The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Here.” Jean took the phone, warm from its nest near Alasdair’s body, and held it to her ear. “Hello, Miranda.”

  “Good afternoon to you,” returned Miranda. “How’s the latest case coming along?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Plodding back to the shelter of the porch, Jean filled her in and reached a full stop. No more words. No more ideas. Just get on with it, keep on keeping on.

  “Well then,” Miranda said, with her usual discretion offering no suggestions. “I do not know if this is helping you, but I’ve heard from an acquaintance at the New South Wales MacLeod society. He knows—knew—Greg MacLeod, as Greg was using their records to research an ancestor, stonemason named Tormod who left Skye for Sydney in 1822. That’s the one he was going on about, is it?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Jean. “Greg said he’d been transported for murder, although we’ve learned since that the story isn’t quite that straightforward.”

  “It’s not that, no. The society chap is saying Tormod wasn’t a convict at all; he was a soldier, sent to guard the prisoners in the penal colony.”

  “A soldier?” Yes, taking the king’s shilling, joining up, was as good a way to get out of town and start over again as any. So why had Greg blithely claimed a convict ancestor? Because it made a better story for his customers? As Jean herself had said, being a descendant of one of the early convicts had become trendy, Down Under. Many of them had done little more than steal a loaf of bread, whereas some of their soldier-guards had been brutal, even sadistic. “Nothing like a little historical editing to fit your prejudices. The prisoners are the stuff of romance now. Whatever happened to the appeal of a man in a uniform?”

  “It’s not gone away,” said Miranda. “Not if the look in your eye when you see the sentries outside the Castle’s any indication.”

  Jean tried to smile at that, but the corners of her mouth seemed tacked in place.

  “It was later on in life,” Miranda went on, “that Tormod went back to working in stone, overseeing some of the work on Government House, for example. Emigrating likely worked out better for him and his Aussie family than biding in Skye.”

  “It’s all a matter of perspective,” Jean said. A police van rolled around the side of the building. Two constables leaped out and removed a stretcher from the back. She hoped it wasn’t the same stretcher that they’d used to carry Greg’s body up from the beach, but then, Tina could hardly complain, not after her particular version of a self-inflicted wound. “Thanks, Miranda. Every little bit of information helps.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll soon be away with Duncan for the Hogmanay celebrations. If there’s anything else, leave a message.”

  “If there’s anything else?” Jean quelled the caustic giggle welling up in her throat. That’s no doubt what Fergie was thinking. If there’s anything else, just shoot me.

  “Then try having yourself a good one, auld lang syne and all.”

  “We’ll try. I’ll keep you posted. Happy New Year to you too.” Jean snapped the phone shut.

  Under Irvine’s direction, the police people placed Tina on the stretcher and the stretcher in the back of the van. He scrambled in after her. The nearest full-service hospital would be in Portree. If her injuries were bad enough, she’d be taken by air ambulance to Inverness or Glasgow. They wouldn’t be interviewing her again any time soon. If ever.

  She must have been terrified, to go out the window like that.

  The van drove away. A glint of sun ricocheted from its back window and smacked Jean in the face. She receded into the entrance hall and stood beside the brass-bound kist, watching each face as everyone trudged past. No one looked guilty, no one looked pleased, every expression betrayed some variety of shock or distress.

  “You’re quite sure Tina was alone when she fell?” Jean asked McCrummin.

  “Aye, she was that, she was not pushed, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking she was threatened, although probably not by an actual person, in person—unless there a secret panel in the fireplace or something.”

  A queasy half-smile tilted one side of McCrummin’s mouth. “You’re joking.”

  Not entirely, but Jean let McCrummin go on her way. From afar rose the bay of the reporters at the front gate, scenting more blood.

  With one long, lost look over his shoulder, then another after Diana and Colin, Fergie marched rather than walked around the corner toward his office. Rab and Nancy, sharing more or less the same frown, went the same route. Gilnockie stopped Young in the doorway. “Where’s Pritchard?”

  Young’s mouth opened and shut and she cast a swift glance around. “He followed us from the incident room.”

  “I heard him shouting at the dogs a few minutes ago,” Jean said.

