The Blue Hackle (26 page)

This time Jean didn’t have to stop and ask.
Tina!

Jean’s heart jolted into her throat, then
dropped into her stomach. The murderer, he’d gotten to her, too—a
kitchen knife, a letter opener, no need for an antique dirk . . .
Alasdair shot out of their room, slammed the door, locked it, ran
for the stairs with Jean on his heels.

Feet up
, she ordered herself.
Feet
down. Breathe
.

Doors crashed, footsteps pounded, dogs
barked, their frenzy muffled by stone walls. A voice echoed up the
stairwell, W.P.C. McCrummin shouting, “She’s gone out the
window!”

“Out the window?” demanded Alasdair.

He and Jean rushed back down the stairs—no
stane, no Seonaid, no time—and met McCrummin at the landing. Every
freckle on her face bounced in agitation, her expressions flipping
from alarm to bafflement, from chagrin to anger. “I was reading a
magazine in the sitting room. She said she was having a nap and
went into the bedroom. Not half an hour on, she screamed. I went
running in. She’d tied her linens to the window frame and crawled
out the window and she fell.”

Jean gave her head a quick shake, rearranging
her preconceptions. Not an attack. An escape.

“Stupid woman, that’s the sort of thing only
works in films.” Alasdair led the two women jostling down to the
ground floor. “Famous last words, eh? Tina’s not getting away, I
was saying. Bloody hell!”

Outside, in the cold sunlight, Jean,
Alasdair, and McCrummin converged with six or seven people. Between
their shifting bodies a life-sized doll lay crumpled on the gravel
of the parking area—feet in brown boots and legs in brown pants
lying akimbo, the leopard-skin coat like a pile of rags, one hand
pitifully small and white, palm up, red-painted nails torn, arm
twisted backward at an unnatural angle. The blond curls flopped
like old straw, leaking crimson.

Jean saw Greg lying on the beach, blood
trailing away toward the sea like an element seeking its primeval
origins. Tina’s face, too, was turned away, toward the garden
wall.

Thomson knelt beside her, one hand tucked
between her curls and her collar. “She’s breathing. I saw her
falling, I couldna catch her, she came down that fast.”

“If you’d tried catching her, lad,” Alasdair
said, each word a pellet of sleet, “you’d be lying there as
well.”

McCrummin knelt beside Thomson, her hand on
his forearm, although Jean couldn’t tell who was steadying whom.
Police radios staticked and phones chirped. Gilnockie and Young
pelted through the front door. Young, carrying a first-aid kit,
skidded to her knees beside Thomson and McCrummin. Gilnockie
stopped below the windows of the library, the dim shape of the
Christmas tree arching over his head.

His eyes closed. His lips moved silently.
Going over procedures, Jean thought. And then, when he looked up
and made the sign of the cross—forehead, breast, shoulders—she
realized he’d been praying. For Tina’s recovery, no doubt, but also
for explanations. More power to him.

Fergie thudded out onto the gravel, Rab and
Nancy just behind. “What’s happened now?” he asked, and answered
his own question. “Oh. No. No.”

Diana and Colin stepped out of the house
behind him, hands clasped tightly, her face filled with dismay, his
with stubborn pride. Fergie glanced at them, away, and then back,
in a classic double-take. Spinning around, he reeled toward Tina,
shaking his head and wringing his hands as though trying to stop
events from running through his fingers.

Alasdair stopped Fergie’s reel with a hand on
his shoulder, so firm his fingers made dents in Fergie’s sweater.
Not a Vulcan nerve-pinch, as much as Fergie might like to be
anesthetized right now. The gesture was the British,
buck up,
mustn’t complain, get on with it,
lacking only the cup of tea
and the biscuit.

The Finlays stood close together, Nancy’s red
mouth turned down, Rab’s eyebrows beetling. “No good,” he said. “No
good’s coming of it all—bleeding Aussies, should’ve stayed home,
got no call turning up here.”

“Rab!” Nancy’s voice snapped like a whip. “We
canna sort things to suit ourselves. Have a care for Fergus and
puir wee Di.”

Rab looked down at his legs and feet, like
tree stumps, and thrust his hands into his pockets.

Inside, the dogs barked. Pritchard’s voice
angrily shushed them. Where were the Krums? Probably in the
village. Their car was still parked by the garden wall.

