Michael took off his sling and peered into a sandwich. “So it was two different people killed her and put her in the tomb. I doot the murderer was right amazed to find she’d been moved. She’s no clyped anyone?”
“She claims not to know who did it. Although we’re still far from sure she isn’t the murderer herself.”
“She could be admitting to one relatively minor point to deflect suspicion from the major one.” Rebecca set the teapot down and stirred her tea. “What about the ring and the brooch?”
“She was released from custody on her own recognizance. She’s not free to leave Rudesburn. We could still charge her with theft.”
Laurence brushed crumbs from his beard. “It’d be up to me and the RDG to press charges. But,” he said and nodded toward Mackenzie, “we thought since she never tried to remove the artifacts from Rudesburn, we’d let that point go for now, and hope she’ll blow the gaffe on the killer.”
“Somebody has to,” Michael muttered into his sandwich.
Mackenzie bit into a biscuit, the crunch loud in the silent space between words. Two or three people strolled past the office door and glanced curiously inside. Rebecca realized she was still stirring her tea. She looked up and met Michael’s eyes. They were like beacons on a distant peak. “Chief Inspector,” Michael said, “is it no aboot time to set a trap?”
“Yes,” said Rebecca. “If the killer thinks I know the location of the treasure, I should go sit out in the cloister after dark or something… .” Her mouth went dry. She must be crazy to say such a thing and step so solidly on Michael’s lines.
Mackenzie and Devlin looked at each other. Laurence stopped, his sandwich halfway to his mouth. Michael’s eyes blazed. “Are you daft, woman? That’d be dangerous! I’ll play the bait.”
“No you won’t. I’m a woman, Sheila was a woman—if the killer is another woman, would she attack a man? And no one would attack the both of us,” she added, forestalling his next remark.
“No one will be attacking you at all,” said Mackenzie. “I’ll have someone behind every rock.” His expression was so suddenly avuncular that Rebecca expected him to pat her on the head and give her a sweet from his pocket. He must have been hoping she’d volunteer, the rat.
“No,” said Michael. “It’s too dangerous, you canna… .” His voice trailed off and his eyes dropped to his lap where they stared at the cup and saucer and half a scone smeared with strawberry jam, red as blood.
“Michael,” Rebecca said softly, “if the mystery isn’t solved, then nothing is solved. You know that.”
Mackenzie inspected another cookie. Devlin checked his notebook. Laurence completed his bite and shoved another one after the first.
The beacons in Michael’s eyes burned to ash and went out. “You’re a fine braw lass, are you noo?” was all he said. She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or complimentary. She tried to smile at him, but all her mouth would do was tremble. Her own heartbeat thudded like a drum in her ears.
“Right,” said Mackenzie.
Michael said to Laurence, “I need to ring Graham aboot settin’ a wee archeological trap for Jerry. I canna believe he’d be so unprofessional as to break doon the wall, but then, he’s no been comin’ to work sober, either.”
Laurence gulped, swallowing his mouthful of sandwich. “If Jerry’s the killer, you won’t be needing an archeological trap.”
“That’s as may be,” said Devlin. “Tell Dr. Graham, Michael, that we’ll be sendin’ the ring and brooch on to the Museum straightaway.”
“We’d best start keepin’ the computer diskettes in the safe, too. I dinna trust Elaine.” Michael reached for the phone.
Rebecca picked up the portfolio. “I’m putting my inventory on disk, but not my notes.”
“Is the Bruce’s reliquary on the inventory?” asked Devlin.
“Sure is. The English knew Anne had it.”
“And what else?” Mackenzie asked.
“Just what we’d thought—coins, jeweled artifacts, lots of altar plate, mostly in silver, but with the occasional gold or latten piece. And the relics, some in fancy reliquaries, some not.”
“What would you say the value of all that would be?”
Rebecca’s eyes crossed slightly. “As hunks of metal? As artifacts? It would depend on who bought them, and why, and how… .”
“Thousands of quid,” said Michael, and with abrupt strokes started dialing. “Enough to make someone kill.”
Laurence whistled. Every one else squeezed out of the room. It took only a few moments’ discussion to sketch out the campaign. They would set the trap. Tonight, they all agreed. Matters had dragged out long enough.
