The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The meager light revealed the chamber as a nasty hole in the ground, the flip side of a hobbit hole. No, the rough vault of the ceiling wasn’t sinking any lower. Jean tried to look into every muck-filled corner without taking her eyes off Rab . . .

  There. Dakota crouched behind a low stone partition, her knees drawn up to her chest beneath a too-large raincoat and her eyes gleaming with tears. Why hadn’t she run? Oh. She wouldn’t make it to the door any faster than Rab would. Check. Time to throw a second pawn into the game. Maybe a knight, leaping at odd angles. Not quite an all-powerful Queen.

  Jean tried a step outside Rab’s spotlight. The glare didn’t follow her.

  One slow step at a time, she sidled toward Dakota, and took the child’s hand in her own. The chill in Dakota’s flesh struck right through her glove even as her senses warmed to an all-too-brief whiff of Diana’s perfume trapped in the lining of the coat.

  “I wanted to see the old castle,” Dakota said, words staccato. “Mom says we’re leaving, like, first thing tomorrow morning, but Dad didn’t have time to bring me down here like he said.”

  “That’s okay,” Jean told her.

  “It was almost light for a few minutes, but when I got here it was dark again. And he followed me. He scared me. So I tried to hide, but he found me.”

  Scared. Oh yeah. Good thing Dakota had found a narrow space where Rab couldn’t quite get at her. He could get at Jean, though.

  Skin crawling, heart palpitating, she looked around. But while Rab was sitting on his rock like a cat at a mouse hole, he didn’t move. Perhaps he was crushed by the weight of his own thoughts. The vestiges of conscience. The enormity of what he’d done. Or perhaps he was simply immobilized by sobriety. They still had a chance . . .

  “No guid will come of this,” he said.

  No shit, Sherlock. Jean pulled Dakota to her feet.

  “Everything was all right ’til the auld laird died. Then Fergie Beg and wee Diana came. They’re family, they had no call opening the place to incomers, outlanders, foreigners, the lot of them poking and prying.” Now the glare of Rab’s light turned toward Dakota and Jean. “The lass there, she was by way of telling Fergie about the Aussie’s card and all. Should have minded her own business.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone you dropped the card and I gave it back to you,” Dakota said. “I didn’t even know it was important until last night. I told about seeing the ghost on the driveway, you know, and they made fun of me, even though that turned out to be important.”

  Jean pulled her one stiff step closer to the door. “That’s okay. We figured it out anyway. As for ghosts . . .”

  “There’s one here. I saw him falling. I yelled, I guess. And then he came running. I couldn’t always understand what he was saying, just that I shouldn’t be here, Mom and Dad and the Australian lady, we should go back where we came from and stop making trouble. He’s got that knife and he doesn’t like me very much and he scared me, you know?” Dakota’s voice climbed into a higher register.

  “I know.” The hair on the back of Jean’s neck was doing a snake-dance, like medieval villagers circling a bonfire on the Winter Solstice, welcoming the return of the light . . . Medieval. Rory MacLeod falling. Jean pulled Dakota another step.

  “We canna help it. We canna sort things to suit ourselves.” Rab’s voice rose, too—he was imitating Nancy. Then his words plummeted downward, reverberating in the tiny chamber. In a dark crevice, something stirred in response. “Rubbish, woman. Stuff and nonsense. We’re never helpless. I’m proving that to you. I’m proving it to Fergie and Diana and the polis.”

  He was working himself up. His next thought would be, in for a lamb, in for a sheep. In for an Aussie, in for two Americans.

  Jean eased Dakota further toward the doorway. Leaning close to the child’s ear, she whispered, “Alasdair’s seen the man falling from the tower, too. But I haven’t. Can you call him, do you think, so I can see him, too?”

  Dakota nodded, her eyes reflecting one tiny gleam of light. She took another step without Jean’s urging. Jean turned them both toward the door even as she kept her face pointed at Rab. His eyes glittered beneath the bill of his cap. The knife glittered in his hand.

  Now! Jean yanked Dakota through the doorway, but it was her own foot that snagged and stumbled, and the child’s hand that steadied her and the child’s momentum that propelled them up the rough steps, out of the dungeon, the cellar, the hole, out of the darkness into open air. Jean swept her flashlight around the enclosing walls—the gateway out of the keep, where the hell was the gateway—there!

