The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Tell Alasdair that,” Miranda said with a laugh, and then her laugh trailing away into caution, “Please tell me you’re not phoning because there’s been criminal activity.”

  Really, Jean thought, Miranda’s ESP was uncannier than her own, and much more useful. “I’m afraid so. An Australian visitor’s been stabbed to death on Dunasheen Beach, mere minutes after getting here. Alasdair’s in full police mode and the troops are assembling.”

  “Ah,” Miranda said. “Well then. Pity.” After a suitable moment of silence, she asked, “Australian, you’re saying?”

  Jean told her everything she knew, little as that was, of Greg MacLeod’s artificially shortened life: Townsville, Queensland. Clan societies and genealogy. A souvenir factory. Property. The art market. A museum of religion a la St. Mungo’s. “Although,” she concluded, “I bet his museum has another attribution, since St. Mungo is peculiar to Glasgow.”

  “There’s something to be said for, say, the Woolloomooloo Museum of Religious Life and Art.”

  Jean surprised herself by laughing, if shortly. “You went Down Under year before last.”

  “Aye, that I did, attending a benefit in Sydney for the descendants of the Scottish masons who built the harbor bridge. Whilst I was there I spoke to several clan societies, including the MacLeods, and made the round of galleries and museums as well. The Ozzies lay on lovely receptions, all in the interest of British/Australian business and cultural relations, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Jean, with a knowing nod. She heard either the soft chatter of Miranda’s keyboard or the discreet jingle of her jewelry.

  “No Greg MacLeods are named in my notes, nor have I a business card on file. You’ve tried an Internet search on the man, have you?”

  “If you’ll look in the next office, you’ll see my laptop sitting on my desk.”

  “Oh aye. And here’s me, saying, no, you’ll not be wanting your computer, being a blushing bride and all. Half a tick.”

  Jean refrained from pointing out that she and Alasdair were past the blushing stage, even though, with Jean’s fair to fish-belly-white skin, flushing was always an option.

  “There’s more than a few Greg MacLeods in the world,” Miranda announced. “Here’s yours, though, in a newspaper article from last year. He sold Waltzing Matilda Gifts to Gung Hay Fat Choy International for a tidy sum, however you’re defining tidy.”

  “That confirms what he told Fergie, though I don’t know why he’d lead Fergie on.”

  “Here’s another bit in the same newspaper, last March. MacLeod gave a donation—another tidy sum, I reckon, or it would not be in the papers—to the Bible History Research Society for excavations in Israel.”

  “That connects him with the museum.” Jean frowned—somewhere in the storage closet of her brain, the name Bible History Research Society rattled like a skeleton shifting uneasily.

  “Just coming, Gavin!” called Miranda. And, back into the telephone, “Sorry, Jean, must run.”

  “Fergie says I can borrow his computer,” Jean told her. “And maybe Tina MacLeod will be up to answering questions when D.C.I. Gilnockie gets here. The guy who replaced Alasdair at Inverness.”

  “You’ll soon be hearing the bellow of the alpha males, then.”

  This time Jean’s laugh was more of a snort, the skeptical retort of the alpha female. “Alasdair promises no territorial disputes this time around. I think he’s finally accepting he’s in another business now. And he told me Gilnockie’s a good cop.”

  “You’ll be keeping me up on events, then. I’ll try asking about among my Ozzie contacts, but with the holiday and all, they’re more likely hanging about Bondi Beach than answering e-mail.”

  It always seemed odd to Jean that Christmas and New Year’s were mid-summer events Down Under. But that was her own cultural bias. “Thanks. I’ll talk to you again before I see you on the second.”

  “You’re still holding the wedding, then?”

  “Oh.” Jean looked around the room, from the painted dragon above the mantel to the sleeping moggie on the posh chair, but neither was offering any advice.

  Maybe she and Alasdair should cancel the festivities. Maybe holding a wedding under the shadow of an unsolved crime would taint their marriage. Or maybe she and her equally stubborn beloved shouldn’t let some bloody-minded person control their destiny any more than various bloody-minded people had already done.

  “Jean?” Miranda asked.

  “Yeah, we’re still holding the wedding.”

