Jamming the phone back into her bag, she stood up. Here came D.C. Gunn, reporting in from the burdensome duty of walking around the Festival. “Good evening, Miss Fairbairn.”
“Good evening,” she returned.
He stepped up to the door of the van just as Alasdair opened it. Gunn retreated. “Sorry, Neville,” Alasdair said, and held the door for him.
So his first name was Neville, just the sort of moniker a thug like Sawyer would find diverting, although Jean supposed it was less rarefied here in the UK.
Alasdair ducked back under the canopy, the lights glinting off the water droplets collected on his hair and shoulders. Before he could speak she said, “Brad wasn’t there. I left a message. I’ll let you know what he says.”
“Right. Thank you.” Alasdair offered her a thick brown envelope. “Here you are.”
“Say what?” She took the package and turned it over in her hands, but saw no distinguishing marks.
“The transcripts of Ambrose’s trial for murder. I promised them to you in return for your working for me.”
There was that glint in his eye, peeking out like a star from behind a cloud. No, not a star, which was an indifferent natural force. Alasdair was pretending nothing embarrassing had happened. Jean inhaled the elusive tang of whiskey once more, trying to rekindle that warm glow. “I thought we were working together.”
“We are. I’m expecting you to read through this lot and tell me what’s there.”
“You could have had someone at your office do that.”
“Wasting police time on a case from nineteen-thirty-three? This is a curiosity, is all. Although if you do go finding some relation to the day’s issues, you’ll be letting me know.”
She managed an off-kilter grin. “Aye, aye, captain. You want me to write up an abstract for you, or will an oral report be all right?”
“That would be quite sufficient.” Alasdair redirected his own awkward grin to the stage.
Jean followed his lead. Ah, Hugh was beginning his final number, the ballad “Flower of Scotland.” The music tickled her vocal chords and plucked each of her muscle fibers into rhythmic contractions. This melody had the rhythm of a waltz, you could slow-dance to it—she remembered the piece Hugh had played earlier, when she thought he was making love to his violin . . . To her relief, the song ended before her glow not only re-kindled, but went nova.
“The tune’s not bad,” said Alasdair quietly, “but the words, now. The battle of Bannockburn was seven hundred years since. It’s time to move on.”
“Moving on can be like crawling out of quicksand,” she replied, and, to mitigate stating the obvious, “‘Flower of Scotland’ is a crowd-pleaser.”
“Oh aye, it is that.”
Pleased, the crowd applauded vigorously. Hugh and his band bowed their way off the stage, to be replaced by two young pipers and a drummer dressed in kilts, T-shirts, and combat boots. They launched into the derisive and inspirational “Johnnie Cope.” Jean tried lobbing a joke in Alasdair’s direction. “Why do pipers march when they play?”
“It’s harder to hit a moving target,” he returned obligingly.
“I was going to say to get away from the noise. But it’s not noise.”
“No, it’s not. Not at all.”
This is the music that stirs the blood was almost the last thing he’d said to her before they parted last month. And now her blood was pounding like a snare drum. The rich scent of peat smoke hung on the air, a hint of creosote and a whiff of chocolate blended into its own unique flavor. The scent complemented the tang of the whiskey in Jean’s nose and mouth, suggesting warm rooms and flickering flames. Maybe she should get it over with and . . .
And what? She didn’t know what the hell she should do. It wasn’t that she felt like a teenager pulling the petals off a daisy and chanting he likes me, he likes me not. She had pretty much conceded the answer to that. It was that she was mature enough to know the hazards of displaying her emotions for someone else to pick over and accept or reject as he wished. He’ll hurt me, he’ll hurt me not. I’ll hurt him.
Hugh walked by waving his violin. “We’re having a ceilidh in the hotel dining room,” he announced. “Come one, come all! Music and dancing and the best of the barley!”
“Does he ever stop playing?” asked Alasdair.
“No,” Jean replied. “I’m a bit envious of a job that’s both work and play.”
“You’re not saying that about your own?”
“Not just now, no. Ask me again after a good night’s sleep. What about your job?”
