The Blue Hackle (28 page)

“Not so serious as it first appeared. Broken
arm and a mild concussion.” Gilnockie eyed the photo again, the
three faces preserved in time. “I’ll have my folk contact Greg and
Tina’s family in Australia, see if we can make any sense of
this.”

Yes, let the official forces do it, Jean
thought. She wouldn’t be able to raise Miranda now anyway, not with
the full spate of Hogmanay under way in Edinburgh.

Gilnockie stopped to deliver the photo and
instructions to a minion before returning to the table where
Pritchard was ignoring Young’s belligerent gaze.

“You didn’t,” Jean told Alasdair, “suggest
that he question Fergie again.”

“No. I reckon that job’s on my head. Every
time I think we’ve moved the investigation away from Fergie it
circles back round again.”

“If not to Fergie then to Diana, whose job
one is protecting him and Dunasheen.” Jean pretended not to see
Alasdair wince at that.

They walked down the corridor past the clan
prints to Fergie’s office and found the door shut. Music penetrated
the dense wooden panels, Hugh Munro’s fiddle tracing the clear
melody and the grace notes of “Peace and Plenty.” In spite of
herself, Jean smiled, comforted.

Alasdair raised his hand to knock, then, with
his own smile of more rue than comfort, let it drop. “Here’s us
away to the village. Fergie will keep.”

They wended their way to the entrance hall,
and were donning their coats when Diana passed along the corridor
carrying a tray of glasses toward the Great Hall, her face set in a
stern “the show must go on” expression. Close behind her came Colin
toting an armload of logs, his face unreadable. Neither
acknowledged Jean and Alasdair’s presence. Neither Jean nor
Alasdair asked for acknowledgment.

They were several steps into the thin, chill
sunlight, when the phone rang in Alasdair’s pocket. Checking the
screen, he answered, “Hello, Rebecca,” then responded to her
greeting with, “Night’s falling, the murderer’s still at large,
we’re in it up to the oxters. And you? Ah, good to hear things are
going to plan in town. Here’s Jean.”

Making a face at him, Jean took the phone.
“Hey, Rebecca. Never mind the bit about being in it up to the
armpits, I think we’re in it up to our chins.”

Rebecca said, “I hope your ‘it’ is the
wedding. Favors, flowers, toasts, you know, all the happiest day of
your life stresses?”

“Not exactly,” replied Jean, and added to
herself,
Buck up, mustn’t complain
.

Discreetly, Rebecca moved on. “Michael says
you’re interested in the Bible History Research Society, something
to do with your investigation.”

“Well, not the BHRS specifically, but our
Aussie victim’s relation to it.”

Alasdair looked around from his perusal of
land, sea, sky, and the elliptical, golden-ivory face of a rising
moon. Jean tilted the phone so he, too, could hear Rebecca’s
digitized voice.

“That’s what we were thinking,” Rebecca said.
“I’ve just now seen a press release from the BHRS, announcing the
purchase of an inscription with Pontius Pilate’s name, only the
second one ever found.”

“Really!” Jean’s antennae twitched like
Dougie’s whiskers.

“Except this one’s complete. It says Pilate
is a procurator, which is what Tacitus calls him and what we were
all taught in Sunday school, not a prefect, like the 1961
inscription does. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, in terms
of his political function, but an interesting discrepancy.”

“It sure is. And the BHRS purchased this darn
near priceless item from . . .”

“. . . Australian antiquities dealer Greg
MacLeod, who meant to display it in his new museum. The deal went
down a couple of months ago, but the BHRS is saying they’ve just
now had the inscription authenticated, not that they’re normally
believing in authenticating mechanisms such as peer review.”

“They never let geologists analyze what was
supposed to be a bit of petrified wood from Noah’s Ark,” said
Jean.

“Nope. However, this time they’re saying
they’ve dated bits of dust and debris in the interstices of the
inscription to the Roman Era and Palestine.”

“Really?”

“I’m guessing they’ve released the news
because of Greg’s death, either hoping to piggyback on the
publicity or as a tribute. Hard to tell without tapping their
phones.”

Alasdair angled his own phone closer to his
mouth. “Where’d Greg come by such a thing?”

“He said it was discovered in the Holy Land
by a family member who’d done a tour of duty there. It’s a small
piece of basalt, chipped off a larger monument, a dedication of
some sort. The Roman equivalent of ‘Pontius Pilate was here.’ Is
that sensible to you?”

