The Blue Hackle (21 page)

Judging by Alasdair’s dour expression, he
remembered police colleagues suffering in a similar way, not just
from the effects of combat, but from the effects of surviving. And
she’d once thought
he
was a reclamation project. “Is
Urquhart having counseling?”

“Aye, he goes away to Inverness once a month
for a session. It helps, I’m thinking, though not so much as
Diana’s helping.” This time Thomson didn’t add anything about her
good heart, since Jean and Alasdair had seen for themselves that
more than her heart was involved. His lopsided smile, embarrassed
and rueful at once, pleaded for tolerance. “Colin’s needing a job,
a steady routine, but they’re few and far between.”

“Right.” Alasdair eyed the knife in the
technician’s hand. “It’s got blood on its blade, has it? Let’s be
hoping it’s got fingerprints as well.”

“Aye, sir,” said Thomson, as though that was
an order he had to fulfill.

Jean and Alasdair walked on up the garden
path, the primrose path, and not for the first time, Jean thought.
By the time they turned down the tree-lined alley toward the new
church, she’d told him everything she knew and most of what she
thought: Dakota and her allergy, and how neither of her parents had
alibis for the time of the murder, and how she’d seen a dark figure
in coat and hat at the gate, and there was Urquhart in his
regimental bonnet.

She and Alasdair should work on learning to
mind-meld. That would save a lot of jawboning. Taking a deep breath
of the crisp air, she went on. If it wasn’t Urquhart Dakota had
seen going through the gate, then who else was wandering around the
estate in the dark? There was more than one kind of shimmery fabric
in the world. Like a raincoat, although Diana’s and Pritchard’s
raincoats were yellow. What if the initials didn’t stand for “Colin
Urquhart” but were text-speak for “see you”? What if they meant
someone was trying to frame Colin, or lure Diana out of the house
by using his initials? What, for that matter, if the raincoat with
the card in the pocket wasn’t even hers?

Alasdair walked along, taking it all in,
gears meshing, grinding, meshing again.

“Still, you saw Diana and Colin,” Jean said.
“That answers our questions about the relationship and probably
explains where Diana was yesterday afternoon, why she missed the
Krums’ arrival and looked so flushed when she got there.”

“Likely she and Colin were at the lighthouse
at three, not killing Greg on the beach.”

“Yeah, but poor Fergie when he hears that
alibi.”

This time Alasdair’s frown was perfectly
genuine.

Then there was what Scott and Pritchard had
said, and finding Fergie’s virtual fingerprints on the Internet,
and how a motive connected to the exceedingly lucrative art and
antiquities trade was perhaps coagulating from the mist, and what
“something else,” in addition to the Fairy Flagon, was Fergie
planning to reveal, anyway?

Alasdair’s frown deepened and his steps
faltered. Before Jean could slow her own, he stepped out again,
marching like a soldier. You followed the investigative path to the
end, wherever it led. They’d both done that in their previous
lives, despite knowing how stiff a price such ends demanded.

“I think Pritchard has a thing for Diana,
too,” Jean said, “which is why he was dissing Colin last night. But
then, Scott’s comment was—not the sort of thing you’d say. You’ve
got me spoiled, you know. I forget how crass some guys, some
people, can be.”

Alasdair’s frown moderated, without
comment.

“But then, like I thought when I saw that
photo of Greg with another woman, jealousy makes a good motive,
too.”

“It does that, aye. Any strong passion makes
a motive. Love become hate or fear makes a grand motive.
Indifference, no.”

“I can’t see Tina coming all the way here
just to kill Greg.”

“Something might could have happened once
they reached the U.K., but no, I cannot see premeditation. Even
though she’s not told all she knows, not by a long chalk.”

“Protecting Greg, I bet.”

“Oh aye. And protecting herself as well.”

The bell tower, the slate roof, the delicate
buttresses and finials, the lancet windows of St. Columcille’s
appeared through the trees. The small building looked like a stone
wedding cake, set in a circle of mulched flowerbeds and shrubbery
borders. A driveway emerged from the trees to sweep past the
building. Sighting along it, Jean could just make out several of
the whitewashed buildings in the village. “Come summer time, Fergie
must have half the people in Kinlochroy taking care of the gardens.
One of the costs of the heritage business.”

