The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “This church was burned down in 1645,” Jean concluded, without providing details, let alone mentioning how barbecuing the neighbors was a fine old human tradition. That dreadful act of violence seemed to have destroyed the spirit that had drawn people to this place—at least, no one else had built here. And yet, while the memory lingered in men’s minds, it did not seem to linger in the eternities of the land, the sea, and the sky.

  She listened with every sense she possessed, then, so quietly her voice blended with the sound of the sea, asked, “Are you picking up anything?”

  That didn’t go past Dakota’s head at all. “No. There aren’t any ghosts here. It’s just kind of cold and sad and yet there’s something else.”

  “The melancholy of age and the consolation of beauty,” Jean murmured. Hey, that was a good phrase. She should use it in her article.

  Beyond a low wall lay the graveyard. What slabs and knobs of tombstones were not swallowed by grass were weathered out of true, so that they resembled natural boulders inscribed with frost and lichen rather than the names of the dead. Here and there trembled a white feather, shed by a gull, not an angel.

  “So there are some really old dead bodies in there,” said Dakota.

  “In acid soil like this, they’re all gone, not even bones left.”

  “Oh.”

  “The special gravestones are over here.” Jean walked the child over to a shed topped by a sheet of green corrugated plastic better suited to protect cows or sheep than rare artifacts. But then, in Scotland, artifacts like these weren’t all that rare.

  Beneath the roof lay a row of fissured gray slabs, patched with moss, lichen, and the occasional strip of concrete. Hands long gone to dust or mud had carved them with armored men holding spears or swords, or, in a couple of cases, just the sword itself, surrounded by raised cords and knotwork like a medieval fetish. Several other slabs were graced by a cross, a skull, or both. A few patches of moss had recently been peeled away from one, revealing damp, corroded stone.

  Dakota eyed the gravestones, soldiers on parade, and said, “That guy’s helmet looks like a chocolate kiss.” So it did, the metal curving around the roughed-in face and coming to a point on top. “They weren’t all buried in a row here, were they? Did they all die at the same time?”

  “No, the stones are from different time periods, and even though some people—” Like Greg MacLeod, Jean thought, “—say they’re the graves of crusaders, they probably don’t go back that far. Though there were a lot of Crusades.”

  “What are Crusades?” Dakota asked.

  Jean had no short answer for that, or one that wouldn’t force her own beliefs on Dakota—there being a fine line between sharing your beliefs and ramming them down someone’s throat. A shame how often the former was perceived to be wimping out and the latter to be stirring and inspirational. How would Greg MacLeod’s museum have presented such issues—contemporary happy-clappy, traditional smells and bells, prescriptive fire and sword?

  “The Crusades were wars,” she said. “The original graves were scattered around the church yard. Fergus’s uncle collected the best gravestones here, to protect them, although the finest one, of a priest or bishop holding a chalice, is in the National Museum in Edinburgh.”

  “That guy there’s holding a really nice sword,” said Dakota, pointing.

  Jean peered into the green-tinged shadow of the shed, following the direction indicated by the girl’s mitten. A broken stone lay on its side behind two of the upright ones, as a prop rather than as part of the display—its carved figure was no more than a clumsy bashed-out sketch of a human being. Or maybe the original mason had intended the figure to be a skeleton, in which case its position, sinking into dark peaty muck, was appropriate . . .

  A straight edge lay next to the figure’s rudimentary hand, half concealed by a tuft of grass. A straight edge reflecting a watery gleam of light and ending in what might have been a chess piece, black and knobbly, and beside that a round glow like a cat’s eye in smoky gray.

  The shapes spun through Jean’s vision like those in a video game, assembling themselves into a whole. Her breath burst out of her lungs in a couple of four-letter words, hastily edited for tender ears. “Holy shi-moley.”

  “What?” Dakota asked.

  Grasping the girl’s shoulders, Jean pulled her back. “Don’t touch anything. Don’t make any more footprints. Stand still. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dakota stood still, her expression swinging between puzzlement and alarm.

  Her folks are gonna love this. Jean whipped out the phone and punched Thomson’s number. Kudos to Alasdair for thinking of programming the phone with that, otherwise they’d have to run down to the beach looking for him—and for Gilnockie, okay, it was still his case.