  “That’s the spirit! Keep your pecker up, eh?”

  “I should hope so.”

  “It’s not too late to be organizing a release of doves. Saw it done once at a wedding in Hampshire, just lovely, off they flew into the blue sky . . .”

  “. . . and were probably picked off by hawks. Thanks anyway, Miranda.” Jean shook her head, round-filing Miranda’s dove idea with her other ones: arriving at Dunasheen chapel in a horse-drawn carriage draped with roses, exiting while military re-enactors formed an arch of swords, champagne fountains and a cake shaped like Edinburgh Castle at the reception.

  “You’ve got no taste for bells and whistles, do you now,” Miranda said sadly.

  “No. And neither does Alasdair. Talk to you again soon.” Jean hit End and leaned against the stone bar separating two windows. It felt like a cold finger tracing down her back.

  Her smile ebbed. Her ears echoed with the absence of Miranda’s familiar voice. With the absence of any sound at all except for the eerie whistle of the wind in the chimney. The shadowed room in front of her seemed to fade away, and she saw the lights of Edinburgh and the crowds jostling along the sidewalks, fireworks over the Castle and rock bands playing.

  No lonely beaches there, just the occasional lonely alley, and all the agitations of the city. There was something—there was a lot—to be said for mountains, sea, and sky, even a clouded one. Caledonia, stern and wild, harsh and beautiful. She’d committed herself to Scotland before she’d committed herself to Alasdair.

  Sitting up, she looked into the darkness, at the lights of the village blurred by the mist and rain, at the fluorescent stripes on the police cars shining in the lights of the house, at the man standing—

  The chill on her back surged through her body, tightening every follicle. A human shape stood below the window, so still she’d have thought he was one of Fergie’s sculptures, if there’d been a sculpture in the parking area. The posture, feet planted wide apart, hands thrust into pockets, indicated a man. But it wasn’t Pritchard, the manager. He’d been wearing a yellow raincoat. And why would he stand there when he had a nice warm cottage or even nicer, if cooler, castle to go to?

  This man wore mottled black, boots, pants, a long jacket with a hood. A hood pulled so well forward that it encompassed only shadow, like one of Tolkien’s ringwraiths or a specter of Death.

  Then he moved, tilting his head back so that the light revealed his face, white as old bone. He spotted Jean in her window, outlined against the dim light, and his body straightened from a merely cautious pose to an alert one.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She returned stare for stare with those hollow eyes.

  Did he slump slightly? Or did he hear the front door opening? Just as light gushed outward and ran off his jacket like water, a yellow-coated figure ran up the driveway and a male voice shouted, “You there!”

  The dark figure faded into the night.

  Chapter Seven

  Jean exhaled between teeth clenched so tightly her jaw hurt.

  Yellow-coat ran into the parking area, still yelling. “Here! You there!” Which seemed a bit contradictory, but she was hardly in a position to criticize. She didn’t recognize the voice, and the figure was too slender to be either Fergie or Rab Finlay. Pritchard, probably.

  Below Jean, presumably from the front porch, Diana’s cool voice cut the heat of the male’s. “Mr. Pritchard, Lionel, if you please, there’s no need to shout.”

&n
bsp; “Diana, we can’t have the man hanging about. Your own father . . .”

  “No harm done. Someone in the village likely told him about—the unfortunate event—and he stopped by on his way home to have a look at the police vehicles.”

  His gait as smooth as a hobby horse’s, Pritchard strode to the door. Jean had to lean forward and press her ear to the icy glass in order to hear him say, “We’re hardly on his way, the path runs beyond the garden wall. He had no call . . .”

  The slam of the front door echoed upward, vibrating as subtly in Jean’s ear as distant thunder. She sat back on the window seat. Who was “he”? Where was “home”? And was Pritchard’s accent English rather than Scottish?

  Well, so was Diana’s. And Fergie himself had been infused with a “proper” accent, as befit the nephew of a baronet, never mind his thistle-strewn Highland ancestry. Although with Fergie, the infusion hadn’t quite taken.

  The clock on the mantelpiece chimed six times. She’d promised to be in the library at six-thirty. With one last searching glance out the window—no mysterious figures, no irascible managers, no police people—she pulled herself to her feet and headed into the bathroom.

