The Blue Hackle (14 page)

In the cloak room, Alasdair once again pulled
off his shoes and chose a set of wellies. “I’ll get Patrick settled
quick as I can. I know we were having a bit of a busman’s holiday
to begin, and we’re not honeymooning just yet, but still . . .”

“But still.” She exchanged her own shoes for
wellies, then remembered she’d taken her coat upstairs. She grabbed
the yellow raincoat hanging by the door, the one she’d replaced on
its hook after their headlong entrance. One of the sleeves was
partially inside out and when she poked it back into alignment it
emitted a pleasant woodsy smell.

It was better to just come out and say what
needed to be said. “Fergie didn’t kill Greg. If nothing else, he
wasn’t at all winded when I caught up with him in the back hall and
told him there’s been an accident—which is what I thought it was,
then—but he was breathing really heavily when we walked out to the
old castle, so he couldn’t have run from the beach all the way
around by the church and back here.”

The wellies were ice cold and stiff as
bricks, but more accommodating than Alasdair’s face. “Whyever would
I be suspecting Fergie?”

“Because you’re a good cop. The same reason
you need to know that I played footman and opened the door for the
Krums because Diana missed her cue. You remember, the dogs were
outside and this raincoat was wet? I think she got back to the
house right before we did. But Fergie didn’t seem to know she’d
gone anywhere.”

Alasdair didn’t react. He made a conscious
effort not to react, Jean estimated, slamming a portcullis, raising
a drawbridge, mortaring a few more blocks onto his patented
frost-and-stone face. He turned away, lifted his coat off the hook,
slipped it on, and only then said, “I’d be hurting Fergie even
worse by suspecting Diana.”

“No, she’d be hurting him by getting involved
in something underhanded. She’s already hurting him, even if all
she’s got going with Colin Urquhart is leaving a basket of scones
on the gatepost.”

“But what motive could she have? What motive
could Colin Urquhart have, come to that?”

“Why was Greg murdered, period?”

With an incoherent growl, Alasdair plunged
out into the glimmering darkness and across the courtyard, leaving
her—the nettling but necessary voice of his conscience—to play
catch-up.

She’d thought the house was cold. The salt
sea wind was so much colder it sucked her breath from her lungs.
She braced herself, expecting rain or even sleet, but no. In fact,
the clouds seemed to have lightened a bit, in texture as well as
color.

The police vehicles were set out in a tidy
rank. Doors opened and shut, reflective jackets formed into knots
and parted again, flashlights flashed. Two moved purposefully away
toward the old castle, its tower a straight-sided shadow against
the fitful gleam of Portree’s invisible flashlights beyond.

Jean recognized Gilnockie’s murmur, and held
herself to a half-step behind Alasdair as he homed in on it.

“There you are, then.” Gilnockie’s gesture
included the woman who stood beside him. “Detective Sergeant Lesley
Young. Alasdair Cameron, ex-C.I.D. His wife, Jean Fairbairn.”

Close enough. “Hello,” Jean said to Young’s
compact shape.

Someone’s beam of light raked the sergeant
from top to toe. Beneath her bulky fluorescent jacket, she stood
with chin up, chest out, shoulders back. Her ordinary, even bland,
cosmetic-free features were set with the nervous intensity of a
mongoose. Jean almost ducked aside, but all Young offered was a
brusque “Hullo” before she turned back to the others.

Now there, Jean thought, was an odd couple,
even odder than Alasdair and his former and unlamented
sergeant.

Whatever.
Thrusting her hands into the
pockets of the raincoat—she’d been too intent on keeping up with
Alasdair to think of gloves or a scarf—Jean shifted anxiously and
coldly from foot to foot while Gilnockie rounded up his troops and
headed them out.

“I’ll be back straightaway,” Alasdair told
her, not pushing his luck by instructing her to wait inside. He
fell into step beside his erstwhile colleague, telling him, “We’re
speculating—aye, we, that’s Jean and me—that MacLeod was meaning to
meet someone at the old church . . .”

Jean smiled at that. They’d been a long time
getting to that automatic “we.” But they weren’t, and never would
be, joined at the hip, just at the heart.