Laurence returned to the bar and Mackenzie and Devlin went outside. Good. Rebecca waited until Michael finished his phone call and fell into step beside him out the door and across the street. “Michael… .”
“You have to do what you have to do, hen,” he said. He tousled her hair in a gesture he obviously thought was affectionate, but which was so forceful it hurt. He headed back down to the crypt while she plodded out to the infirmary trench.
Adele was peacefully spooning dirt. “Glad to see you back,” Rebecca told her.
“Nice to be back.”
“We need every worker we can get,” Rebecca went on. “We’re so far behind, I’m going to have to work on the inscriptions tonight.”
Adele nodded. Dennis and Hilary glanced up in alarm. Rebecca offered them a weak smile and wandered down to the crypt. There she consulted with a bleary-eyed Jerry about her notes and keeping the records straight, and how much work had yet to be done. Finally he stood up from the foam box and its grisly cut-out shape and said, “All right, Miss Know-It-All, if you want to work overtime, be my guest!”
Michael’s back, bent over the skeleton, shook as if he were either laughing or swearing. Mark glanced up skeptically. Tony said, “Scholars, don’t know when to leave well enough alone.” He took a picture of her. Rebecca imagined it in the next day’s newspaper—another victim of the Rudesburn Ripper… . Stop it, she ordered herself.
In the church Rebecca compared notes with Elaine. “I’m typing as fast as I can,” the woman said. “You lot should stop finding things.”
“I’ll be working late tonight,” Rebecca told her. “Maybe I can get caught up.”
Quitting time once again. Rebecca walked back to the hotel and called across the crowded pub to Laurence, “I’ll be hanging onto the portfolio for a while yet tonight. I need to get in some extra work after supper.”
Laurence nodded with wide-eyed sincerity.” No problem. Just be sure to bring back the crypt key, too.” Rebecca returned along the corridor thinking she ought to go ahead and paint her face like a clown’s and start doing juggling tricks. Surely everyone could hear the sham in her voice. But no one even bothered to look up.
In the office, she and Nora surreptitiously exchanged a handful of menus for the genuine papers, keeping out only the notebooks so Hilary could make her rough sketches into finished drawings. She’d be all right in the cottage since Mark would be with her and Grant would be out on the doorstep… .and the killer after Rebecca herself… . The pulse in her throat pounded against her collar.
Adele fixed pot roast for supper. It was probably delicious, but Rebecca couldn’t taste a thing. Michael shoved his food around on his plate. After dinner they waited in the bedroom until the appointed time, Michael shaking his head over Mark’s sad story. Other people’s problems could invariably make one’s own look smaller. “Did you put Mark and Dennis and Hilary in the picture?” Rebecca asked after yet another long pause.
“Oh aye. They’ll hold the fort here. I’ll be wi’ Devlin.”
She’d be wasting her breath to try and argue him into the cottage, too. They kissed. His lips were cold, his eyes as hooded as Mackenzie’s. Gathering her portfolio and a flashlight, she went out into the evening.
Only in Scotland, she thought, could it be cool and oppressive at the same
time. No wonder Adele had thrown open all the windows while she was cooking, and Hilary had wadded her ponytail into a bun. Overhead the sky was a deep Prussian blue, stitched with the moving lights of an airplane. But banks of cloud massed on the horizon like soldiers gathering for an attack. She saw a flash that was either lightning or the reflected lights of traffic on the A68. She tied the sleeves of the jacket around her neck; she was hot enough already and felt a sick sweat pooling on her body. The chill breeze felt good.
The priory blushed in the last rays of the sun. Its grounds seemed utterly deserted, not a living soul in sight. Nor a dead one, for that matter. Voices and slamming doors seemed to echo down a long tunnel from the village, the sounds compressed and distant.
Rebecca sat at the base of the wheel cross and made a show of taking notes. Not that she expected anyone to jump her in this open area—she was merely displaying the decoy. The only attention she attracted was that of Guinevere and Lancelot, who came trotting across the grass and nuzzled her pockets like horses searching for sugar.
