“Ah, Jean. Just taking the lads here for their last run of the night. Nothing like a dog to get you up and moving, eh?” If his face hadn’t yet defaulted to its usual affability, at least it was no longer rumpled like an unmade bed. “Rab and Nancy are clearing things out of the old kitchen. Will the police be wanting chairs and tables, do you think?”
“Usually they bring their own.” So now she was the expert on incident rooms. “Alasdair’s gone down to the crime scene. I’m going upstairs.”
“Diana’s gone up as well. She’s got a headache, understandably enough. Things didn’t exactly go to plan this evening.”
Jean didn’t blame Diana for keeping her head down, out of the line of fire. “Sorry,” she said, having nothing better to offer than sympathy. “Good night.”
“Good night. Off we go, Somerled, Bruce, time to check your p-mail.” Fergie maneuvered the dogs into the night and shut the door with a very quiet click, rather like Gilnockie’s whispery voice.
She would have slammed the door. Jean took off the raincoat, hung it on the hook, slipped off the wellies and on her shoes. She started for the corridor, then reversed course. What had been sticking her hand, anyway?
From the pocket of the raincoat she pulled a white business card, its thick, high-quality paper water-stained on one corner but still relatively crisp. “Fergus MacDonald and Diana MacDonald” read the raised lettering. “Dunasheen Castle, Kinlochroy, Isle of Skye. Weddings and quality holidays.” The phone number, website URL, and e-mail address were printed discreetly in the corner.
Fergie had blanketed the world with identical cards. There was a silver tray filled with them in the suite upstairs, and Jean had left several with assorted friends in Edinburgh—darn it, she hadn’t asked about the baby crib.
She turned the card over. On the back, in jagged black letters, was written, “Meet me at the church at 3. CU.”
CU? Colin Urquhart? Was that three p.m. today? Which church, old or new? Well, technically the new one was a chapel, but not everyone was as pedantic as Jean.
Was that Colin Urquhart’s handwriting? Was that where Diana had been this afternoon, meeting with a violent man just as a visiting Australian met with a violent end?
Jean folded the card so tightly in her hand that all four corners pricked her palm. She hurried along the halls, distractedly returned P.C. Thomson’s “good night,” and bolted up the shadowy staircase past the suites where Tina MacLeod was—eating, weeping, phoning—and the Krums were probably looking out over the courtyard toward the real-life C.S.I. episode.
Halfway up the next flight, Jean stubbed her toe on the tripping stane and scrabbled frantically for the rope handrail. But what she grasped was a cold hand.
Or the hand grasped hers, rather, steadying her onto the next step and sending a bolt of ice through her body, from the sixth-sense receptor on the back of her neck down her spine to her toes.
The spectral hand moved her shrinking flesh and blood hand to the rope and released it, leaving Jean clinging like a mountaineer over an abyss. Clinging like a householder in an earthquake, except this was a temblor in the space–time continuum, the strongest she’d ever felt. And she’d felt quite a few.
As quickly as she could with the lead coat of perception weighting her shoulders and buckling her knees, she looked around, up, down, sideways . . . there! A woman stood on the third-floor landing, her form sketched in shade upon shadow.
She wore a high-waisted, low-necked, straight-skirted gown of the early 1800s, frilled at breast and sleeves and ornamented with rich embroidery around the hem. A shawl with a paisley-patterned border hung loosely from her lower arms. Her hair was pulled into a knot on the top of her head, except for the ringlets cascading past either side of a face colorless—not Gilnockie’s pale, but colorless—except for cornflower-blue eyes. The full lips were parted as though on a sigh, even though no breath passed between them. The eyes looked both at Jean and through her, into a dimension so alien it couldn’t even be named the Other World.
And then she was gone.
Every tendon quivering like a rubber band, Jean straightened from her crouch and caught her breath. Had the ghost’s clothing been tinted a faded and weathered green, or had Jean simply filled in the color? No matter. She’d just met the Green Lady, up close and personal. Very personal.
So much for Alasdair and his, “I’ve never yet sensed a ghost could push.”