  Their footsteps echoed. So did a scrape, a bird disturbed or a pebble beneath someone’s foot. The entire Northern Constabulary, right down to the janitors, could have besieged the castle in the time she’d spent underground. But Jean wasn’t going to stop dead—the operative word being “dead”—and wait for a possibly nonexistent cavalry to arrive.

  Flashlight flaring, Rab burst out of the dungeon doorway like a grizzly bear from its den.

  Jean released Dakota’s hand and shoved her toward the gateway—you don’t have to outrun the bear, just outrun your companion—Rab’s steps thudded closer and she sensed the sharp blade at her back—at least Greg had been stabbed in the chest, he’d faced his killer . . .

  Not now, chattered the teeth of her brain. Not now, I’m getting married!

  Caught between fire and sword, Jean’s nervous system convulsed. Even as she lurched over brush and stone, her mind, her senses, screamed: Jump! Leap! Take the plunge!

  And in front of her Dakota darted a frantic look upward. “The ghost, he was there. He jumped, he fell . . .”

  The invisible weight, the weight of the invisible, dropped like armor onto Jean’s shoulders and she gasped. Through her vision swooped a bird, no, a falling body—fluttering fabric, limbs pumping, mouth open on a wail of surrender as much as despair, a perceptible howl that cut the dark mist like the slash of a dagger.

  Rab looked up, stopped, spun, cried out in horror. Rory fell right through him, knocking him off balance so that Rab tripped over his own feet and toppled to the ground.

  Jean and Dakota collided, clutched at each other, staggered backward. For what seemed like a long, long moment but was probably no more than a split second, the ghost of the fallen man and the living flesh of a man whose mind had fallen lay tangled together, yellow raincoat against rough plaid, Rab’s mouth gaping like a cavern in a thicket, Rory’s eyes focused on a dimension above below beyond.

  Then Rab lay there alone. Flailing and cursing, he pulled himself to his feet.

  Jean pushed Dakota over the threshold and out of the keep. Beyond the enceinte wall lights sprang up, distorted eerily by the mist. Footsteps converged on the gateway. A woman’s acid-etched voice said, “Stop just there. Drop the knife.”

  Lesley Young stood between the two bulwarks of stone, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, both pointed steadily at Rab. He crouched, head swinging back and forth, scowling. One beat, two, and his fingers opened. The knife clattered onto the muddy cobbles.

  Young stepped forward and with a well-placed kick sent it flying into the shadows.

  People boiled into the keep—fluorescent jackets, stark white faces, voices shouting. There was Heather, crying, her makeup leaving streaks on her cheeks, and Scott, stunned. They fell on Dakota and crushed her in a double embrace.

  “Good job,” said Patrick Gilnockie’s dry voice, “that Rab tripped and fell just there.” He walked on past Jean before she had a chance to reply, not that she had a reply to make.

  And there was Alasdair, his arm pulling her so tightly against his side she felt his heart hammering behind his ribs. His grit-on-velvet voice said, “I’m here. I’m here.”

  The tension seeped down Jean’s body and out through her toes. She fastened her arm around Alasdair’s waist and hung on as her mind drifted into the sparkling mist . . .

  The sparkles steadied. Flashlights focused. The uniformed scrum eddied
and revealed Rab standing handcuffed. D.C.I. Gilnockie stood over him, the archangel over the beast. “Rab Finlay, I arrest you in connection with the murder of Greg MacLeod. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  Rab growled unintelligibly. The uniforms hustled him away, followed by the multilegged knot that was Heather, Scott, and Dakota. The child glanced back at Jean, tautness ebbing from her features, exhilaration flowing into them. Her small face split into a broad grin. Then the Krums, too, were gone, no more than lights and footsteps receding across the footbridge and into the mist.

  Which seemed to be thinning. Or else, Jean thought, her eyes were clearing. She let Alasdair’s strong arm propel her through the gateway and down the slope to the bridge. Even though the sun was long set and night fallen, she could make out the ocean waves rolling forward one by one, as they always had, as they always would.