  “Find the man,” Gilnockie ordered, and Young vanished down the corridor.

  Alasdair walked into the entrance hall beside Thomson, who said to Gilnockie, “That’s me away, then, sir.”

  Distractedly, Gilnockie assented, then drifted after Young toward the incident room.

  Alasdair took the cell phone from Jean’s hand. “Let’s have us a look at Tina’s things. Sanjay, we’ll catch you up in the village.”

  “Aye, sir.” Thomson said, and closed the door behind him.

  Alone again. For what that was worth. Each foot heavy as clay, Jean walked up the stairs beside Alasdair and told him what Miranda had said.

  He considered, every line in his face flexing and then loosing—she could almost hear him ordering himself, Focus, man, focus. “Interesting. With nothing left for him here, and Norman set on revenge, Tormod went to be a sodger, to paraphrase Burns.”

  “You don’t suppose Fergie really is descended from Tormod the mason rather than Norman the laird, do you? I mean, Fergie said Norman accepted Seonaid’s son as his. Even if someone could prove otherwise, and that’s not likely, would there be any legal ramifications?” Jean started up the second-floor corridor. “If there’s an illegitimate birth, then the title and property would revert to, I don’t know, the descendants of some cousin of old Red Norman’s. Red Norman. Makes him sound like a communist rather than a minor aristocrat.”

  Alasdair managed a scorched snicker. “In other words, did Fergie or Diana murder Greg meaning to prevent him claiming the title and the estate? Or is Lionel Pritchard, say, the secret heir, aiming to come into his own? Jean, your mind can be positively byzantine at times.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she replied. “And yes, you’re right, that’s too complicated a scenario. But there’s a lot about Greg we don’t know.”

  “And Tina as well.” Alasdair paused below another Fergie MacDonald creation, a version of da Vinci’s Last Supper. Here the central figure was the Sphinx. His companions were Easter Island statues, a chubby, smiling Buddha, an Aztec in full feather, and the March Hare. The tablecloth was MacDonald tartan, scattered with candy wrappers and greasy newspapers wrapping fish and chips. Through the arches in the background gleamed the rings of Saturn, crossed by human footprints.

  “And then there’s Fergie’s mind. Makes yours look . . .” Alasdair’s voice ran down and out.

  “Normal,” concluded Jean. “Extra normal.”

  The door of the Queen suite stood ajar, presumably the way McCrummin had left it when she ran out. Jean pushed it open.

  The Queen suite wasn’t as spacious as the Charlie, but it was appointed as nicely, with amenities ranging from fresh, colorful fabrics to chipped bric-a-brac. If you were going to be under house arrest, Jean thought, this was the way to go. Then again, with the way Tina had gone, maybe not.

  Together they quartered the sitting room, noting a ceramic dish holding MacDonald business cards, a set of golf clubs propped in the corner, a copy of Country Life lying in front of a wingback chair. Alasdair inspected the dishcloth-shrouded contents of a tea tray. “Tina’s not touched her lunch.”

  “I bet she told Nancy she was feeling better and she’d be down for
dinner just to get rid of her,” Jean said.

  “I’ll accept that wager,” said a slick male voice.

  Jean and Alasdair whirled toward the bedroom doorway. Lionel Pritchard emerged, a smug smile attached as firmly to his face as his moustache. He held out a piece of paper. “You’re looking for this, I expect.”

  Alasdair’s narrow-eyed glare would have frozen anyone else in his tracks, but it slipped off Pritchard’s smirk and shattered on the threadbare rug. He snatched the paper from Pritchard’s hand. Jean leaned in to look.

  The printed itinerary gave flight numbers and times from Townsville through Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur to London. Across the bottom, in black, jagged letters like motes of Klingonese, were handwritten the words, “Here you are, Tina. The holiday of a lifetime. Don’t worry packing your nighties, LOL. CU. Greg.”

  Laughing Out Loud. See You. That answered that question. Tina had said that Greg used his phone to text, but she’d lied about recognizing the writing on the card. So who had he written to? And had the card been enough to set the appointment, so that his phone call was irrelevant?

  Alasdair’s face petrified. Barely moving his lips, he told Pritchard, “You wasted no time getting here, did you? Where did you find this?”