He didn’t answer. She looked around to see his profile against the misty lights, still and stern. Bleak, like a rocky valley scraped clean and dry by a glacier.
Last month she had wondered if he was on the verge of burning out. But he wasn’t just going through the motions, not like some people did when they grew disenchanted with their jobs. No, not Alasdair. He would never just go through the motions, professionally or personally . . .
She’d done it again. Puncturing the mood the first time had been justified by circumstances. But this time she’d defaulted to her usual clumsy mix of self-defeating, self-preserving, behavior. This time there was no rekindling the glow. “I think I’ll turn in.”
“Good idea,” he replied politely.
“Thank you for the whiskey. I should have some sort of report on the trial transcripts for you tomorrow.” Jean unzipped her bag, pulled out her folding umbrella, and stuffed the envelope with the transcripts inside, next to—nothing. Her notebook was gone.
No. Oh no. Turning toward the light, Jean rooted around in the bag as though the notebook was somehow small to enough to have slipped to the bottom with her keys. It wasn’t there. “Hell and damnation! My notebook’s gone! It had all my notes from my interviews and what I’d been thinking about the case, everything.”
In an instant Alasdair went to full alert. “When did you last see it?”
“At the hotel. I was writing in it while I had my tea. I realized earlier I left my bag open when I paid my bill. All the time I was walking around here it was hanging open. Anyone could have taken that notebook.” She yanked the zipper shut, closing the barn door long after the horses had galloped down to the loch and plunged in.
“The notebook, but not your wallet?”
“A pickpocket would want the wallet, yes, but maybe he—she—just grabbed what they could get. In that case the notebook’s probably lying around here somewhere, trampled underfoot.” Jean peered around suspiciously, at the faces bleached out by the lights, at flags and tartans suddenly too bright, brash instead of brave.
“I’ll have the lads look out for it. It’s just a student copybook, is it? Spiral-bound?”
“Yes, that’s it. Like the one I had last month.”
“I’ll walk you to the B&B,” Alasdair said.
Not now, she told herself. Not like this. Not under duress. “No, thank you. Please let me go on believing that there’s nothing to this, that it’s just happenstance. That the notebook’s lying back there in the lobby of the hotel or something.”
“Jean . . .” His chin went up, but he knew better than to gainsay her. He took a step backwards. “All right then. Have yourself a good night.”
“You too, get some rest.” For just a moment she dared to look into his eyes, but they were shielded and told her nothing. She turned, wobbled—funny how she hadn’t felt the whiskey in her knees until she stood up—and walked away not really sure just what she’d been looking for. Reassurance? Affection? Yeah, whatever.
Outside the shelter of the canopy the rain was coming down, lightly but steadily. A couple of drops dribbled down Jean’s glasses and half a dozen more went down the back of her neck, extinguishing the last furtive embers of her glow. She wrestled her umbrella open and put one foot in front of the other.
Behind the clouds the sun flirted with the western horizon, but here on terra firma Scotia, mist pressed in around the lights of the Festival. Past th
e illuminated area the evening was so thick that the town seemed no more than a series of box-shapes spattered with the pale splotches of lights. The mountains had vanished, as though rubbed out by a giant dirty eraser.
A footprint-shaped puddle gleamed faintly before her, then another, and another, until in front of the gate the ground was a churned mess of mud and grass, like a relief map of Scotland complete with trickling streams. Jean paused, looking for a path through the mess.
The thud of steps came from behind her and she glanced back. Alasdair? No, yes, no . . .
It was Roger’s pale face turned toward her, beard bristling like steel wool, hair matted onto his forehead. His voice was less flat than prostrate. “Oh. Jean. Hi. Going back to Pitclachie?”
“Yes.” She caught a whiff of whiskey, not a warm fragrance like Alasdair’s breath but something sour, evoking spoiled dreams and harsh realities.
“Allow me.” He offered her his arm.
If he was stumbling drunk . . . But no, he was walking as steadily as she was. That was a mark of the alcoholic, wasn’t it, to drink and drink and still appear sober? She rested her hand on his forearm—it felt brittle—and like tightrope walkers, umbrella and all, they balanced on tufts of sodden grass through the muddy area.
