“Only you,” said Heather, “would come all the way to Scotland to watch football. Let it go, already.”
“This way,” Diana said, her gesture that of a traffic cop—move along, move along.
In the back of the room, Pritchard hissed, “I’m sure the police are saying what they can. But the reporters are making a meal of it, talking about ‘the stately home murder.’ I expect Dunasheen will be on Page One of The Sunburn tomorrow morning. Although there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Just as long as they spell ‘Dunasheen’ correctly, eh?”
What? Jean thought. Was he clueless or did he just have a crass sense of humor?
Fergie neither corrected Pritchard nor laughed. He wilted, covering his face with his hand. Alasdair took a step toward him, then, apparently thinking twice about offering hollow platitudes he might have to recant, sat back down in his chair.
Pritchard oozed back into the pantry and Fergie stumbled behind, leaving the door swinging.
Dakota made her way to the hall door, inspecting every photo and print she passed on the way. Jean smiled, remembering the words of one of her own cousins: “I bet you read cereal boxes, too.”
Why yes, she did.
She had to talk to the child about ghosts in general and what she’d seen tonight in particular, without going behind her parents’ backs. Although if Gilnockie decided Dakota needed to help the police with their inquiries, all bets were off.
With a last look at the portrait hanging at the head of the table, and a last glance over her shoulder at Jean—did she sense a kindred spirit, or was she just wondering why the older woman kept smiling at her—Dakota followed the others into the hallway, and that door shut, too.
Alone at last, but this was no time for billing and cooing. Just one thing . . .
Jean had been looking at the portrait all evening. It depicted a blond woman wearing a moss-green dress with a satin shawl collar, a locket at her exposed throat. Her features were clumsily drawn, but with such affection that her smile beamed from the painted canvas like the glowing fire in the Calanais fantasy. “Is that Fergie’s portrait of his wife—what was her name?”
Alasdair looked up at it. “Oh aye. That’s Emma MacDonald. Mind you, I only met up with her two, maybe three times, having nearly lost touch with Fergie during those years.”
“I see the resemblance to Diana,” Jean said, without employing any adjectives such as “cool” or “smooth.” “He hung the portrait at the head of the table so she could still be the lady of the house. Although I don’t suppose she was ever the lady of this house.”
“No, he inherited Dunasheen—and the title, come to that—three years ago, and she’s been gone four, I’m thinking. Breast cancer. Pity, that.”
“Oh yes, it is.” Jean sat back down and leaned her elbows on the table, a casual, even sloppy, pose she’d hesitated to assume in front of Diana. “Fergie was talking about his Green Lady, as in a household chatelaine returning after death to continue her domestic duties. But Dunasheen isn’t haunted by his wife.”
“Got it in one. Dunasheen’s haunted, Fergie’s not.” Alasdair inclined his head toward the portrait. “I’m thinking that’s why he’s so keen on seeing ghosts.”
“On believing in the supernatural. He wants to know that Emma’s not really gone.” The room fell silent, the dense wooden doors and stone walls muffling any sounds. Still, Jean lowered her voice. “I’m pretty sure I heard Seonaid MacDonald, the Green Lady, in the drawing room, right after you went after Tina. A kind of murmuring wail, just like in the stories.”
Alasdair nodded. “So she’s real, then, it’s that Fergie cannot sense her. Nothing peculiar about that, not to us, leastways.”
“But what is peculiar is that Dakota, the little girl, was insisting she saw a ghost when they drove up the driveway, which would have been about the same time.”
“Maybe she’s got the allergy, poor lass.”
“Or maybe she saw a person. There was a man in black standing in the parking area about six. Pritchard yelled at him to go away.”
“Thomson was going on about a hermit living nearby. Sounds to be the local character. Maybe it was him.”
“Then he’s not a hermit in the traditional sense, like the Egyptian holy men who’d take up residence on top of a pillar in the desert, or the Celtic ones on their little islands.”
“That’s all you heard, Pritchard seeing him off?”
