The Blue Hackle (43 page)

Well no, Jean thought, the Krums hadn’t been
marinating in Scottish accents like she had.

“Rab Finlay.” Alasdair’s hands remained
clasped on the table, but his tone was enough of a pointing finger.
“He made an appointment with Greg, to show him the gravestones—and
the dirk—and likely telling him he could organize a word with
Fergie about the estate itself. But Rab was meaning instead to take
Greg’s measure as a threat.”

“Meaning to kill him?” The faint sheen of
bronze, his genetic tan, was ebbing from Thomson’s face, but he
didn’t shy away from the facts.

“That’s a question for the jury, not for
us.”

Jean could see the scene, Rab grim and tense,
and Greg’s ready laugh inadvertently pushing Rab over the edge.

“Rab and Nancy know we’re struggling to make
a go of the place,” said Diana. “We might have taken Greg’s offer,
if with some plan to stay on as managers ourselves.”

“Someone did kill Greg to stop him from
getting something,” Jean said. “To stop him from getting Dunasheen
itself. Rab didn’t kill the goose laying the golden eggs. He killed
the man who would deprive them of the goose, the eggs, and the
nest, too.”

“Rab came away from the pub in good time to
be meeting Greg,” said Thomson. “I saw him myself, stopping for a
word with the American lass, Dakota—she’d dropped a scrap of paper,
I’m thinking—and then buttoning his coat and pulling on his
gloves.”

Alasdair picked up the story. “His mind
muddled by beer or whisky . . .”

Scotch courage
, Jean thought.

“. . . Rab went walking through the kitchen
yard into the gardens. If Fergie’d seen him, he’d have thought
nothing of it. Rab’s job was to go walking about the place. Save
Kenneth was just behind him. And Rab did not know that.”

“It was Rab I saw, then. I should have known,
his raincoat’s big as a tent. But it was gey murky with the mizzle
and . . .” Colin choked. Again, Diana took his hand.

“Rab took the knife but left the sheath,”
Jean suggested, “so Fergie or Diana wouldn’t notice it was gone. He
didn’t throw it into the sea—it had belonged to Fergus Mor in the
good old days, and it would be worth a bundle to a collector of
military memorabilia. He intended to retrieve it, clean it, and put
it back in the sheath. But Diana did notice. So did Dakota.”

“I reckon,” said Colin faintly, “Rab never
thought it all out, not like that. Likely he found himself standing
on the beach holding a bloody knife and the man’s body . . .”

Diana’s fingers knotted with his. “That’s why
Nancy was slow to say she saw Kenneth in the yard. Whether or not
she knew that Rab intended to meet Greg, let alone kill him, by the
time she was interviewed she knew what he’d done. And she was
dealing with it, as she’s always dealt. Practical. Pragmatic.”

“Nancy befriended Tina,” Jean said, “to find
out how much Tina knew about Greg meeting Rab. She might even have
planted the suggestion that Tina let herself down from the window
to escape the murderer, hoping she’d fall—but that’s going out on a
limb.”

Alasdair said, “I’ll get onto Gilnockie.
We’ll be needing a show of force when we go confronting Rab. And
hard evidence, more than all this supposition, sensible as it
is.”

“More than any statement I could be making,
eh?” Colin asked.

No one answered. Alasdair reached for his
phone. “The crime scene reports, Thomson. What have you got
there?”

Thomson was staring bleakly off into the
distance, probably watching a turret of his childhood castle
subside into the sea—how often had Nancy given him and the other
village lads cookies . . . Jerked back to the present, he flipped
open the folder. “Aye. The reports. What footprints we’ve got
aren’t at all definitive, save there are muckle ones of large
boots, and Rab’s are the largest.”

“His job is walking around the estate,” Jean
reminded him.

“Aye, but when the boffins went comparing
prints to boots, Rab’s were the only ones that were clean. Everyone
else’s had some muck in the treads, but not his.”

“Nancy’s cleaned them, then,” Diana said.
“She had ample time to clean them.”

“That’s all well and good, but it’s still no
more than circumstantial.” Alasdair punched buttons on the phone.
Thomson considered another page of the report. Diana wilted against
Colin’s shoulder and no doubt considered the ramifications,
Dunasheen left without any staff at all, for one.

