Alasdair reappeared just as the fluorescent letters on the bedside clock confirmed the sitting room clock’s twelve tinkling strokes. Midnight wasn’t necessarily the witching hour.
Jean peered out from the heaped bedclothes like a mummy from her wrappings while he paced into the bathroom, face taut, lips tight. So things hadn’t gone well at the crime scene.
Closing the academic journal she hadn’t been reading, she put it and her glasses on the bedside table. Dougie was curled up beside her leg, doing his imitation of an anchor. But Alasdair didn’t try to evict the cat when he slipped into the bed and switched off the light.
Jean blinked at the surrounding darkness—ah, good, a glow leaked between the window curtains—and turned to her beloved. It was like snuggling up to a marble statue and she broke out in gooseflesh. Served him right for all his cracks about her cold feet. “You’re frozen.”
“Oh aye,” he replied on toothpaste-scented breath. “I was not meaning to stay so long at the scene, but Patrick . . .”
She waited.
“I do not know what’s come over the man. He’s gone distant, in a way. His wife left him a decade ago, before I ever met him, so it’s not that.”
Ouch, Jean thought. “Maybe he’s burned out, like you were.”
“When I was burning out, I worked all the harder.”
“I noticed,” Jean said. “What happened at the scene?”
“Nothing’s happened, that’s the problem. Patrick’s waiting for daylight and the pathologist’s reports, forensics, and all. And Tina needs questioning. For all we’re knowing, Greg’s been getting death threats more direct than the one Urquhart made Fergie. I stopped outside the Queen suite just now, and put my ear to the door like the worst sort of sneak, and heard Tina’s voice but could not hear the words. She was speaking on the phone, I reckon. It’s by way of being morning Down Under.” He was starting to warm up, becoming flesh and blood once again.
Speaking of which . . . “A couple of things have happened here. I met the Green Lady on the staircase, and she’s no wee bit ghostie. It must be true what they say about Skye, it’s half in the Otherworld. Plus I found a note in the pocket of Diana’s—I think it’s Diana’s—raincoat.” Jean filled in the details, cooperated with Alasdair’s interrogation, and finally lay silently while the mills of his intelligence and experience ground exceedingly fine, but, as yet, produced nothing.
Dougie stood up, yawned, and moved to a spot at the foot of the bed. He kneaded the duvet, plucking it with his claws, and settled down again.
Last night he’d found himself shut into the sitting room listening to the rhythmic squeaks of the ancient four-poster. Jean and Alasdair hadn’t accomplished their purpose without pausing half a dozen times to laugh—no matter what arrangement they’d attempted, the bed squeaked. That left the room something to be desired as a honeymoon suite, although with those same thick walls, neither squeaks nor ensuing laughter would dampen the honeymooners’ enthusiasm.
A murder, now, that was a damper.
Tonight Jean dozed off yet again in Alasdair’s arms, this time fully clothed and chilled rather than sweaty, and woke repeatedly with images of hackled bonnets, cornflower blue eyes, and bloodstained shingle clinging to her mind. When she at last fell soundly asleep, she dreamed the same images and more, struggling through faceless shapes holding flashlights.
The beam of one flashlight pierced her eyelids, sending a flare of crimson across her vision—blood, fire, and swords gleaming . . . She opened her eyes to see a thin ray of sun stretching from the gap between the curtains and hitting her in the face.
Not just morning, but also sunlight, what a concept. And either the ambrosial aroma of coffee hung on the still, cold air, or her caffeine receptors were going into withdrawal.
With an insistent meow, Dougie hopped up onto the bed. At least he hadn’t waked her with a claw in one nostril, as he’d once done. She crawled to her feet and dispensed cat comestibles.
Alasdair rolled out of the bed, saying, “It’s gone nine” with resignation rather than disapproval. There were nights when quantity of sleep had to make up for quality.
They walked warily down the turnpike stair, finding no Green Ladies in residence. Nor was Sanjay Thomson still guarding the entrance hall—only the hooks showed where the two dirks had hung. Jean hoped that Gilnockie’s forensics team had worked late rather than started early, allowing the constable to go home for the night.