Reflective jackets, white coveralls,
flashlights, a stretcher, light stanchions. The cavalcade moved off
down the path, was partially obstructed by the hillside, reappeared
in individual blips at the castle, then fell into shadow. A few
moments later the faint thrum of a generator added a new note to
the thrum of the waves. Lights sprang up behind the ancient walls
as though a flying saucer was strafing the beach.

Jean was reminded of a sound and light show
at a tourist attraction. She imagined portentous music and a plummy
voice narrating the story of Rory MacLeod, who had leaped from
Dunasheen’s tower to escape a wronged and therefore wrathful
husband. The lover’s leap, the maiden’s leap, soldier’s leap, Leap
Year, when women were entitled to propose marriage instead of
enticing the object of her affections into initiating the marital
leap of faith. She couldn’t remember now which of them, she or
Alasdair, had brought up the subject of marriage.

Her thoughts wobbled to a stop. She heard no
music, no voices, only a scrape of gravel as a lone constable
patrolled the parking area. Her hands, clenched in the pockets of
the heavy coat, were chilled to the bone—except for the spot at the
root of her thumb poked by something sharp. She shifted her hand
away from the annoyance.

Standing around here waiting for Alasdair was
sheer masochism. His “straightaway” could be hours, depending on
how many of his opinions Gilnockie demanded. One more time she
trekked across the courtyard and into the cloak room, to find
Fergie donning hat, coat, and gloves, and the two dogs straining at
their leashes.

“Ah, Jean. Just taking the lads here for
their last run of the night. Nothing like a dog to get you up and
moving, eh?” If his face hadn’t yet defaulted to its usual
affability, at least it was no longer rumpled like an unmade bed.
“Rab and Nancy are clearing things out of the old kitchen. Will the
police be wanting chairs and tables, do you think?”

“Usually they bring their own.” So now she
was the expert on incident rooms. “Alasdair’s gone down to the
crime scene. I’m going upstairs.”

“Diana’s gone up as well. She’s got a
headache, understandably enough. Things didn’t exactly go to plan
this evening.”

Jean didn’t blame Diana for keeping her head
down, out of the line of fire. “Sorry,” she said, having nothing
better to offer than sympathy. “Good night.”

“Good night. Off we go, Somerled, Bruce, time
to check your p-mail.” Fergie maneuvered the dogs into the night
and shut the door with a very quiet click, rather like Gilnockie’s
whispery voice.

She would have slammed the door. Jean took
off the raincoat, hung it on the hook, slipped off the wellies and
on her shoes. She started for the corridor, then reversed course.
What had been sticking her hand, anyway?

From the pocket of the raincoat she pulled a
white business card, its thick, high-quality paper water-stained on
one corner but still relatively crisp. “Fergus MacDonald and Diana
MacDonald” read the raised lettering. “Dunasheen Castle,
Kinlochroy, Isle of Skye. Weddings and quality holidays.” The phone
number, website URL, and e-mail address were printed discreetly in
the corner.

Fergie had blanketed the world with identical
cards. There was a silver tray filled with them in the suite
upstairs, and Jean had left several with assorted friends in
Edinburgh—darn it, she hadn’t asked about the baby crib.

She turned the card over. On the back, in
jagged black letters, was written, “Meet me at the church at 3.
CU.”

CU? Colin Urquhart? Was that three p.m.
today? Which church, old or new? Well, technically the new one was
a chapel, but not everyone was as pedantic as Jean.

Was that Colin Urquhart’s handwriting? Was
that where Diana had been this afternoon, meeting with a violent
man just as a visiting Australian met with a violent end?

Jean folded the card so tightly in her hand
that all four corners pricked her palm. She hurried along the
halls, distractedly returned P.C. Thomson’s “good night,” and
bolted up the shadowy staircase past the suites where Tina MacLeod
was—eating, weeping, phoning—and the Krums were probably looking
out over the courtyard toward the real-life
C.S.I.
episode.

Halfway up the next flight, Jean stubbed her
toe on the tripping stane and scrabbled frantically for the rope
handrail. But what she grasped was a cold hand.

Or the hand grasped hers, rather, steadying
her onto the next step and sending a bolt of ice through her body,
from the sixth-sense receptor on the back of her neck down her
spine to her toes.

The spectral hand moved her shrinking flesh
and blood hand to the rope and released it, leaving Jean clinging
like a mountaineer over an abyss. Clinging like a householder in an
earthquake, except this was a temblor in the space–time continuum,
the strongest she’d ever felt. And she’d felt quite a few.