  His voice barely louder than the swish and thrum of the sea, Alasdair said, “Brenda ran up to the attics, telling us where you’d gone.”

  “Clever deduction,” said another, familiar voice, “that the lass had gone to see the old castle.” Ah. Sanjay Thomson was walking right behind them, followed by Young and Gilnockie.

  “With Jean,” said Alasdair, “it was by way of being a flash of intuition.”

  Smiling, Jean asked, “How’s Fergie?”

  “He’ll do, Irvine’s saying. A night in hospital, two at the most.”

  “We’ve got Nancy,” said Thomson. “Orla’s handcuffed her to her own cooker. She’s not blaming Rab. She’s saying it could not be helped, circumstances conspired, and all that.”

  “Right,” Jean said. They followed the path up the brae and stopped. Dunasheen, windows gleaming, fairy lights glistening, rose ahead of them, an oasis in the midst of darkness and despair. “Who fixed the generator?”

  “Colin,” replied Thomson, “keeping himself busy.”

  Gilnockie edged past them, telling Young at his side, “Urquhart saw the murder. That’s why he ran.”

  “He should have come forward,” she said. “We’ll do him for perverting the course of justice.”

  Gilnockie’s voice sank into its supernal serenity. “You were seeing how confused Mrs. MacLeod was after her concussion. Could be Urquhart’s seeing a murder concussed his mind, being a blow upon a bruise, in a way.”

  “Ah.” Young’s voice indicated a thoughtful rather than an accusing frown, but with her back turned and retreating up the path, Jean couldn’t tell.

  Thomson fell into step behind Young and Gilnockie, Alasdair and Jean behind him. Alasdair asked Jean, voice now soft and smooth, “How’d you get Rory to appear on cue?”

  “Do you remember how, soon after we first met, we were backed into a corner and a ghost staged a timely distraction? Maybe two people having an allergic reaction, and a crisis blooming—ghosts are emotional resonances, after all—and you know, sometimes things are more than the sum of their parts, so there are times even people who don’t normally have allergies . . . Well, we called him, I guess. It’s Dunasheen, Dun na sithein, fortress of the fairies, and the ghosts have substance here.”

  Alasdair chuckled. “That’s the sort of lucid explanation I’d be expecting from you, Jean.”

  The tall, lean shape that was Thomson half turned toward them. “Mind you, odd things are always happening. They could be our small minds connecting with the larger one. There’s a reason folk believe in sacred places, landscapes, holy relics, eh? Mind your step, the gravel’s slippy.”

  Jean smiled—the lad’s hearing was as finely tuned as his brain—and considered Alasdair’s minimalist features in the courtyard lights. So there. Ultimately you believed because you chose to believe. Ultimately you made your choices based on your beliefs.

  His gaze rolled from Thomson’s back to Jean’s face. Shaking his head and returning her smile, he locked his arm even more securely around her shoulders, and they walked back into the house.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jean gazed over the railing of the minstrel’s gallery, if not in command, then at least in appreciation of all she surveyed.

  Below her lay the Great Hall of Dunasheen Castle. Sunlight streamed in the tall windows, making the gold thread in the banners sparkle. The long refectory table was set with glasses and plates, trays of nibbles, and a wedding cake, its three tiers of chocolatey goodness embellished with red strawberries, red raspberries, and a few strategically placed red flowers.

  “Only you could get that all the way here from Edinburgh in perfect shape,” Jean said.

  Miranda Capaldi smiled her best Mona Lisa smile and did not disagree. In her pale aqua silk suit and pearls, she displayed her usual understated elegance, acting as Jean’s maid of honor without overshadowing her. She’d even reduced her crest of golden-red hair to a smooth cap of ash-blond.

  Jean hoped she looked as good in her long silk suit shimmering teal, green, and blue, and her gold Claddagh jewelry, variations on the theme of two hands holding a heart. Miranda was in charge of Alasdair’s wedding ring, a gold band incised with Celtic interlace. Knowing Alasdair, he’d glued Jean’s matching ring to Fergie’s hand.

  The laird and best man had returned from the hospital late yesterday, Irvine in attendance, in good time to stage a stag party for Alasdair at one end of the house while Diana staged a hen party for Jean—and why wasn’t it a doe party?—at the other. A few drinks, a few jokes, ribald and otherwise, were sufficient to mark the occasion, considering.

