The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Alasdair’s sharp gesture sent the male constable in pursuit. Then he asked Kenneth, “Did you see the chap’s face? Did you see where he went?”

  “No. I ducked back into the trees, didn’t want him to see me. I’d just got to the new church when I heard Tina screeching. I’d know her voice anywhere, like a galah with a carpet-snake round its nest. But by the time I got back to the headland—that garden’s a bloody maze . . . I don’t know.” Kenneth slumped down again, rubbing his face with his grimy hands. “I got to the edge of the headland and saw the flashlights on the beach. Saw what the flashlights were aimed at. Tina was gabbling at some bloke—guess it was you, Cameron. You were looking after her. She didn’t need me. She’d made it clear she didn’t need me.”

  Thomson’s voice echoed along the corridor. “Colin!”

  This time Alasdair did look around, grimaced in frustration—even he couldn’t be in two places at once—and turned back to his antipodean bird in the hand. “It was you standing just where the path down to the beach begins, was it?”

  Kenneth tucked his mud-caked, low-cut boots further beneath his chair. “I never went past the top of the track. I never went onto the beach. I didn’t kill Greg.”

  Jean sensed the infinitesimal breeze of several pent-up breaths released at once, including her own. Far away, a door slammed with a report like that of a shotgun.

  Diana stood petrified, her face whiter than her apron. Fergie might have adopted a martial posture entering the arena, but now he walked like a ballet dancer out of it, delicately, on his toes. He wrapped his arm around Diana’s shoulders and guided her away. If he said to her, “I told you so,” Jean didn’t hear. But how unlike Fergie it would be, to gloat over his enemy’s defeat.

  Assuming Colin had been his enemy. Assuming Kenneth’s evidence was Colin’s defeat. She and Alasdair and everyone else, for that matter, had manufactured a lot of assumptions recently, to say nothing of leaped to an array of conclusions, and most of them had been mistaken.

  Occam’s razor was all well and good, but if Kenneth had not played Cain to his brother’s Abel, if Colin or someone else had killed Greg, then she could no longer pretend that the murderer was not someone belonging, however temporarily, to Dunasheen.

  Nancy and Rab stood close together, his scowl eased into neutrality, her neutrality tightening into a glower that hit every face in the room in turn. Alasdair met her gaze with an almost audible clang. “Thank you, Nancy, Rab. I’m thinking it’s time to be calling it a night.”

  “Easy for you to be saying,” said Nancy. “I’ll be tidying up ’til the wee hours.”

  And Alasdair wouldn’t? But all he said was, “It’s already the wee hours.” Turning to McCrummin, he ordered, “We’ll be keeping Mr. MacLeod’s things. Catalog every piece.”

  “Aye, sir,” she said, and picked up the passport.

  Thomson shouldered past the Finlays, his own glower one of chagrin edged by worry. “Sorry, sir. Colin’s got away from me.”

  With a muttered curse, Alasdair ran for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Jean levered herself to her feet and propelled herself into a walk. She didn’t notice until she stood beside Alasdair in the entrance hall that Kenneth had lumbered along behind her.

  Thomson offered no excuses such as It’s dark out there. He simply opened the door again and peered out into the night.

  The air filtering in seemed even colder than it had been earlier, with a raw edge. Her skin shrinking beneath the fabric of the dress, Jean tried visualizing August in Texas, vast parking lots radiating heat like pancake griddles and furtive breezes hot as gusts from a blow dryer. All that did was raise goosebumps on her arms.

  Beyond the lights of the house the world had disappeared under a pall of darkness, which suddenly lurched closer . . . oh. Someone had turned off the lights on the Christmas tree in the library window. The rest of Creation still existed—someone who had obviously indulged in his first-foot beverage sent up a celebratory shout from the village.

  The second constable materialized from the murk and jog-trotted into the porch, his rapid breath steaming upward and mingling with the mist condensing from the air. “He’s either gone to ground or still running, though I couldna hear his steps.”

  “He’s got no coat,” said Thomson. “His jacket’s hanging in the cloak room. And he’s wearing Rab’s old trainers, a size or more too large. But he’s familiar with the gardens and the woods.”

  “P.C. Nicolson, is it?” Alasdair asked the other constable. And, without waiting for an answer, “Have a look at the lighthouse, in the event he’s gone there. Has he a vehicle?”