Chafing dishes lined the sideboard in the dining room, steaming with sausage, bacon, eggs, kippers, baked beans, grilled mushrooms, and tomatoes. Racks held crispy if cold pieces of toast beside bowls mounded with butter, jam, and marmalade. It was all insulation against the cold, like the sumptuous dinners, Jean supposed, although considering those dinners, she’d just as soon have had a bowl of porridge this morning.
A tea pot and a coffee pot sat on the table beneath cozies shaped like a chicken and a pumpkin, respectively. As befit their national origins, Jean took coffee and Alasdair tea.
They didn’t eat alone, not with all the eagle-eyed soldiers looking down from the surrounding photos—especially the third man with Allan and Fergie Mor, whose bunched eyebrows indicated that he was either facing the sun or he had sensed his dirk would one day serve as a murder weapon.
Jean shifted her gaze to the tall windows, which now revealed a shimmering vista of gold and green land, gray stone, and blue sky with clouds like smears of whipped cream. Her feet twitched eagerly. No surprise that a trio of empty plates occupied one end of the table, along with the dregs of two coffees and one cocoa. The Krums were already up and about.
Jean was draining her second cup of life-affirming liquid into a grease-lined stomach when Nancy Finlay bustled through the swinging door, Rab at her heels less bustling than dawdling with broom and dustpan. “Good morning,” she said. “I’ll be clearing away now.”
“We’ve got the polis in the old kitchen,” said Rab, in such a dark tone Jean expected him to add, “and we’re phoning the exterminator.”
“That puir Mrs. MacLeod,” Nancy said, “putting up such a brave front, coming down for breakfast and then not eating more than a bittie toast, and here’s me making her up a nice plate of bacon and sausages and sitting down to keep her company.”
Jean’s gaze glanced off Alasdair’s. No surprise Tina might find sausage, bacon, and small talk a little hard to stomach. Although, once again, Nancy meant well.
“Fancy,” Nancy went on, “paying guests and now the polis at Dunasheen, poking and prying. I’m afeart it canna be helped.”
“The old laird, Fergus’s uncle, he’s likely birling in his grave,” concluded Rab.
At least Jean and Alasdair weren’t paying guests themselves, although their raison d’etre was to create more of the same. “Where is the old laird’s grave?” she asked.
“In the graveyard at Kinlochroy.” Nancy stacked plates so briskly they pealed like bells.
“No one’s buried at St. Columcille’s? The new—newish—chapel?”
“Not a bit of it, no.” Rab seized coffee and tea pots. “Not a proper church, is it now? Never consecrated, not after the murder and all, though it’s registered for weddings, no worries there.”
Jean and Alasdair had chosen the chapel and an Episcopal priest for a religious ceremony not only to reflect their own family traditions, but because a civil wedding lacked any resonance of the history, mystery, and myth that had drawn them together to begin with . . . “What murder?” she asked, just as Alasdair asked, “What murder?”
Rab answered with a scowl. “That was a right scandal, the laird ordering all the pernickety, papish, carved bits for his church, and the apprentice stone mason outdoing his master, and the master that jealous he stitched him up for the murder of the laird’s wife, or so it’s said.”
“There’s a similar legend associated with Rosslyn Chapel in the Borders,” Jean replied. “Was she murdered in the chapel?”
“No, no, they found her here at the house, on the staircase, strangled by a strong pair of hands, like those of a stonemason.”
“Or those of someone with a right good temper.” Alasdair cocked an eyebrow at Jean, daring her to guess just which staircase had seen the dreadful deed.
“That story’s not half fancies and lies,” Nancy stated, and headed for the pantry. “Off we go, Rab. It’s the last day of the year and the house is wanting a thorough clean.”
Making a face at her back, Rab followed. The door swayed back and forth and stopped.
“Oh boy.” Jean met the flare in Alasdair’s eye with a flash of her own. “The chapel is Gothic Revival, meant to evoke a medieval Catholic church, what the good Presbyterians of Skye would call ‘papish.’ It had to have been built in the early 1800s. The Green Lady’s wearing clothes from the early 1800s. Greg said his ancestor Tormod was transported in 1822.”