“Kenneth,” said Alasdair. “Greg’s father. If
I’m remembering aright, the Royal Scots served in Palestine just
before the war.”

“When trade in antiquities was legal under
the British mandate,” Rebecca added.

Jean shook her head as again shapes fell
through her vision, this time imaginary ones, tiny bits like the
flecks of color in a kaleidoscope, not the definitive form of
Kenneth MacLeod’s dirk lying against a tombstone dedicated to a
crusader.

Crusaders also brought home souvenirs
.
“Fergie was saying there used to be a Pilate inscription here at
Dunasheen.”

“Was he?” asked Alasdair.

“It was at dinner last night. You were
talking to Irvine.”

Rebecca’s voice said, “An inscription at
Dunasheen? How many Pilate inscriptions are floating around,
anyway?”

“Good question.” Jean stared unfocussed
toward the facade of the house—someone had removed Tina’s makeshift
rope from the window. Alasdair stared unfocussed at the gravel
beneath his feet.

Then Rebecca said, “That’s given you food for
thought. Speaking of food, we’re not going out into the madness
tonight; Michael’s sister and her family are coming to us. Four
children, that’s madness enough.”

Jean pulled up her train of thought and
changed tracks. This might be her first Hogmanay—she’d just missed
last year’s—but she knew the vocabulary. “You never let Michael
first-foot, do you? He’s too fair.”

“He’s usually bad luck,” joked Rebecca. “No,
Maddy’s husband is our first-foot, he’s black Welsh and will do
nicely. Besides, he always brings a single malt to die for.”

“Please don’t. Happy New Year, and see you
Saturday,” Jean said, reminding herself, when, not if.

Alasdair muttered something appropriate, and
restored the now-mute phone to his pocket. His gaze, wider rather
than narrower than usual, met Jean’s. “The thot’s plickening,” she
told him, shook out her tongue and tried again. “The plot’s
thickening.”

“It was quite thick enough to begin.”

They started down the driveway, Jean lifting
her feet, throwing her shoulders back, raising her chin. The cobalt
blue of the sky was now diluted, washed with fragile shades of
peach, plum, and pink. Darkness gathered in the north and east, but
far to the southwest the setting sun painted skeins of cloud with
gold dust and cast glimmering gauze over the jagged edge of the
Black Cuillins. The cold air was scented with peat smoke,
silvery-gray strands rising vertically from a dozen village
chimneys and dissipating into the dusk. “It’s a pretty evening.
Early, but pretty.”

Alasdair’s face tilted upward in agreement,
and the light eased the whetted angles of his features—until they
neared Dunasheen’s wrought-iron gates. Then he saw the two media
vans parked outside, and the camera-carrying figures camped around
them. Most of the reporters had hared off after Tina, then, as well
as back to civilization for the holiday. Still, his features
hardened again.

Snapping to attention, two constables opened
the gates wide enough for Alasdair and Jean to slip through. The
waiting reporters surged forward. “Inspector Cameron, Inspector
Cameron, how are you getting on with this new case?”

Great
. He hadn’t been retired long
enough to fall off the media event horizon.

“It’s not my case,” he replied, pushing
through.

“It’s Miss Fairbairn, isn’t it? Are you
assisting the police in this case as well?”

There was someone with much too good a
memory. With her best inscrutable smile, making no eye contact,
Jean dodged the extended microphones and lengthened her stride to
match Alasdair’s, past several rundown cottages that had once
housed estate workers and onto the main—and pretty much only—street
of Kinlochroy.

The white-stuccoed, gray-slated buildings had
a pared-down look, square and plain, with narrow eaves like
spinsters pulling in their skirts. Even the signs marking several
shops and a couple of guesthouses were simple wooden boards, not a
one of them swinging dramatically out over the street. In the
summer, flowerpots and window boxes might brighten the village, but
not now. And perhaps not ever. The place seemed to Jean to be
modest and tidy not just from an urge to cleanliness but from the
need to use up and wear out, to make do and mend.

A child crossed the street without bothering
to look, a video game bleeping in her hand. Two more whizzed by on
skateboards. An elderly couple left the Co-op grocery store,
carrier bags swinging. Small cars were parked along—and on—the
sidewalks. Boats bobbed in the harbor, a bulbous GPS unit squatting
atop every superstructure, just as every rooftop boasted an antenna
or satellite dish.