“Diana defended him, said he wasn’t causing any harm, that he’d probably been in the village—I guess even a monk or a misanthrope would need more food than shellfish and seaweed—and he heard about Greg and stopped on his way home to see the police cars. Although it seemed to me he was looking at the house. He saw me sitting in the window and had himself a good hard stare.”
Again Alasdair nodded, the equivalent of clicking “save” in a computer program. “Likely the man’s the equivalent of the village idiot, a bit of an embarrassment.”
“Mentally-challenged,” Jean corrected, albeit with a smile.
“Aye.” Alasdair leaned on the table, too. Between them, down the expanse of snowy linen, paraded six small sculptures of tree trunks. Eyes, noses, and mouths were sunk deep into the wrinkles of the bark, and branches bearing the leaves of different kinds of trees made stylized crowns, reminding Jean of Tolkien’s tree-people, the ents. Except hollows in these sculptures held tea lights, still flaming, if somewhat wanly in their puddles of wax.
Jean wondered if Diana would have preferred classical silver or brass candlesticks, whether Fergie’s taste for fantasy was a source of conflict.
“Still,” Alasdair said, “he might could have seen or heard something near the beach. I’ll have a word with Thomson and Fergie as well.”
Who? Oh. The man in black watching the house. Jean dropped her voice into a harsh whisper of her own. “There’s something else. Alasdair, did you notice that one of those regimental dirks hanging in the entrance hall is missing? Just the knife, not the sheath.”
“Is it now?” Whatever trace of post-prandial satisfaction had softened his expression vanished like sunlit sky behind a thunderstorm, and his eyes and mouth hardened with the implications. He looked at his watch again.
A familiar brittle jingle echoed from the pantry. Through the door came Nancy Finlay pushing the serving cart, now furnished with several bottles and a coffee carafe emitting a delectable vapor. Her gray hair was set in waves solid as cement curbs, revealing rhinestone earrings. Her watery gray eyes were edged with blue shadow and her lips gleamed with red lipstick that, Jean saw as she spoke, also edged her front teeth. “Fergus bid me bring your coffee and drinks here. He said you’d be having yourselves a wee bit blether about the murdered man, may he rest in peace. Though that’s not likely, not with him being done to death afore his time. We had no such goings-on in the old laird’s day. It’s like being transported back in time, no stranger safe and families going at it . . .”
Like billy-o, Greg had said.
“Thank you, Nancy.” Fergie reappeared on her heels and took possession of the cart. “An excellent dinner, despite the distractions.”
“Ah, it’s nowt but plain food with a bit extra.” She wiped her hands on the ruffled apron she wore over a flour-dusted double-knit pantsuit. “I made a plate for young Sanjay. A scraggy lad like him needs more than sandwiches. Di could do with building up as well, and both American lasses, mother and daughter. Good to see you’re not after slimming yourself to a skeleton, Jean.”
Jean managed to squeak, “Thank you.” Nancy meant that as a compliment.
“I’ve sent Rab with a tray for that poor Mrs. MacLeod,” Nancy went on. “The doctor’s saying she’s agreed to try a wee bit dinner. She’s not half demented, puir lass, but then, so we’d all be.”
“Quite right,” said Fergie. And, as the hall door opened, “Ah, here’s the doctor just now.”
Nancy stood like a Hebridean Colossus of Rhodes while Irvine greeted everyone. Half a head taller and twi
ce as broad, she made him look like a leprechaun. “Sit yourself down, Doctor,” she said at last. “I’ll be along straightaway with your dinner.”
“Thank you kindly,” Irvine replied, “but no need. I’d just had myself tea and a sandwich when Sanjay rang.”
“Your loss, then.” Nancy strode back toward the pantry and into the swinging door, which didn’t swing.
From its other side came Rab’s bellow. “Have a care, woman.”
“Have a care yourself,” retorted Nancy, and this time managed to push her way through the door. Their competing voices dwindled into the kitchen.
Sitting himself down in what had been Dakota’s chair, next to Alasdair, Irvine ran his hand up his high forehead and across his hair. It was white as thistledown and the same texture—he succeeded not in smoothing it down but in fluffing it up.
“How is Tina getting on?” Alasdair asked. “Gilnockie and his team will have questions that need answering soon as may be.”