  “In the pocket of Tina’s suitcase. Or the suitcase filled with women’s clothing and cosmetics. I know you detectives like things to be properly witnessed.” Pritchard’s smirk spread into a moist, wolfish grin. His other hand rose from his side. “And this was in the man’s suitcase.”

  Alasdair seized the large brown envelope from Pritchard’s fingers. The mailing label on the outside was that of Dunasheen Castle, addressed to Greg MacLeod on Ross River Road, Townsville, QLD, Australia. Inside were a letter printed on ordinary white paper and a receipt for a Hogmanay package. Jean’s brows rose at the price—she knew she and Alasdair were getting a deal, but what a deal it was. The least they could do was earn their room, board, and double round of festivities by lifting the ten-ton block of murder from Fergie’s back.

  Alasdair read the letter aloud. “October Seventeenth. My dear Mr. MacLeod, my daughter and I will be delighted to welcome you and your wife to Dunasheen Castle for Hogmanay. It will also be a great pleasure to display the Crusader Coffer with an eye to your possible purchase. Safe journey. Sincerely yours, Fergus MacDonald. P.S. Enclosed are several business cards for your friends and business associates.”

  “Crusader Coffer?” Jean repeated. “Not that kist in the entrance hall, that’s medieval or even younger. The chest across from our door is Middle Eastern, but it’s too new to be crusader-era, probably not even a hundred years old.” Not that that had stopped Scott Krum from giving it the onceover, she added silently. And then, “Oh, Fergie means—”

  Alasdair shot a warning glance across her bow and she snapped her mouth shut on the rest of her sentence: The artifact that he’s been teasing us with for two days now.

  Pritchard’s black eyes switched from face to face. “Just as I told you, I didn’t write the note on the back of that card. It was MacLeod. He had his eye on one of Fergus’s special treasures.”

  “And you nipped up here quick as may be,” said Lesley Young from the outer door, “while Mrs. MacLeod was likely dying on the ground outside, more concerned with saving your own skin, eh?”

  Pritchard spread his arms wide. His motion released another wave of sweaty, musk-ox aroma. “It’s a fair cop.”

  “Here!” Young snapped her fingers as though she was summoning a waiter, and W.P.C. McCrummin stepped up to the door. “Take Mr. Pritchard downstairs. Have a care, he’s a slippy one.”

  “I’d never slip away from a woman in uniform,” he said. “Orla, wasn’t it?”

  McCrummin’s freckles hardened. “Come along, sir,” she said between her teeth, and escorted Pritchard into the hall and away.

  Jean stared after him, imagining him getting his comeuppance when Gilnockie arrested him for murder. If, not when, she corrected herself. You had to follow the investigation where it led.

  Young grabbed for the papers in Alasdair’s hands, saying “Police procedure, sir. Inspector Gilnockie’s asked me to secure the scene.”

  Alasdair let the papers go rather than have them torn in half, but this time his glare hit home. Young ducked, held the papers defensively before her chest, and retreated.

  Jean didn’t waste her breath pointing out that Gilnockie would just as soon have Alasdair inside as outside the scene. With a grimace she didn’t care if Young interpreted as a smile or not, she backpedaled toward the door and down the hall, up the stairs and to their own room, feeling Alasdair’s chilly breath on the back of her neck the entire way.

  Again he unlocked the door, door-locking being a nicety that hadn’t occurred to McCrummin as she ran out of the Queen suite. But another distaff police person was on Jean’s mind. “How dare Young throw your own line about police procedure back in your face? Does she have the social skills of a turnip or what?”

  “Law enforcement’s not about social skills,” Alasdair returned.

  “The heck it isn’t! What about catching more flies with honey and all that?”

  “Is that how I went catching you, then, with honey? I do not think so.”

  “You caught me with something like whisky, sharp at first, but smooth going down.”

  “Right.” Alasdair opened the door and stood with his hand on the old-fashioned latch, the crevice between his eyebrows closer to a crevasse. “Greg wrote the card. Likely he sent it to the killer.”

  “Who then put the card in Diana’s pocket? Why? To implicate her? To implicate Colin?”