This one hadn’t pushed. She’d pulled. She’d saved Jean from a nasty fall. And she’d . . . Jean looked down at her hand, still cold as ice. The business card was gone. No. The ghost couldn’t have taken it. Whatever emotion, whatever desire, caused her to linger at Dunasheen couldn’t extend far enough to palming evidence incriminating her multiple-great-granddaughter Diana Ban . . .
There was the card, on the step where she’d dropped it. Jean picked it up and scanned it suspiciously. Fergus MacDonald and Diana MacDonald. Meet me at the church at 3.
Much more cautiously, she climbed the rest of the stairs and made her way down the hall and into the Charlie suite. Once inside, she slammed the door and stood with her back against it.
I’m going to have to tell Alasdair.
Chapter Ten
Alasdair reappeared just as the fluorescent letters on the bedside clock confirmed the sitting room clock’s twelve tinkling strokes. Midnight wasn’t necessarily the witching hour.
Jean peered out from the heaped bedclothes like a mummy from her wrappings while he paced into the bathroom, face taut, lips tight. So things hadn’t gone well at the crime scene.
Closing the academic journal she hadn’t been reading, she put it and her glasses on the bedside table. Dougie was curled up beside her leg, doing his imitation of an anchor. But Alasdair didn’t try to evict the cat when he slipped into the bed and switched off the light.
Jean blinked at the surrounding darkness—ah, good, a glow leaked between the window curtains—and turned to her beloved. It was like snuggling up to a marble statue and she broke out in gooseflesh. Served him right for all his cracks about her cold feet. “You’re frozen.”
“Oh aye,” he replied on toothpaste-scented breath. “I was not meaning to stay so long at the scene, but Patrick . . .”
She waited.
“I do not know what’s come over the man. He’s gone distant, in a way. His wife left him a decade ago, before I ever met him, so it’s not that.”
Ouch, Jean thought. “Maybe he’s burned out, like you were.”
“When I was burning out, I worked all the harder.”
“I noticed,” Jean said. “What happened at the scene?”
“Nothing’s happened, that’s the problem. Patrick’s waiting for daylight and the pathologist’s reports, forensics, and all. And Tina needs questioning. For all we’re knowing, Greg’s been getting death threats more direct than the one Urquhart made Fergie. I stopped outside the Queen suite just now, and put my ear to the door like the worst sort of sneak, and heard Tina’s voice but could not hear the words. She was speaking on the phone, I reckon. It’s by way of being morning Down Under.” He was starting to warm up, becoming flesh and blood once again.
Speaking of which . . . “A couple of things have happened here. I met the Green Lady on the staircase, and she’s no wee bit ghostie. It must be true what they say about Skye, it’s half in the Otherworld. Plus I found a note in the pocket of Diana’s—I think it’s Diana’s—raincoat.” Jean filled in the details, cooperated with Alasdair’s interrogation, and finally lay silently while the mills of his intelligence and experience ground exceedingly fine, but, as yet, produced nothing.
Dougie stood up, yawned, and moved to a spot at the foot of the bed. He kneaded the duvet, plucking it with his claws, and settled down again.
Last night he’d found himself shut into the sitting room listening to the rhythmic squeaks of the ancient four-poster. Jean and Alasdair hadn’t accomplished their purpose without pausing half a dozen times to laugh—no matter what arra
ngement they’d attempted, the bed squeaked. That left the room something to be desired as a honeymoon suite, although with those same thick walls, neither squeaks nor ensuing laughter would dampen the honeymooners’ enthusiasm.
A murder, now, that was a damper.
Tonight Jean dozed off yet again in Alasdair’s arms, this time fully clothed and chilled rather than sweaty, and woke repeatedly with images of hackled bonnets, cornflower blue eyes, and bloodstained shingle clinging to her mind. When she at last fell soundly asleep, she dreamed the same images and more, struggling through faceless shapes holding flashlights.
The beam of one flashlight pierced her eyelids, sending a flare of crimson across her vision—blood, fire, and swords gleaming . . . She opened her eyes to see a thin ray of sun stretching from the gap between the curtains and hitting her in the face.
Not just morning, but also sunlight, what a concept. And either the ambrosial aroma of coffee hung on the still, cold air, or her caffeine receptors were going into withdrawal.
With an insistent meow, Dougie hopped up onto the bed. At least he hadn’t waked her with a claw in one nostril, as he’d once done. She crawled to her feet and dispensed cat comestibles.
