A series of thuds reverberated through the house, and the doorbell whirred and then rang.
Chapter Nine
Jean compared Patrick Gilnockie to Alasdair while the two men conferred in the entrance hall.
Gilnockie was substantially taller, somewhat leaner, and so much paler of complexion and eye he seemed almost colorless. Even his hair, cut above his high forehead in a military-style short back and sides, was a neutral gray. His face seemed to be carved of stone, not craggy but austere, a patrician arch to his nose like the flying buttress of a medieval cathedral. He listened to Alasdair’s accounts of events while peeling off his black gloves, loosening his navy blue muffler, and turning his level gaze to the two sheaths and one dirk hanging on a wall no less stone-built than his expression.
Jean knew only too well that Alasdair’s stony expression was a pose, a wall like old Dunasheen’s enceinte, not only defending against invaders but also confining a molten core. With Gilnockie, though, she suspected the stone was fathoms deep, any magma pools at its root long since cooled.
Alasdair would say she was leaping to conclusions. She preferred to think she was following her intuitions.
“. . . and Irvine has gone home, asking us to phone if Tina MacLeod needs looking after.” Alasdair took a half-step back indicating the passing of the torch. He’d done his bit. He was entitled to step down now, not that he’d exit the picture, being expert advice and curious as a cat to boot.
Gilnockie nodded. “Thank you.”
The sound of recorded voices echoed from the drawing room. From the other direction came the murmur of live voices, Thomson chatting with Rab, and the clash of dishes as Nancy cleared away dinner and anticipated the arrival of Portree, the next shift in her scheduled feeding of the multitudes.
Fergie peered around the corner and caught Jean’s eye, but couldn’t quite manage a smile. She sent one to him instead. “It’s an invasion, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you’re accustomed to it.”
“You never get accustomed to it. Not if you’re a bystander, anyway, and even the cops will burn out eventually. Like Alasdair.”
Alasdair heard his name and looked around. Spotting Fergie, he waved him over and made introductions.
“Anything I can do to help matters along . . .” Fergie said, leaving the end of his sentence open to interpretation.
“A map of the property would be right helpful,” returned Gilnockie, his voice still hushed. “We’ll be needing an incident room. A lumber room would work a treat, so long as there’s electricity.”
“There’s the old kitchen, behind the new one. It’s got a door into the courtyard, near the old laundries and shops. Make it easier for the lot of you to come and go.”
And keep the lot of them out of the house? Jean queried silently.
“The telephone connection will hardly be up to the needs of your computers,” Fergie added.
“No worries,” said Gilnockie. “If necessary we can stop by the police house in Kinlochroy or even return to Portree. I’ll have a word with my sergeant, start setting up so we can begin taking statements and collecting evidence. Alasdair, you’ll be showing me to the scene, eh?”
Alasdair took a full step back. “The local constable is—”
“I’d appreciate your opinion. Round the back, is it? I’ll not be a minute.” Replacing his gloves, Gilnockie turned toward the door. “I’d be obliged if you’d set the constable to guarding the knives,” he added, and the door shut with a thump.
Fergie looked at the display of dirks, his brows drawn down in puzzlement. Then his eyebrows shot up his forehead, his mouth fell open, and he stopped breathing.
“You did not know the dirk had gone missing?” Alasdair asked, more in the sense of fair play, Jean estimated, than to gather information.
With an inhalation that was almost a moan, Fergie turned his bulging eyes on Alasdair. “Greg was killed with a knife, Sanjay was saying. Was it that one? The dirk belonging to my father’s school friend?”
“No one knows that, not just yet,” Alasdair said. “When did you last see it?”
“Several days ago. Several weeks ago. I don’t know. There are so many things to keep track of, I’ve never had time for a proper inventory. And you know how you see what you expect to see.”
No kidding. Jean waded in. “Fergie, how come you have the second dirk, too?”
For a fraction he stared as though he didn’t recognize her. “Ah, erm, the man was killed in the war and my dad kept his dirk and his bonnet. He had no relations, or my father couldn’t find them, or something to that effect . . .” He turned back to Alasdair, his face taking on a grayish tint. “Am I a suspect?”
