The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Jean reminded herself that she might be a journalist, but she was no barbarian. Her relief at Dakota’s story about the pub being confirmed was tempered by her guilt for pumping the child to begin with.

  Thomson went on, “The Krums are in the pub just now, after walking up the lane beyond old Calum’s cottage for the lass to have a look at the sheep, and then back round to the harbor. They stopped in at the Co-op to buy sweets and day-old bread to feed the gulls.”

  Who needed a Protect and Survive surveillance system in Kinlochroy?

  “Cheerie-bye!” Brenda called to the hikers, and, as the door shut behind them, “You’ll be excusing me please, Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn, the lass is needing help with the clearing up.”

  Behind the counter, the lass started from her reverie and reached for a dish cloth.

  “I’d best be away to the castle,” Thomson said, his dark eyes with their bright gaze targeting first Alasdair and then Jean. He touched his forefinger to the side of his nose. “Fergus is asking me to play the first foot. I’ll be seeing you at the bells, then, carrying my lump of coal, my tin of shortbread, and my bottle of whisky—Fergus has already given me them, just to make sure.”

  The bells of midnight. The cusp, the turning point. How many events were marked by bells—death, marriage, or no more than the passing of the hours? Jean’s gaze fell on a framed print hanging on the wall, Dunasheen in the sunshine, its towers and gables rising above a lawn covered with daffodils. Spring would come, no matter what else happened. “We’ll see you then.”

  “Thank you, constable,” said Alasdair, and as Thomson walked away settling his hat on his head, “It’s time we were getting back as well, Jean. Fergie’s expecting us in the library at six.”

  “Yeah, the whole artifact and article thing is one of the reasons we’re here. Exploiting history is why everyone’s here, in a way.” Jean didn’t mention their own bottom line—speaking of the devil of wedding cancellation might make it appear.

  Alasdair called to Brenda, “Thank you kindly.”

  “It was nice meeting you,” Jean added, and braced herself for the cold and the dark outside.

  Despite the dark and cold, warmth emanated from the buildings, probably the psychological effect of all the lighted windows. Night had erased the Cuillins and muted the gleam of the sea. But Dunasheen Castle glittered bravely, even stubbornly, behind its wall and beyond its naked trees.

  Leaning close together, Jean and Alasdair walked across the street and looked through the front window of the pub. Yes, the Krums occupied the settle closest to the fireplace, Scott gazing into an empty beer glass as though into a crystal ball, Dakota wrapped around a paperback, Heather writing with a thick pen in a small book.

  If any reporters had taken refuge there, they were gone now. A few locals sat at tables or stood at the bar, while the publican minded his post between a fence of knobby beer spigots and a wall of bottles and glasses. A pop song played in the background and leaked out onto the sidewalk, making less of an impact on the silence than the everlasting murmur of the sea.

  Alasdair and Jean turned away from one of the town’s sanctuaries and walked toward another, the white-painted church at the end of the street. Its windows were dark arrowheads in its pale flanks, and the array of monuments behind its surrounding wall looked in the gloom like a thicket of stone. The peaked roof of a small building rose to one side. “Fergie’s family mausoleum.” Alasdair’s breath seeped in a sparkling cloud toward the graves and vanished.

  “I guess Norman the Red and Seonaid are lying side by side. Seonaid’s physical remains, at least. And their son, and his son, and so on down to Fergus Mor and his brother the laird, primly and properly arranged for eternity. Or for Judgment Day, whichever comes first.” Jean caught Alasdair’s quick gleam, but he didn’t dispute her theology.

  A door slammed, and voices echoed down the tunnel of the street. One of them spoke with a familiar accent, its flatness emphasized by its underlying whine. “. . . I deserve it, that’s why,” Heather was saying. “Journaling relieves stress. What’s a good pen and a nice book, to relieve stress?”

  Scott probably had an answer to that, but he didn’t vocalize it. He and Heather, Dakota at their heels, passed within several yards of Alasdair and Jean.

  Alasdair called, “Hullo there.”

  The three shapes spun around. “Whoa,” said Scott with a forced laugh. “I thought for a minute we were hearing voices from beyond the grave.”

