The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Thomson’s blurry image placed the first-foot gifts, a bottle of whisky, a tin of shortbread, a tissue-wrapped lump of coal, on a nearby table. Luck, bad or good, was no more than superstition, than happenstance, and yet coincidences happened and events made tangled webs . . . She resumed her glasses in time to see Thomson, smooth as a maitre d’, extract Kenneth’s suitcase from a hand reddened by both sun and cold and point the man to a chair.

  Tossing his coat aside to reveal a frayed sweater, the source of the faint wet-sheep aroma annotating his aura of stale sweat and old fry-ups, Kenneth thumped down. “Let’s get on with it, okay?”

  Alasdair’s unhurried but intense tones into his phone were doubtless directed at Gilnockie. “Aye, I’ll have Thomson witness and record—she is, is she? We’ll come round the morn, then.”

  Nancy appeared with steaming mugs of tea and the remains of the post-dinner biscuits and cheese rearranged on a smaller plate. Whatever pleasure she’d taken in the Hogmanay games had soured, and she considered Kenneth with a dour stare he returned twice over. “You favor your brother, not quite two peas in a pod, but close. You’ll have eaten, I reckon, though I might could be heating the dinner leavings.”

  “No, thanks just the same,” Kenneth replied, even as he accepted a cup and cradled it between his hands. “I’ve eaten airline stuff ’til my gut’s turned up. Kuala Lumpur’s the best connection, but the tucker’s nothing but chook-food and fruit.”

  When Tormod MacLeod went out to Australia from Skye in 1822, he traveled in a wooden cockleshell eating half-rotten food for months on end. As recently as Jean’s parents’ generation, if you emigrated to the other side of the world, you were gone for good, almost as though you’d died. Even if an aging Tormod had returned to Scotland, to the dark and bloody ground of his lost love, his journey hadn’t lasted only a few hours. But Kenneth . . .

  “Nancy,” asked Alasdair, “how do you know what Greg looked like?”

  “Ah,” she said, “well now, there was a photo on Mrs. MacLeod’s mobile—she’s still Mrs. MacLeod, isn’t she?—she showed me whilst we were having us a blether over breakfast, though, come to think it, likely the photo was of you . . .” She peered more closely at Kenneth, frowned, shook her head, and backed toward the door. “That’s me away, then.”

  Alasdair watched her until she left the room, expression intended to be unreadable, even if to Jean it was an open book—wheels turning, gears meshing, not a speck of rust in the works, no matter how reluctantly activated.

  “Tina told you she was Greg’s wife, did she?” asked Kenneth.

  Jean looked around. “He called her ‘the wife.’ We assumed the rest. Sometimes you don’t ask the right questions. Sometimes you don’t know you should be asking questions.” Ignoring the sugar bowl and milk pitcher, she gulped at her unsweetened black tea. The clear, hot, mildly acrid liquid cleared away the gunk packing the crevices of her mind—rich food, excess drink, the long, demanding day—although the shock at the front door had already knocked some of her wits back into her.

  Thomson stepped forward, punching buttons not on his cell phone but on a tiny digital recorder. He gave the time, place, Alasdair’s name and Kenneth’s, and placed the recorder on the table. “Here you are, sir.”

  Alasdair added milk and sugar to his tea, drank, and only then turned to Kenneth. “P.C. Thomson will have told you that Tina’s in hospital in Portree. She fell from her bedroom window whilst climbing out, she was that anxious to leave the house. She suffered a broken arm and a concussion. Inspector Gilnockie’s just telling me she’s sensible again. We’ll be interviewing her tomorrow morn. You’re welcome to drive with us, though I reckon you’ve got a car.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a car. Flew to Inverness and hired one.” Kenneth looked anywhere but at Alasdair’s face—around the room, up, down, sideways.

  Alasdair cut to the chase. “Greg and your wife ran away together.”

  “Yeah. Couldn’t settle, either of them. I thought she was settled okay with the kids, but then they grew up and left home and she went all restless again. And Greg’d go from scheme to scheme like he was pure grifter. Dunvegan—that’s our place, cane farm, been in the family three generations—that was never good enough for him. A bit of a spiv, I’m afraid, even if he’s my brother. Was my brother.”

  “Did he ever speak of your ancestor, Tormod MacLeod?”