  “An old banger,” said Thomson.

  “Watch that as well, then. And issue a bulletin.” Alasdair made an abrupt about-face and showed no surprise whatsoever in finding himself nose-to-nose with Kenneth. “Thomson, have you a room at the police house for Mr. MacLeod?”

  “Oh aye. The lock-up makes a fine guest room, long as I’m not actually locking the door. Lest you’re wanting me to go locking the door.” Thomson’s dark eyes assessed Kenneth’s bulldog face but drew no perceptible conclusions.

  “No need,” Kenneth said. “I’m tired of hiding. I want this over with.”

  “As do we.” Alasdair didn’t bother defining his “we.” “P.C. Thomson will be taking your boots for testing. He’ll lend you a pair of trainers.”

  “Fine, mate. Anything. You’ve got a shower, have you?” he asked Thomson.

  “Aye, sir. No worries. I’ve got clean pajamas as well. And an extra coat, if you’re all right walking a wee while in your sweater.” Thomson herded Kenneth toward the door.

  The Aussie stopped on the threshold. “I’m sorry about all this, Inspector Cameron. I should have come forward soon as I arrived, or soon as Tina rang me about Greg, but Greg was always the one in trouble while I kept my head down, and . . .”

  “Good night,” Alasdair told him, and shut the door.

  His fingers still grasping the handle, he let his forehead fall against the wooden planks. For a moment Jean thought he was going to hammer on the door with his skull. But no, that would have been too dramatic. He stood immobile. The pleats of his kilt swayed and then settled above the braw Cameron calves. The epaulettes on the broad Cameron shoulders rose and fell.

  He wouldn’t let anyone but her see him in such a pose. She set her hand on his sleeve and squeezed the cloth until she could feel his arm beneath, and sense the now-familiar but never taken for granted hum of his body. If together, they didn’t make more than the sum of their parts, then what was the point of the relationship, let alone marriage?

  The tiny hairs in her ear canal twitched to a low murmuring wail, almost a voice but not quite. “The wind’s picking up,” she said.

  “That’s never the wind.” Alasdair looked up and around. “That’s Seonaid playing the Dunasheen glaistig. Is she predicting good news or bad?”

  The cry twined down the staircase, a vine of sound. Drawn upward, Jean and Alasdair passed the dark hallway of the second floor—no sound came from the Wallace suite and the door of the Queen suite was locked tight—and paused at the tripping stane.

  The air on the staircase was so cold it sizzled. The wail rose and fell and died into an elemental resonance, no longer sound at all. As Seonaid had died, there on the staircase, the breath of life squeezed out of her. Here she’d known fear and grief. At the chapel, she’d known joy, foolish as it might have been.

  Sleet gathered in the creases bracketing Alasdair’s lips. Clearing his throat and taking Jean’s hand, he walked on up the stairs, down the corridor, and through the door to their own sanctuary. “Get on to bed. I’m looking to have a word with Fergie or Diana.” And he was gone again, her knight errant riding back into the lists.

  Don’t think about it, any of it, Jean ordered herself. But she thought about all of it while she washed, put on her pajamas, shoved Dougie out of the center of the bed, and climbed under the covers. The litt
le cat placed his paw on her arm and fixed her with his calm golden gaze. The rumble of a purr came from his throat, echoing a soft brushing noise from the window. Snow. Colin was outside, shivering, alone.

  The door opened and shut and the key turned. Alasdair plodded into the bedroom, shedding his jacket and unbuckling his kilt. “Diana’s locked herself in her room. Fergie’s locked himself in his office and is listening to monks chanting. I’d suggest sleeping whilst we can. It’s already tomorrow.”

  “The tomorrow we were worried about, yeah.”

  Even after Alasdair washed, changed, and climbed in beside her, making a cat sandwich, Jean still failed to not think about it.

  By his breathing she knew he wasn’t asleep, either, even though he lay still as a tomb effigy. A knight carved on a grave slab overlooking the Outer Hebrides, a grave slab that was broken into a hundred pieces that Jean was trying frantically to reassemble, while Alasdair stood chanting with the other monks in the tiny stone-built chapel—religious figures were often ghosts, perhaps because of the spiritual dimensions of their lives—her dream shifted and she saw Dunasheen as Elsinore above the sea, and Diana holding aloft Tormod’s skull, “Alas poor Rory, I knew him well.” And there was Hamlet himself, sensing a presence behind Seonaid’s tapestry, killing a bristle-bearded Polonius with his father’s regimental dirk . . .