Alasdair could have said, “No.” Instead, he said, “It’s early days yet. Gilnockie’s a good cop. He’ll sort it. And, as your security advisor, I’d suggest you not hanging valuable or dangerous items just inside the front door, leastways, not without bolting them to the wall like the other weaponry.”
“Ah,” said Fergie. “Quite right.”
A tattoo of footsteps and Scott Krum shot around the corner. “You know something, Fergus, there’s a hell of a lot of policemen milling around outside for an accidental death. What aren’t you telling us?”
Fergie turned his ghastly complexion toward Scott, stared at him, too, then managed to stammer, “The man was murdered, Mr. Krum. The police are investigating.”
“Okaaaay.” Scott looked from Fergie to Jean to Alasdair. Apparently finding nothing inspirational in their faces either, he vanished down the hall.
“I’ll—the old kitchen—things stored away . . .” Fergie headed toward the back hall, then, clumsily, spun around and came back again, expression firmer but still whey-colored. “Was it you who saw Urquhart hanging about, Jean?”
“I saw a man dressed in black looking up at the house. Pritchard told him to go away, but Diana said he wasn’t causing any harm.”
Fergie shook his head so vehemently his ponytail swished back and forth, either disagreeing with Diana’s opinion or shuddering that she’d have that particular one.
“Who is Colin Urquhart?” asked Alasdair.
“A loony. A nutter. He’s squatting in the old keeper’s cottage at Keppoch Point lighthouse, studying the wildlife, he claims. In November, he went berserk in the pub, broke some bottles and glassware before Sanjay calmed him down. He’s threatened me to my face, offered me a death threat, if you can imagine.”
“A death threat?” Alasdair repeated.
“I caught him messing about the new church and asked him to move on. He got right up my nose, said I’d best have a care, men in his vicinity died nasty deaths. I looked about for something to defend myself with, but he went on his way without making good on his threat. Pritchard does his best, but Diana, well—it’s not that she’s encouraging him, don’t get me wrong, it’s that she has a kind heart.”
One half of Alasdair’s mouth quirked upward. Aha.
At least they now had the answer to one imponderable, why Diana had lied about Urquhart. But, like most answers, this one only created new questions. Jean hazarded, “You’re trying to protect her from him, but she doesn’t understand, and thinks you’re stifling her?”
“Yes. Odd how much more sympathetic to my own parents I am now.” Fergie summoned a shaky smile. “She’s all I’ve got. Dunasheen, well, the balance sheets, they’re a problem—who knows how much longer I’ll have it, but Diana, now, I know I’ll be walking her down the aisle sooner rather than later, and I can’t really blame Urquhart for hanging about her, even as a child my uncle called her Diana Ban, fair Diana, but damn it, he’s just not . . .”
“He’s not good enough for her,” Alasdair finished.
“No, he’s not good for her, full stop. Oh, I know, nowadays we talk about psychological disorders and the like, and the man’s been to war, I hear. And we’re told to do unto others and show mercy. Still, he frightens me. I only wish he frightened Diana as well, or, failing that, went away.” Fergie
’s voice died into a pained sigh.
So Diana had taken on a reclamation project. Or perhaps the goddess of the hearth, the vestal virgin of Dunasheen, the proper British rose, had allied herself with a suspect character as a way of acting out. Jean’s inner bad girl was tempted to pump a fist in the air. But her inner schoolmarm—much the stronger of the two—pointed out that playing with matches could burn more than a girl’s fingers.
Look who Jean herself had ended up with, about the least suspect character in the British Isles.
Alasdair’s eye met hers, reserving judgment and reminding her to do the same. To Fergie he said, “Gilnockie will be taking a statement from Urquhart as well.”
“He’s a violent man,” insisted Fergie, and then, grudgingly, “But just because I’ve taken against him doesn’t mean he’s your murderer. Our murderer.”
P.C. Thomson came strolling around the corner without his canine entourage. “Thank you for the grand meal, Fergus. Am I needed on the beach, Mr. Cameron?”