Jean realized she was standing with her hands
pressed flat against her chest, holding her heart in place, while
temblors ran through her limbs and mulligatawny soup roiled in her
stomach. She turned her eyes to the sky, to the bare branches of
the trees, to the windows of the Queen suite, two glass panels
pushed out, one gaping open. A long, thick, white strip of fabric
was knotted around the stone separating the two, and now swayed
gently as a hangman’s rope. Had Tina been able to grasp the linen
at all? Had she fallen straight from the windowsill? With the high
ceilings of the ground floor, she had fallen twenty or twenty-five
feet. Even Skye’s springy soil had proved no cushion.

Above that window, the bay window of the
Charlie suite angled gracefully out from the facade. Dougie’s small
gray shape sat against the glass, looking down curiously. Something
hung from his mouth that was too small to be a mouse. That’s right,
Alasdair had said something about
her
cat. He was
her
cat when he decided to, say, lick the butter dish.

Right now, he was welcome to butter dishes,
pillows, whatever.

Dr. Irvine came running up the driveway,
every limb pumping, his bag swinging. Gasping for breath, he
shouldered through the crowd and knelt beside Tina.

And somewhere a phone rang, bleat-bleat,
bleat-bleat . . . Alasdair jumped, plunged his hand into his
pocket, glanced at the phone’s tiny display. “Miranda. Fine
timing.”

“Here.” Jean took the phone, warm from its
nest near Alasdair’s body, and held it to her ear. “Hello,
Miranda.”

“Good afternoon to you,” returned Miranda.
“How’s the latest case coming along?”

“Funny you should ask.” Plodding back to the
shelter of the porch, Jean filled her in and reached a full stop.
No more words. No more ideas. Just get on with it, keep on keeping
on.

“Well then,” Miranda said, with her usual
discretion offering no suggestions. “I do not know if this is
helping you, but I’ve heard from an acquaintance at the New South
Wales MacLeod society. He knows—knew—Greg MacLeod, as Greg was
using their records to research an ancestor, stonemason named
Tormod who left Skye for Sydney in 1822. That’s the one he was
going on about, is it?”

“Yes, it is,” said Jean. “Greg said he’d been
transported for murder, although we’ve learned since that the story
isn’t quite that straightforward.”

“It’s not that, no. The society chap is
saying Tormod wasn’t a convict at all; he was a soldier, sent to
guard the prisoners in the penal colony.”

“A soldier?” Yes, taking the king’s shilling,
joining up, was as good a way to get out of town and start over
again as any. So why had Greg blithely claimed a convict ancestor?
Because it made a better story for his customers? As Jean herself
had said, being a descendant of one of the early convicts had
become trendy, Down Under. Many of them had done little more than
steal a loaf of bread, whereas some of their soldier-guards had
been brutal, even sadistic. “Nothing like a little historical
editing to fit your prejudices. The prisoners are the stuff of
romance now. Whatever happened to the appeal of a man in a
uniform?”

“It’s not gone away,” said Miranda. “Not if
the look in your eye when you see the sentries outside the Castle’s
any indication.”

Jean tried to smile at that, but the corners
of her mouth seemed tacked in place.

“It was later on in life,” Miranda went on,
“that Tormod went back to working in stone, overseeing some of the
work on Government House, for example. Emigrating likely worked out
better for him and his Aussie family than biding in Skye.”

“It’s all a matter of perspective,” Jean
said. A police van rolled around the side of the building. Two
constables leaped out and removed a stretcher from the back. She
hoped it wasn’t the same stretcher that they’d used to carry Greg’s
body up from the beach, but then, Tina could hardly complain, not
after her particular version of a self-inflicted wound. “Thanks,
Miranda. Every little bit of information helps.”

“You’re welcome. I’ll soon be away with
Duncan for the Hogmanay celebrations. If there’s anything else,
leave a message.”

“If there’s anything else?” Jean quelled the
caustic giggle welling up in her throat. That’s no doubt what
Fergie was thinking.
If there’s anything else, just shoot
me.

“Then try having yourself a good one, auld
lang syne and all.”

“We’ll try. I’ll keep you posted. Happy New
Year to you too.” Jean snapped the phone shut.

Under Irvine’s direction, the police people
placed Tina on the stretcher and the stretcher in the back of the
van. He scrambled in after her. The nearest full-service hospital
would be in Portree. If her injuries were bad enough, she’d be
taken by air ambulance to Inverness or Glasgow. They wouldn’t be
interviewing her again any time soon. If ever.