  “Sorry,” Alasdair told them. “You’re away to the house, then?”

  “Yeah. The whole Hogmanay thing gets going at seven, Fergus said.”

  They walked away en masse, Heather adding, “About time. So far just about the only entertainment is the whole C.S.I.: Dunasheen thing.”

  “Entertaining?” demanded Scott. “There’s a guy dead . . .”

  “Too much information for the k-i-d,” Heather retorted, as though Dakota couldn’t spell. “You know what I mean. Cut me some slack for a change, will you?”

  Maybe Heather meant We don’t know them, so they don’t matter. Jean caught Dakota’s eye and smiled encouragingly. Dakota smiled back, then shrank into her muffler as the group approached the gates, iron looping and swirling against the lights of the house.

  But the news vans had gone, leaving a solitary constable on guard, his dark clothing shadowed so that his yellow reflective jacket seemed to be disembodied.

  Heather flashed a grin. Thumbs upraised and forefingers pointed, she pretended to draw from the hip and fire shots at him. His face went from bored to deliberately blank, and he spun toward the gate. Everyone hurried through the narrow opening so quickly Heather had to break into a jog to avoid being left behind. “Thank you, constable,” Alasdair enunciated, and the gate clanged shut.

  The driveway ran into the deep shadow between village and house. Jean directed her steps closer to Alasdair and eyed the black bulk of the garden wall, of Pritchard’s cottage, of the trees spaced across the lawn. Someone could easily be hiding there, watching them. Just because the gates were shut didn’t mean the estate wasn’t easily accessible.

  A few paces further on, Dakota stopped dead. “Wow! How did they do that?”

  Oh. Jean crawled up from the primordial sludge of her doubt and dread to see stars strewn across the sky, luminous freckles on the face of God. Some were hard points of icy light, others were smudges. Groups of stars made smears of radiance that faded near the glowing puddle of the moon—and in the west, blotted by thin streamers of cloud.

  “How did who do what?” asked Scott.

  “Those are special effects, right? There aren’t really that many stars.”

  Definitely a city kid, Jean thought. “Yes, there are that many. You just can’t see them when there are a lot of other lights. Street lights, lights of buildings.”

  “Oh. Cool.” Her head tilted back, Dakota wobbled along, her mother’s hand on her shoulder keeping her if not on the straight and narrow, at least on the driveway.

  Scott, too, looked upward, so that when a black lab and a white terrier rushed toward him from the darkness he almost fell over them. “Hey! Oh, hi, guys.”

  Rab Finlay trotted along after the dogs. “Bruce, Somerled, get back here you sons of . . . Hullo there. Just walking the dogs.”

  “Looks like they’re walking you,” said Heather.

  “They’re that eager to be off, slipped their leashes whilst I tied my trainers—the polis took my wellies, much good that’ll do them, and here’s me, heading for the nearest patch of glaur and ice.” The dogs capered on across the lawn, “Somerled! Bruce! No free run tonight, lads, there’s things doing at the house, get back here with you!”

  “I hear you, pal.” Scott bent his knee and lifted his foot so that a pair of polished wingtips caught the light. “I wasn’t anywhere near the place when the guy, you know, but still they took my hiking boots, brand new ones. A heck of a lot warmer than these.”

  “I should hope so,” said Hea
ther. “They cost as much as designer pumps.”

  Rab’s black and white beard bristled like the southbound end of a northbound badger. His eyes glinted in the shadow of his tweed cap. His silence rejecting Scott and Heather’s familiarities, he hooked the dogs’ leashes to their collars and continued on down the driveway.

  “Why did the police take everybody’s shoes?” asked Dakota.

  Alasdair, who had so far borne out her estimation of his speaking habits, answered. “There were footprints near the scene of the crime, prints of shoes with treads. The boffins—the laboratory technicians—are after making a match. And matching the mud and other matter at the scene with matter caught in the treads of someone’s shoes.”

  “The problem is, everyone wears shoes with treads these days.” Like Brenda and her comfortable sneakers, Jean added to herself. “There must have been a dozen pairs of wellies in the cloak room, just for a start.”

  “Too much information,” Heather said again, despite Alasdair’s circumspect “matter.” “Come on people, let’s get dressed for whatever’s going on tonight. I hope they have more of that wassail. That was good.”

