The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Most do, being stories.” Alasdair bit into a piece of shortbread without needing to add, And Greg knew it before ever coming here.

  His mouth being immobilized with caramel, Jean asked the next question. “Was Greg interested in anything beyond Tormod’s story?”

  “After that first message, he never spoke of it again, mostly asking the history of the house and the estate, how Fergie and Diana are getting on, that sort of thing. Making up his mind whether to visit, I’m thinking.”

  The parallel furrows along the tops of Alasdair’s brows indicated he was thinking, too, and not necessarily about one of Fergie’s sketches for sale at the book counter, of Diana as Titania, queen of Faerie. Clearing his mouth with a swig of tea, he asked, “Did Greg and his wife stop in here yesterday?”

  “No, like as not they went straight on to the castle.”

  “And how are Fergie and Diana getting on, then?”

  “Well now.” Brenda leaned across the table, dropping her voice. “It’s been said at the pub they’re near skint, looking to sell more than a few valuables afore the bank and Inland Revenue come howling like a wolf pack at the door. Look at the laird who was after selling off the Cuillins themselves so as to repair the castle’s roof, and the one near Inverness selling his castle for a golf course and luxury time-shares. How the mighty have fallen, you could be saying, but I’ll not. The lairds are ordinary folk like us anymore. Even the royals with their divorces, though they’re not half wealthy, still.”

  “Tradition and economics make uneasy bedfellows.” Jean thought of the application forms on Fergie’s desk. A lot of other historic properties competed for available funding and corporate grants.

  Alasdair muttered something about either historic Scotland or hysteric Scotland.

  “Top off your cups?” Brenda hoisted the metal pot and poured tea, black as cola but twice as fragrant.

  Jean ate a bite of the shortbread and floated away on the sugar rush.

  “Have you seen any other strangers in town the last day or so?” asked Alasdair. “Other than the reporters.”

  “The reporters have been thick as midges, aye, but yesterday there was only the American family, the parents like film stars, ever so smart, and the child with the big eyes like a creature in a Disney film. Was I hearing the father right, he called her Dakota?”

  “Aye, that’s her name,” said Alasdair.

  “Fancy that.” Shaking her head, Brenda went on, “Mind you, I’m here in the shop all day. Sanjay, now . . .”

  “He’s on it,” Jean reassured her. Mulling over the art of naming children, she drained her tea and with her forefinger blotted up the last pastry crumbs.

  Brenda pushed back from the table. “You’re wanting a keek at the heritage display, are you? We’ve got nothing of Tormod’s, but there’s a miniature of Norman the Red as a child.” She walked them to the long, glass-topped case.

  On a blue fabric background lay a small copy of the Wilkie portrait of Seonaid. Beside it lay a miniature of a child about Dakota’s age, his face propped like an egg on an intricately folded neckcloth and dark jacket. The tiny oval revealed nothing more than a set of human features, no clues to personality or passions. “What happened to Norman?” Jean asked.

  “All the local folk reckoned he’d murdered his wife,” replied Brenda, “but there was no one accusing him, with him being the laird. He sent his son away to school, shut himself up in Dunasheen Castle, and spent his remaining years alone, the place going to rack and ruin about his ears. When he died it’s said there was no one to follow his coffin to his grave. Not like when puir Seonaid was buried, when folk came from miles away. A sad story, from start to finish.”

  “I’m not sure it’s finished yet,” Jean said.

  Alasdair inspected the other contents of the case. A series of prints and photos leading from Norman to a young Fergie, his face less round but just as mild. Other photos of boats long sunk, buildings long crumbled, fishermen, farmers, and shepherds long dead. Postcards home from the world wars. A massive iron key that probably locked a dungeon. A very nice sketch of old Dunasheen, the signature “Fer McD” looking like a wilted thistle in one corner. The obligatory item once belonging to Flora MacDonald—in this case, a scrap of fabric from her petticoat.

  What the Kinlochroy Heritage Museum didn’t have, Jean noted, was the obligatory lock of hair from Bonnie Prince Charlie. If you collected all the hair in Scottish museums purported to be his, there’d be enough to stuff a mattress, like combining all the bits of the True Cross scattered around the world would build a structure the size of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.

