The Blue Hackle (39 page)

The door opened and shut and the key turned.
Alasdair plodded into the bedroom, shedding his jacket and
unbuckling his kilt. “Diana’s locked herself in her room. Fergie’s
locked himself in his office and is listening to monks chanting.
I’d suggest sleeping whilst we can. It’s already tomorrow.”

“The tomorrow we were worried about,
yeah.”

Even after Alasdair washed, changed, and
climbed in beside her, making a cat sandwich, Jean still failed to
not think about it.

By his breathing she knew he wasn’t asleep,
either, even though he lay still as a tomb effigy. A knight carved
on a grave slab overlooking the Outer Hebrides, a grave slab that
was broken into a hundred pieces that Jean was trying frantically
to reassemble, while Alasdair stood chanting with the other monks
in the tiny stone-built chapel—religious figures were often ghosts,
perhaps because of the spiritual dimensions of their lives—her
dream shifted and she saw Dunasheen as Elsinore above the sea, and
Diana holding aloft Tormod’s skull, “Alas poor Rory, I knew him
well.” And there was Hamlet himself, sensing a presence behind
Seonaid’s tapestry, killing a bristle-bearded Polonius with his
father’s regimental dirk . . .

Jean awoke abruptly to something poking her
in the side. Alasdair?

Dougie had somehow swapped his velvet paws
for iron prods, and was kneading her ribcage. The moment her
eyelids flickered he meowed. The clock in the next room struck six.
At least three more hours of darkness yet to come. What was the
matter with the dang cat, anyway?

Alasdair shifted and his breath caught.
Subtly but distinctly came the sound of a door shutting, and
footsteps, and something falling to the floor accompanied by a
muffled curse.

Jean sat up, shedding Dougie—someone was in
their living room . . .

“Someone’s in the Queen suite.” Throwing back
the comforter—Dougie’s indignant meow came from beneath the
cloth—Alasdair leaped out of the bed and seized his bathrobe.

Oh. The wooden floor transmitted sound much
better than the thick stone walls. Jean jumped up, grabbed her
robe, and hopped along behind Alasdair, cramming her sock-clad feet
into her slippers.

Walking into the corridor was like walking
into the Ice Age, the air dank with the dying breaths of mammoths
and cave bears. Shoulder to shoulder, Jean and Alasdair crept
toward the dimly lit staircase, Jean cursing herself for not having
brought a flashlight upstairs. Not that anything lurked in the
corners that hadn’t been there in the daylight. The ivory-inlaid
chest was still an inlaid chest. The suit of armor was still
armor.

Yeah, she’d been trying that ploy for years.
It might have worked if not for her allergy to the unseen.

They passed by the unseen on the staircase,
and crept up the second-floor corridor, and stopped at the now
partially open door of the Queen suite. Inside, floorboards creaked
and a light flared and faded—someone else hadn’t forgotten a
flashlight.

Alasdair reached into his pocket with one
hand and shoved the door with the other. A shadowy figure swung a
beam of light toward the door and the room disappeared in a flash
of brilliance.

Wincing, Jean realized that Alasdair was
armed with the camera.

He stepped into the room. Another flash, and
the shadowed figure reeled back and emitted a yelp of pain.
Alasdair didn’t say, “Come out with your hands up.” He said, “Lost
your way, did you, under the influence of the evening’s drinks?”
and switched on the lights.

Jean squinted. Scott Krum wore a velour robe
over silk pajamas. His razor-cut hair was disheveled and his
finicky goatee was smudged by new whiskers. With a grimace of pain,
he lowered both his flashlight and the hand he’d raised to shield
his face. “Oh. Hi.”

“How’d you get in here?” With his other hand,
Alasdair raised his phone and set it to record.

“It’s an old Chubb lock, easy to pick with a
nail file. Heather’s got an arsenal of nail files.”

“Why’d you break in?”

“Would you believe me if I said I was looking
for items for the auction house?”

“No.” Alasdair took a step forward. “You
could be doing that in the daylight, with Fergie’s permission, in
rooms of the house not sealed by the police.”

Jean stayed by the door, her toes curled, her
arms locked, trying to quell the tiny shivers that crawled like
insects through her muscles.

“All right, all right.” Scott turned off the
flashlight, rubbed his temples, and grimaced again. “I couldn’t
sleep. I got to thinking that maybe Greg had printed out one of my
e-mails and how that wouldn’t look good, with him being murdered
and everything.”