  “It sure was,” said Scott, leaping on a point of agreement. “Let’s ask for the recipe.”

  The two adults swept Dakota across the gravel and into the porch. The door opened, emitting a burst of light, and shut again. In the darkness, the dogs woofed perfunctorily at the gate constable. The phone in Alasdair’s pocket rang, and the light of the display cast a greenish, alien glow on his face. “Hullo, Hugh.”

  This time he angled the phone toward Jean, so she could hear Hugh’s voice. No thanks to the tiny audio circuits that it came across clear as a bell, if only half as loud—he made his living as much with his voice as his musical instruments. “I’ve got two minutes before the taxi arrives. Three, if it’s slowed down by the crowds on the High Street. But I’ve heard from my fiddler friend in Townsville, a quick message before going off to a New Year’s barbie on the beach whilst I’m freezing my nose hairs here in Auld Reekie and Darkie.”

  “Any good gossip about Greg MacLeod?” Jean asked with a grin.

  “She did not know him personally, but knew of him. Quite the smooth talker, she’s saying, and a clever businessman, with many a scheme, resorts, apartment buildings, suburb development, a souvenir business, your art gallery and museum of religion.”

  Alasdair waded in. “Rebecca’s saying he sold an ancient inscription to the Bible History Research Society, all the time working a deal to display it in his own museum. Eating your cake and having it as well, sounds to be.”

  “That’s Greg,” said Hugh, “or so she’s saying. Always selling up the last venture and starting in again, looking out the main chance. Mind you, he’s never known for churchgoing, or New Age piety, or even holding séances, nothing of the sort. It’s that with war, fire, flood, economic troubles, nowadays there’s muckle money in religion.”

  “Hence a Museum of Religion and an antiquities gallery under one roof.” The side of Jean’s face next to Alasdair’s was almost warm. The other side was so cold she felt the gold studs like tiny icicles in her earlobes.

  “Hope that helps,” Hugh said. “Time to go singing for my supper.”

  “You’d sing for nothing,” Jean told him. “Thanks, it does help. Happy New Year!”

  “’Til Saturday,” stated Hugh. “I’ll not be missing out Alasdair’s stag party.”

  Alasdair twitched, a stag party not being on his list of priorities. But before he could remonstrate, the connection went silent. He tucked the phone away.

  Jean leaned away from him, feeling the chill fall on her face. “I really wish we’d gotten to know Greg. He sounds like quite a character.”

  “He was after the main chance, was he? So are the Krums. And Pritchard.”

  “An old manor house,” said Jean, “filled with precious objects religious, secular, no one knows what, the owners in difficult financial straits, and a shady manager. Quite a setup.”

  Alasdair looked up at the glowing windows. “What was Greg wanting that someone killed him to stop him getting it? What was Tina knowing that made her risk her life escaping? Was she thinking the murderer nearby, and coming for her next?”

  The light streaming from the library window wavered as Diana leaned in close to the Christmas tree. Its tiny red and green lights winked on, casting a hard-edged gleam into Alasdair’s eyes.

  Jean could sense his thought cycling like an electric current: Every time I think we’ve moved the investigation away from Fergie it circles back round again.

  The lingering sweetness in her mouth went sour.

  Chapter Twenty

  Alasdair considered his image in the tall mirror. Jean considered him and his heather-blue tie, charcoal jacket, and tall socks with red flashes, all setting off the red and green Cameron kilt—not quite the red and green of Christmas, but then, tartan was appropriate for all seasons. “There may be something about a man in a uniform,” she said, “but there’s really something about a man in a kilt.”

  “Kilts have been uniforms. See my dad and Fergus Mor.” He thrust the tiny traditional dagger, the sgian dubh, into the top of his sock, and double-checked the clasp on his kilt pin. “You had no call giving me an engagement gift.”

  She fluttered her left hand toward him. “You gave me a diamond ring. Besides, I couldn’t resist that pin.” A silver dragon with a sapphire eye, it was just small enough not to be gaudy, otherwise he’d never wear it.