  “The stonemason? Yeah, that was one of Greg’s crappy ideas, tracing the family back to Skye and finding Tormod’s grave—the bloke came back here as an old man, but there’s no grave registered. What the hell does stuff like that matter? Look ahead, I say, never mind about what’s left behind.”

  You could never look ahead to a fresh, new future unstained by the past, Jean thought. Even Greg and Kenneth’s grandfather had named his farm after Skye’s Dunvegan, MacLeod Central.

  “Greg’s six years younger than me. He’s been a thorn in my hide all his life. I had to look after him when our dad died in Korea. Now that he’s done more than well for himself, he’s acting like he has to look after me.” Kenneth gazed so intently at the fireplace that Jean glanced around. But nothing moved in the cavernous darkness. He was still avoiding the keen blue gaze of his questioner.

  Who summarized, “Greg was restless, as was Tina.”

  “Tina,” Kenneth said, and Jean could almost see her materializing on the hearth. “She left me a letter, said she wasn’t getting any younger and if she was ever going to run mad, now was the time. Said she was sorry it had to be Greg. I reckon, though, that keeping it all in the family’s not such a bad thing. You know what you’re getting, then. You know what you’re losing.”

  “Were you surprised learning there was something between them?” Thomson asked.

  Kenneth thrust his cup toward Jean. Oh. He wanted her to refill it. That told her something about his relationship with Tina right there. But without comment, she poured.

  “Ta,” he said. “Greg always flirted with her. He’d flirt with anything in skirts. She knew that, but she’d still flirt back. And now this. He was away again, he was always away somewhere, business, pleasure, all one to him. This time when he asked her to go along, she said yes. Probably surprised the hell out of him. Probably surprised her that he’d take her. But he showed her a good time, I’m sure of that. An eye for detail, and too clever by half, that’s Greg. That was Greg.”

  “You never had a good relationship with your brother?” asked Alasdair.

  “It wasn’t a bad one. We’re just not—well, we look alike is all. Tina likes to say one of us was left on Mum’s doorstep by fairies, that we’re not actually related. We are, though. Greg and Tina knew how I’d feel about them spitting the dummy, but they did it anyway.”

  “Spitting the dummy?” Thomson asked.

  “Yanking the pin. Getting sick of it all.”

  “How are you feeling, then,” asked Alasdair. “Angry? Jealous?”

  “Goes without saying, mate. How’d you feel if your . . . sorry, didn’t catch the name, missus.”

  He assumed she wouldn’t be there if she weren’t connected to Alasdair. For once, an assumption was right. “Jean Fairbairn,” she answered.

  With a thin, lopsided smile of apology toward her, Alasdair went on, “So you followed Greg and Tina here. Why?”

  “To bring her home, like I said. Now she’s had her fling, I thought she might settle down.”

  “Were you planning on taking Greg back as well?”

  Kenneth’s face creased as though straining to see something not quite in focus. “I just want things back how they were. Tina’s got her shoes and her artsy-fartsy projects, but she’s a good mum to the kids and the grandkids. I’ve seen families break up because one or two people played the fool. I don’t want that.”

  “You can’t have things back the way they were. Greg’s dead.” Now it was Alasdair who sounded like Nancy and her fatalistic retorts to Rab’s nostalgia.

  “Yeah. Tina phoned and said he was dead. Sa
id he’d been murdered, though I kept hoping that was just her usual carry-on.” Kenneth’s sigh of weariness seemed to well up from his toes. He rested his elbow on the table and his face on his hand with its ragged cuticles and dirty nails. Muffled, he concluded, “I’d just phoned him. He said they’d got to Dunasheen and he was off to meet someone over a deal. Said part of it would interest me. I wasn’t interested in much he did, I’ll say that. Except for Tina, of course. Said he’d phone back, we’d have a talk, work things out. Suppose he never had time.”

  Alasdair’s deceptively cool gaze met Jean’s. Greg had been talking to his brother outside the courtyard. Civil wars, clan feuds—brother against brother could be the worst sort of conflict.

  “Did you know your father’s old regimental dirk was here at Dunasheen?” Alasdair asked.

  Kenneth shook his head, letting his hand fall heavily away from his face. “I’d seen it in photos of him, but that’s all we had of him, old photos.”

  “His bonnet’s here as well,” said Alasdair. “His regimental hat, a tam o’shanter, a beret.”