Alasdair said, “What’s not looking good is
you breaking and entering. It’s you lying to Gilnockie about
knowing Greg.”

“Oh no, no, I didn’t
know
him, we’d
just e-mailed each other a few times. We had a mutual friend, a
dealer in Chicago, and he told Greg I’d been to Dunasheen, and so,
you know, Greg was pumping me for information.”

“About the Crusader Coffer?”

“Oh, man.” Scott shook his head and then
groaned, as though his brain had ricocheted off the sides of his
skull. “I’m not touching that. Religious stuff is too political.
There’s too much skullduggery. Diana’s Egyptian necklace, those
Chinese snuff bottles, the Wilkie portrait—I could do something
with those.”

So much for Fergie’s Plan B, Jean told
herself. She hoped he had a Plan C that didn’t involve any
ambiguous artifacts.

“What was Greg asking you about, then?”
Alasdair took another step forward.

Scott stepped back and collided with a chair,
which went down with a crash. Moaning, he kneaded his scalp. “Give
me a break, I’ve got a headache that would knock over a horse.”

“What was Greg asking you about?”

“The terrain and the gardens,” said Scott.
“Whether the house is in good repair. What sort of collections
Fergie has. What he and Diana are like. Couldn’t help him there, I
never met them, just Pritchard. Hey, is it true Fergus sent
Pritchard packing?”

Jean heard footsteps on the staircase, and
not Seonaid in her ephemeral slippers.

Alasdair demanded, “Did Greg ask you anything
at all about the Crusader Coffer? Did he mention Tormod MacLeod at
all?”

“I never heard of the Coffer until tonight. I
never heard of that other guy, period.”

P.C. Nicolson appeared in the doorway, both
face and uniform wrinkled by a long night’s doze in a chair. “Is
there a problem, sir?”

“Oh aye,” Alasdair replied. “Take this man to
his room and make sure he stays there the night.”

Nicolson reached toward Scott, who fended him
off. “I get it already. Busted. I’ll go quietly.”

Alasdair waited while Nicolson reinstalled
Scott in his room and found a chair to collapse into. Then he
switched off the lights in the Queen suite and shut the door. “I’d
be obliged if you’d keep an eye on this door as well, constable,”
he said, and let Jean pull him toward the staircase.

When they were tucked back into their own
bed, pressed together like chilled slabs of meat in a butcher’s
window—thank goodness for Dougie serving as foot-warmer—she asked,
“Does Scott know that what you got on the phone and the camera
isn’t necessarily admissible evidence?”

“He knows I’m no longer a cop, or should do,
if he’s been paying attention.”

“By the time that occurs to him maybe we’ll
have more evidence.”

“Right.” The glow of the bedside clock
reflected in Alasdair’s eyes like starlight on twin icebergs.
“Gilnockie’s had all the rooms searched, not just the Queen Suite,
and Greg and Tina’s luggage as well. There’s no correspondence.
Krum’s hoisted himself with his own petard.”

“Nothing like a little alcoholic remorse to
muddle your thought processes,” Jean suggested. “Though if he was
lying about what Greg asked him, you think he’d come up with
something more creative than a description of the estate and the
collections.”

“Aye,” said Alasdair.

“Do you think he killed Greg? It’s possible
he had the dirk . . . oh!” Jean exclaimed—it wasn’t exactly a
coup de foudre
, but she’d take any inspiration she could
get. “What if Greg himself had the dirk? That would eliminate the
need for either Colin or Scott to have sneaked it out earlier.
Maybe Fergie pointed it out to him when he and Tina arrived.”

“You’re forgetting, Fergie did not know our
fathers’ friend was Kenneth MacLeod, let alone that Kenneth was
Greg’s father. Or so he’s saying.” Alasdair jerked fretfully, the
starched pillowcase rustling beneath his head. “If Greg had the
dirk on him, that’s bringing us back round to unpremeditated
murder, an argument gone wrong. A brother out for revenge. We’ve
got to have a word with Colin, see if his testimony agrees with
Kenneth’s. Damn the man for running.”

“Yeah, well, he’s twitchy. That doesn’t mean
he’s guilty.”

“Someone’s guilty.” Alasdair’s hand lay heavy
on her flank, the fingers rising and falling as if typing a police
report. Or arranging pieces of a puzzle, several of which were
missing. Slowly his body warmed. He was no effigy, he was a man,
her man, an ex-cop who couldn’t get away from copping any more than
she could get away from academicizing.

