The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Thank you, Mrs. MacLeod. Lesley, escort her back upstairs, please.” Gilnockie stood up, leaving Young to grasp Tina’s shoulders and maneuver her to the door as though she was loading furniture on a truck. As soon as she was out of earshot he added, “Poor woman. Dreadful state she’s in.”

  Alasdair’s eyebrows tightened, creating the vertical cogitational crease that Jean knew only too well. But he offered no opinions about Tina, Young, or Gilnockie himself, who gestured toward the bulletin board where Fergie still stood. “We’ve downloaded the photos from your camera and printed them out. The others are coming in. There’s nothing from forensics just yet. Mrs. Finlay’s saying she doesn’t have enough hands to be dusting the weapons in the front hall every few moments, and she’s got no idea when the dirk disappeared, and not to trouble her when she has cleaning and cooking to see to. Rab was saying the same thing, if more, ah, assertively.”

  Jean could hear them, muttering about the good old days when assisting the police in their inquiries wasn’t part of their job description. “What did Diana say?”

  “We haven’t interviewed Diana yet. She’s running errands.”

  “But you’re thinking the dirk’s the murder weapon?” asked Alasdair.

  “That’s my theory just now. The postmortem shows that Greg was stabbed twice by a blade eighteen inches long, a right-handed person striking from below. He died instantly.” Pulling a pen from his pocket, Gilnockie mimed two thrusts into Alasdair’s chest.

  “None of this clumsy overhand business like you see in the cinema, then,” said Alasdair. “That’s flashy, but not as quick or as effective.”

  Visualizing the famous shower scene in Psycho, Jean nodded. “So the killer was very efficient. Someone who’d had military training, maybe?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Gilnockie turned a puzzled glance toward her.

  But Alasdair had learned to follow—not her train, her carnival ride—of thought. With something between a grimace and he grin, both quickly suppressed, he produced from his own pocket the small white square of a business card. “Jean found this bittie paper in a raincoat hanging by the back door. It looks to be someone was making an appointment for the time and near the place of the murder. The ‘CU’ might be a chap named Colin Urquhart, who supposedly’s an ex-soldier.”

  Fergie was turning away from the bulletin board, too far away to hear Alasdair’s “supposedly,” which was ordinary police-speak but which did cast doubt on Fergie’s information. Jean moved to intercept him, hoping to keep him too far away to hear Diana’s name. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning, Jean. Lovely day, isn’t it? I told you we’d be seeing the sun yet.” His amiable smile lit only the bottom half of his face. His eyes still reflected the photos, the harsh, cold light of camera flashes illuminating a harsh, cold scene.

  “Yes, you did. Beautiful day. Have the Krums gone out already?”

  “They’re having a look round, yes. And Diana’s away to Kinlochroy for a few last-minute items for the old-fashioned Hogmanay festivities tonight.”

  He didn’t have to market to her. Jean knew that “old-fashioned” was relative—the Scottish tourist industry was creating traditions as fast as it could—but he was just defaulting to his usual spiel. “When was St. Columcille’s built?”

  “It was completed in 1822. The designer meant to leave it unfinished, all the better to suggest a medieval ruin, but the laird at the time, Norman MacDonald—Norman the Red, he was called—he had it completed, if not quite to his original scheme. That was seen locally as too Catholic. I suppose it’s not a proper folly, even if we do hold weddings there.” Fergie’s smile seeped upward.

  Jean seemed to hear the whir of spinning wheels and the clank of looms. They might not be manufacturing a second case at all. “Rab was telling us . . .”

  “Fergus!” called a peremptory male voice.

  Jean and Fergie looked around to see Pritchard gesticulating from the door.

  “Now what?” Fergie asked the air. “If you’ll excuse me, Jean . . .”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed as a neuron fired, stinging her memory. “I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’ve got a baby crib. A baby cot. My friends from Edinburgh have to bring their little girl. She’s just six months old, so they don’t need anything elaborate.”

  “A little girl?” Fergie’s smile swept over his face and down his body, so that he wriggled like a delighted puppy. “Wonderful! Tell them the lass is welcome to the family cradle. And you, Jean, you’re welcome to my computer—it’s switched on and booted up.”