  Her cosmetics bag was wedged between a ceramic lizard studded with fake gems and Alasdair’s nylon shaving kit, which in turn sat next to a Chinese vase holding fresh if odorless flowers. Maybe instead of donning the cap, bells, and motley of a court jester, she should don war paint. She applied eye shadow and mascara, chose a colorful tapestry vest over a basic skirt-and-turtleneck combo, added necklace and earrings, and traded her walking shoes for decorative flats, all the while pondering what Diana had called the unfortunate event.

  It was too much to expect the mysterious man in the parking area to be the murderer. Murderers, in Jean’s thankfully limited experience, didn’t stand around looking sinister. Besides, Diana and Pritchard both knew him, or of him, at least. He must be some local character.

  If one of the two military dirks in the entrance hall was the murder weapon, then the murderer must have come from inside the house. Or passed through it. Or known someone with access to it. Did that mean the murder had been a collaborative effort, and that there were two killers to apprehend? Great.

  In the bedroom, the telephone lay where she’d left it, on one of the tasseled pillows piled on the four-poster bed. Its little screen gazed up at her blankly. No, he doesn’t need you right now.

  She tried a telepathic message instead: Alasdair, let everyone else deal with the crime scene. Come get dinner.

  Her summons produced only Dougie, who trotted out of the dressing room licking his lips, leaped onto the bed, and snuggled down amidst the pillows. Jean regarded him with a touch of envy. Not so long ago she’d been proud of her hard-earned self-sufficiency, the sort of pride that went before falling in love. Now she was incomplete without a man, if far from just any man.

  They had been through more together in less than a year than she and her first husband had experienced in two decades. Alasdair had never met her ex, a man who was all ground and no imagination, but she’d met his, a woman who was all imagination and no ground. All four had promised to have and to hold until death did them part. But it wasn’t death that had parted them, although divorce was a sort of death.

  Fergie had lost his wife to disease. And Tina had lost Greg to murder.

  Jean jerked to attention as the clock struck six-thirty. Places to go, people to see, clues to ferret out. Tucking the phone into her second-best evening bag, a small leather pouch on a long strap, she gave her engagement ring a quick polish against her skirt and charged out into the hall.

  She almost caromed off Scott Krum, who was lifting the lid of an ivory-inlaid chest opposite the door of the Charlie suite. He dropped it with a thud and whoosh that made the Grainne tapestry ripple. His teeth gleamed in a fixed smile framed by his dark—no, what Rab Finlay had was a beard. Scott’s goatee looked like it had been traced on his face by a black marker.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hi. I forgot the camera, the girls want snapshots, I came back upstairs—this is your room, huh?”

  “Mine and my fiancé’s, yes.”

  “Your fiancé is here, too?” He sidled away.

  With a suspicious glance at the chest—Fergie probably wasn’t keeping the family silver in there—and another at Scott—she didn’t see any cameras about his person, but a digital one would fit in a pocket—Jean locked the door and allowed herself to be led toward the staircase. “We’re getting married at St. Columcille’s, the Dunasheen chapel, on the third.”

  “Great, great. After you.” Averting his eyes from the bedizened suit of armor, to say nothing of the mistletoe, Scott waved her onto the turnpike stair.

  Jean stepped past the tripping stane and the chill spot, and at the second-floor landing asked, “So are y’all enjoying the Wallace suite?”

  “Heather hasn’t found much to complain about yet, and that’s saying something.”

  They walked down the first flight in silence, Jean breathing in the odors of roasting meat and baking pastry. Her stomach’s pitiful grumble reminded her she’d missed tea and Nancy Finlay’s superior baked goods, but then, she’d feasted on them yesterday, so it averaged out.

  Safely in the entrance hall, Scott said, “I guess you’re wondering why I was on the third floor.”

  “The question had crossed my mind.” Jean turned around to face him.

  He’d abandoned the smile for an embarrassed grimace, but his eyes were guarded. “I work for an auction house in Maryland, doing appraisals, estate sales, that kind of thing. You know, Antiques Roadshow stuff. I was curious about what the MacDonalds have tucked away here. The older the house, the greater the chance of something really cool lying forgotten in a closet.”