Alasdair rolled out of the bed, saying, “It’s gone nine” with resignation rather than disapproval. There were nights when quantity of sleep had to make up for quality.
They walked warily down the turnpike stair, finding no Green Ladies in residence. Nor was Sanjay Thomson still guarding the entrance hall—only the hooks showed where the two dirks had hung. Jean hoped that Gilnockie’s forensics team had worked late rather than started early, allowing the constable to go home for the night.
Chafing dishes lined the sideboard in the dining room, steaming with sausage, bacon, eggs, kippers, baked beans, grilled mushrooms, and tomatoes. Racks held crispy if cold pieces of toast beside bowls mounded with butter, jam, and marmalade. It was all insulation against the cold, like the sumptuous dinners, Jean supposed, although considering those dinners, she’d just as soon have had a bowl of porridge this morning.
A tea pot and a coffee pot sat on the table beneath cozies shaped like a chicken and a pumpkin, respectively. As befit their national origins, Jean took coffee and Alasdair tea.
They didn’t eat alone, not with all the eagle-eyed soldiers looking down from the surrounding photos—especially the third man with Allan and Fergie Mor, whose bunched eyebrows indicated that he was either facing the sun or he had sensed his dirk would one day serve as a murder weapon.
Jean shifted her gaze to the tall windows, which now revealed a shimmering vista of gold and green land, gray stone, and blue sky with clouds like smears of whipped cream. Her feet twitched eagerly. No surprise that a trio of empty plates occupied one end of the table, along with the dregs of two coffees and one cocoa. The Krums were already up and about.
Jean was draining her second cup of life-affirming liquid into a grease-lined stomach when Nancy Finlay bustled through the swinging door, Rab at her heels less bustling than dawdling with broom and dustpan. “Good morning,” she said. “I’ll be clearing away now.”
“We’ve got the polis in the old kitchen,” said Rab, in such a dark tone Jean expected him to add, “and we’re phoning the exterminator.”
“That puir Mrs. MacLeod,” Nancy said, “putting up such a brave front, coming down for breakfast and then not eating more than a bittie toast, and here’s me making her up a nice plate of bacon and sausages and sitting down to keep her company.”
Jean’s gaze glanced off Alasdair’s. No surprise Tina might find sausage, bacon, and small talk a little hard to stomach. Although, once again, Nancy meant well.
“Fancy,” Nancy went on, “paying guests and now the polis at Dunasheen, poking and prying. I’m afeart it canna be helped.”
“The old laird, Fergus’s uncle, he’s likely birling in his grave,” concluded Rab.
At least Jean and Alasdair weren’t paying guests themselves, although their raison d’etre was to create more of the same. “Where is the old laird’s grave?” she asked.
“In the graveyard at Kinlochroy.” Nancy stacked plates so briskly they pealed like bells.
“No one’s buried at St. Columcille’s? The new—newish—chapel?”
“Not a bit of it, no.” Rab seized coffee and tea pots. “Not a proper church, is it now? Never consecrated, not after the murder and all, though it’s registered for weddings, no worries there.”
Jean and Alasdair had chosen the chapel and an Episcopal priest for a religious ceremony not only to reflect their own family traditions, but because a civil wedding lacked any resonance of the history, mystery, and myth that had drawn them together to begin with . . . “What murder?” she asked, just as Alasdair asked, “What murder?”
Rab answered with a scowl. “That was a right scandal, the laird ordering all the pernickety, papish, carved bits for his church, and the apprentice stone mason outdoing his master, and the master that jealous he stitched him up for the murder of the laird’s wife, or so it’s said.”
“There’s a similar legend associated with Rosslyn Chapel in the Borders,” Jean replied. “Was she murdered in the chapel?”
“No, no, they found her here at the house, on the staircase, strangled by a strong pair of hands, like those of a stonemason.”
“Or those of someone with a right good temper.” Alasdair cocked an eyebrow at Jean, daring her to guess just which staircase had seen the dreadful deed.
“That story’s not half fancies and lies,” Nancy stated, and headed for the pantry. “Off we go, Rab. It’s the last day of the year and the house is wanting a thorough clean.”
Making a face at her back, Rab followed. The door swayed back and forth and stopped.