The town’s war memorial was a granite Celtic
cross. In the fading light, Jean could barely read the names carved
into the main plinth, dating from 1914–18, let alone those from
1939–45. The latter list had been embossed on a bronze plaque and
affixed to the base of the cross when World War I, The War to End
All Wars, didn’t.

“There’s a fair puckle of MacLeods and
MacDonalds,” said Alasdair. “No surprise there. The lads from these
small towns joined up together and died together. There’s no place
in the U.K. that did not lose the flower of its youth.”

That was unusually poetic for him. But then,
Jean, too, could almost hear distant pipes playing the lament, “The
Flowers o’ the Forest,” for soldiers of more than the twentieth
century who had never returned home. She could definitely hear the
grating shriek of gulls scavenging along the waterfront and
whirling overhead in an airborne scrum.

Shivering, she turned back toward the windows
of the town, some dark behind their lace curtains while others
glowed with warmth. “Over here,” she said, and led Alasdair to the
door she’d spotted yesterday, across the street from the Flora
MacDonald pub.

This sign read
Kinlochroy Bookshop and
Café.
One of the windowpanes displayed not only posters of
local events, but also a blue Tourist Information sticker and a
computer-printed notice:
Heritage Museum
. The moment Jean
stepped inside, her glasses steamed up, leaving her to smell books,
coffee, and scones, and hear a mellow voice singing Burns’ “Green
Grow the Rushes, O.”

“Time for a snack,” she told Alasdair as her
vision cleared. “Dinner’s late and we’ll be up until midnight or
past.”

“Oh aye, that we will.” He stepped briskly
across to a counter displaying trays of pastry and sandwiches and
consulted with the teenage lass behind it.

Several tables and chairs were grouped at the
front of the shop. One was occupied by two older ladies chatting
quietly over a pot of tea. Three young men sat around another,
their outdoor garments, muddy rucksacks, and spread of soup,
sandwiches, scones, and soft drinks declaring them to be hikers
momentarily gone to ground.

Opposite the café counter stood a second one,
this in the style of a library circulation desk. A rack of ghost
stories, Dunasheen guidebooks, and various tourist pamphlets
propped up one side, no doubt the collection that had drawn
Dakota’s attention yesterday. On a counter behind the desk sat a
framed black and white photo, a soldier wearing full kit, from
hackle to kilt, beside a woman dressed in the extravagance of an
Indian wedding outfit—embroidered veil, jewelry, flowers, sari in
elaborate folds. By comparison, a Western white wedding seemed
plain and dull as a saltine.

Beyond the desk stood shelves teeming with
books new and old, a display case, and a table topped by two
computers. The woman bending over one looked up, dark eyes sparking
at the sight of customers. Thick black curls sprang from her high
forehead and her comfortably upholstered figure was draped by a
flower-embroidered cardigan and a denim skirt, its hem hanging
above fuzzy wool socks and sneakers. Her golden complexion plumped
above the dazzling white crescent of a smile. “Good afternoon. Can
I help you?”

Jean returned the smile in kind. “Hello.
We’re ah . . .”
Investigating a murder
might be a bit
abrupt. “We’re interested in your Heritage Museum.”

“Yon case of odds and ends is it, though
we’ve got census records and the like on file. Looking out your
genealogy, are you?”

“Well, not ours specifically. I’m Jean
Fairbairn and that’s my fiancé, Alasdair Cameron. We’re staying at
the castle.”

The woman stepped forward. “It’s yourselves,
is it then? Sanjay was saying you’d be stopping in. I’m Brenda
O’Donnell, his aunt.”

“I see the resemblance,” Jean told Brenda,
and with relief that P.C. Thomson had already covered the
preliminaries, “He’s a fine young man. You must be very proud of
him.”

“He’ll do,” Brenda said, her beam belying the
neutrality of her words. Then she sobered. “He’s telling me the
puir murdered man was Greg MacLeod, and now his wife’s been carried
away to hospital.”

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

Alasdair paced across the polished wooden
floor, his hands holding a tray rattling with metal pots and
earthenware dishes, his features set inquisitively. Jean made
introductions and Brenda swept the tray from his grasp, placing it
on the table closest to the bookshelves. “Here you are. I’ll sit
with you, shall I?”