“Thanks,” Jean said, releasing him the moment they’d achieved the sidewalk.
“No problem.” Without the least attempt to share her umbrella, Roger walked on ahead, hands in his pockets, chin sunk on his chest, either lost in his own thoughts or freed from them by therapeutic booze.
The castle in the air he’d described to her yesterday had collapsed into a pile of rubble. It was possible that he himself had sapped its foundations, but if so, wouldn’t he be bending her ear at this very moment with plans for new construction? Here was her chance to ask him what his plans were . . . No. No matter what evidence turned up tomorrow, either for or against him, tonight she’d take pity on him and leave him alone.
Jean glanced back at the Festival. Beneath the large tent the mass of people blended into one organic mass of movement and color, like a psychedelic amoeba. The rhythm of their clapping was lost in the patter of rain on the road and its rustle in the tall stalks of the nettles, but the skirl of the pipes came through loud and clear.
A man-shape was taking long strides across the field toward the gate. Again Jean’s mind, unbidden, repeated the mantra, Alasdair? Then she saw the glint of metal on his shoulders and the shape of his cap. A constable, no doubt dispatched by his chief inspector to make sure a certain journalist went to ground safely.
Suddenly bright lights leaped out of the mist, making her and Roger’s shadows twirl wraith-like across the asphalt. They jumped, startled. A spray of water and air wet Jean’s legs and fluttered her skirt. Then the car was receding up the road to the north, its taillights swallowed by the damp and murk.
The pipe music had concealed the sound of the approaching car. Roger glanced around sharply, resentfully, then trudged on. Jean grimaced. Technically, the man—make that the gentleman—should be walking on the outside, but there was one of those old customs that had gone by the wayside ages ago. No problem. She was as much drip-dry as Roger was.
And, technically, they should be walking on the right-hand side of the road, facing the traffic, in mirror-image to the routine back home. But to do that they’d have to cross to the other side and then cross back again. Instead, Jean walked as far away from the road as she could get without brushing against the nettles. There went another car, a flash of light and a cold, damp whoosh.
The hotel’s white-painted sides were illuminated by floodlights, and smears of rosy light leaked from its front door and windows. Hugh’s ceilidh would be highly entertaining, but no, she was wet and cold and tired. She wanted a hot shower, a mug of chocolate, her flannel nightgown. Solitude. Safety.
She heard the crescendo of the pipes, and Miranda’s voice saying, You came here because you were tired of playing it safe . . . A sudden roar detonated in her head. A hard rush of air spun her against Roger just as a black behemoth struck him a glancing blow.
Jean saw his face, eyes wide, mouth agape, hands flung outwards. She heard her own voice cry out, the sound thin and weak. The umbrella launched itself from her hand and she fell, limbs flailing, fabric billowing. She landed on Roger’s wiry, knobby body—arms, elbows, ribs, a surprisingly soft paunch. One of her hands was burning.
With the squeal of skidding rubber, the behemoth jounced over the curb and back into the road. Twin red eyes blinked open and vanished into the mist. Tail lights. A car. No particular shape, no particular color, seemingly as uninhabited behind the streaming windows as the ghost coach of nightmare.
Jean lay sprawled on the sidewalk, one thought looping repeatedly through her mind: Alasdair was right. I do need to be protected.
Chapter Nineteen
The sound of the pipes was an attenuated hum, less loud than Jean’s own heartbeat leaping in a syncopated rhythm as much in her throat as her chest. Her breath was rasping. No, that was Roger’s rancid breath, wheezing, cursing. Voices shouted and footsteps pounded, each one resounding in the cold, rough asphalt grating her knee.
Dazed, bewildered, suspended in that moment when something’s going to hurt but it isn’t hurting yet, Jean tried to struggle to her feet without adding insult to Roger’s injuries. He was heaving at her, oblivious to which of her body parts his hands and knees made contact with.
