The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean looked toward the swinging door into the pantry. It shivered a bit, leaking bits of dialog, Rab’s gruff lilt rising and falling in counterpoint to what sounded like Clint Eastwood’s gruffer drawl.

  Alasdair lifted the photo of the three soldiers down from the wall, and, using the tip of the corkscrew lying ready on the sideboard, pried off the backing. He and Jean touched heads over the faded words written on the back in a mashed-thistle hand similar to Fergie’s own.

  Allan Cameron, Fergus MacDonald, Kenneth MacLeod. 1944.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jean closed her eyes and opened them again, but the words didn’t change. “Kenneth MacLeod.”

  “So it says.” Alasdair’s sturdy forefinger touched the letters as though to make sure. “Greg’s brother’s name is Kenneth.”

  “Well yeah, but a lot of people are named MacLeod. Michael Campbell-Reid told me once that there are so many little boys here on Skye named Donnie MacLeod that teachers assign them middle initials according to when they enrolled. Donnie A. MacLeod, Donnie B. MacLeod, you know.”

  “We’re past finding coincidences.” He turned the photo over. The yellowed face of his own father looked up at him, gaze even, mouth firm—Allan had been the beta model of Alasdair’s Ice Prince. But Alasdair was focused on Kenneth. “This chap’s the right age to be Greg’s father.”

  “Kenneth senior, sure. But wouldn’t an Aussie join one of the Anzac regiments?”

  “Fergie’s saying his dad and Kenneth were at school together. He likely joined up here.”

  “So in the thirties young Aussies were sent ‘home,’ for some extra polish? I bet Kenneth was tickled to meet someone from his family’s ancestral stomping grounds.” Beneath the photographic tarnish, Kenneth’s blunt, square face, compressed in a frown, revealed nothing more than a vague similarity to Greg. “If this is Greg’s father, then he wasn’t just getting newspapers from home, he obviously went back and engendered at least two kids. How old was Greg, do you know? Over sixty? Didn’t Fergie say this Kenneth was killed in the war?”

  “Which war? I’m thinking the Royal Scots served in Korea as well.”

  “Ah, yeah, that would do it.”

  From the kitchen came the sound of gunshots and sirens and a whirring that was probably a food processor. The aroma of onions sizzling in butter wafted through the air and Jean’s mouth watered.

  Unmoved—impressive, how men could disconnect stomach from brain—Alasdair tucked the disassembled frame into the sideboard and started for the door. The delectable odor followed them down the hall to the incident room, where Gilnockie and Young were, judging by her frustrated and his aloof expressions, still struggling to climb the greased pole of Pritchard. Instead of joining in, Alasdair beckoned Gilnockie to the door.

  Gilnockie turned the photo over and back again while Alasdair explained, and at last summarized in his own words, “So the man might have been killed with his own father’s dirk? That’s no coincidence, that’s a bit personal.”

  Murder is always personal. But Jean knew what Gilnockie meant, clan feuds, arguments festering for centuries. “We already know that Greg came here for more than genealogical research.”

  “And Tina will not be answering questions, not just yet,” concluded Alasdair. “What’s her condition?”

  “Not so serious as it first appeared. Broken arm and a mild concussion.” Gilnockie eyed the photo again, the three faces preserved in time. “I’ll have my folk contact Greg and Tina’s family in Australia, see if we can make any sense of this.”

  Yes, let the official forces do it, Jean thought. She wouldn’t be able to raise Miranda now anyway, not with the full spate of Hogmanay under way in Edinburgh.

  Gilnockie stopped to deliver the photo and instructions to a minion before returning to the table where Pritchard was ignoring Young’s belligerent gaze.

  “You didn’t,” Jean told Alasdair, “suggest that he question Fergie again.”

  “No. I reckon that job’s on my head. Every time I think we’ve moved the investigation away from Fergie it circles back round again.”

  “If not to Fergie then to Diana, whose job one is protecting him and Dunasheen.” Jean pretended not to see Alasdair wince at that.

  They walked down the corridor past the clan prints to Fergie’s office and found the door shut. Music penetrated the dense wooden panels, Hugh Munro’s fiddle tracing the clear melody and the grace notes of “Peace and Plenty.” In spite of herself, Jean smiled, comforted.