  The readout displayed the time. 11:45. Where was Alasdair, anyway?

  “P.C. Thomson.”

  “This is Jean Fairbairn. Are you with Alasdair and Inspector Gilnockie?”

  “Oh aye, that I am, if you’d like . . .”

  “I’ve found the—well, the missing regimental dirk, not necessarily the murd—” She saw Dakota’s ears growing like Dumbo’s beneath her earmuffs. “It’s with the grave slabs in that shed next to the old church. Y’all need to get up here ASAP.”

  “Aye, madam, I’ll spread the . . .”

  Word, Jean concluded, when Thomson ended the call a bit too quickly. News. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket, she peered once again into the shed. Was that mud on the knife blade or the dark rust-red of blood?

  Now Dakota’s eyes were growing larger, the mind behind them evaluating acceptable responses. Jean told her, “Let’s go around to the other side of the church, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you getting cold?”

  “A little.”

  A minute ago, Jean would have said the same thing. Now, if she unbuttoned her coat a cloud of steam would escape. “We’ll go back to the house as soon as the others get here.”

  “Okay.” And, after a moment punctuated by the brush of grass against denim, Dakota said rather than asked, “The man who died, he was killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe with that knife. That’s what the police have to find out. Okay?”

  Well, no, it wasn’t, but . . . a shadow ran swiftly over Jean’s face. She looked up, but saw nothing. A bird must have come between her and the sun. It wasn’t a blip in reality.

  Dakota was looking not up but down. Jean followed the direction of her gaze.

  From this side of the church, they could see into the ravine separating the hillside shelf from the steep slope leading to the lighthouse. The bridge spanning the rocky stream at the ravine’s bottom was identical to the one spanning the moat at the old castle, as though Fergie’s uncle, the old laird, had found them at a two-for-one sale.

  And just as Jean and Alasdair had stood on the one bridge yesterday evening, this morning Diana and Colin Urquhart stood on the other. Except this couple wasn’t sharing a joke but a passionate kiss, the silk scarf tied around her blond hair tucked in close to his dark tam o’shanter. They couldn’t have been entwined any more closely if they’d been wearing the same coat.

  But they weren’t. Diana’s coat was a beautiful lilac tweed. Colin’s was a bulky camouflage jacket . . . that’s what he’d been wearing when Jean saw him last night, a black hooded sweatshirt beneath a military jacket treated with waterproofing and fire retardant chemicals that shimmered in the light.

  Clasped together, they swayed back and forth as if to silent music, oblivious to their audience. Colin, Jean saw, knew his way around Dunasheen’s daughter as well. She was going to have to reassess that “vestal virgin.”

  Dakota asked, “Are they having sex?”

  “No, they aren’t!” Jean grasped the child’s narrow shoulders and this time spun her quickly toward the church wall with its empty, bird-nested windows. “Look there, see how the stones in the
wall aren’t too well dressed, they’re still kind of lumpy, except for the ones at the corners, which are squared off, they’re called quoins.”

  “Dressed? Coins?”

  From the corner of her eye, Jean saw a human figure duck back into the exit of the smaller garden path, the one leading from the kitchen yard. Pritchard? The shape was masculine, and too slender to be Rab’s. Had he been afraid she and Dakota would steal the totem pole? Or was he keeping an eye out for Diana?

  Here came the cops up the brae from the beach, Gilnockie and Alasdair at point. Here came Diana and Colin up from the bridge, walking a demure three feet apart. Maybe no one had been home at the lighthouse when Thomson knocked on the door this morning. Maybe no one had answered the knock. Or maybe . . . surely the constable hadn’t lied, but then, he was Diana’s childhood friend and Colin’s defender, not an impartial observer.

  Now Thomson, Young, and two white-suited crime scene technicians beelined for the shed while Gilnockie and Alasdair beelined for Jean.

  Spotting the advancing police people, Colin stopped. He put one foot behind the other as if about to spin around and run. Diana shot a level glance from Jean and Dakota to Gilnockie and Alasdair. She settled her mesh shopping bag on her left arm and took Colin’s hand with her right. Victoria couldn’t have claimed Albert with any more dignity.

  “What’s wrong with his face?” asked Dakota.

