If he continued to make gentle jokes at her expense for Denny's amusement, they might have words about the British attitude toward women as well, she thought.
Owen, looking more like his Saint Bernard puppy self, interrupted these mutinous thoughts with news of his own.
He appeared to have enjoyed his session with the police hugely.
"I got the constable's autograph!'' he announced, in tones suggesting possession of the Hope Diamond, or at least a winning lottery ticket.
"That I would like to have seen," murmured Denny, picturing the spotty young policeman's reaction to celebrity status.
"He was a nice guy," Owen assured them. "Asked me all kinds of stuff about Disney World. Which I haven't been to, but I was able to advise him not to make hotel reservations near his cousin's place in Pittsburgh, and then plan to drive down to Orlando for the day." He shook his head. "Boy, you people are really hazy on distances here."
Denny raised his eyebrows. "Did the subject of the recent murder happen to crop up?" he inquired.
Owen nodded, his enthusiasm undampened by the sarcasm. "Sure did! Do you know who that guy was?"
"Elizabeth seems to." Cameron grinned.
Owen ignored the bait. "His name was Kevin Keenan." No signs of recognition lit the feces of his listeners. "Well, I'd never heard of him, either," he admitted. "I just thought you guys might have. He was a reporter for the World Star. A lady cop came in while I was talking to Donald, and she said they'd called his newspaper back in Britain."
"England!" said Cameron in menacing tones. Why couldn't the bloody Americans get their terms straight? Britain for the whole country; England, Scotland, or Wales for wherever you happened to be.
"Whatever!" Owen shrugged. "Anyhow, she was telling Donald that they said it sounded like Kevin Keenan, from
the description on the phone. And you'll never guess what he was doing in Scotland!" Without waiting for the clever remarks that would surely follow, Owen supplied the answer himself. "He was working on a story for his newspaper."
Cameron shrugged. "The World Star is a scandal sheet. I wouldn't use it to wrap fish in."
"So different from the high journalistic standards of your own dear newspaper," Elizabeth purred.
Denny frowned. "Stop bickering, both of you. Owen, I can't think how you got the police to take you into their confidence, but—"
Owen looked uneasy. "Well, when the policewoman came in, I said I had to go to the toilet. But I left the door a bit ajar so that I could hear what they said."
Cameron smirked. "How very—" A glance at Elizabeth told him that it would be as much as his life was worth to complete that sentence with the word American, as he'd planned, "—resourceful," he finished lamely.
"You'll never guess what he was working on!"
"Tell us," Denny suggested.
"He was doing a piece on famous murderers. A where-are-they-now article!"
Cameron blinked. "What do you mean, where are they now? Peterhead, I should think. And Barlinnie, and Wormwood Scrubbs, and Strangeways—"
"No, not that," said Owen. "Now that you people have abolished capital punishment, most killers get out sooner or later. I guess they go somewhere and start new lives, maybe change their names, if they were well known."
"And then this reporter comes barging into their lives,
telling everyone about their past. No wonder someone murdered him!" Elizabeth said.
"I wonder who he was looking for in Edinburgh," said Owen. "Merrett has been dead for years. Madeline Smith, the poisoner, died in the twenties. One of the Moors Murderers was from Glasgow; but they're not out, are they?"
"Oh, give it up, Owen!" Denny said. "Keenan's murder was probably not related to his story at all. And even if it were, the murderer would turn out to be some druggie that nobody ever heard of.''
"I suppose so," said Owen, dampened by this dose of common sense.
"And besides," Cameron said, "after tomorrow, you'll be stuck on a barren island in the Hebrides. So there'll be no chance for you to play detective anyhow."
Owen wasn't listening. "A not-so-reformed killer loose in Edinburgh," he mused. "I wonder how Keenan found him?"
CHAPTER
7
CAMERON
We left Edinburgh early on Sunday morning, when the streets were empty and all the shops were shut, thus relieving Elizabeth of having to decide whether or not she could live without the teddy bear in Waterston's window, the one decked out in the MacPherson tartan.