The sun glided along the horizon in a dazzle of pink and red. The shadows ran like molasses, engulfing the entire priory. Rebecca and her feline escort walked into the church. The beam of her flashlight picked out the sarcophagus where Sheila had lain. The back of her neck bristled. She hurried past and unlocked the crypt door. The hollowed steps looked like an optical illusion, extending upward instead of down. But it was down she went, into the crypt, the cats sliding along the wall and sniffing warily. It wasn’t so much that the human reptilian brain was afraid of the dark itself, Rebecca thought; it was afraid of things that went bump in the dark.
There was the switch. The ceiling lights flared so harshly she winced. The close, musty air clogged her throat. The bristly feeling in the back of her neck spread down her spine until she felt like a porcupine. She forced herself not to look around. Mackenzie was out there somewhere. So were Devlin and Michael. She turned off her flashlight.
A faint scrabbling sound broke the silence. Rebecca spun around. Her teeth clenched, she inspected a narrow aperture. Just an empty tomb, and tiny red eyes vanishing through a slit in the wall. The cats bounded forward, leaving pawprints in the dust, but the rat was gone.
The scientific coffin was draped with blue plastic that looked shockingly garish in this monochromatic landscape. Anne’s tomb was almost empty, only the bones of her torso left to form hieroglyphics in the dust. “Earth to earth,” Rebecca murmured, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection unto eternal life…”
Lancelot put his forepaws on the edge of the box and peered inquisitively back up the corridor. Guinevere looked up with an interrogative meow, her tail twitching, her eyes gleaming. I shouldn’t look around, Rebecca told herself. I shouldn’t look.
“… through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the earth and the sea shall give up their dead…”
There was a rustle behind her. She tensed. Her whisper died away. Lancelot growled softly. The odor of incense, sweat, ale, and onions wafted down a breath of cold air. Rebecca looked. A white shape wavered in the dark opening to a tomb.
Anne was once again probing that membrane between this world and the next. Had no one ever before prayed over her bones? Even the Protestant prayer for the dead Rebecca had learned for a term paper on comparative religion was better than nothing.
The shape glided forward. Rebecca forced herself to stand still. Every muscle shrieked with tension, every instinct tuned to fight or flee.
Then the shape was gone. The heavy odor disappeared as if sucked into another dimension. The cold abated. The cats whisked away up the corridor and into the night. Rebecca slumped against the wall—an uninscribed stretch of wall—quelling a wave of nausea. She thought suddenly, when was Sheila’s funeral? Had she any friends or family to lay her to rest? The woman had been obliterated, leaving nothing but bitter memory.
The lights went out. Rebecca stared into the nothingness, utterly blind. Her trembling hand turned on her flashlight. Great. She might as well light up a neon sign saying, “Here I am”. She turned it off. But she was supposed to attract someone. She turned the flashlight back on and sidled away from the wooden box—a scuffle might damage the artifacts and that would never do… .
A beam of light struck her in the face. Galvanized, she jumped three feet backward. The grit of the wall snagged her jacket. She jerked free. There was the shape again, draperies billowing, advancing closer and closer. Except this time it, too, carried a flashlight. A faint scent of whiskey tickled Rebecca’s distended senses. Her jaw writhed, her teeth set tightly to keep her from screaming—but she wouldn’t give this apparition the satisfaction of scaring her.
The shape had no face, just a dark, smooth oval encircled by white fabric. But the shape did have a hand. It held a knife, a streak of cold flame. Rebecca clutched the portfolio and her own flashlight, directing its beam directly into the nonexistent face. Maybe there was a gleam of eyes, maybe not. The flowing draperies were looking more and more like a bedsheet. Part of Rebecca’s mind stated very coolly, I can’t believe the trap worked. The rest of her mind was all for immediate flight. Where’s Mackenzie? A man behind every rock, yeah, sure… .
She threw her flashlight. Shadows cartwheeled. There was a thud, and the figure emitted an unmistakable yelp. The flashlight shattered on the floor. Visualizing herself as a three-hundred-pound linebacker, Rebecca tucked in the portfolio and charged head down past the figure and toward the stairs.
She plunged from light into dark, slipping on the stone floor. The merest suggestion of light spilled down the staircase. A brighter light came after her, and the thump of footsteps. A ghost with track shoes? She stumbled up the stairs and angled left toward the south transept door, hoping whoever her pursuer was would run on through the nave and into the arms of the law.