“The heritage business,” Alasdair said,
“generates jobs for the locals. The old laird—the old, old laird,
Norman the Red MacDonald . . .”

“Must have been a real carrot-top,” said
Jean.

“. . . likely had this chapel built as
make-work for his tenants. More credit to him, when other lairds
were turfing them out in favor of sheep, sheep turning a more
handsome profit than people.”

“There’s a passion for you. Greed.”

“Oh aye. Though I’m never saying Fergie’s
greedy keeping Dunasheen afloat.”

“No way, no how.”

“I’d not be surprised if Fergie was planning
to sell off a family mathom or two. There are few stately
homeowners who’ve not had to sacrifice the odd Rembrandt—not that
Fergie’s found any Rembrandts, more’s the pity. His uncle already
sold off most of the farming and hunting land. Good job his
grandfather rented the place out to a Glasgow millionaire in the
twenties, else it would have no heating, no plumbing, no electric
flex. Could be Pritchard was dealing with Krum on Fergie’s
instructions.”

“Well, yeah,” Jean said. “Sorry. It’s not
like I’m trying to implicate Fergie.”

“No need apologizing.”

They stopped beside the church, Jean admiring
the play of light and shadow in the intricately carved dark gray
stone. “So maybe Greg was here to buy. Maybe Scott’s here to buy.
And Fergie finds it all kind of embarrassing, so is not telling us.
Yet, anyway.”

“And Greg was not telling us, but went
blethering on about the genealogy, Tormod MacLeod, the 1822 murder,
seeing as how his business with Fergie was none of ours. Then.”

“Speaking of jealousy as a motive, the master
mason was jealous and so forth, but who did kill Seonaid? And why?
And yes, I know you said we already had one case, but, darn it, I
want to know what happened. If nothing else, that story brought
Greg here as much as his business did.”

“Oh aye,” was all Alasdair replied, his tone
dropping from analytical to pensive.

Together they peered through the tall,
pointed windows of the chapel. There were the wooden pews incised
with leaves and tendrils, the decorative vaulting, the white-draped
altar that they’d inspected with Fergie last night—before he went
back to the house and they went on to the old church, the old
castle, and a new crime.

Then they’d talked about flowers, candles,
menus, ritual, and music. Now Jean stood outside the tiny porch and
noticed how the chapel’s front door faced a break in the trees,
providing a glimpse of the gable end of the old church and the sea.
This new church sat at the center of a sundial, in a way. If she
didn’t know how recent it was, she’d suspect that it, too, had been
sited on some prehistoric place of power.

The 1822 laird, Norman MacDonald, had
intended to build a folly, a mock ruin, an elaborate joke. If one
of the stonemasons had murdered his wife, then he’d probably felt
the place was folly indeed, in another meaning entirely.

Behind her back, Alasdair rattled the door.
“It’s locked.”

“Well, yes. Can’t you just see the place
littered with empty liquor bottles and used condoms? Assuming
anyone from Kinlochroy would be that crass, never mind what I just
said about most guys.”

“I’m not minding it, no. But look here.”

She turned around into the shadow of the
porch, and followed Alasdair’s forefinger to the iron latch and
lock of the door. Several scratches glinted dully in the metal.
“Looks like someone was trying to pick the lock. Recently. Was it
like that yesterday?”

“I’ve got no idea. Fergie was leading the way
with the key. Half a tick, whilst I check the vestry door.” He
hurried away around the building.

Jean trailed behind, then stopped. What was
that beside the gnarled roots of a huge tree on the far side of the
driveway? Several modest sculptures—an angel, St. Francis,
Buddha—rose from the herbaceous borders, but this was different.
Another of Fergie’s whimsical touches, such as a ceramic fairy
house shaped like a toadstool?

A few paces carried her into chill dappled
shadow beneath the heavy branches. No, the mound was a miniature
round-shouldered tombstone, perhaps six inches of it protruding
from leaf mold and lichen. Jean bent to brush away the debris,
first from the stone, then from her gloves, still expecting to see
another joke. Here lies the eight-track tape, perhaps. If nothing
else, this might be the grave of a pet.

The weathered letters didn’t read
Fido
or
Felix
. They read,
A stranger known but to God. Rest in
peace.