  Kenneth didn’t reply. But then, Jean thought, he’d said himself he didn’t care about souvenirs of the dead. All he wanted was peace, quiet, and to tend his sugar cane Down Under. Not that she knew Down Under—red dirt, and eucalyptus trees, and the unrelenting sun that had taken its toll of his . . .

  Lower face. His forehead was several shades paler. So were the tops of his ears. The classic image of the Australian outdoorsman or soldier included a wide-brimmed hat.

  Jean sat up straight. Not all webs were tangled. A quick slash of Alasdair’s favorite weapon, Occam’s razor—the concept that the simplest explanation was the true one—cut away many a knot. Why should there be two men, both a stranger and Kenneth? Maybe there was only one, the murderer, whose motive was jealousy and revenge, never mind his mild words.

  She glanced down at Kenneth’s suitcase, then up at Alasdair, drawing his gaze back to her. Hat, she mouthed, and mimed the shape of a broad brim around her head.

  He nodded in grim comprehension. “Ask Fergie to stop in, would you please, Thomson? And Nancy.”

  Nancy? thought Jean.

  Thomson handed the task off to McCrummin and returned to his position beside the table. Alasdair turned back to Kenneth. “Mr. MacLeod, I could be getting myself a warrant to check over your luggage, but we’d moving things on if you’d agree without a fuss.”

  Again Kenneth rubbed his hand over his face. “Go on then, mate.”

  As bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever—nothing like a police classroom on his own doorstep—Thomson leaped on the suitcase, spun it around, flipped it open. Resting on top, stuffed with wadded garments, was a floppy, wide-brimmed canvas hat, sun-faded, sweat-stained, dust-sprinkled.

  Thomson’s nod held an element of surprise. Placing the hat on the table, he delved further into the suitcase and turned up a used brown envelope, Kenneth’s address cancelled out with a stroke of a pen. From inside he drew a printout of Fergie’s map on the Dunasheen website.

  “Your passport, please?” Alasdair asked.

  Reaching into his shirt pocket, Kenneth produced the navy blue booklet of a passport and handed it over.

  “Thank you.” Alasdair flipped it open. “You arrived at Heathrow airport December the twenty-eighth, did you? When Mrs. MacLeod rang you with the news of her husb—of Greg’s death, you were already in the U.K. Just because the phone’s got an Australian number’s not meaning the phone’s in Australia.”

  Kenneth’s bloodshot eyes stared dully ahead.

  “P.C. Thomson,” said Alasdair, “I reckon Lachie from the Co-op’s still out and about, with Hogmanay and all. If you’d go asking him if he’s met this man before . . .”

  “But Lachie said the man was a Londoner,” Thomson protested.

  “I once told a couple of my nephews,” Jean said, “that a cartoon koala bear was speaking Cockney, the accent of London’s East Enders. Then I realized my mistake. A koala, Australia, duh. Lachie didn’t have that much of a clue. He heard the flat vowels, the twang, and gathered the man wasn’t a local, but then assumed he was from the south of Hadrian’s Wall, not south of the equator.”

  Fergie marched down the steps into the room. “Alasdair? Sanjay?”

  “Sanjay?” Kenneth echoed faintly.

  Alasdair asked Fergie, “The man you saw walking through the kitchen yard, the one you thought was Greg. Was he wearing a coat like this?” He pointed to Kenneth’s bulbous coat, a drab, dark, gray-green polyester shiny with cheap waterproofing. Dropped suddenly into winter, Kenneth might have bought the first coat he’d come to in the first shop he passed in the U.K.

  “Yes, yes, it was. And the hat on the table there, that’s the one he was wearing. I saw you, then, Mr. MacLeod? And the American lass, Dakota, she saw you as well—this must mean . . . Oh.” Catching on, Fergie stepped back and stage-whispered to Alasdair, “But he’s Greg’s brother!”

  Alasdair made a down-boy gesture just as Nancy, Rab on her heels and McCrummin just behind, walked back into the room. “Aye?” Nancy asked, pointedly wiping her hands on a dishtowel.

  Alasdair’s gesture changed direction and indicated Kenneth. “Nancy, tell me again where you saw this man’s face.”

  “On Tina’s mobile,” she repeated.