  Good question. Half of Colin’s face was set in handsome, symmetrical lines. The other half consisted of taut patches of scar tissue. As Diana drew him closer to the others, Jean saw that his good eye was the same startling cornflower blue as hers. But Colin’s other eye glinted dully from a nest of shattered flesh.

  No telling what scars laced the body beneath clothing that Jean now saw was too large, the coat hanging off his shoulders, the trouser legs sagging over scuffed military boots. He’d lost weight. A long grueling hospital stay would do that. As for the cause . . . “He was hurt in the war,” Jean whispered, but Dakota, staring in horrified fascination, didn’t respond.

  Neither did Diana. Anyone else would have looked frumpy with a scarf wrapped around her head, but on Diana, the scarf made a fashion statement. Her complexion would have abashed a rose. The words “beauty” and “beast” materialized in the back of Jean’s mind, and guiltily she dismissed them.

  Gilnockie stepped forward, greeted Diana, and introduced himself and Alasdair to Colin, who said nothing. A slight breeze riffled the red hackle on the bonnet pushed forward over his forehead. Black Watch. Another distinguished regiment.

  The side and back of his head were also scarred, so that the crew-cut dark hair grew in patches above a pristine but achingly vulnerable nape. His hands knotted at his sides and his entire body seemed to shrink, coiling like a compressed spring, poised for fight or flight. Oh yes, he was a reclamation project. In spades. Was that why Fergie thought Colin wasn’t good for his daughter? Was the broken man asking, or was Diana offering, too much?

  Jean thought of him standing outside the house last night. He’d thought Jean in her window was Diana. Some people might interpret that sort of thing as stalking, but not Diana.

  Gilnockie said, “We’ve been hoping to have a word with you both,” which was a typical Gilnockian understatement.

  Alasdair’s sharp gaze moved from face to face, ending at Jean’s. His eyebrow shivered, almost infinitesimally, not at any beasts or beauties but at her little shadow. “Hello there, Dakota. You’d like to be getting on back to the house, I reckon. It’s going on for noon. Diana . . .”

  “Luncheon will be served at one,” said Diana, her rasped red lips smiling imperturbably. She relinquished Colin’s arm and extended one handle of her mesh bag, revealing, yes, potatoes and other edibles. “Dakota, can you help me carry the shopping?”

  “Thanks for coming with me,” Jean said to the child. “I’ll see you later.”

  Shrugging—inscrutable were the ways of adults—Dakota took the proffered handle and walked off beside Diana, the bag hanging lopsided between them. “What’s for lunch?”

  “Mrs. Finlay’s laid on a mulligatawny soup. Do you know what that is?” The two figures, one tall, one short, disappeared into the garden.

  Alasdair’s and Gilnockie’s heads turned in unison, from Diana back to Colin.

  “Would you be so good as to walk back to the house with me, Mr. Urquhart?” Gilnockie and his long shadow gestured toward the beach. “Let’s go this way, shall we?”

  To see, Jean added silently to herself, how Colin reacts when he passes the site of the murder. In medieval times the authorities might have had all the suspects lay hands on the body, to see if it started bleeding again at the touch of the murderer.

  Colin cast a quick glance toward Thomson, who offered a gesture that was part greeting, part reassurance. He cast a slower one at the crime scene techs easing the dirk into a plastic bag, then set off down the brae. Young fell in behind Gilnockie and his—well, not prisoner, person of interest—and with a nod of satisfaction rather than encouragement followed.

  Exhaling as the pressure, not to mention the heat, went out of her chest, Jean turned to Alasdair.

  A tiny crack or two opened in his countenance, the everyday personality shifting beneath the police carapace. “Well done Jean, finding the dirk.”

  “Not really. It was Dakota who pointed it out to me. Y’all would have worked your way up here eventually, on your way to the lighthouse.”

  “Eventually, aye, though likely we’d have had rain or a blow or something of the sort first. We’d have had our wedding as well, Gilnockie’s team dusting the aisle behind us.”

  Laughing, if shamefacedly, she bumped up against his side. “Here I thought you hadn’t noticed the proximity of the crime to the wedding.”