  She eyed a small, soot-stained bit of stone from the old church above the sea, and a nicely carved baby gargoyle from the new chapel. “Tormod’s work?”

  “Who’s to say?” Brenda leaned over the glass, using a corner of her cardigan to polish away a sticky fingerprint.

  Tormod’s work. And who’s to say whether Tormod had ever tried his hand at a mock Roman inscription, for the glory of God and the chapel, for the laird’s collection of relics and souvenirs, or for his own descendants, late in life?

  With a quirk of his eyebrow, Spock-style, Alasdair’s gaze darted toward the gargoyle and back to Jean’s. Beneath his breath and over Brenda’s head, he said, “Convenient, that Greg would have stone bits to sell, with a stonemason in his ancestry. Though the dirt’s dated it.”

  Brenda straightened. “Eh?”

  “Some research we’re working on,” Jean told her in complete honesty.

  Speaking of souvenirs, above the case hung a series of products—mouse pads, key chains, T-shirts—embossed with the MacDonald and MacLeod clan crests, the seaborne galley of the former coexisting in happy commercial proximity with the bull of the latter. Jean grinned at the legend Leod, Preod, MacLeod arranged in an arc above the crest and motto: Hold Fast. And those little chicken tracks were meant to be the clan plant badge, which was . . .

  Juniper.

  Yes, Jean thought, she’d just heard “juniper.” A good thing she believed in synchronicity more than coincidence, where events were grouped not by cause but by meaning.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jean turned on Brenda. “Fergie says you’ve got the photos of the bones found in the garden near Dunasheen chapel. And the associated artifacts.”

  “Oh aye, so we do.” Brenda stepped over to a nearby filing cabinet and dug around in a drawer.

  “Ah, that,” said Alasdair. “After yet another wild goose, are you?”

  “Quack,” Jean replied. “Or honk, or whatever geese say. Although this time I’m hoping to find one already cooked.”

  “Here you are.” Brenda produced an antiquated portfolio and a scruffy cardboard box that had once held candy, and handed them to Jean. “This puir soul was loved by someone. Putting a name to him would be a good deed.”

  The front door opened and Sanjay Thomson made his entrance, every bit of insignia on his uniform shining. The two ladies and the hikers fell abruptly silent, their faces turning toward the emblem of authority. His smile brighter than any insignia, he called, “Auntie Brenda? Oh, hullo there, Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn,” and everyone went back to eating and drinking.

  Brenda confided, “He stops by about four o’clock, most days. A young lad’s needing his provender. I’ll leave you with the evidence.” Returning Sanjay’s smile, she conducted him to the food counter. The teenage server colored prettily and switched her body language from upright professional to girlish flirt.

  Suppressing something between a chuckle and a groan, Alasdair plucked the box from Jean’s hand. “Let’s have a look at the remains.”

  She opened the portfolio to reveal several sepia-toned photos on thick paper, closeups of a skull and long shots of an entire skeleton, pieced together in more or less anatomical fashion on a canvas cloth.

  “Narrow pelvis, heavy brow ridges, strong jaw,” said Alasdair. “That’s a man.”

  “A lot of wear on the teet
h,” Jean said. “And some of them are missing, though they could still be in the ground. Look, the growth fissures in the skull are shut tight. He wasn’t young.”

  Alasdair arranged the contents of the box on the glass top of the display case. “Four good-quality brass buttons. A buckle. Two pennies with a young Queen Victoria, never so dour as the old one. Someone’s cleaned these up. Not much to be done with this, though.” He held a strip of dirty, moldy cloth between thumb and forefinger.

  “All that’s left of the man’s waistcoat?” hazarded Jean. She poked at a dark mound of material that might just as well be a dead mole. “Is that the bonnet Fergie mentioned? How could they tell?”

  “Likely it was spread out, then. Now it’s too far gone. But this, and this as well . . .” Delicately he stirred what looked like several thin toothpicks, the needles from a defunct Christmas tree, and tiny spheres like wrinkled olive pits. “Sprigs of juniper, oh aye. These are the berries. And I’m thinking this here might just be a hackle.”