“You’re needed here,” Alasdair answered. “Have an eye for these dirks, see that no one messes them about ’til D.C.I. Gilnockie’s people come for them.”
“The dirks?” Thomson leaned forward to look. “A blade’s turned up missing, has it? You’re not thinking . . .” His dark eyes swiveled toward Fergie’s pasty face. With admirable restraint, he said only, “Aye, sir,” and took up a stance beside the massive chest. His firm nod was leavened by a satisfied tilt to his mouth, evidence of the good dinner and now duty indoors.
Around the other corner came the Krums, Scott and Heather looking right and left like Custer’s scouts scanning the horizon. Scott turned a faux grin on Fergie, Alasdair, Jean, and Thomson, but didn’t focus on any of them. “We’re pretty jet-lagged. We’re going upstairs.”
Dakota grumbled, “We were just getting to the part where the spaceships . . .”
“Read some of those books you brought along,” said Heather. “We were this far from paying excess baggage fees.”
“Good night, then,” said Fergie.
Jean tried, “If Dakota would like to stay downstairs awhile longer, I’d be glad to sit with her. I like science fiction, too.” And we might find we have more than that in common, she concluded silently.
Dakota opened her mouth. Scott said, “No, really, you don’t want to watch a movie with her, she asks questions the entire time.”
“Good for her,” Jean said under her breath, but the family was already on the staircase and climbing.
Heather said, as though footnoting a previous statement, “It’s not as though there’s another hotel close by, just a tacky little place or two in the village.”
“This isn’t a hotel,” Scott said. “Diana corrected you on that already.”
Heather tossed her head. “Oh yeah, she made quite an impression on you, didn’t she?”
Alasdair refrained from pointing out that even if the Krums packed up and left tonight, they’d still have to give statements to Gilnockie, and they disappeared around the curve of the staircase.
Muttering beneath his breath, Fergie started for the back hall, then less spun than floundered back around. “Jean, Alasdair, I promised to show you the Fairy Flagon and, well, there’s something else, something special for your article, but I’m afraid it will have to wait until tomorrow.”
“No worries,” Alasdair told him, overriding Jean’s, “What something else is that?”
Fergie vanished down the back hall while Alasdair himself started off in the other direction, toward the cloak room. Jean clung to his heels. “You might just as well get on upstairs,” he told her.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” she replied. “I’ll see you to the path. Get some fresh air.”
“Right.”
No need to explain that despite the size of the house, the tall ceilings and the large rooms, she was feeling a bit claustrophobic. A grandfather clock beneath a back stairway struck nine-thirty as they passed, its notes echoed in a syncopated rhythm by other clocks scattered throughout the house. Surely there had been enough hours since sunset and crisis to make up a complete night, but almost twelve more hours of darkness lay ahead, stretching out to infinity. At least they were past the solstice and the nights were getting shorter.
In the cloak room, Alasdair once again pulled off his shoes and chose a set of wellies. “I’ll get Patrick settled quick as I can. I know we were having a bit of a busman’s holiday to begin, and we’re not honeymooning just yet, but still . . .”
“But still.” She exchanged her own shoes for wellies, then remembered she’d taken her coat upstairs. She grabbed the yellow raincoat hanging by the door, the one she’d replaced on its hook after their headlong entrance. One of the sleeves was partially inside out and when she poked it back into alignment it emitted a pleasant woodsy smell.
It was better to just come out and say what needed to be said. “Fergie didn’t kill Greg. If nothing else, he wasn’t at all winded when I caught up with him in the back hall and told him there’s been an accident—which is what I thought it was, then—but he was breathing really heavily when we walked out to the old castle, so he couldn’t have run from the beach all the way around by the church and back here.”
The wellies were ice cold and stiff as bricks, but more accommodating than Alasdair’s face. “Whyever would I be suspecting Fergie?”
“Because you’re a good cop. The same reason you need to know that I played footman and opened the door for the Krums because Diana missed her cue. You remember, the dogs were outside and this raincoat was wet? I think she got back to the house right before we did. But Fergie didn’t seem to know she’d gone anywhere.”