  Alasdair raised his hand to knock, then, with his own smile of more rue than comfort, let it drop. “Here’s us away to the village. Fergie will keep.”

  They wended their way to the entrance hall, and were donning their coats when Diana passed along the corridor carrying a tray of glasses toward the Great Hall, her face set in a stern “the show must go on” expression. Close behind her came Colin toting an armload of logs, his face unreadable. Neither acknowledged Jean and Alasdair’s presence. Neither Jean nor Alasdair asked for acknowledgment.

  They were several steps into the thin, chill sunlight, when the phone rang in Alasdair’s pocket. Checking the screen, he answered, “Hello, Rebecca,” then responded to her greeting with, “Night’s falling, the murderer’s still at large, we’re in it up to the oxters. And you? Ah, good to hear things are going to plan in town. Here’s Jean.”

  Making a face at him, Jean took the phone. “Hey, Rebecca. Never mind the bit about being in it up to the armpits, I think we’re in it up to our chins.”

  Rebecca said, “I hope your ‘it’ is the wedding. Favors, flowers, toasts, you know, all the happiest day of your life stresses?”

  “Not exactly,” replied Jean, and added to herself, Buck up, mustn’t complain.

  Discreetly, Rebecca moved on. “Michael says you’re interested in the Bible History Research Society, something to do with your investigation.”

  “Well, not the BHRS specifically, but our Aussie victim’s relation to it.”

  Alasdair looked around from his perusal of land, sea, sky, and the elliptical, golden-ivory face of a rising moon. Jean tilted the phone so he, too, could hear Rebecca’s digitized voice.

  “That’s what we were thinking,” Rebecca said. “I’ve just now seen a press release from the BHRS, announcing the purchase of an inscription with Pontius Pilate’s name, only the second one ever found.”

  “Really!” Jean’s antennae twitched like Dougie’s whiskers.

  “Except this one’s complete. It says Pilate is a procurator, which is what Tacitus calls him and what we were all taught in Sunday school, not a prefect, like the 1961 inscription does. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, in terms of his political function, but an interesting discrepancy.”

  “It sure is. And the BHRS purchased this darn near priceless item from . . .”

  “. . . Australian antiquities dealer Greg MacLeod, who meant to display it in his new museum. The deal went down a couple of months ago, but the BHRS is saying they’ve just now had the inscription authenticated, not that they’re normally believing in authenticating mechanisms such as peer review.”

  “They never let geologists analyze what was supposed to be a bit of petrified wood from Noah’s Ark,” said Jean.

  “Nope. However, this time they’re saying they’ve dated bits of dust and debris in the interstices of the inscription to the Roman Era and Palestine.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m guessing they’ve released the news because of Greg’s death, either hoping to piggyback on the publicity or as a tribute. Hard to tell without tapping their phones.”

  Alasdair angled his own phone closer to his mouth. “Where’d Greg come by such a thing?”

  “He said it was discovered in the Holy Land by a family member who’d done a tour of duty there. It’s a small piece of basalt, chipped off a larger monument, a dedication of some sort. The Roman equivalent of ‘Pontius Pilate was here.’ Is that sensible to you?”

  “Kenneth,” sa
id Alasdair. “Greg’s father. If I’m remembering aright, the Royal Scots served in Palestine just before the war.”

  “When trade in antiquities was legal under the British mandate,” Rebecca added.

  Jean shook her head as again shapes fell through her vision, this time imaginary ones, tiny bits like the flecks of color in a kaleidoscope, not the definitive form of Kenneth MacLeod’s dirk lying against a tombstone dedicated to a crusader.

  Crusaders also brought home souvenirs. “Fergie was saying there used to be a Pilate inscription here at Dunasheen.”

  “Was he?” asked Alasdair.

  “It was at dinner last night. You were talking to Irvine.”

  Rebecca’s voice said, “An inscription at Dunasheen? How many Pilate inscriptions are floating around, anyway?”

  “Good question.” Jean stared unfocussed toward the facade of the house—someone had removed Tina’s makeshift rope from the window. Alasdair stared unfocussed at the gravel beneath his feet.