  “Fergus!” called Pritchard. “The reporters have got at the Americans.”

  With a glance toward Gilnockie and Alasdair, Fergie started toward the door. “Thanks,” Jean called after him, and wondered what was up with Scott and Heather, not to mention Dakota, another little girl. It wasn’t as though they knew anything about the case. All they knew was the laird and his daughter.

  The stately home murder. Stately homicide. Great.

  The blip and whir of electronics contrasted with the voices echoing off the vaulted ceiling and from the void of the fireplace. The hearth still held traces of ash and bits of charcoal from fires long dead. Supposedly ashes cleaned out of the household fireplaces on New Year’s Eve could be read like tea leaves, foreseeing the future. But Jean saw nothing—unless the future was dark.

  She tried visualizing Alasdair’s charcoal gray Argyll jacket, the one he wore with his kilt for special occasions. Like the dinner party where they’d first connected. Like his upcoming wedding.

  He took a step away from Gilnockie. “Well then, Patrick . . .”

  “I’m just joining the team at the beach—the sunlight’s a blessing, no doubt of it—I’d be obliged if you’d come along as well. At the back gate in five minutes, eh?” He ambled toward the coat rack beside the outside door, stopping en route to inspect and approve each assembled work station.

  Alasdair stared after him, his expression no doubt intended to be inscrutable. Jean drifted toward him. “For once you’re trying to give up the police work and you can’t get rid of it. And I was worried you’d be clashing antlers with him.”

  Alasdair’s eyes narrowed in irritation, but they were still turned toward Gilnockie.

  “If you’re at the beach you can avoid Fergie. And Diana—she’s gone to Kinlochroy, cutting through the reporters like an icebreaker. You heard what Pritchard said about the Krums, right?”

  “I’m afraid so.” His irritated gleam shifted to the door leading to the main house. So many fires to put out, so little time. And his hoses and axes mothballed. Decisively, he headed up the flight of steps, Jean matching him stride for stride.

  In the hallway, she said, “I’m going to check out some things on Fergie’s computer. And I’ll take the phone, please, so I can check in with the reserve troops in Edinburgh. I’ll meet you at the old church in what? An hour? We can walk back by the new one—which, by the way, was built in 1822.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Alasdair pulled the phone from his pocket and handed it over. “Half past eleven at the old church,” he said, and almost managed to get away before she caught his shake of the head and roll of the eye. But she did catch them, and indulged in her own shake and roll at his disappearing back.

  Then a crash and a woman’s harsh shout sliced through the silence.

  Chapter Eleven

  Pelting into the entrance hall, Jean almost collided with Alasdair. He stood just inside the open front door—that was the crash, the heavy wooden panels hitting the wall.

  Beyond the tunnel of the tiny porch, on the sun-drenched gravel of the parking area, Tina MacLeod stood braced between two suitcases. Her spotted coat was buttoned to the throat. Her sunglasses hid half her face, while her red lips looked like a bloody slash across the other half. Prying them apart, she said, “I’m leaving.”

  “No, you’re not.” Lesley Young stood between Tina and the three cars parked along the garden wall in the stance
of a soccer goalie.

  “I can’t stay here. I have to leave. I have to get away.” Tina yanked on her suitcases, but the wheels snagged on the gravel and they toppled over.

  Young seized one of the handles. “Have you no police in Austria? Don’t you know you can’t be leaving the scene of a crime?”

  Tina pulled back. “That’s Australia, you stupid cow.”

  “Had your bags all packed, did you? Why are you running? What are you hiding?”

  Alasdair’s nostrils flared and his lips clamped. Jean dodged as he strode out the door, then tiptoed behind him into the brilliant light of day.

  His large, capable hands grasped one leopard-skin shoulder and one drab cloth-coated shoulder, stopping the spontaneous tug-of-war. “That’s enough, the pair of you. Mrs. MacLeod, if you’re wanting to see your husband, he’s in Portree. Inspector Gilnockie can arrange transport.”

  Tina threw herself away from Alasdair’s hand, only to droop over the remaining suitcase. “That’s just it—I mean, no, I don’t, I can’t—you don’t understand, I can’t stay here.”