Alasdair didn’t react. He made a conscious effort not to react, Jean estimated, slamming a portcullis, raising a drawbridge, mortaring a few more blocks onto his patented frost-and-stone face. He turned away, lifted his coat off the hook, slipped it on, and only then said, “I’d be hurting Fergie even worse by suspecting Diana.”
“No, she’d be hurting him by getting involved in something underhanded. She’s already hurting him, even if all she’s got going with Colin Urquhart is leaving a basket of scones on the gatepost.”
“But what motive could she have? What motive could Colin Urquhart have, come to that?”
“Why was Greg murdered, period?”
With an incoherent growl, Alasdair plunged out into the glimmering darkness and across the courtyard, leaving her—the nettling but necessary voice of his conscience—to play catch-up.
She’d thought the house was cold. The salt sea wind was so much colder it sucked her breath from her lungs. She braced herself, expecting rain or even sleet, but no. In fact, the clouds seemed to have lightened a bit, in texture as well as color.
The police vehicles were set out in a tidy rank. Doors opened and shut, reflective jackets formed into knots and parted again, flashlights flashed. Two moved purposefully away toward the old castle, its tower a straight-sided shadow against the fitful gleam of Portree’s invisible flashlights beyond.
Jean recognized Gilnockie’s murmur, and held herself to a half-step behind Alasdair as he homed in on it.
“There you are, then.” Gilnockie’s gesture included the woman who stood beside him. “Detective Sergeant Lesley Young. Alasdair Cameron, ex-C.I.D. His wife, Jean Fairbairn.”
Close enough. “Hello,” Jean said to Young’s compact shape.
Someone’s beam of light raked the sergeant from top to toe. Beneath her bulky fluorescent jacket, she stood with chin up, chest out, shoulders back. Her ordinary, even bland, cosmetic-free features were set with the nervous intensity of a mongoose. Jean almost ducked aside, but all Young offered was a brusque “Hullo” before she turned back to the others.
Now there, Jean thought, was an odd couple, even odder than Alasdair and his former and unlamented sergeant.
Whatever. Thrusting her hands into the pockets of the raincoat—she’d been too intent on keeping up with Al
asdair to think of gloves or a scarf—Jean shifted anxiously and coldly from foot to foot while Gilnockie rounded up his troops and headed them out.
“I’ll be back straightaway,” Alasdair told her, not pushing his luck by instructing her to wait inside. He fell into step beside his erstwhile colleague, telling him, “We’re speculating—aye, we, that’s Jean and me—that MacLeod was meaning to meet someone at the old church . . .”
Jean smiled at that. They’d been a long time getting to that automatic “we.” But they weren’t, and never would be, joined at the hip, just at the heart.
Reflective jackets, white coveralls, flashlights, a stretcher, light stanchions. The cavalcade moved off down the path, was partially obstructed by the hillside, reappeared in individual blips at the castle, then fell into shadow. A few moments later the faint thrum of a generator added a new note to the thrum of the waves. Lights sprang up behind the ancient walls as though a flying saucer was strafing the beach.
Jean was reminded of a sound and light show at a tourist attraction. She imagined portentous music and a plummy voice narrating the story of Rory MacLeod, who had leaped from Dunasheen’s tower to escape a wronged and therefore wrathful husband. The lover’s leap, the maiden’s leap, soldier’s leap, Leap Year, when women were entitled to propose marriage instead of enticing the object of her affections into initiating the marital leap of faith. She couldn’t remember now which of them, she or Alasdair, had brought up the subject of marriage.
Her thoughts wobbled to a stop. She heard no music, no voices, only a scrape of gravel as a lone constable patrolled the parking area. Her hands, clenched in the pockets of the heavy coat, were chilled to the bone—except for the spot at the root of her thumb poked by something sharp. She shifted her hand away from the annoyance.
Standing around here waiting for Alasdair was sheer masochism. His “straightaway” could be hours, depending on how many of his opinions Gilnockie demanded. One more time she trekked across the courtyard and into the cloak room, to find Fergie donning hat, coat, and gloves, and the two dogs straining at their leashes.
The Blue Hackle Page 10