  “Aye, Greg’s mobile, that Tina was using, had several photos of family members. Small ones, none too clear. I’m asking if you’ve seen this man before, in the flesh. Wearing that hat.”

  Ahhh, Jean told herself. That’s where Alasdair was going. The windows of the new kitchen overlooked the yard, just like the windows of Fergie’s office.

  Nancy’s colorless eyes flicked from Kenneth to Rab—his forehead crumpled and his eyes scrunched, leading Jean to conclude he was hiding a scowl behind his beard—and then back to Alasdair. “Well then, I was thinking it was Greg I caught a glimpse of in the kitchen yard. Are you telling me it wasn’t him at all?”

  “It wasn’t him at all.”

  Fergie overrode Alasdair’s follow-up question, which would probably have been, Why did you not say so to begin with? by asking Kenneth, “You haven’t just arrived in the U.K., have you? You’ve been here since . . .”

  The murder. The words hung in the air like a bad smell. Even the appearance of Diana in the open doorway, an apron wrapped around her green dress and Colin a shadow in the corridor behind her, didn’t provide any fresh air.

  Alasdair reclaimed command by lowering, not raising, his voice. “You bought food at the Co-op. You wandered about the area. You broke into the chapel and spent the night—there’s a sleeping bag or blanket in your car, I reckon. Where is it? In the village car park by the harbor?”

  “Yeah,” said Kenneth. “That’s right.”

  “Why’d you come to P.C. Thomson? Because the chapel’s locked up now? Because Lachie or someone else told you of Tina’s fall?”

  “I’m tired, all right? It’s a bloody mess and I’m tired of it all.”

  No kidding, thought Jean.

  Kenneth’s chin tilted defensively even as his eyes sagged with weariness and grief. “Yeah, I followed them to the U.K. Just missed them in London, but got here first. I saw them driving in the gate, laughing together. I saw them unpacking the car. I told Greg in that last phone call that I was here as well, that we were going to have it out—talking, that’s all. I never meant it to get rough. He’s my brother, after all.”

  “Even though Tina phoned you,” Alasdair went on, “she did not know where you were. Not ’til Nancy identified Kenneth’s photo as Greg, and told Tina she’d seen him in the kitchen yard. That must have given Tina a horrible shock. She went frantic to get herself away. She thought you’d killed Greg and were coming for her.”

  “I hung round, trying to get a word with her, just the two of us. But no. You lot had her locked away in the house.” Kenneth’s jaw tightened. “How could she think I’d touch either of them?”

  No one answered. No one could
answer.

  Maybe back home, Kenneth had a reputation as a violent man. Maybe here, Tina had felt so much guilt, especially after Greg’s death, that she made an assumption. Or . . . Jean told herself yet again that she didn’t have enough straw to make one brick, let alone a wall of them.

  Alasdair’s face was hard enough to have been built of bricks. “Where were you when Greg was killed, then?”

  “Filthy weather here, cold, wet, dark—I don’t blame old Tormod for leaving.”

  “There was more to his leaving than the climate. Where were you—”

  “I went out into the garden,” Kenneth replied, his hoarse voice sharpening. “That’s where I stopped and phoned Greg. Someone was walking ahead of me, and I thought it was him, but I couldn’t hear him except on the mobile.”

  Jean sensed the flap of several pairs of ears. Alasdair went into his patented looming position, never mind that he was sitting down—head lowered, shoulders coiled, spine extended. He was on a roll. If he sent everyone away he’d give Kenneth a chance to think about his answers. “Someone was walking ahead of you?”

  “Yeah. When I came out onto the headland, I saw him, bloke in a camouflage coat and a regimental hat like my father’s. Except his had a red flash, and my dad’s was white, near as I can tell from a black and white photo.”

  A low gasp and murmur ran through the watchers. Fergie went more or less onto his toes, his body following his eyebrows into the stratosphere. As one, Rab and Nancy backed away.

  “I saw him squatting beside that green shed,” said Kenneth. “Looked like he was scraping moss off a heap of stones. He saw me, I’m pretty sure of that.”

  Alasdair did not look around, although his back-of-the-neck sensors were no doubt registering Diana’s presence, not because she was moving or breathing but because she was not. As for Colin . . .

  Colin was the one who had lied. He had not been at the lighthouse at the time of the murder. An eddy in the watchers was Thomson loping up the steps and out the door. “Eh, Colin, wait up.”