It was a grave, all right. Of a human being.
But Rab had said there were no graves near the new church.

A prickle emanated from the roots of her
hair, danced across her nape, and slipped down her back like an
invisible icicle. A faint disturbance in the Force, a fragile
qualm, a whiff of the paranormal. Slight as it was, it was still
more than she’d sensed at the old church, site of a famous mass
murder. But Rab had said Seonaid was found dead at the house, not
here.

The prickle had nothing to do with the grave.
Slowly Jean looked around. The chapel and its grounds were so quiet
she heard a car engine and birds calling in the distance, and up
close the slow friction of leaf on leaf as subtle drafts played
through the woods. Or was that a draft? Yet again she heard
footsteps. It used to be that lairds would hire a hermit to live in
their gardens. Maybe Fergie, having one of those already, had hired
a Bigfoot.

Silence. Jean stood up. “Alasdair?”

The church bell rang, its bright, clear note
launching a couple of gulls, squawking in surprise, from the roof
into the sky. Again it rang, and a third time, sending a subliminal
reverberation less through Jean’s ears than her sixth sense.

She ran toward the chapel. “Alasdair?”

The small arched door stood open. Jean
stepped into a tiny room furnished with table, chair, a line of
coat hooks, a couple of shelves holding candlesticks and vases. You
couldn’t leave prayer or hymn books out here in the damp and cold,
they’d be worm fodder. At least the place didn’t have too strong a
wet-dog smell . . .

Whoa.
She slumped against the table,
the prickle at her neck and back thickening into lead shielding.
Seonaid?

Yes. Through the door from the main part of
the church walked Seonaid MacDonald, in her green dress and
ringlets as solid, as real, as colorful as any living soul—except
for her gaze still fixed on another world. A sunlit world, its
radiance shimmering in her blue eyes as though on the surface of
the sea. Her complexion might be cool and white, but her pale pink
lips were parted in a smile.

She passed so close that every follicle on
Jean’s body tightened and every hair twitched—the surface tension
between realities touching as lightly as a kiss.

Jean was long past feeling afraid of these
moments, not that she enjoyed them. But what she felt now wasn’t
fear at all, not her own, not any hanging like a sour odor around
the ghost. Despite the cold weight on her shoulders, her heart was
buoyed upward on the scent of spring flowers.

Seonaid glided with light but measured steps
out into the afternoon. With a creak like that of rusty machinery,
Jean turned her head and watched.

Seonaid cast no shadow, even though she
walked through the shadow of several trees—through the shadow of
the valley of death—to the stump of the marker. For a long moment
she stood over the grave. And then she was gone, transported
between one second and the next into another dimension.

Warmth flooded back into Jean’s body. Her
shoulders lifted and she straightened her spine. She shook herself
the way Dougie would shake off water, spraying the room with motes
of perception. If ghosts were bits of strong emotion caught in time
like a fly in amber, then, unusually, Seonaid’s strong emotion
wasn’t fear or grief, but joy. Jean felt her face relax into a
smile.
Wow.

Heavy footsteps thumped up to the inside door
and Alasdair plodded into the vestry as slowly and heavily as
though chill had penetrated deep into his bones. And yet he, too,
was smiling. His voice brushed against the nap, wavering oddly, he
said, “You saw her, then.”

Jean’s voice seemed to be transmitted through
helium. “She brushed right by me. Can you still get that whiff of
flowers?”

“Oh aye. No sackcloth and ashes for that one.
Right cheery ghost, I’m thinking, for all she was murdered.”

“She was murdered at the house. Here, she’s
happy. Why she’s here, as in, on this plane of existence, though,
is the question.”

“She’s not after revenge. Nor
identification.”

“No.” Jean stretched, reveling in the pulse
in her own body. “Did she ring the bell?”

“Aye, she did that. I was reaching beneath a
pew when I heard the bell ring. By the time I’d looked up, there
she was, up the aisle and away.” With a stretch of his own,
Alasdair peered out through the doorway. “She went outside, did
she?”

“Yeah, and vanished at the grave.”

“What grave?”

“I’ll show you. I don’t see any way it could
be her own grave, but . . . Why were you reaching under a pew?”