“She’s responding well to a mild dose of sedative,” replied Irvine. “I’m hoping she’s eating Nancy’s lovely meal, but when I left her she was making phone calls.”
“To Australia? On my phone?” Fergie asked. And, quickly, “She’s welcome to do so.”
“No, she’s got herself a phone. Here’s your camera back again, Alasdair, was it? Young Sanjay’s telling me you’re by way of being a famous detective.”
“Alasdair, aye,” was all he would admit to. Ducking Jean’s acerbic glance, he accepted the camera, switched it on, and started viewing the photos on the playing card–sized screen. His face frosted over as Irvine made brief but explicit remarks about body parts.
Fergie turned one way and busied himself with bone china cups and crystal glasses. Jean turned the other way and busied herself by inspecting the pictures lining the walls. The chandelier suspended from a gorgeous knotwork plaster ceiling made this the brightest room in the house, except for the kitchen with its industrial lighting, and she could easily make out a theme.
Perhaps building on the adage that an army marched on its stomach, Fergie had chosen to line the dining room with the history of the Scottish fighting man. Prints and etchings in various stages of dilapidation portrayed Norse berserkers, medieval crusaders, swords for hire in myriad countries including Russia, while red-jacketed and bekilted soldiers plied their business in Revolutionary Virginia, below the Sphinx, beside the walls of Lucknow. Black and white photographs showed soldiers swathed in the uniforms of Victorian empire, wearing bearskin hats, pith helmets, or—Jean turned completely around—the flat metal helmets of World Wars I and II. Above the sideboard, the photos tapered away, just as the Scottish regiments had recently been trimmed down and consolidated to much gnashing of teeth and clashing of verbal claymores. And yet they were still serving, as a small color snapshot of several men in modern desert gear testified.
Jean leaned sideways to better see a black and white photo beside the sideboard. There, again, were Allan Cameron and Fergus Mor, this time with a third uniformed man. The hackle on his tam o’shanter appeared to be white, indicating a different regiment.
Fergie dealt out the coffee. “Liqueur as well?”
“Sure, thanks,” Jean told him, adding to herself, maybe the alcohol will cancel out the caffeine. Although she was expecting to get no sleep tonight anyway—and not for the reason she’d originally anticipated. “Fergie, who’s the third man in that photo?”
“A chap my father was at school with. I don’t know his name. They met again during or after the war, I believe. Suffice it to say, whilst my father and Alasdair’s enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders, this chap signed on with the Royal Scots.”
“The oldest of the Scottish regiments.”
“It is that. They claim they were Pontius Pilate’s guard, appropriately enough, and say they’d never have fallen asleep whilst guarding Jesus’s tomb.”
“I always thought the way the Roman guards fell asleep was divine intervention,” said Jean. “Why ‘appropriately enough’?”
“Because Pontius Pilate was born in Scotland, at Fortingall in Perthshire. Pilate’s father was sent out as an ambassador after Caesar’s invasion of Britain and married a Pictish chief’s daughter.”
“That’s a great story, but as history, the dates don’t add up.”
“That’s as may be,” Fergie conceded, “but then, history’s all in the interpretation.”
Jean didn’t try to deny that—she made her living affirming it.
Fergie set a small glass brimming with golden liquid in front of her, then doled out the same to Alasdair and Irvine. “Supposedly there was an inscription with Pilate’s name here at Dunasheen some years ago, brought back by a crusader or a soldier, who knows? But it’s long gone.”
“That’s a shame. The only other inscription with his name on it only turned up in the 1960s, I think it was, and that’s not complete.”
“Ta.” Alasdair arranged cup and glass in formation—by the right, drink!—and sent Fergie a sharp look from beneath his brows. “My dad’s regimental dirk’s hanging in my mum’s sitting room in Fort William. The two dirks in your entrance hall, are those the ones belonging to your dad and the other chap?”
“Yes, they are. A fine set, aren’t they now, two regimental dirks, complete to the last detail. The fittings need a polish, I’m afraid, but running Dunasheen’s a rear-guard action against decay. What’s a bit of tarnish when . . .” Fergie let his sentence trail off.