  Then Rebecca said, “That’s given you food for thought. Speaking of food, we’re not going out into the madness tonight; Michael’s sister and her family are coming to us. Four children, that’s madness enough.”

  Jean pulled up her train of thought and changed tracks. This might be her first Hogmanay—she’d just missed last year’s—but she knew the vocabulary. “You never let Michael first-foot, do you? He’s too fair.”

  “He’s usually bad luck,” joked Rebecca. “No, Maddy’s husband is our first-foot, he’s black Welsh and will do nicely. Besides, he always brings a single malt to die for.”

  “Please don’t. Happy New Year, and see you Saturday,” Jean said, reminding herself, when, not if.

  Alasdair muttered something appropriate, and restored the now-mute phone to his pocket. His gaze, wider rather than narrower than usual, met Jean’s. “The thot’s plickening,” she told him, shook out her tongue and tried again. “The plot’s thickening.”

  “It was quite thick enough to begin.”

  They started down the driveway, Jean lifting her feet, throwing her shoulders back, raising her chin. The cobalt blue of the sky was now diluted, washed with fragile shades of peach, plum, and pink. Darkness gathered in the north and east, but far to the southwest the setting sun painted skeins of cloud with gold dust and cast glimmering gauze over the jagged edge of the Black Cuillins. The cold air was scented with peat smoke, silvery-gray strands rising vertically from a dozen village chimneys and dissipating into the dusk. “It’s a pretty evening. Early, but pretty.”

  Alasdair’s face tilted upward in agreement, and the light eased the whetted angles of his features—until they neared Dunasheen’s wrought-iron gates. Then he saw the two media vans parked outside, and the camera-carrying figures camped around them. Most of the reporters had hared off after Tina, then, as well as back to civilization for the holiday. Still, his features hardened again.

  Snapping to attention, two constables opened the gates wide enough for Alasdair and Jean to slip through. The waiting reporters surged forward. “Inspector Cameron, Inspector Cameron, how are you getting on with this new case?”

  Great. He hadn’t been retired long enough to fall off the media event horizon.

  “It’s not my case,” he replied, pushing through.

  “It’s Miss Fairbairn, isn’t it? Are you assisting the police in this case as well?”

  There was someone with much too good a memory. With her best inscrutable smile, making no eye contact, Jean dodged the extended microphones and lengthened her stride to match Alasdair’s, past several rundown cottages that had once housed estate workers and onto the main—and pretty much only—street of Kinlochroy.

  The white-stuccoed, gray-slated buildings had a pared-down look, square and plain, with narrow eaves like spinsters pulling in their skirts. Even the signs marking several shops and a couple of guesthouses were simple wooden boards, not a one of them swinging dramatically out over the street. In the summer, flowerpots and window boxes might brighten the village, but not now. And perhaps not ever. The place seemed to Jean to be modest and tidy not just from an urge to cleanliness but from the need to use up and wear out, to make do and mend.

  A child crossed the street without bothering to look, a video game bleeping in her hand. Two more whizzed by on skateboards. An elderly couple left the Co-op grocery store, carrier bags swinging. Small cars were parked along—and on—the sidewalks. Boats bobbed in the harbor, a bulbous GPS unit squatting atop every superstructure, just as every rooftop boasted an antenna or satellite dish.

  The town’s war memorial was a granite Celtic cross. In the fading light, Jean could barely read the names carved into the main plinth, dating from 1914–18, let alone those from 1939–45. The latter list had been embossed on a bronze plaque and affixed to the base of the cross when World War I, The War to End All Wars, didn’t.

  “There’s a fair puckle of MacLeods and MacDonalds,” said Alasdair. “No surprise there. The lads from these small towns joined up together and died together. There’s no place in the U.K. that did not lose the flower of its youth.”

  That was unusually poetic for him. But then, Jean, too, could almost hear distant pipes playing the lament, “The Flowers o’ the Forest,” for soldiers of more than the twentieth century who had never returned home. She could definitely hear the grating shriek of gulls scavenging along the waterfront and whirling overhead in an airborne scrum.

  Shivering, she turned back toward the windows of the town, some dark behind their lace curtains while others glowed with warmth. “Over here,” she said, and led Alasdair to the door she’d spotted yesterday, across the street from the Flora MacDonald pub.