  “You’re guilty, are you now?” demanded Young.

  Guilty of what? Jean asked herself. Then she felt the heel of an imaginary hand hit her in the forehead. Oh. Tina had gone looking for Greg. Maybe he’d been alive when she found him.

  Alasdair wrenched the second suitcase away from Young, throwing her off balance. Even as she lurched backward, gravel spattering, he snapped, “Sergeant, I’d recommend you remembering police procedure. Inspector Gilnockie is expecting you at the beach. Get on with it.”

  Young stared at him, eyes blazing and then cooling in his arctic blast. Don’t say it, Jean beamed telepathically at her. Don’t tell him he has no authority here.

  Contracting to a defensive crouch, Young scuttled around the far end of the house just as

  Sanjay Thomson came loping up the driveway, a woman constable keeping pace with him. Both were sending dubious glances over their shoulders.

  Jean squinted toward the mass of color seething around the wrought-iron gates at the end of the drive. That’s right, the Krums were holding an impromptu press conference. But Fergie and Pritchard were dealing with it. They didn’t need her help. They didn’t even need her shivering, tooth-chattering presence—the air was calm but so cold that the thin, liquid sunshine barely registered on her shrinking flesh. She crossed her arms around her sweater-clad midriff and tucked her hands into her armpits.

  “You’d not be getting away without passing the reporters,” Alasdair told Tina. She turned, looked, and wilted even further. He clasped her elbow, steadying her. “You, W.P.C.—what’s your name, please?”

  The female constable goggled at him from beneath the brim of her hat, the ends of her short-cut carrot-red hair waving at her freckled temples like antennae. “Orla McCrummin, sir. Portree.”

  She seemed to expect Alasdair to rip open the front of his sweater and reveal a red-and-yellow, rampant-lion-of-Scotland initial monogrammed on superhero spandex. His reputation preceded him, thanks probably to Thomson.

  His expression that of someone ignoring a bad smell, Alasdair said, “W.P.C. McCrummin, escort Mrs. MacLeod to her room and sit down with her.”

  “Yes, sir.” McCrummin took possession of Tina’s arm as Thomson claimed the suitcases with that usual male grimace of, What’s in here, bricks?

  “P.C. Thomson,” said Alasdair. The youth hung back while McCrummin gently guided Tina to the door. “Get on with the luggage, then collect Colin Urquhart at the lighthouse and bring him to the incident room.”

  “Sir, Inspector Gilnockie was sending me to collect Colin not an hour since, but he was not home.”

  “Ah,” said Alasdair, with such a subtle release of tension in his head and shoulders that Jean was sure only she saw it. So the investigation was proceeding, if by steam rather than bullet train.

  “What were you saying about Colin Urquhart?” she asked Thomson. “He’s a hermit?”

  “Of a sort. He comes into the village now and again, but mostly keeps to himself. Some folk say he’s a layabout, a toe rag, that he’s squatting in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. But he’s paying rent to the lighthouse board, so Kinlochroy council’s got no reason to move him on. And he’s not asking anyone for money, he’s got some sort of assistance, being ex-military.”

  “Ex-military,” Alasdair repeated. “Fergie was saying he’s got a tendency to violence.”

  “Posttraumatic stress disorder, Doctor Irvine’s saying. Aye, Colin caused a wee bit stramash at the pub in November. Rab Finlay and Lionel Pritchard and two of the older chaps, pensioners, they were taking the mickey by saying soldiers nowadays have it easy, hot meals and the like. He’s not a bad sort. He had a rum go in Iraq is all.”

  “What’s his relationship with Diana MacDonald?” asked Jean.

  “She’s kind to him. She’s always had a good heart, has Diana.”

  “What’s your relationship with Diana?” Alasdair asked.

  “Friends,” Thomson said with a quick smile. “We played together when she visited here as a child.”

  Yes, Jean thought, the local constable was the best source of information on a community. The trouble was, the local constable was still a member of the community.

  “Inspector Gilnockie has not yet interviewed her, has he?” asked Alasdair.

  “She’s not had time to sit herself down with him, no.”