“Oh boy.” Jean met the flare in Alasdair’s eye with a flash of her own. “The chapel is Gothic Revival, meant to evoke a medieval Catholic church, what the good Presbyterians of Skye would call ‘papish.’ It had to have been built in the early 1800s. The Green Lady’s wearing clothes from the early 1800s. Greg said his ancestor Tormod was transported in 1822.”
“You’re thinking Seonaid MacDonald, the Green Lady, was murdered? And that Tormod was the apprentice? But if it’s known he was framed . . .” He pushed back from the table. “No need to go manufacturing a case from whole cloth. We’ve already got one. Let’s have ourselves a visit to the incident room.”
He led the way down the back hall, past the new kitchen with its contemporary stainless steel, to the old with its soot-stained stone vault. Jean kept herself from ducking—the ceiling wasn’t that low—as she stepped down a short staircase onto linoleum that a century or so ago had been stylish and trendy.
Two electric bulbs dangled like spiders from the ribs of the vault, emitting a tentative glow. No surprise a couple of police people were setting up not only tables, chairs, and computers, but also lamps. An electric kettle stood amid a collection of mugs and tea bags beside a stone sink big enough for Dakota Krum to bathe in. On the far side of the room, looking very small and lost, Fergie inspected a bulletin board set in the maw of a vast fireplace. Alasdair made a deliberate right-face away from Fergie, picking his way over cables and cords toward two windows like super-sized arrow slits.
Below them, Gilnockie and his sergeant, Lesley Young, sat across from Tina MacLeod. They’d obviously tried to make her as comfortable as possible, with a cushion on her folding chair and a cup and saucer on the plastic tabletop before her. Still, she sat in a nervous huddle, limbs knotted, curls springing in all direction, leopard-skin coat draped over her swaying shoulders like a gutted pelt hung out to dry. “. . . no threats,” she was saying, her voice featureless as the Nullarbor Plain. “No problems at all. He had the museum, meetings with planning commissions, receptions, golf holidays—loads of exciting things. Even the genealogy was exciting to him. He was a happy man.”
Gilnockie acknowledged Alasdair’s presence with a grave nod, then leaned back in his chair, at ease. An old briar p
ipe would have completed his image, except Gilnockie’s lips were too thin, too ascetic, to grasp something so self-indulgent. “You arrived here at a quarter past three. Then what?”
Tina didn’t seem to notice the newcomers. “Greg took himself off to the church.”
“Was he meeting someone there?”
“Not so he told me, no.”
“Did he seem to be in a rush, as though he had an appointment?”
“He was driving too fast for those roads. They’re no more than bitumen laid over sheep paths. But then, he’s, he always drove too fast. Ken used to say—Ken, he . . .” Tina stopped, and pressed her pale, almost gray, lips so tightly together her chin looked like a prune.
After a moment, Gilnockie asked, “What did Ken say?”
After another moment, Tina replied, “No matter, not anymore.”
Young’s limp dishwater-brown hair was scooped carelessly back, ends straggling beside her lean, keen face with its pointed chin. Her hand and arm close to the torso of her button-down blouse and jacket, as though defending herself, she held up Greg’s cell phone. It was one of those so sophisticated it probably brushed teeth. “You took the phone from Greg’s pocket whilst he was lying dead on the beach.”
“I don’t remember picking it up, but there it was in my pocket.”
“Bits of the phone’s memory have been erased,” said Young. “There’s no record of activity before the three calls made late last night to Australian numbers.”
“It’s Greg’s phone. He could take photos and text and the lot. All I can do is make calls.”
“There are no texts here,” Young pointed out, “Only photos of your relations.”
“Who did you phone last night, Mrs. MacLeod?” Alasdair asked.
Young sent a sharp, almost hostile glance up at him. Gilnockie said nothing, his calm gaze remaining on Tina’s face.
Her red, swollen eyes, embedded in dark pouches large enough for koala embryos, looked up at Alasdair, then back at Gilnockie. “I phoned the family in Townsville. A friend in Sydney. And Kenneth, Greg’s brother. I had to tell him myself. I couldn’t let him read it in the papers.” Tina picked up her cup, stared at it, then let it crash down to the tabletop. Her face twisted. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
The Blue Hackle Page 11