  Jean awoke abruptly to something poking her in the side. Alasdair?

  Dougie had somehow swapped his velvet paws for iron prods, and was kneading her ribcage. The moment her eyelids flickered he meowed. The clock in the next room struck six. At least three more hours of darkness yet to come. What was the matter with the dang cat, anyway?

  Alasdair shifted and his breath caught. Subtly but distinctly came the sound of a door shutting, and footsteps, and something falling to the floor accompanied by a muffled curse.

  Jean sat up, shedding Dougie—someone was in their living room . . .

  “Someone’s in the Queen suite.” Throwing back the comforter—Dougie’s indignant meow came from beneath the cloth—Alasdair leaped out of the bed and seized his bathrobe.

  Oh. The wooden floor transmitted sound much better than the thick stone walls. Jean jumped up, grabbed her robe, and hopped along behind Alasdair, cramming her sock-clad feet into her slippers.

  Walking into the corridor was like walking into the Ice Age, the air dank with the dying breaths of mammoths and cave bears. Shoulder to shoulder, Jean and Alasdair crept toward the dimly lit staircase, Jean cursing herself for not having brought a flashlight upstairs. Not that anything lurked in the corners that hadn’t been there in the daylight. The ivory-inlaid chest was still an inlaid chest. The suit of armor was still armor.

  Yeah, she’d been trying that ploy for years. It might have worked if not for her allergy to the unseen.

  They passed by the unseen on the staircase, and crept up the second-floor corridor, and stopped at the now partially open door of the Queen suite. Inside, floorboards creaked and a light flared and faded—someone else hadn’t forgotten a flashlight.

  Alasdair reached into his pocket with one hand and shoved the door with the other. A shadowy figure swung a beam of light toward the door and the room disappeared in a flash of brilliance.

  Wincing, Jean realized that Alasdair was armed with the camera.

  He stepped into the room. Another flash, and the shadowed figure reeled back and emitted a yelp of pain. Alasdair didn’t say, “Come out with your hands up.” He said, “Lost your way, did you, under the influence of the evening’s drinks?” and switched on the lights.

  Jean squinted. Scott Krum wore a velour robe over silk pajamas. His razor-cut hair was disheveled and his finicky goatee was smudged by new whiskers. With a grimace of pain, he lowered both his flashlight and the hand he’d raised to shield his face. “Oh. Hi.”

  “How’d you get in here?” With his other hand, Alasdair raised his phone and set it to record.

  “It’s an old Chubb lock, easy to pick with a nail file. Heather’s got an arsenal of nail files.”

  “Why’d you break in?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I was looking for items for the auction house?”

  “No.” Alasdair took a step forward. “You could be doing that in the daylight, with Fergie’s permission, in rooms of the house not sealed by the police.”

  Jean stayed by the door, her toes curled, her arms locked, trying to quell the tiny shivers that crawled like insects through her muscles.

  “All right, all right.” Scott turned off the flashlight, rubbed his temples, and grimaced again. “I couldn’t sleep. I got to thinking that maybe Greg had printed out one of my e-mails and how that wouldn’t look good, with him being murdered and everything.”

  Alasdair said, “What’s not looking good is you breaking and entering. It’s you lying to Gilnockie about knowing Greg.”

  “Oh no, no, I didn’t know him, we’d just e-mailed each other a few times. We had a mutual friend, a dealer in Chicago, and he told Greg I’d been to Dunasheen, and so, you know, Greg was pumping me for information.”

  “About the Crusader Coffer?”

  “Oh, man.” Scott shook his head and then groaned, as though his brain had ricocheted off the sides of his skull. “I’m not touching that. Religious stuff is too political. There’s too much skullduggery. Diana’s Egyptian necklace, those Chinese snuff bottles, the Wilkie portrait—I could do something with those.”

  So much for Fergie’s Plan B, Jean told herself. She hoped he had a Plan C that didn’t involve any ambiguous artifacts.

  “What was Greg asking you about, then?” Alasdair took another step forward.