  He growled, “Assuming Diana herself’s not implicated.”

  “Yes, let’s assume that,” Jean told him. “And what the hell is up with Fergie and this Crusader Coffer . . .” She suddenly saw past Alasdair into the sitting room. Bits of white and blue fluff lay on the rug, drifting in the sneaky little drafts playing along the floor. “That’s right. Dougie.”

  Alasdair looked around. “Oh aye, your moggie’s made a mess of something. Feathers?”

  “I bet he killed one of those stuffed birds.” Jean followed the trail into the bedroom. “Funny, though, the feather bits are only the two colors . . . oh boy.”

  They’d had a visitor at some point over the last couple of hours, one who had probably placed on top of the bed the dusty old hat box that was now lying beside it, surrounded by macerated blue and white feathers.

  “Dougie?” Jean called. “Here, kitty, kitty!”

  Of the two rounded lumps beneath the bed, one, she saw, was a cracked commode, called in her part of the world a thunder jug. The other lump opened its golden eyes. You rang?

  That white bit at the tasseled edge of the rug wasn’t a bit of feather but a business card. She picked it up. Fergus MacDonald and Diana MacDonald . . . She flipped it over. “‘I found them. Here you are. F.M.’ Fergie found what?”

  Alasdair knelt beside the hatbox, shoving aside a striped lid and streamers of torn tissue paper. “A mouse once gnawed himself a wee hole here, after a nesting place. He left enough scent to attract Dougie’s attentions. And then . . . aha. Here we are.” He held up two tam o’shanters, their badges tarnished, their hackles reduced to fragile spines.

  “Dougie!” Jean exclaimed. “Those are Fergie’s bonnets!”

  “One Cameron Highlanders—that’s Fergie Mor’s. My dad’s is identical. The other is Royal Scots. Pontius Pilate’s guard, Fergie’s fond of saying. It’s this chap’s dirk killed Greg. That’s why Fergie looked them out—he’s taken to heart that bit about not knowing what’s important. . . . What’s this?” Alasdair probed delicately at the interior of one bonnet, producing a crinkle and a musty smell.

  Pressing up against his side, Jean saw that the band of the bonnet was lined with newspaper, a deep yellowish-brown with decay. “Nothing like a do-it-yourself repair job.”

  Alasdair managed to pull one edge of the paper from behind the sweat-stained band without
it disintegrating in his hand. It was the top of a page, the name of the newspaper making a faint track like an antediluvian fossil’s: Townsville Bulletin. Just below Jean could barely make out the beginning of a headline. “Australian troops advance . . .”

  She looked at Alasdair just as he looked at her, wild surmise flying from mind to mind and back like a boomerang. Jean said, “We’ve got to take that photo down from the dining room wall and see if the dirk guy’s name is on the back. No, you don’t know what’s important, and by this time . . .”

  “I’m thinking there’s nothing that’s not to do with the murder.”

  Hastily they gathered up the remains of the hackles, piled them, the bonnets, the scrap of newspaper, and the tissue back into the box. They affixed the lid and shut the lot in the wardrobe. “Get your coat,” Alasdair said, “and we’ll have a look at the photo on our way out. Respecting you, my lad, scolding’s no good, is it?”

  Dougie blinked and yawned.

  “What a mighty hunter,” said Jean. “You went after a mouse and landed two birds.”

  The clock in the sitting room struck two-thirty as they walked out the door, leading Jean to ponder relativity, how the last twenty-four hours had lasted a week, whereas her average day at the office lasted about five minutes.

  And there was some sort of spectral relativity as well, she thought when they stepped past the tripping stane on the turnpike stair. She was getting so used to walking through Seonaid’s paranormal resonance that she no longer noticed it any more than she noticed the pink feather boa on the suit of armor or the mistletoe hanging from the archway.

  The ground floor was eerily quiet, considering the number of people who were tucked away in various corners of the house. The dining room table was set with the tree-people candlesticks ranged along a boxwood garland, and with all the surgically gleaming cutlery and gold-rimmed dishes and crystal of a posh, traditional party. Now each side of the table sported three chairs. Rab and Nancy had taken Tina at her word, then, and set a place for her too.