She was on all fours, feeling as though she were playing a particularly gawky game of Twister, when hands plucked her upwards. Oh, the constable. And behind him came a thundering wave of humanity. Alasdair’s face emerged from the murk and wet, into the light cast by the hotel floodlights, not at all rosy but ashen. One quick, raw, look passed from his eyes to hers and back—terror chased by relief, chased by the realization that all the might-have-beens had almost come home to roost. Then his face went blank and he got down to business.
Voices shouted. Bodies bustled. Jean stood swaying, tremors running along her limbs, the rain plastering her hair to her head and smearing her glasses so that the scene became increasingly impressionistic. The bright blue lights of first police cars, and then an ambulance, strobed. Jean felt as though she and Roger were surrounded by paparazzi. But then, someone probably was taking photos.
Roger had borne the brunt of the fall and the nettles, but was still healthy enough to stand unsupported and bellow profanities at all and sundry. Including Tracy, when she finally appeared. She stammered that she’d been having a drink with Kettering in the bar of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, she hadn’t noticed anything until she’d heard the ambulance siren, what happened, someone was out to get them, she’d said so, hadn’t she? And the police hadn’t listened.
Kettering was close behind her, elbowing through the official cordon into the frenetic lights, his face stamped with an expression that said so clearly Now what? it might just as well have been tattooed on his sallow cheeks.
Then Jean found herself handed into the back of the ambulance, where she was probed and tested like a product under development. Her hand burned where it had gone into the nettles. The paramedic spread salve on it. Her knee oozed blood and mud through ripped nylon. The paramedic cut away the leg of her panty-hose, cleaned off her knee, and wrapped it in a bandage. She could have done all that herself. What she needed was a warm bath and clean clothes and a snort of sedative from one of the little phials sparkling seductively on a nearby rack.
Roger, his store of invective emptied at last, lay silently on the stretcher across from her as a second paramedic tended to various abraded, bruised, and stung body parts. Poor Roger, Jean thought. He would probably have looked just as bleary if her glasses had been clean.
The blurred ovals of faces floated disembodied in the doorway—Tracy’s red lips turned down in a scowl, Kettering gabbling, Sawyer stony rather than truculent. Then the paramedics were easing her back out into the darkness. Oh, there was Alasdair again, his firm grasp on her upper arm st
eering her across the sidewalk and into the back of a police car. Maybe it was the same one she’d ridden in earlier that day. Last week. Whenever.
Alasdair was sitting beside her, his keen, cold face winking in and out of shadow as the car jolted past the brightly-lit island of the hotel and into the driveway leading up the hill to Pitclachie House. More lights flashed as another car, coming from the opposite direction, turned in just behind them. Lights glowed among the trees and solidified into arched windows.
The car door opened. Kirsty took one arm and Brendan the other, helping Jean onto her feet as though she were a centenarian. In the distance a couple of vaguely familiar voices, male and female, asked questions in halting French-accented English. All the dialects blended into a Tower of Babel moment—Jean didn’t understand a word.
Kirsty opened the door of the Lodge. Alasdair cut Jean from the herd and ushered her through the door. Lodge, she thought. Home away from home. She took a breath so deep it made her ribs hurt and groped for the light switch. The room leaped into color and definition. Her voice was scraped a bit thin, but it worked. “I’m fine. More scared and shocked and angry and all that, you know, than hurt.”
Whether or not she’d intended to dissuade him from coming inside made no difference. Grimly, Alasdair shut the door, brushed past her, and set her bag on the table. How long had he been carrying that?
Over the arm of the chair next to the fireplace appeared a small bewhiskered face and two bat-like ears. The calico cat, Mandrake, looked with a proprietary air toward the door, decided to permit the interlopers entrance, and settled back down again. He must have sneaked in when the police did their search.
With a narrow glance at the cat, Alasdair proceeded to open doors, try windows, and close curtains downstairs and up. He might be back in full inscrutable mode, but his practiced expressionlessness didn’t fool Jean one bit. That quick look at the brim of disaster had shattered any remaining rationalizations about his feelings for her, or hers for him. Oh God.
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