Jean remembered Rab standing beside Greg’s
body, saying, “No good will come of that.” No wonder he’d spoken
with such conviction, and resentment as well, with Greg’s blood
staining his boots. But then, she, Alasdair, and Thomson might have
traces of Greg’s blood on their footwear. If Nancy had just left
well enough alone Rab could have claimed that he, too, had picked
up blood droplets when he came to move the body. And the same would
go for droplets on his . . .

“Raincoat,” Jean said. “Rab was wearing a
raincoat and gloves when he left the pub, right?”

“Right,” said Thomson.

“And he was wearing his raincoat when you saw
him, Colin?”

“Right,” Colin said.

“But when he came down to the beach with
Irvine, he wasn’t wearing a raincoat. He left it at the house so
Nancy could clean it off, too. And he wasn’t wearing gloves,
either. He dumped them somewhere.”

“Patrick,” Alasdair said into the phone.
“We’re needing you at Dunasheen soon as may be—the reports,
Thomson, aye, reinforcements—you’re on your way, then? Good.”

Just below the crisp notes of Alasdair’s
voice, Jean heard something else, a rattle of bones in the wardrobe
of her mind, or the clatter of billiard balls across
it—traditionally billiard balls were bone-ivory . . . She focused
on a Christmas card hanging between Colin and Diana, one depicting
a traditional robin-redbreast. And her mouth went dry.

Last night, Dakota Krum had been standing on
the other side of the Christmas tree, just beyond a robin ornament,
while Jean and Alasdair discussed Pritchard and the business card.
Dakota had asked about it. Ever since then, the child had been
looking at them as though trying to make up her mind to say
something. As though deciding whether to crawl out once again on
the limb of witness, when her first foray out there had left her
hanging on by her fingernails.

“Sanjay,” Jean said, hearing her own voice go
sharp. “Rab was in the pub Wednesday afternoon at the same time as
the Krums?”

“Aye. Well, the mother and the father were
coming and going, but the lass was sitting there with her
book.”

“She dropped her bookmark or something and
Rab picked it up as he was leaving. Or did
he
drop a scrap
of paper, and
she
picked it up?”

Thomson frowned. “Maybe it was the other way
round, aye, Rab dropping a bittie white scrap from his pocket as he
went pulling out his gloves, and her handing it to him. I didna
know I was playing witness, or I’d have had a closer look.”

Focus, woman, focus!
Jean said slowly,
meticulously, “What if it was Greg’s business card that fell from
Rab’s pocket, just as it did again, later on, in the parking area?
What if Dakota saw it? Gilnockie asked her parents about the card,
not her. Last night, though, she asked Alasdair and me about
it.”

Every eye around the table, from Thomson’s
dark brown through Alasdair’s, Colin’s, and Diana’s shades and
temperatures of blue, snapped toward Jean and widened.

“Rab does not know the results of the tests
on the boots,” said Alasdair. “He does not know that we’ve found
the truth of his and Nancy’s embezzling, or that we’ve found Colin,
come to that, and that Colin saw the murder. He’s likely thinking
the only evidence we have against him is his having that card in
his pocket—when he’s made a formal statement he knew nothing about
it.”

Horror oozed like cold jelly down Jean’s
back. “In other words, what if Rab thinks Dakota’s testimony is the
only thing that can put him in jail?”

“Who’d go harming a child?” asked Colin.

“A man,” Alasdair answered, “who’s already
killed.”

After a long moment in which the words
fibrillated above the table, Diana ventured, “Her mum and dad have
never left her alone.”

“Yeah, when she wanted to walk in the garden
they asked me to go with her.” Jean’s horror ebbed on a long
breath. It’s all right . . .

The phone, still in Alasdair’s hand, rang. He
jabbed at it. “Fergie?”

Fergie’s voice emanated from the tiny
speaker, whetted by agitation. “The dogs, they’ve found a pair of
bloody gloves just outside the courtyard—Alasdair, what if they
broke loose from Diana on Wednesday because they, well, animals
have ESP, you know—they sensed the murder, and they scented the
killer’s gloves and found them and brought them back here.” He
gulped. “Alasdair, they’re Rab Finlay’s gloves, fleece-lined
leather, Nancy’s brother sent them.”

“Fergie,” Alasdair demanded. “Where’s the
lass, Dakota?”

“Odd you should ask. Her parents went
upstairs and she was sitting here in the library—I saw her not half
an hour ago—but she’s not here now. I don’t know where she’s
gone.”

Jean’s horror came roaring back like a
tsunami, swamping her every sense.
Dakota!