  No kidding, Jean thought, but what she said was, “Something that could be bought cheap and then sold on for a lot of money?”

  “I don’t cheat anyone. Reselling is part of the business.” He dropped the grimace as well. “So what do you and your fiancé do for a living?”

  “I’m a journalist and part owner of Great Scot magazine in Edinburgh.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Pretty good worldwide circulation, right? Both paper and electronic?”

  “Yes, we’re blanketing the world with dead trees and pixels both.”

  “You think you could cut me a deal on advertising rates?”

  “You’d have to check with my partner, Miranda Capaldi. She’s the boss.” And the various departments such as Advertising, Circulation, Editorial, Printing, and Web Design were scattered from Leith to Dalkeith, hardly out of Miranda’s sight, but pretty much out of Jean’s mind. “Alasdair—Alasdair Cameron—is the head of Protect and Survive, the security agency.”

  Scott nodded. “Oh yeah, they’ve got a good reputation. I’d like to touch bases with him. Where is he?”

  “He’s . . .” She redirected her statement in midstream. “He should be here for dinner.”

  “Great. We’ve got drinks first, huh? The library, Diana said. Down this way?” Smile restored, he bowed Jean toward the hallway.

  “Yep, this way.” She glanced back at the two black sheaths, establishing that the one on the right was still empty. Scottish regimental dirks were collectible items, but if Scott had decided to help himself, he’d have taken the sheath with its silver fittings and diminutive knife and fork as well.

  Just because he was checking the place out didn’t mean he was a thief. Just because Jean’s curious nature had developed a suspicious streak didn’t mean there was anything suspect in an art dealer like Greg and an antiques dealer like Scott turning up in the same place at the same time. They’d both been attracted by the house itself. And Fergie certainly had things to sell, if not actively for sale.

  Like books. Passing beneath another stag’s head, this one wearing a Sherlock Holmes–style deerstalker hat complete with an eagle feather, Jean led Scott into the library.

  Glass-doored cabinets lined the room, rank afte
r rank of books old and new glimmering behind polished panes like treasure at the sea bottom. The cabinet holding the Fairy Flagon was closed—Fergie was understandably protective of his family talisman. A peat fire burned in the fireplace, with both of the dogs, the lab and the terrier, lying broadside to it and absorbing most of the warmth. New Age interpretations of Christmas classics emanated from hidden speakers. In front of the center window sparkled a Christmas tree, every light reflected in the glass.

  Jean tasted the air like she would a fine wine—a trace of smoke, a soupcon of old paper and leather, the sharp odor of evergreen, the silken hint of spices. No wet dog, though. The animals looked as though they’d been blow-dried.

  Had they reacted at all to the black-clad man standing alone, wet, and cold in the parking area, looking not at the police vehicles but up at the lighted windows of the house? Or did they know him?

  Heather Krum waited in the middle of the room, her arms folded across a beaded and embroidered jacket, her narrow glasses perched below a heavy fall of bangs letterboxing her eyes. “There you are,” she snapped to Scott. “I thought you’d met up with that Diana woman.”

  “Our hostess?” he retorted. “I ran into Jane on the staircase, okay?”

  “Jean,” Jean corrected, without continuing on to correct Scott’s geographical ambiguity.

  Heather’s slitted eyes looked Jean up and down. “Are you here alone?”

  “No, I’m here with my fiancé for our wedding on January third.”

  “Oh.” Despite her tight ski pants, Heather flounced into a chair.

  Jean wasn’t sure whether her soon-to-be married status or her age had absolved her of threatening the Krums’ relationship. She hesitated between being insulted and laughing, but neither seemed appropriate.

  Dakota was methodically working her way along the shelves, her head tilted as she considered Fergie’s impressive array of books, not just peeling and yellowed ones dating to generations past, but also contemporary titles ranging from astronomy to crypto-zoology, from archaeology to geomancy, from history to frenzied fringe tomes claiming that alien astronauts had not only built ancient structures from Stonehenge to Angkor Wat to Teotihuacan, but also that alien astronauts were humanity’s primeval gods.