  “If this was a military tam o’shanter, not a civilian one, shouldn’t there be a badge?”

  “An enterprising gardener might nick himself a silver badge tarnished from a few years in the ground, knowing it would clean up nicely. Or melt down, come to that.”

  They looked at each other, two minds, one thought. Jean put the thought into words. “Could this be Tormod himself? The sea lanes between here and Down Under run both ways. Most men do wear hats of some sort, in this climate, and an old military tam o’shanter would work just fine—we saw Colin wearing his this morning. Juniper’s the clan badge of the MacLeods. A bit of nostalgia for the returning emigrant, tucking juniper into his bonnet? You’d expect Australian coins, but then, if Tormod came back he’d have picked up some local currency.”

  “Australia was a British colony, and not one that went haring off on its own, like you lot. I’m not so sure it had its own currency ’til this century.”

  “I bet he came back, years later, as an old man, after his Australian wife died and their children grew up. Maybe he stayed with family that was still here in Kinlochroy, and asked them to bury him where he and Seonaid had been happy, at the chapel. Maybe he just lay down and died there. Whatever, we saw Seonaid walking toward his grave.”

  “There’s high romance for you,” Alasdair said. “A Hollywood-style ending, their ghosts going into the west hand in hand.”

  “There’s a reason Hollywood endings are so popular. Although, like I told Brenda, I’m not sure this story has ended.”

  “We’ll never be proving any of it, not with no more evidence than these things and a ghost.”

  “I know. It’s just an educated, maybe enlightened, guess.”

  “Coincidence.” Alasdair looked up at the speaker embedded in the ceiling above their heads.

  Jean realized that the disembodied voice was reciting “A Canadian Boat Song,” the lament of the emigrant Scottish Highlander in many more countries than Canada. The words might be wistful but they carried a sting, about mountains and seas dividing, and yet the blood being strong and the heart Highland, and how in dreams we can behold the Hebrides.

  With her own bittersweet smile, Jean slipped the photos back into the portfolio. Maybe death was a dream. Maybe life was. Maybe it all flowed on together, no now, no then. That would explain synchronicity, ESP, and ghosts in one fell swoop.

  Here came Brenda back again, having done her bit for law enforcement and family as well. Jean looked past her to see Thomson, his hat tucked beneath his arm, raising a steaming cup toward his lips. He tossed it down what must have been an asbestos-lined throat—an inheritance from both sides of his ancestry, no doubt—and inhaled a rich, raisin-studded cake called a black bun, all the time chatting affably with the winsome lass across the counter.

  “What do you make of that lot?” Brenda indicated the remnants atop the glass.

  “Well now,” said Alasdair, and gave Brenda their analysis of the photos and the boxed relics, if omitting the clue of the cheerful ghost.

  She listened in increasing amazement and gratification, leaning forward at each sentence, until she had to take a quick step to keep from falling over. “Tormod himself, is it then?”

  “Perhaps,” Alasdair cautioned. “We’ve done no more than make a guess.”

  “Entire industries have been built on guesswork, inference, and extrapolation,” said Jean, without giving the Bible History Research Society as an example.

  Thomson ranged up beside them, not one crumb marring either his chin or his uniform, and Alasdair repeated the explanation, concluding with the same caution.

  “A pity,” Thomson said, “that Greg MacLeod never knew of this.”

  “I’d not be so sure of that,” said Alasdair, and, before Thomson could ask him what he meant, went on, “What have you learned asking round the village? Any strangers about?”

  Folding her arms over her embroidered flowers, Brenda settled in to examine this evidence, too.

  Thomson began, “Lachie at the Co-op’s saying a man with an accent—Londoner, most likely—stopped in yesterday, buying some bits and pieces as though for a picnic, though it’s hardly picnicking weather. Yon hikers, now, they’re young, warm-blooded, but this man was not so young.”

  “A picnic,” said Alasdair.

  Jean knew he was seeing a bag of potato chips beneath a pew in the chapel, and the lock to the vestry door picked. “Did Lachie say whether the man was wearing a hat?”

  “No, why should he, most men hereabouts are wearing hats.”