The church seemed positively light and airy after the crypt. The rectangle of night through the door of the cloister was as glorious as the pearly gates. Two bounding footsteps, three, magnified into a thundering stampede… . Someone grabbed her.
She gasped and struck out with the portfolio. “It’s me, it’s me,” exclaimed Michael, dodging the blow.
There really were lots of footsteps. Those light streaks in her eyes weren’t the implosions of her own nerves but flashlights. She sagged against Michael, his slinged arm a bar of iron pressed between them, her free hand a knotted claw in his shirt. Either her heart or his galloped in her ears.
Hordes of constables rushed forward, surrounded the white shape that ran out of the crypt, and brought it none too gently down onto the floor. The knife went skittering across the tile and bounced off Rebecca’s shoe. A table knife. Not the sgian dubh. That wasn’t right… . She bumped her nose on Michael’s collarbone.
Mackenzie’s lean form lifted the white figure from the floor and tore away a pair of panty hose the—the man had over his face. Devlin unwound a bedsheet, revealing jeans and a T-shirt reading, “Stratford-upon-Avon Drag Races.”
It was Bob Jenkins. The culprit wasn’t someone from the expedition after all… .
“Bluidy hell,” said Michael in her ear. “Rebecca, no matter what else he did, he didna kill Sheila. He can prove he was in London.”
Jenkins essayed a charming smile and said, “Can’t you peelers take a joke?” With a snarl of disgust Mackenzie dropped him. “I knew you were onto something,” Jenkins continued, “the way you were chatting up the American girl. Thought you could tell us sod-all, hide the treasure—the laws of treasure trove—it’s our right to see those notes—freedom of the press… .”
Devlin said contemptuously, “He’s drunk.”
“Take him away,” said Mackenzie. Several constables surrounded the hapless Jenkins and dragged him down the nave.
Dennis burst through the transept door. “Inspector! Inspector, come quick! Somebody’s knocked out Grant—and Hilary, too! The notes are gone, they got the notes
after all!”
“Bloody hell” was mild compared to what Mackenzie replied to that. “Locate everyone with the expedition,” he shouted. “Now!”
Michael and Rebecca joined the rush toward the cottage. She was surprised at how dark the night had become, the sky matted with damp clouds that absorbed light as well as sound. Only the blue lights of the police cars sparking and flashing on the driveway weren’t filmed with gloom.
Several people gathered around a dark figure sprawled on the doorstep—it was Grant with blood smearing his temple, his hat several paces away, a doctor taking his pulse. “How is he?” asked Mackenzie.
“A right smart blow with a heavy object,” replied the doctor. “Concussion. I’ve sent for an ambulance.”
Winnie and Laurence came running down the driveway. She fell to her knees beside her husband, touching his face and chest as if to reassure herself he was still alive. Laurence chewed his moustache with agitation. “Don’t worry, Winnie, we’ll look after the children.”
“He’ll be all right,” the doctor said. Someone came out of the cottage with a couple of blankets; Winnie tucked them around Grant. A police car took off up Jedburgh Street, its siren howling.
Michael’s face in the flashing blue light looked thin and hard, his eyes like arctic ice. “If Jenkins knew we were up to something,” he muttered to Rebecca, “then so could the real culprit. Ah, damn it all, did he turn the trap back on us?”
The adrenalin that had pumped into Rebecca’s system earlier was draining away. Her hurt shoulder throbbed at each slow thud of her heart. Numbly she fumbled at her jacket and put it on. The portfolio felt as if it were stuffed with bricks. “What about Hilary?”
The doctor stood up. “Now then, let me see to the lassie.”
Hilary was stretched out on the dining room floor, her head cradled in Mark’s lap. His face was set in a scowl of rage and terror. Hers was so pale as to be almost transparent, but she was blinking and looking around in confusion. She was wearing the sweater vest, and her brown hair was still in a straggly bun—at first glimpse she could pass for… . “My God,” said Rebecca. “The trap worked just fine. He thought she was me, sitting here working late. He came after the notes, just as we’d intended.”
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