Perhaps she would have decided against him, anyway; he might have been out of place where she was going, which seemed to be the eighteenth century.
In the car's tape deck she put a cassette of Gaelic folk songs, of which neither of us understands a word, although she claims to know "instinctively" what the songs are generally about. She has learned a few phrases of the language out of one of her interminable books, but her pronunciation is arbitrary, and her fluency nil. Still, whatever ghosts she expects to find in the Highlands would think her very pretty: her hair falls about her shoulders in soft waves, and her dark eyes have a new sparkle of anticipation. She was wearing a white tapestry skirt and a teal-blue shawl of lambswool, acquired during one of her raids on Princes Street. I said that I hoped she had more suitable clothing for grubbing about in the dirt on Banrigh, and she made a face at me and said I had the soul of a chartered accountant, and that the stone circle on the island was a Celtic cathedral. I replied that she could rinse off the sacred soil in holy water if she wanted to, but she'd better add two cups of Clorox besides. (We were not amused.)
She paid hardly any attention at all to Glasgow. It is too rough and modern. Its monoliths are bustling office buildings of glass and steel, rooted in concrete, rather than the abandoned stone circles of the Hebrides, drifting in mist and heather. She did not want to stop; nothing there caught her interest. The Highlands were waiting.
So we left the twentieth century, a rapidly diminishing vista in the rear-view mirror, and side by side in my brother's green Moggie Thou, we went our separate ways.
"Oh, ye'll tak' the high road an' I'll tak' the low road." Elizabeth is too fond of explaining to people that the song refers to the differing means of travel used by mortals and fairy folk. The high road would be the motorway of today, and the low road is the magic passageway used by the Daoine Sidhe to reach their destinations in the twinkling of an eye. "An' I'll be in Scotland before ye." But will you come to the same place?
Because we started out with different memories, we were going to different destinations. The Highlands to me was scout camporees on the banks of Loch Ness and long stretches of country roads perfect for trying out my motorbike on weekends away from college. But Elizabeth was taking the low road north. She had visited the Highlands in a stack of books on history and folklore: on her A82 the Campbells massacred the MacDonalds in the glen of weeping, shadowed by Buchaille Etive Mor, the rock bastion that supposedly shepherds the pass. Her A830 is a scattering of loch-shore caves where the Bonnie Prince hid after the disaster of Culloden.
There are no billboards or convenience stores to pull her back into the twentieth century, and she wrapped herself in the unintelligible Gaelic songs, overlooking the modernity of car and well-paved road.
When she talked to me, it was to tell me tales I'd never heard about the fairy folk, who hid the Sleeping Warriors in the Hollow Hills, in case Britain should ever need them again. And stories of Ossian and Cuchulain, who fought the Norsemen with cold iron and magic. She's had it all out of her books; these tales were not handed down at the fireside by her MacPherson kin, who must all have forgotten about their point of origin several generations before Elizabeth herself existed. Perhaps they had good reason to forget. Such as the New World was two centuries ago, with disease and Indians and only pockets of civilization in a great howling wilderness, the people who went there must have had desperate reasons for going. The Scotland she has returned to is not the one they left; nor is she—the mid
dle-class, college-educated, well-spoken young lady—the same MacPherson who departed these shores so long ago. She could find no more distant strangers, I think, than the ghosts of her own ancestors.
Appalachia has the look of the Highlands, she says, but the New World has more trees. And the people have the same look about them in bone structure, the same fiddle tunes, but even she concedes that the conscious memories of Scotland are generations gone.
"I wonder why we never see the fairy folk in Scotland these days," I said once, in an effort to humor her.
She answered me in Gaelic. I've no idea what she said.