Jean could fill in several possible endings, but assumed that “. . . when one of the dirks murdered a man” wasn’t among them. So then, either Fergie didn’t know one was missing, or he was covering up its loss. Great.
She stirred cream into her coffee, turning the black liquid into brown, and caught a black look from Alasdair that cream wouldn’t mitigate. She bounced his look back. I don’t want Fergie to be implicated, either!
And she hadn’t even mentioned Diana being late on the scene to greet the Krums.
Irvine was still manipulating the camera. “Grand photos of the old castle.”
“Those are for Jean’s magazine article about Dunasheen.” With a shrug in her direction, Alasdair turned back to the camera. He didn’t speculate whether the article was still on track. It had probably never occurred to him to speculate if the wedding was still on track. His blond shot with gray head almost bumped into the cumulous cloud of Irvine’s. “Well now, that’s interesting.”
“What?” Jean asked.
“Greg MacLeod,” said Alasdair. “Jean, did you notice him having his hand to his ear as he stepped out the gate?”
“No.” She half-rose from her chair, leaned across the table, grasped Alasdair’s cold hand, and angled it so that the pattern of smudges on the camera display resolved themselves into an image. Dusk, Dunasheen, and a man in a red jacket, with, yes, his hand to his ear. “I bet he’s talking on a cell phone. No reason we’d notice that.”
Alasdair pulled the camera back and peered at the picture, but even though there were times Jean suspected he had x-ray vision, he wasn’t capable of blowing up the photo.
“I don’t understand,” said Fergie, “why the man talking on the phone is important.”
“You never know what’s important,” Jean told him.
“This may not be important at all,” Alasdair said. “But Thomson was telling me and Portree that he turned out Greg’s every pocket and found the usual, a wallet, money—proving robbery’s not the motive, by the way—but no phone.”
“Tina must have taken it while she was alone with him,” Jean said. “That’s no big deal, maybe they had only the one—heck, we only have the one—and she knew she’d have to call home with the news. That’s what she’s doing now, didn’t you say, Doctor?”
Alasdair overrode Irvine’s mumble of agreement. “When I reached her, she was trotting to and fro wringing her hands, as near to incoherent as makes no difference. All I could make out was something about having to tell Kenneth.”
Irvine added, “Kenneth is Greg’s brother, I caught that much. Every time she started to calm herself, she’d work back round to his name and off she’d go again.”
“Kenneth MacLeod,” Fergie repeated.
“I reckon she’s phoning him or the son just now,” said Alasdair. “The question is, who was Greg phoning—or who phoned him?”
“The someone he intended to meet at the church?” Jean guessed. “Although it might not have been anything more than a computerized call advertising a holiday in Australia.”
The hall door opened and Diana sailed into the room. “Are you finished with the drinks trolley, Father?”
“Oh yes, yes, we are. Sorry, we got to talking about the, erm . . .”
With a gracious smile directed at no one in particular, she neatened the remaining cups and glasses and took up a position behind the cart.
“Diana,” Alasdair said, his voice part velvet, part grit. “Who was the man standing in the parking area, looking up at the house, at six p.m. or thereabouts? The one Pritchard saw off?”
Her hands on the push-rail contracted so fiercely her knuckles glinted like pearls. But the only change in her expression was a flutter of her lashes, as though someone had shone a light into her eyes. Her voice preternaturally calm, she replied, “I have no idea.”
Jean sensed Alasdair’s police-whiskers stiffening. Diana had a very good idea where the man lived. She knew—or felt, at least—that he was harmless.
His plump cheeks flushing, Fergie said only too loudly, “It was Colin Urquhart, I expect. He daren’t show his face to me, I’d see him off, and right smartly, too. Layabout. Toe rag.”
“Now, now . . .” began Irvine.
Diana’s pink lips parted, revealing her set teeth. “This is hardly the time or place . . .”
Fergie backed off, his hands raised in surrender. No, whatever was staining the family linen, this was not the place to air it out.
Jean looked at Alasdair. Fergie, angry? Alasdair looked at Jean. Diana, lying?
The Blue Hackle Page 9