  This sign read Kinlochroy Bookshop and Café. One of the windowpanes displayed not only posters of local events, but also a blue Tourist Information sticker and a computer-printed notice: Heritage Museum. The moment Jean stepped inside, her glasses steamed up, leaving her to smell books, coffee, and scones, and hear a mellow voice singing Burns’ “Green Grow the Rushes, O.”

  “Time for a snack,” she told Alasdair as her vision cleared. “Dinner’s late and we’ll be up until midnight or past.”

  “Oh aye, that we will.” He stepped briskly across to a counter displaying trays of pastry and sandwiches and consulted with the teenage lass behind it.

  Several tables and chairs were grouped at the front of the shop. One was occupied by two older ladies chatting quietly over a pot of tea. Three young men sat around another, their outdoor garments, muddy rucksacks, and spread of soup, sandwiches, scones, and soft drinks declaring them to be hikers momentarily gone to ground.

  Opposite the café counter stood a second one, this in the style of a library circulation desk. A rack of ghost stories, Dunasheen guidebooks, and various tourist pamphlets propped up one side, no doubt the collection that had drawn Dakota’s attention yesterday. On a counter behind the desk sat a framed black and white photo, a soldier wearing full kit, from hackle to kilt, beside a woman dressed in the extravagance of an Indian wedding outfit—embroidered veil, jewelry, flowers, sari in elaborate folds. By comparison, a Western white wedding seemed plain and dull as a saltine.

  Beyond the desk stood shelves teeming with books new and old, a display case, and a table topped by two computers. The woman bending over one looked up, dark eyes sparking at the sight of customers. Thick black curls sprang from her high forehead and her comfortably upholstered figure was draped by a flower-embroidered cardigan and a denim skirt, its hem hanging above fuzzy wool socks and sneakers. Her golden complexion plumped above the dazzling white crescent of a smile. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

  Jean returned the smile in kind. “Hello. We’re ah . . .” Investigating a murder might be a bit abrupt. “We’re interested in your Heritage Museum.”

  “Yon case of odds and ends is it, though we’ve got census records and the like on file. Looking out your genealogy, are you?”

  “Well, not ours specifically. I’m Jean Fairbai
rn and that’s my fiancé, Alasdair Cameron. We’re staying at the castle.”

  The woman stepped forward. “It’s yourselves, is it then? Sanjay was saying you’d be stopping in. I’m Brenda O’Donnell, his aunt.”

  “I see the resemblance,” Jean told Brenda, and with relief that P.C. Thomson had already covered the preliminaries, “He’s a fine young man. You must be very proud of him.”

  “He’ll do,” Brenda said, her beam belying the neutrality of her words. Then she sobered. “He’s telling me the puir murdered man was Greg MacLeod, and now his wife’s been carried away to hospital.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  Alasdair paced across the polished wooden floor, his hands holding a tray rattling with metal pots and earthenware dishes, his features set inquisitively. Jean made introductions and Brenda swept the tray from his grasp, placing it on the table closest to the bookshelves. “Here you are. I’ll sit with you, shall I?”

  “Please,” said Alasdair, and with his courtliest manners seated both women before sitting himself.

  He’d chosen a cheese scone and a piece of millionaire’s shortbread. As though butter and sugar-rich shortbread alone wasn’t enough, some fertile Scottish mind—or tongue—had come up with the idea of embellishing hearty slabs of it with layers of caramel and chocolate. “Feeling your sweet tooth?” Jean murmured, and poured tea steaming into a pair of cups.

  He doctored his with milk. “You’re the one saying the climate justifies sugar and fat.”

  “The climate’s good for Mum’s curries as well,” said Brenda. “But you’re here asking about the puir murdered man, eh? He e-mailed me about the story of Tormod MacLeod and Seonaid MacDonald, Thomson that was.”

  “Your family’s related to Seonaid?” Jean asked.

  “Ah, everyone’s related to everyone here.”

  And worldwide, just not quite so intimately. Around a toothsome morsel of scone Jean went on, “You told him the story, then, of Tormod being transported?”

  “Tormod emigrated, no doubt of that, but likely he left of his own will after the scandal, the murder and all. Seems to be the story’s changed round a bit in the telling.”