As quickly as she could with the lead coat of
perception weighting her shoulders and buckling her knees, she
looked around, up, down, sideways . . . there! A woman stood on the
third-floor landing, her form sketched in shade upon shadow.

She wore a high-waisted, low-necked,
straight-skirted gown of the early 1800s, frilled at breast and
sleeves and ornamented with rich embroidery around the hem. A shawl
with a paisley-patterned border hung loosely from her lower arms.
Her hair was pulled into a knot on the top of her head, except for
the ringlets cascading past either side of a face colorless—not
Gilnockie’s pale, but colorless—except for cornflower-blue eyes.
The full lips were parted as though on a sigh, even though no
breath passed between them. The eyes looked both at Jean and
through her, into a dimension so alien it couldn’t even be named
the Other World.

And then she was gone.

Every tendon quivering like a rubber band,
Jean straightened from her crouch and caught her breath. Had the
ghost’s clothing been tinted a faded and weathered green, or had
Jean simply filled in the color? No matter. She’d just met the
Green Lady, up close and personal. Very personal.

So much for Alasdair and his, “I’ve never yet
sensed a ghost could push.”

This one hadn’t pushed. She’d pulled. She’d
saved Jean from a nasty fall. And she’d . . . Jean looked down at
her hand, still cold as ice. The business card was gone. No. The
ghost couldn’t have taken it. Whatever emotion, whatever desire,
caused her to linger at Dunasheen couldn’t extend far enough to
palming evidence incriminating her multiple-great-granddaughter
Diana Ban . . .

There was the card, on the step where she’d
dropped it. Jean picked it up and scanned it suspiciously.
Fergus MacDonald and Diana MacDonald. Meet me at the church at
3.

Much more cautiously, she climbed the rest of
the stairs and made her way down the hall and into the Charlie
suite. Once inside, she slammed the door and stood with her back
against it.

I’m going to have to tell Alasdair.

Alasdair reappeared just as the fluorescent
letters on the bedside clock confirmed the sitting room clock’s
twelve tinkling strokes. Midnight wasn’t necessarily the witching
hour.

Jean peered out from the heaped bedclothes
like a mummy from her wrappings while he paced into the bathroom,
face taut, lips tight. So things hadn’t gone well at the crime
scene.

Closing the academic journal she hadn’t been
reading, she put it and her glasses on the bedside table. Dougie
was curled up beside her leg, doing his imitation of an anchor. But
Alasdair didn’t try to evict the cat when he slipped into the bed
and switched off the light.

Jean blinked at the surrounding darkness—ah,
good, a glow leaked between the window curtains—and turned to her
beloved. It was like snuggling up to a marble statue and she broke
out in gooseflesh. Served him right for all his cracks about her
cold feet. “You’re frozen.”

“Oh aye,” he replied on toothpaste-scented
breath. “I was not meaning to stay so long at the scene, but
Patrick . . .”

She waited.

“I do not know what’s come over the man. He’s
gone distant, in a way. His wife left him a decade ago, before I
ever met him, so it’s not that.”

Ouch,
Jean thought. “Maybe he’s burned
out, like you were.”

“When I was burning out, I worked all the
harder.”

“I noticed,” Jean said. “What happened at the
scene?”

“Nothing’s happened, that’s the problem.
Patrick’s waiting for daylight and the pathologist’s reports,
forensics, and all. And Tina needs questioning. For all we’re
knowing, Greg’s been getting death threats more direct than the one
Urquhart made Fergie. I stopped outside the Queen suite just now,
and put my ear to the door like the worst sort of sneak, and heard
Tina’s voice but could not hear the words. She was speaking on the
phone, I reckon. It’s by way of being morning Down Under.” He was
starting to warm up, becoming flesh and blood once again.

Speaking of which . . . “A couple of things
have happened here. I met the Green Lady on the staircase, and
she’s no wee bit ghostie. It must be true what they say about Skye,
it’s half in the Otherworld. Plus I found a note in the pocket of
Diana’s—I think it’s Diana’s—raincoat.” Jean filled in the details,
cooperated with Alasdair’s interrogation, and finally lay silently
while the mills of his intelligence and experience ground
exceedingly fine, but, as yet, produced nothing.