  Not Alasdair. The perpetual motion of his brain kept his head warm. “A toe rag, perhaps? A vagrant, unemployed or not quite right in the head? Or a native son who’s been working away, making a visit to the home ground? No matter—he’s a potential witness to the murder.”

  “Or the murderer himself,” said Jean, without delving into the difficulties of motivation.

  “I’ll be keeping a lookout,” Thomson said, and went on, “Most folk hereabouts are gey predictable. Lionel Pritchard, now, he’s in the pub most every day, same as Rab Finlay. But not yesterday. He’s stated he was in Portree.”

  “Is he well liked in these parts?” asked Alasdair.

  “He’s not disliked, save when he’s giving in to the incomer’s curse, telling us we should be conducting our business the way his folk do in England. He and Rab, like chalk and cheese.”

  “Let me guess,” said Jean. “Pritchard thinks everything should change and Rab keeps talking about how things were better in the old days.”

  “They were, in a way. Then, entire families were supported by the estate. Now most of the young men, like Rab’s own brother-in-law, are obliged to work away. Fergus is the odd man out, coming instead of going, eh? Still, Rab’s loyal to the MacDonalds, and he and Pritchard work for them, so there are times they make common cause.”

  Brenda called, “Cheerie-bye!” Thomson turned to wave at the older ladies, who’d gathered their shopping bags and were heading out into the night.

  “Common cause, like the day Rab, Pritchard, and a couple of pensioners started fighting with Colin?” Alasdair asked.

  “They didna aim at fighting,” Thomson replied. “Colin stopped by the pub to buy himself a bottle of whisky, and the pensioners took notice of him. They were going on about their own war, and, for once, how things were worse then. Pritchard’s not got much use for Colin, thinks he’s got his own chance with Diana.” He snorted a demurral. “And Rab, he’s thinking Colin’s not right in the head, and is causing trouble for the family. They joined in the ragging, and Colin, well, he’s thinking the best defense is offense, eh?”

  “Puir lad, Colin,” said Brenda. “Diana’s got a good heart to take that one on. Although he’s got something to offer, I’m sure.”

  Jean wasn’t going to touch that line. “Is Fergie the only person in town not to know the, ah, full extent of their relationship?”

  “I’m thinking so,” Thomson said. “He’s a fine man, Fergus, no
airs and graces, none of this incomer rubbish like Pritchard, and he’s doing his best for Dunasheen, but . . . well, dinna go taking this wrong, but he’s got his own ways of thinking and doing, and there’s times he’s seeing what wants seeing, and there’s times he’s seeing only what he’s wishing to see, if you follow my meaning.”

  Alasdair followed his meaning just fine, Jean estimated. So did she. “And Diana?”

  “She’s here shopping from time to time, giving the school prizes, having a blether at the pub,” said Brenda. “Lovely girl, Diana. A bit posh for us plain folk, but polite to a fault.”

  Now the hikers started collecting their gear. With no customers, Brenda would want to close early, it being New Year’s Eve. As quick on the uptake as ever, Thomson pressed on. “Mr. and Mrs. MacLeod likely drove straight through the town without stopping yesterday. No one’s seen them at all. The Americans, the Krums, they stopped here.”

  “Here,” said Brenda, pointing at the floor. “The father bought a book and a sweetie for the lass whilst the mother, well, I thought at first the drains were giving off a bad smell, then decided that’s just her way.”

  “Yes,” Jean said, “that’s just her way.”

  “Yesterday,” said Thomson, “they spent an hour or more in the pub—I was by way of seeing them myself when I stopped in. The father went away, and then the mother. The two Morrison lads saw Scott walking to and fro with his phone. Mairi Macaulay met the mother, Heather, outside the Co-op, thinks Heather was asking her if she’d seen Scott, but Mairi couldna quite understand the woman’s lingo, and Heather couldna understand Mairi’s, so they both gave it up as a bad job.”

  “Bottom line,” said Alasdair, “is that both the parents were out and about at the time of the murder. And Dunasheen’s gates were standing open then.”

  “Oh aye. They’re always open. I didna know they would shut, to tell the truth, but Pritchard, he put his back into it. Closing the gates to the barbarians.”