  Scott stepped back and collided with a chair, which went down with a crash. Moaning, he kneaded his scalp. “Give me a break, I’ve got a headache that would knock over a horse.”

  “What was Greg asking you about?”

  “The terrain and the gardens,” said Scott. “Whether the house is in good repair. What sort of collections Fergie has. What he and Diana are like. Couldn’t help him there, I never met them, just Pritchard. Hey, is it true Fergus sent Pritchard packing?”

  Jean heard footsteps on the staircase, and not Seonaid in her ephemeral slippers.

  Alasdair demanded, “Did Greg ask you anything at all about the Crusader Coffer? Did he mention Tormod MacLeod at all?”

  “I never heard of the Coffer until tonight. I never heard of that other guy, period.”

  P.C. Nicolson appeared in the doorway, both face and uniform wrinkled by a long night’s doze in a chair. “Is there a problem, sir?”

  “Oh aye,” Alasdair replied. “Take this man to his room and make sure he stays there the night.”

  Nicolson reached toward Scott, who fended him off. “I get it already. Busted. I’ll go quietly.”

  Alasdair waited while Nicolson reinstalled Scott in his room and found a chair to collapse into. Then he switched off the lights in the Queen suite and shut the door. “I’d be obliged if you’d keep an eye on this door as well, constable,” he said, and let Jean pull him toward the staircase.

  When they were tucked back into their own bed, pressed together like chilled slabs of meat in a butcher’s window—thank goodness for Dougie serving as foot-warmer—she asked, “Does Scott know that what you got on the phone and the camera isn’t necessarily admissible evidence?”

  “He knows I’m no longer a cop, or should do, if he’s been paying attention.”

  “By the time that occurs to him maybe we’ll have more evidence.”

  “Right.” The glow of the bedside clock reflected in Alasdair’s eyes like starlight on twin icebergs. “Gilnockie’s had all the rooms searched, not just the Queen Suite, and Greg and Tina’s luggage as well. There’s no correspondence. Krum’s hoisted himself with his own petard.”

  “Nothing like a little alcoholic remorse to muddle your thought processes,” Jean suggested. “Though if he was lying about what Greg asked him, you think he’d come up with something mor
e creative than a description of the estate and the collections.”

  “Aye,” said Alasdair.

  “Do you think he killed Greg? It’s possible he had the dirk . . . oh!” Jean exclaimed—it wasn’t exactly a coup de foudre, but she’d take any inspiration she could get. “What if Greg himself had the dirk? That would eliminate the need for either Colin or Scott to have sneaked it out earlier. Maybe Fergie pointed it out to him when he and Tina arrived.”

  “You’re forgetting, Fergie did not know our fathers’ friend was Kenneth MacLeod, let alone that Kenneth was Greg’s father. Or so he’s saying.” Alasdair jerked fretfully, the starched pillowcase rustling beneath his head. “If Greg had the dirk on him, that’s bringing us back round to unpremeditated murder, an argument gone wrong. A brother out for revenge. We’ve got to have a word with Colin, see if his testimony agrees with Kenneth’s. Damn the man for running.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s twitchy. That doesn’t mean he’s guilty.”

  “Someone’s guilty.” Alasdair’s hand lay heavy on her flank, the fingers rising and falling as if typing a police report. Or arranging pieces of a puzzle, several of which were missing. Slowly his body warmed. He was no effigy, he was a man, her man, an ex-cop who couldn’t get away from copping any more than she could get away from academicizing.

  She couldn’t stay awake, but she couldn’t sleep, either. She dozed and woke, heard Alasdair breathing deeply and evenly, and dozed again, seeing a succession of images rather than real dreams—Scott Krum’s face stark and startled in the light of the camera, Dakota insisting she’d seen a ghost in the glare of the headlights—I’ll have to tell her she saw Kenneth, Jean thought. And that the ghost she did see, Seonaid, was perhaps running toward him, Tormod’s descendant . . .

  Jean opened her eyes to see the room filled with a thin silvery light, sunshine veiled by clouds sparkling with ice crystals. Alasdair sat on the edge of the bed staring dully at his kilt and jacket hanging from the handle of the wardrobe. Dougie sat on the foot of the bed having his morning bath, each lick loud in a silence deep as that of the MacDonald mausoleum.