  “Bonny Jean.” He took her hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Above the gleam of the diamond, heat lightning flickered in the depths of his own sapphire eyes, ones more changeable than the dragon’s. “That’s a lovely frock you’re wearing.”

  “Thank you, dear.” Still holding his hand, Jean checked her mirrored self. Okay, she paled in magnificence next to him, the way a peahen paled next to a peacock. But still, the deep-crimson dress Miranda had talked her into buying looked good with her fair skin and auburn hair, and the necklace of chunky stones and twisted wires seemed both antique and contemporary. She might even hold her own next to Diana and Heather.

  Her dress for the wedding waited in the wardrobe, sheathed in plastic and anticipation. It was a lovelier frock than her first wedding dress, which had been so stark a white she hadn’t been a blushing bride but a blanched one. She should have taken that as an omen.

  As for whether she’d be wearing her second-time-around dress on schedule, she could use an omen, a sign, a portent—if she had a magic eight-ball she’d consult that too. At least she’d see Alasdair in his kilt tonight, even if they had to delay—not cancel, delay—the formalities and the celebration following.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said Alasdair, his fingers tightening on hers.

  “I’m not going to start charging you for them now,” she replied.

  “Worrying about the wedding, eh?”

  “I don’t want a furtive ceremony and hushed voices. I don’t want to honeymoon under a cloud. We’ve done a lot of compromising, but I don’t want to compromise with this. Although we may have no choice.”

  “You’re sounding like Nancy and her ‘we canna sort things to suit ourselves,’ not Bonny Jean the stubborn.”

  “Stubborn, moi? Look who’s talking,” she retorted, and the little clock on the mantel struck five-forty-five.

  With a smile and a last firm squeeze of her hand, Alasdair picked up her best beaded evening bag, just big enough for a pen and notepad, and draped it over her shoulder. “That’s us away, then.”

  Having exhausted himself stalking and killing the two hackles, Dougie now slept soundly on the French gilt chair. “All he needs is a couple of footmen in white wigs delivering catnip,” Jean said.

  Alasdair’s iron rod of an arm urged her out of the room and into the hall, where she eyed Seonaid’s tapestry. “Is it possible to deliberately choose ghosthood over going into the west, or the night, or wherever souls go? Given my druthers, I’d rathe
r fade out and rest in peace than spend eternity searching for something I never attained in life.”

  “Is it possible to choose—ghosthood, hah—for someone else, by not letting them go?”

  “You’re thinking of Tormod and Seonaid? Although you’d think once Tormod was gone, Seonaid would go, too.”

  “Habit.” Alasdair tucked the room key into his sporran and they strolled off down the corridor.

  “With all that Fergie and Diana have had to deal with, they might prefer us being fashionably late,” Jean told him.

  “I’m after having a proper chin-wag before the Krums arrive on the scene,” he returned.

  “Well, yes, like how you weren’t far wrong guessing that Greg was after one of the crusader tombstones, when he was after something called a Crusader Coffer.” Jean paused at the tripping stane, and not only because she was now wearing shoes with dizzyingly tall one-inch heels. What she felt, though, wasn’t dizziness, just the delicate prickle, the cold press of something that was only abnormal, she supposed, because so few people were sensitive to it.

  “You haven’t heard the Green Lady, Seonaid, wailing or anything, have you?” she asked.

  “Warning of disaster? If she was carrying on about Tina’s falling from the window, I did not hear.” With a barely perceptible shudder, Alasdair walked on down the steps, his elbow angled in Jean’s direction should she trip over her own feet or feel the need to make a formal entrance on his arm. She confined herself to a light pat on the sleeve of his jacket.

  They were walking through the entrance hall and its aroma of cooking food and a hint of smoke when Gilnockie and Young rounded the corner from the back hall. “Good evening,” Gilnockie said. Young exposed several teeth, then looked their finery up and down and folded her arms across her nondescript coat.

  Jean and Alasdair rendered appropriate greetings, which included not commenting on how Gilnockie seemed grayer, graver, and more cadaverous than ever, as though he’d eaten nothing but ashes since his arrival at Dunasheen. “Hogmanay’s under way, then,” he said. “Lord Dunasheen’s been kind enough to ask us to join in the festivities . . .”