  “I’d have made a piss-poor detective observing that little.” His fierce mock frown moderated into a smile. “Just now Patrick’s having his crew dredge the water off the beach and scour the rocks on the hillside. We’ve, he’s found no evidence beyond a few scuff marks in the shingle and footprints on the path. Looks to be one set stood for a time at the head of the brae, whilst other sets ran on by. The weight’s on the toes,” he explained, “that means running. They’re all boots or shoes with treaded soles, like everyone’s wearing these days. Sorry to be letting the time get away, but . . .”

  “Someone needs to keep the investigation moving along.”

  “Patrick’s keeping it moving, it’s just that his head’s somewhere else. Young let slip that he’s retiring this spring.”

  “And she’s planning to take his place?” Jean asked.

  “She’ll be a sergeant a long while yet. Those rough edges need smoothing. I had a word with Patrick about the scene with Tina MacLeod, and he had a word in Young’s ear.”

  “And now she’s pegged you as a busybody and tattletale.”

  “Oh aye, she’ll have done that, right enough.” Alasdair’s grim smile indicated his lack of concern for Young’s opinion.

  The sea shone the brilliant lapis lazuli of Diana’s Egyptian necklace. Waves swelled, surged forward, tripped and fell into froth, receded and swelled again, with a slow rolling thrum like the heartbeat of the Earth itself. Jean felt her own rough edges starting to smooth—and chill seeping into her body. More food, especially spicy soup, sounded like a great idea. “We have just enough time to check out the chapel again before we go to the house. I know you want to sit in on Colin Urquhart’s interview. And Diana’s.”

  “As do you.”

  “If you can get me in there, great.” Jean went on, “Did Fergie make his statement this morning, before we got to the incident room?”

  “Aye, he did that. Patrick’s saying there’s nothing there to be going on with.”

  Well no, not if you don’t ask the right questions. Jean opened her mouth to tell Alasdair about her odyssey through Fergie’s computer, then shut it again. Better to work up to that.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they turned away from t
he sea toward the shed, where Thomson had assumed his best parade-rest position. “What happened to Urquhart?” Alasdair asked.

  “Roadside bomb in Iraq,” replied Thomson. “There were four men in a lorry carrying supplies from the quartermaster’s depot. He was the one in charge, and the only one made it out.”

  “That’s a shame,” Jean said, inadequately. How many Scottish soldiers had come home with posttraumatic stress, or shell shock, or whatever the horrors of war were called in their eras? Dealing with that made dealing with an allergy to ghosts a piece of cake.

  Judging by Alasdair’s dour expression, he remembered police colleagues suffering in a similar way, not just from the effects of combat, but from the effects of surviving. And she’d once thought he was a reclamation project. “Is Urquhart having counseling?”

  “Aye, he goes away to Inverness once a month for a session. It helps, I’m thinking, though not so much as Diana’s helping.” This time Thomson didn’t add anything about her good heart, since Jean and Alasdair had seen for themselves that more than her heart was involved. His lopsided smile, embarrassed and rueful at once, pleaded for tolerance. “Colin’s needing a job, a steady routine, but they’re few and far between.”

  “Right.” Alasdair eyed the knife in the technician’s hand. “It’s got blood on its blade, has it? Let’s be hoping it’s got fingerprints as well.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Thomson, as though that was an order he had to fulfill.

  Jean and Alasdair walked on up the garden path, the primrose path, and not for the first time, Jean thought. By the time they turned down the tree-lined alley toward the new church, she’d told him everything she knew and most of what she thought: Dakota and her allergy, and how neither of her parents had alibis for the time of the murder, and how she’d seen a dark figure in coat and hat at the gate, and there was Urquhart in his regimental bonnet.

  She and Alasdair should work on learning to mind-meld. That would save a lot of jawboning. Taking a deep breath of the crisp air, she went on. If it wasn’t Urquhart Dakota had seen going through the gate, then who else was wandering around the estate in the dark? There was more than one kind of shimmery fabric in the world. Like a raincoat, although Diana’s and Pritchard’s raincoats were yellow. What if the initials didn’t stand for “Colin Urquhart” but were text-speak for “see you”? What if they meant someone was trying to frame Colin, or lure Diana out of the house by using his initials? What, for that matter, if the raincoat with the card in the pocket wasn’t even hers?