TRAVELER'S DIARY
I'm beginning to understand why my pioneer ancestors stopped their journey in the hills of western North Carolina, rather than pushing on for the plains of the Midwest. They must have thought they were back home. On our drive from Glasgow to Mallaig there were long stretches of landscape that could have been Carolina, if they'd thrown in a few trees. What trees there were turned out to be evergreen; no hardwoods to speak of. I asked Cameron if previous generations had cut down all the good trees for firewood (I can almost sympathize with that; it is July, and I have been so cold at times, I might have burned the Book of Kells to take the chill out of the room), or if hardwood trees have never grown there at all, because of climate, or altitude, or whatever. Of course, he didn't know. To Cameron, Glenfinnan is a brand of Scotch, and Caithness is glass paperweights, not Pictish ruins. How can you get a sense of the past out of someone who cannot even remember the name of his first-grade teacher?
Even in summer the sky has been a misty gray most of the time, giving a brooding quality to the landscape. You can see for miles on the ribbon of highway through the hills: slippery-looking green mountains dotted with sheep and stone fences, and almost never a sign of human habitation. I would want to live out here in the wilderness, where there'd be nobody else for miles, but the British seem to want to cluster together in cities. I wonder if this is because of land prices, or if it's that the matey ones stayed in Britain, and those who loved solitude (like my kinfolk) left for the New World, where the wilderness went on forever.
Cameron is definitely one of the matey ones. He just loves his apartment back at the university. I told him, "You put me in a box up off the ground, where I can hear folks on three sides through the walls, and I'd be dead in a month." I feel the spell of the mountains and the past very strongly in the north of Scotland, but all of that is lost on Cameron, the seal-man.
On the drive up, I asked him the name of the mountain in the distance. I was looking for Ben Nevis, or perhaps the first of the Five Sisters of Kintail. Cameron glanced at the stark bluish peak across the valley and quipped, "The locals call it Benny Hill." He seemed to find this wonderfully amusing. He was still chuckling over it miles later and didn't seem to notice that I wasn't speaking to him. Then he assumed that I had missed the joke, so lie carefully explained to me that ben is Gaelic for mountain, and that Benny Hill is a television comedian. I replied that he got full marks for bilingual punning and no credit at all for sensitivity. In fact, he owes points in that category. Cameron's heart is not in the Highlands; it is probably not attached to his brain; it may even be in a jar of formaldehyde in an Edinburgh University biology lab.
He looks the part, though. When he isn't being so gratingly modern, he could pose for cover art for practically any of those silly romance novels with titles like Tartan Rapture. It's the kind of handsomeness that won't change with age. (As a forensic anthropologist, I can tell about things like that.) His looks are in the bone structure, not in what covers them. He'll probably still have those looks at sixty. And despite it all, I hope I will be around to verify that hypothesis. It will probably take till then to break through all that British reserve anyway.
We have until tomorrow morning to reach Mallaig, from which the Calmac ferry departs for the islands beyond, and after that we'll be taken to Banrigh in Cameron's small boat. It will be so fitting, I think, to be crossing the Scottish sea in the same sort of craft my ancestors must have used—a boat like the one Flora McDonald used to take Bonnie Prince Charlie to Skye.
Cameron says that a visit to Culloden Moor would be out of our way, so I will probably have to cry before he will agree to take me. Men can be so difficult at times.
Elizabeth found Mallaig to be a picture postcard sort of fishing village perched between mountain and blue sea. She spent much of the wait for the ferry buying postcards and running around taking photographs, explaining to Cameron, "I must have something to remember this by!" It never seemed to occur to her that she had nothing to remember the village for, since she had spent her entire time there storing up memories rather than making them.
The other members of the Banrigh expedition arrived by train, and the group reassembled at a cafe near the dock, waiting for the Calmac ferry that would take them to the islands beyond.
"Want another meat pie?" Cameron asked Elizabeth. "This is the best meal you'll get for a while."
"I'm not hungry just now," said Elizabeth. "Perhaps I could get one to go."