Alasdair was on his feet, waving the others
toward the door. She stumbled after him, then spun around and threw
her twenty-pound note back down onto the table.

“Find her,” Alasdair was saying. “Get
McCrummin from the incident room—Nicolson’s off duty, damn and
blast—find Rab and Nancy as well. Here’s Jean.”

Thrusting the phone into Jean’s hands,
Alasdair threw open the door of their car and had the engine
started before she’d scrambled in beside him.

From the phone in her hand came Fergie’s
breathless voice, “Nancy’s upstairs, Rab’s round the back . . . Is
it Rab, then? How could—oh God, when I came into the kitchen to get
help with Greg he was just taking off his coat, breathing hard—I
thought he’d just come from the pub—oh God, it was Rab, wasn’t it?
Oh God.”

And the phone went dead.

Jean let go of the phone, hung onto her
seatbelt with both hands, and watched with slitted eyes and gritted
teeth as the mist-covered landscape sped by on either side of the
car. Thank goodness it was Alasdair driving, hands locked on the
wheel and eyes hotter and brighter than the headlights he’d
switched on.

Thomson’s vehicle and then Diana’s followed
close behind. The one time Jean glanced in the side mirror she saw
them rising and falling along the narrow, winding, bumpy road like
ships on an angry sea. She winced, swallowed a rush of nausea, and
didn’t look again.

Ahead, a sheep stood on the very edge of the
pavement. Alasdair hit the horn, a bleat like that of a
super-charged goat split the air, and the sheep looked around. The
passing car almost shaved him more closely than the best shearer
and he scrambled away.

The sparkle in the sunlight was fading, and
the light itself growing gray and dull. How did people live in this
part of the world before artificial light? Jean wondered. They must
have developed huge eyes, like amphibians living in caverns.

And she wondered what they’d find back at
Dunasheen—surely not bodies scattered all over, like in the last
scene of
Hamlet
. Please, no, no more bodies. “Fergie just
dropped the phone is all,” she said.

“Right.” The dashboard lights sketched
Alasdair’s features in harsh shadow and shine.

Suddenly the houses of Kinlochroy leaped from
the gloom. Two or three people watched slack-jawed from the
sidewalk and a couple of others lifted their window curtains as the
cars sped through the village and, brakes squealing, stopped in
front of Dunasheen’s gates.

They were closed. And, Alasdair and Jean
discovered when they bailed out of the car and pushed at them,
locked. Thomson ran up and trained his flashlight on the black
ironwork, revealing a massive padlock and a length of even more
massive chain.

Where were Scott Krum’s lockpicking skills
when you needed them?

Here came Diana, Colin at her side. “Father
told Pritchard, and Rab as well, to lock the gates if there’s no
constable on duty.”

Colin threw his weight against them. They
rattled as forlornly as the shackles on transported prisoners.
Beyond the iron tracery, through the darkening, thickening mist,
the house seemed no more than dense shadow, not showing even the
one lighted window of a Gothic novel.

Alasdair went right, to where the wall
enclosing Dunasheen ended at the sea strand. Colin went left,
toward the driveway leading back to the chapel. Thomson said, “I
radioed Orla . . .”

“Who?” asked Diana.

“W.P.C. McCrummin when she’s at home.”

She wasn’t at home, thought Jean. She’d been
called out on a murder case.

“She’s saying the generator packed up,”
Thomson went on. “Fergus’s phone is a portable with a base unit,
eh? That’s why he was cut off, I reckon.”

I hope
, Jean thought for everyone.

“Orla’s got a torch, she’s searching the
place for Dakota and for Fergus as well. Have you got a key to the
gate, Diana?”

“I went off without one, they’re huge,
Victorian slabs . . . Half a tick. Your aunt’s got one on display.
I’ll knock her up.” Diana sprinted into the village, her hair
streaming back from her face so that she looked like a ship’s
figurehead.

“Right.” Stowing his flashlight in his
jacket, using the decorative curlicues as foot and hand holds,
Thomson clambered up the gate, straddled the top, and dropped down
on the far side. “Haven’t done that since I was a lad,” he said and
raced up the driveway.

Jean, the fifth wheel, stood alone in the
dusk. Her own breath wasn’t just visible, it was audible in the
sudden silence . . . Footsteps scrabbled along the shore. Far away,
like the report of a gun, a door slammed. Alasdair reappeared
inside the gate just as Diana pelted back from the village. “Brenda
answered my knock straightaway, she’s coming as well, here you
are.”