She must have been terrified, to go out the
window like that.

The van drove away. A glint of sun ricocheted
from its back window and smacked Jean in the face. She receded into
the entrance hall and stood beside the brass-bound kist, watching
each face as everyone trudged past. No one looked guilty, no one
looked pleased, every expression betrayed some variety of shock or
distress.

“You’re quite sure Tina was alone when she
fell?” Jean asked McCrummin.

“Aye, she was that, she was not pushed, if
that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking she was threatened, although
probably not by an actual person, in person—unless there a secret
panel in the fireplace or something.”

A queasy half-smile tilted one side of
McCrummin’s mouth. “You’re joking.”

Not entirely, but Jean let McCrummin go on
her way. From afar rose the bay of the reporters at the front gate,
scenting more blood.

With one long, lost look over his shoulder,
then another after Diana and Colin, Fergie marched rather than
walked around the corner toward his office. Rab and Nancy, sharing
more or less the same frown, went the same route. Gilnockie stopped
Young in the doorway. “Where’s Pritchard?”

Young’s mouth opened and shut and she cast a
swift glance around. “He followed us from the incident room.”

“I heard him shouting at the dogs a few
minutes ago,” Jean said.

“Find the man,” Gilnockie ordered, and Young
vanished down the corridor.

Alasdair walked into the entrance hall beside
Thomson, who said to Gilnockie, “That’s me away, then, sir.”

Distractedly, Gilnockie assented, then
drifted after Young toward the incident room.

Alasdair took the cell phone from Jean’s
hand. “Let’s have us a look at Tina’s things. Sanjay, we’ll catch
you up in the village.”

“Aye, sir.” Thomson said, and closed the door
behind him.

Alone again. For what that was worth. Each
foot heavy as clay, Jean walked up the stairs beside Alasdair and
told him what Miranda had said.

He considered, every line in his face flexing
and then loosing—she could almost hear him ordering himself,
Focus, man, focus
. “Interesting. With nothing left for him
here, and Norman set on revenge, Tormod went to be a sodger, to
paraphrase Burns.”

“You don’t suppose Fergie really is descended
from Tormod the mason rather than Norman the laird, do you? I mean,
Fergie said Norman accepted Seonaid’s son as his. Even if someone
could prove otherwise, and that’s not likely, would there be any
legal ramifications?” Jean started up the second-floor corridor.
“If there’s an illegitimate birth, then the title and property
would revert to, I don’t know, the descendants of some cousin of
old Red Norman’s. Red Norman. Makes him sound like a communist
rather than a minor aristocrat.”

Alasdair managed a scorched snicker. “In
other words, did Fergie or Diana murder Greg meaning to prevent him
claiming the title and the estate? Or is Lionel Pritchard, say, the
secret heir, aiming to come into his own? Jean, your mind can be
positively byzantine at times.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she
replied. “And yes, you’re right, that’s too complicated a scenario.
But there’s a lot about Greg we don’t know.”

“And Tina as well.” Alasdair paused below
another Fergie MacDonald creation, a version of da Vinci’s
Last
Supper
. Here the central figure was the Sphinx. His companions
were Easter Island statues, a chubby, smiling Buddha, an Aztec in
full feather, and the March Hare. The tablecloth was MacDonald
tartan, scattered with candy wrappers and greasy newspapers
wrapping fish and chips. Through the arches in the background
gleamed the rings of Saturn, crossed by human footprints.

“And then there’s Fergie’s mind. Makes yours
look . . .” Alasdair’s voice ran down and out.

“Normal,” concluded Jean. “Extra normal.”

The door of the Queen suite stood ajar,
presumably the way McCrummin had left it when she ran out. Jean
pushed it open.

The Queen suite wasn’t as spacious as the
Charlie, but it was appointed as nicely, with amenities ranging
from fresh, colorful fabrics to chipped bric-a-brac. If you were
going to be under house arrest, Jean thought, this was the way to
go. Then again, with the way Tina had gone, maybe not.

Together they quartered the sitting room,
noting a ceramic dish holding MacDonald business cards, a set of
golf clubs propped in the corner, a copy of
Country Life
lying in front of a wingback chair. Alasdair inspected the
dishcloth-shrouded contents of a tea tray. “Tina’s not touched her
lunch.”