“You’re thinking Seonaid MacDonald, the Green Lady, was murdered? And that Tormod was the apprentice? But if it’s known he was framed . . .” He pushed back from the table. “No need to go manufacturing a case from whole cloth. We’ve already got one. Let’s have ourselves a visit to the incident room.”
He led the way down the back hall, past the new kitchen with its contemporary stainless steel, to the old with its soot-stained stone vault. Jean kept herself from ducking—the ceiling wasn’t that low—as she stepped down a short staircase onto linoleum that a century or so ago had been stylish and trendy.
Two electric bulbs dangled like spiders from the ribs of the vault, emitting a tentative glow. No surprise a couple of police people were setting up not only tables, chairs, and computers, but also lamps. An electric kettle stood amid a collection of mugs and tea bags beside a stone sink big enough for Dakota Krum to bathe in. On the far side of the room, looking very small and lost, Fergie inspected a bulletin board set in the maw of a vast fireplace. Alasdair made a deliberate right-face away from Fergie, picking his way over cables and cords toward two windows like super-sized arrow slits.
Below them, Gilnockie and his sergeant, Lesley Young, sat across from Tina MacLeod. They’d obviously tried to make her as comfortable as possible, with a cushion on her folding chair and a cup and saucer on the plastic tabletop before her. Still, she sat in a nervous huddle, limbs knotted, curls springing in all direction, leopard-skin coat draped over her swaying shoulders like a gutted pelt hung out to dry. “. . . no threats,” she was saying, her voice featureless as the Nullarbor Plain. “No problems at all. He had the museum, meetings with planning commissions, receptions, golf holidays—loads of exciting things. Even the genealogy was exciting to him. He was a happy man.”
Gilnockie acknowledged Alasdair’s presence with a grave nod, then leaned back in his chair, at ease. An old briar pipe would have completed his image, except Gilnockie’s lips were too thin, too ascetic, to grasp something so self-indulgent. “You arrived here at a quarter past three. Then what?”
Tina didn’t seem to notice the newcomers. “Greg took himself off to the church.”
“Was he meeting someone there?”
“Not so he told me, no.”
“Did he seem to be in a rush, as though he had an appointment?”
“He was driving too fast for those roads. They’re no more than bitumen laid over sheep paths. But then, he’s, he always drove too fast. Ken used to say—Ken, he . . .” Tina stopped, and pressed her pale, almost gray, lips so tightly together her chin looked like a prune.
After a moment, Gilnockie asked, “What did Ken say?”
After another moment, Tina replied, “No matter, not anymore.”
Young’s limp dishwater-brown hair was scooped carelessly back, ends straggling beside her lean, keen face with its pointed chin. Her hand and arm close to the torso of her button-down blouse and jacket, as though defending herself, she held up Greg’s cell phone. It was one of those so sophisticated it probably brushed teeth. “You took the phone from Greg’s pocket whilst he was lying dead on the beach.”
“I don’t remember picking it up, but there it was in my pocket.”
“Bits of the phone’s memory have been erased,” said Young. “There’s no record of activity before the three calls made late last night to Australian numbers.”
“It’s Greg’s phone. He could take photos and text and the lot. All I can do is make calls.”
“There are no texts here,” Young pointed out, “Only photos of your relations.”
“Who did you phone last night, Mrs. MacLeod?” Alasdair asked.
Young sent a sharp, almost hostile glance up at him. Gilnockie said nothing, his calm gaze remaining on Tina’s face.
Her red, swollen eyes, embedded in dark pouches large enough for koala embryos, looked up at Alasdair, then back at Gilnockie. “I phoned the family in Townsville. A friend in Sydney. And Kenneth, Greg’s brother. I had to tell him myself. I couldn’t let him read it in the papers.” Tina picked up her cup, stared at it, then let it crash down to the tabletop. Her face twisted. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you, Mrs. MacLeod. Lesley, escort her back upstairs, please.” Gilnockie stood up, leaving Young to grasp Tina’s shoulders and maneuver her to the door as though she was loading furniture on a truck. As soon as she was out of earshot he added, “Poor woman. Dreadful state she’s in.”