Cameron and Denny burst out laughing. "It's obvious that you've never had one of these things cold," Denny told her. "Congealed grease! I think I'll have another beer to wash mine down, though I probably shouldn't, as it's pill time."
"Oh, do you have a cold?" Cameron asked.
Denny grinned. "No, just a bit of an infection. My doctor told me to take this antibiotic—ampicillin, I think he said— and to cultivate better taste in women!"
Cameron sighed. "You haven't changed a bit since university. '
"And has Cameron changed?" asked Elizabeth.
"Seal-men never change," said Denny. "Except into seals and back."
At a nearby table Owen Gilchrist and Callum Farthing, who had driven over from Inverness, were holding a desultory conversation about American Indian mound builders, because their table-mates, Alasdair and his Danish girlfriend, were talking in urgent whispers and pretending that they were alone at the table.
Gitte, as always, looked nervously obsequious. Like a whipped hound, Callum thought to himself. He had sized up the med student as a pompous asshole early on and was prepared to have as little to do with him as possible, easier said than done on a tiny island. The girl was a mousy type, rather shaky in her English; he dismissed her at once, thinking that it would be nice to have someone doing the scut work. Cooking detail and washing up—that would be the extent of her usefulness. He wasn't sure about the American one: she looked more capable, but she might be one of those artistic loonies that archaeology seemed to attract. (Callum had once been on a dig with a grandmotherly woman who clanked of turquoise jewelry and wanted to dance naked among the ruins by moonlight.) He smiled to himself: that might be all right; anything to liven up Banrigh.
"Of course, I haven't heard any evidence that the eastern mound builders actually practiced human sacrifice or ritual cannibalism," Owen was saying wistfully.
Callum smiled. The resident loony was present and accounted for.
"Wonderful to be getting away from it all!" Derek Marchand remarked to his assistant.
"Wonderful, indeed," Tom Leath said, through his teeth. He hoped the bottles wouldn't clank in his rucksack. With his luck Marchand would either demand that he pour them out or expect him to share the lot.
"I like the fact that we'll be right away from civilization. It will make me feel more in touch with the people who built this thing. Set up a channel across the centuries, perhaps— no interference." He grinned. "I'm being fanciful—not daft!"
"Right," Leath grunted. "Let's hope they tip you off to some good burial sites. We could do with a major find."
"Like the Viking ship at Sutton Hoo?" Marchand smiled. "That would do wonders for our funding, wouldn't it?"
"We've as much chance of finding Nessie, though."
"Don't be too pessimistic, lad. Our ship may come in."
In fact, it had, but it was the Calmac ferry, a nautical monopoly of the
Caledonian MacBrayne Company, which inspired the Scottish doggerel:
The earth belongs unto the Lord, and all it contains, Except the western highland piers, and they are all MacBrayne's.
Elizabeth enjoyed the ferryboat ride very much. Despite a sharp wind from the sea, she spent most of the time on deck, scanning the water for seals and taking photographs of the mainland diminishing in the distance across an expanse of darkest blue. Occasionally, when the wind made her cold, she climbed back into the Dawsons' Moggie Thou, parked with the other cars on the deck, but soon she would brave the elements again, trying for just one more shot of a seabird diving for its dinner. She asked Cameron when they were going to pass the white castle that showed up in all the calendars of Scotland. When he finally realized that she was talking about Eilean Donan, he explained that she could stop waiting for that particular shot: that castle was on the way to the Skye ferry at the Kyle of Lochalsh, and they wouldn't be going anywhere near it.
Elizabeth took it philosophically, saying that castles didn't seem to bring her much luck anyhow.
After several hours of sea watching and picture taking, punctuated by conversations with various members of the expedition over sausage rolls in the snack room, Elizabeth saw the small green point of land appear in front of them. Cameron, who was leaning against the railing, his green windbreaker zipped to protect him from the sea spray, touched her shoulder and pointed to the island. "I guess this is it," Elizabeth murmured, snuggling closer to him.
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