She couldn’t stay awake, but she couldn’t
sleep, either. She dozed and woke, heard Alasdair breathing deeply
and evenly, and dozed again, seeing a succession of images rather
than real dreams—Scott Krum’s face stark and startled in the light
of the camera, Dakota insisting she’d seen a ghost in the glare of
the headlights—I’ll have to tell her she saw Kenneth, Jean thought.
And that the ghost she did see, Seonaid, was perhaps running toward
him, Tormod’s descendant . . .

Jean opened her eyes to see the room filled
with a thin silvery light, sunshine veiled by clouds sparkling with
ice crystals. Alasdair sat on the edge of the bed staring dully at
his kilt and jacket hanging from the handle of the wardrobe. Dougie
sat on the foot of the bed having his morning bath, each lick loud
in a silence deep as that of the MacDonald mausoleum.

Jean and Alasdair washed and dressed. Halfway
downstairs, he detoured for a word with Nicolson. If anyone
deserved coffee, Jean thought, Nicolson did. But it was like the
flight attendant’s instructions on an airplane—if you didn’t apply
your own oxygen mask first, you weren’t going to be helping anyone
else with theirs.

The dining room stood empty, the expanse of
the table swept clean and polished into a mirror. “Nancy? Rab?”
Alasdair pushed through the pantry door and a minute later called,
“Everyone’s still sleeping. Let’s be making our own breakfast.”

The cheery lemon-yellow kitchen shone, light
and bright, despite the wan morning. And clean, too. No wonder
Nancy wasn’t up yet. She’d probably been up until four a.m.
scrubbing the tiles with a toothbrush. Even the remotes for the
television and its related systems were lined up like soldiers on
parade.

Alasdair pulled bread out of the breadbox and
removed the lid from the butter dish. Jean pounced on the sleek
stainless-steel coffee maker that ground its own beans. So where
were the beans? Not in the first two cabinets, not in a tier of
drawers, not in the plastic garbage bin set into its own alcove
beneath the counter and emitting a faint vapor of meat scraps, fish
scales, and dog food. “Surely Gilnockie had the rubbish bins in the
kitchen yard searched for the killer’s gloves.”

“Aye, that he did. No joy.”

“Why’d the killer ditch the gloves but not
the knife? Ah, here we go, coffee beans. Or do you want tea?”

“Either’s fine.”

She inhaled deeply, the aroma not only
helping to wake her up but overriding the garbage bin’s reminder
that all flesh must pass. “Alasdair, what sort of alibis do Rab and
Nancy have for the time of the murder? I mean, they told Gilnockie
they were here in the kitchen, but did Fergie or anyone see
them?”

Frowning, searching his data-storage banks,
Alasdair slipped the bread into the toaster oven. “Fergie welcomed
Greg and Tina, then went straight to his office and sat there with
his papers and his music ’til he heard you calling. That’s when he
came into the kitchen. If one of the Finlays is the killer, then
the other’s either covering or denying, eh?”

“You expect to go out on a limb for your
spouse.”

“There are those who’d be chuffed sawing it
off beneath him. Or her.”

“True.” Bracing herself on the edge of the
counter, Jean watched the black elixir stream down into the coffee
pot and told herself to be patient, that drinking straight from the
nozzle would be counter-productive . . . there. A cup, coffee,
milk—the morning was looking better.

She and Alasdair sat down at the table and
the door opened. Fergie peered around its edge like a groundhog on
February second. “I thought I smelled coffee. Lovely. How’d our
ancestors ever get up and going of a morning without coffee or tea,
I ask you?”

Alasdair’s glance at Jean intersected hers at
him. Here was their chance to add that last straw to Fergie’s
burden. Better them than anyone else, though—even Gilnockie’s
gentle touch could only go so far.

Fergie sat down with coffee and toast. “I’ll
have Nancy organize a fry-up soon as may be. Comfort food.”

Jean’s stomach was uneasy enough without
filling it with bacon, sausage, eggs, and bread drenched in salty
grease. She managed something noncommittal.

What Alasdair had no stomach for was waffle,
friend or no old friend. “Did you know, Fergie, that you had Greg’s
father’s dirk hanging in your front hall?”

“No,” Fergie replied, it apparently not
occurring to him he’d already answered that question.

“Good job you looked out into the kitchen
yard just as Kenneth walked by.”