  “Thank you. Mrs. MacLeod’s in the Queen of Scots suite.” Alasdair stood still, very still, as Thomson walked into the house and hung a left toward the stairs.

  Jean considered the glacial ridges in Alasdair’s face, all the thicker for the frustration bubbling beneath. She ventured, “Well?”

  “Aye?” asked Alasdair, and then, “You’ll catch your death, Jean, outside without a coat.”

  “You’re not wearing one either,” she said, and led the way back into the house. She shut the door, asking, “Who threw the door open? D.S. Young?”

  Alasdair was halfway to the back hall. “Aye. Tina closed it carefully, I reckon. She almost got away.”

  “But you’re right, she wouldn’t have made it past the reporters. They’d have alerted Thomson and McCrummin, like the geese that alerted the sentries in Rome, whenever it was. I’d say poor Tina, but, damn it, Young has a point, no matter how clumsily she expressed it.”

  His smile was thin as a blade but vanished before it was fully drawn. “It’s only now occurred to you that Tina might have killed Greg herself?”

  That figured, it had never occurred to Alasdair that their own wedding might be in jeopardy, just that spouses killed spouses. “Yes, it’s only now occurred to me. Cynicism is your occupational hazard.”

  “And rose-colored glasses are yours.”

  “Right,” she said, expelling the “t” like a micro-missile. “Someone erased the phone’s memory. Yeah, Gilnockie can get records from Greg’s provider, but that will take time, and doesn’t change the fact that if it wasn’t Greg who altered the memory, it was Tina, and she lied about it. If Tina killed him herself, she would have had the knife with her when we saw her, but . . .”

  “Why? Oh aye, why?” Alasdair stepped back. “Jean, I’d better be getting onto Gilnockie.”

  “Yeah, you go on.” Of all the places where Jean would have liked to be a fly on the wall, Alasdair’s next conversation with Gilnockie just went to the top of the list. Nevertheless, she could only see ghosts, not practice astral projection.

  Around the corner and back down the hall beneath a plush toy moose’s head, and she was in Fergie’s office. She was tempted to lock the door, but this wasn’t her sanctuary, it was his. Who else’s could it be, with its collection of books, artwork, and gimcracks jumbled together like the contents of Ali Baba’s den and scented with potpourri and mildew?

  An orange Ganesh, the multi-armed Hindu elephant god, sat atop a bookshelf stacked two and three deep with books and magazines. A tooled-leather copy of Gulliver’s Travels s
upported a framed illustration from Peter Pan and a paperback on the Shroud of Turin. From a crystal block sprouted a letter opener shaped like Excalibur. A copy of the Kildalton Cross from Islay, ancient homeland of the MacDonalds, hung above a CD changer stacked with albums of New Age music, Bollywood scores, and chanting monks. Next to that sat a portable telephone on its base, one dating all the way back to the last century—ancient, in electronic years.

  Several of Fergie’s own works-in-progress were propped in a corner, the top piece a sketch of the old castle as it had once been, smoke eddying and flags flying above a medieval galley pulled up on the beach.

  A triptych of photos—Emma in her wedding gown, Emma holding infant Diana, child Diana mounted on a pony—was half-obscured by the papers drifting across a Victorian slab of a desk. The red tape was getting ahead of Fergie, it seemed.

  The desk was stationed in front of tall windows draped with lush but frayed brocade. Jean looked through the wavery glass to see a part-flagstone, part-gravel yard below. To one side sat a cement-block building, no doubt storehouse and garage, its brutal lines accented by the empty flower pots, plastic bins, and broken sculptures piled against it.

  On the far side of the yard, though, rose the lovely lichen-encrusted stones of the garden wall, breached by a wooden gate and topped by bare tree limbs. A sign beside the gate might read, “To Old Dunasheen Church”—it was small and weathered and Jean couldn’t quite make it out. Yesterday she and Alasdair had made their way to new and old churches alike via the main garden gate, past the trees and dormant flowerbeds. This looked like an alternate route.

  A spark floated across her memory and winked out the moment she tried to grab it. Someone, somewhere, had said something about walking to the church. But then, who hadn’t said something about walking to the church? She was on the way there herself.