  “Well then,” said Miranda with a delicate arch of her eyebrow. “The butler did it.”

  “Rab wasn’t exactly the butler, but yeah, he did it. Ironic, that if Fergie hadn’t been going on about a big sale that would save them all . . .”

  “Meaning the Coffer, not the Estate,” said Miranda.

  “Yes, but Rab didn’t know that. He thought Fergie was going to sell Dunasheen. And he knew a clever businessman like Greg wouldn’t buy the place without evaluating its contents and auditing the books, at the very least.”

  “Rab and Nancy could no longer be creaming off the goods, then.”

  “A new owner would change everything, and if Rab was afraid of anything, it was change.” Jean shook her head. “If Fergie hadn’t been so sure he’d had something valuable in Tormod’s little sarcophagus, then Rab wouldn’t have murdered Tormod’s descendant.”

  “If,” Miranda repeated. “There’s no way of knowing.”

  There was knowing, and there was perceiving. Jean looked back down into the Hall to see Diana tweaking the Christmas holly and ivy along the fireplace and brushing away an invisible speck of ash remaining from the Yule log. No need, the happy couple had decreed, to bring in fresh, off-season flowers when the place was already spruced up—literally, when it came to the Christmas tree.

  Ken MacLeod would have approved of that frugality. But he and Tina had started for Australia this morning. What happened once they got there—other than the formal disposition of Greg’s ashes—was beyond Jean’s brief.

  So was wallowing in what-might-have-beens.

  She summoned a smile. “It was nice of so many people from the village to help turn the guest rooms over and fix things for the wedding.”

  “Everyone loves a party.” Miranda did not add that the party would soon be over, leaving the MacDonalds and their neighbors to pick up the pieces. But then, there were pieces to pick up. At least the last of the second wave of reporters had receded, following the action to the legal edifices of Portree and beyond.

  Brenda O’Donnell bustled into the Hall with another platter of edibles, this one decorated with sugar doves. In her polka-dotted best dress she looked like an ambulatory bedspread. Next to her, Diana in her soft, spring-green wool dress and jacket appeared even more chic than usual. The Egyptian necklace would have complemented the color of Jean’s dress, but Diana wasn’t wearing it. Tou
ching, the way the real beauties dialed themselves back in honor of the bride.

  Bride. That’s me. Jean forced a deep breath into her chest and noted that Miranda and Diana wore the same perfume. Jean had actually remembered to dab some behind her ears and on the pulse point at her throat, a light floral fragrance symbolizing the rising of her sap into, among other places, her cheeks, which were now two little furnaces heating the rims of her glasses. Prickles of anxiety and delight ran up and down her limbs. Don’t lock your knees, she reminded herself, and did a couple of bends for practice.

  “Is living in Scotland what you were expecting, then?” asked Miranda.

  “Didn’t you ask me that mere hours before I met Alasdair? In the same paragraph as something about romantic fantasy?”

  “All I’m remembering is you claiming to be a hard-bitten cynic.”

  Jean laughed. “Heck, no. It’s merciful fantasy that keeps you going. Scotland, writing, The Lord of the Rings, marriage. Speaking of marriage . . .”

  Miranda’s significant other, Duncan Kerr, strolled into the Hall. With his sleek silver hair, beautifully groomed moustache, and striped suit befitting a corporate lawyer, he looked positively Viennese, too smooth, too refined, to be Scottish.

  “Marriage?” Miranda’s eye tracked Duncan’s progress around the room. “We’ll be watching how you and Alasdair make a go of it.”

  “Yeah, I know. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  And there was Scottish refinement, needing no fixing whatsoever—Alasdair in his kilt and jacket, a red rose sweetly blooming in January pinned to his lapel. Beside him walked his mother, so small her tartan sash fell almost to the hem of her dress. When she grew up, Jean wanted to be like Rhona Cameron. She exuded Alasdair’s intelligence and gravity, but had a tart tongue of her own and a crown of unabashedly red hair that made her almost look younger than her son.

  Diana asked Rhona, “What have you got there?”