Doulton cup in its translucent saucer.

  Jean pressed a number and was momentarily startled when the call was answered by a male voice: “Great Scot.”

  It only seemed like midnight. In real time, the office was still open and receptionist Gavin was duly minding reception. “Hi,” Jean said. “It’s me. You mean Miranda’s making you work all the way to six p.m.?”

  “Oh aye,” the lad returned. “My filing wants sorting before I’m allowed away on holiday. How are you getting on at the Misty Isle?”

  “It’s misty,” Jean said. “Downright murky, even. Put me through to Miranda, please, and she can tell you all about it.”

  “Righty-ho.”

  A click and a buzz and Miranda’s smoke-and-honey voice answered. “Miranda Capaldi.”

  “Hi. It’s me,” Jean said again.

  “You’re supposed to be honeymooning, Jean.”

  “No, I’m supposed to be writing a puff piece about Fergus MacDonald, advertising executive turned stately homeowner. The honeymoon doesn’t come until after the wedding.”