Alasdair’s eyebrows tightened, creating the vertical cogitational crease that Jean knew only too well. But he offered no opinions about Tina, Young, or Gilnockie himself, who gestured toward the bulletin board where Fergie still stood. “We’ve downloaded the photos from your camera and printed them out. The others are coming in. There’s nothing from forensics just yet. Mrs. Finlay’s saying she doesn’t have enough hands to be dusting the weapons in the front hall every few moments, and she’s got no idea when the dirk disappeared, and not to trouble her when she has cleaning and cooking to see to. Rab was saying the same thing, if more, ah, assertively.”
Jean could hear them, muttering about the good old days when assisting the police in their inquiries wasn’t part of their job description. “What did Diana say?”
“We haven’t interviewed Diana yet. She’s running errands.”
“But you’re thinking the dirk’s the murder weapon?” asked Alasdair.
“That’s my theory just now. The postmortem shows that Greg was stabbed twice by a blade eighteen inches long, a right-handed person striking from below. He died instantly.” Pulling a pen from his pocket, Gilnockie mimed two thrusts into Alasdair’s chest.
“None of this clumsy overhand business like you see in the cinema, then,” said Alasdair. “That’s flashy, but not as quick or as effective.”
Visualizing the famous shower scene in Psycho, Jean nodded. “So the killer was very efficient. Someone who’d had military training, maybe?”
“I beg your pardon?” Gilnockie turned a puzzled glance toward her.
But Alasdair had learned to follow—not her train, her carnival ride—of thought. With something between a grimace and he grin, both quickly suppressed, he produced from his own pocket the small white square of a business card. “Jean found this bittie paper in a raincoat hanging by the back door. It looks to be someone was making an appointment for the time and near the place of the murder. The ‘CU’ might be a chap named Colin Urquhart, who supposedly’s an ex-soldier.”
Fergie was turning away from the bulletin board, too far away to hear Alasdair’s “supposedly,” which was ordinary police-speak but which did cast doubt on Fergie’s information. Jean moved to intercept him, hoping to keep him too far away to hear Diana’s name. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, Jean. Lovely day, isn’t it? I told you we’d be seeing the sun yet.” His amiable smile lit only the bottom half of his face. His eyes still reflected the photos, the harsh, cold light of camera flashes illuminating a harsh, cold scene.
“Yes, you did. Beautiful day. Have the Krums gone out already?”
“They’re having a look round, yes. And Diana’s away to Kinlochroy for a few last-minute items for the old-fashioned Hogmanay festivities tonight.”
He didn’t have to market to her. Jean knew that “old-fashioned” was relative—the Scottish tourist industry was creating traditions as fast as it could—but he was just defaulting to his usual spiel. “When was St. Columcille’s built?”
“It was completed in 1822. The designer meant to leave it unfinished, all the better to suggest a medieval ruin, but the laird at the time, Norman MacDonald—Norman the Red, he was called—he had it completed, if not quite to his original scheme. That was seen locally as too Catholic. I suppose it’s not a proper folly, even if we do hold weddings there.” Fergie’s smile seeped upward.
Jean seemed to hear the whir of spinning wheels and the clank of looms. They might not be manufacturing a second case at all. “Rab was telling us . . .”
“Fergus!” called a peremptory male voice.
Jean and Fergie looked around to see Pritchard gesticulating from the door.
“Now what?” Fergie asked the air. “If you’ll excuse me, Jean . . .”
“Oh!” she exclaimed as a neuron fired, stinging her memory. “I’ve been meaning to ask you if you’ve got a baby crib. A baby cot. My friends from Edinburgh have to bring their little girl. She’s just six months old, so they don’t need anything elaborate.”
“A little girl?” Fergie’s smile swept over his face and down his body, so that he wriggled like a delighted puppy. “Wonderful! Tell them the lass is welcome to the family cradle. And you, Jean, you’re welcome to my computer—it’s switched on and booted up.”
“Fergus!” called Pritchard. “The reporters have got at the Americans.”
With a glance toward Gilnockie and Alasdair, Fergie started toward the door. “Thanks,” Jean called after him, and wondered what was up with Scott and Heather, not to mention Dakota, another little girl. It wasn’t as though they knew anything about the case. All they knew was the laird and his daughter.
The stately home murder. Stately homicide. Great.
The blip and whir of electronics contrasted with the voices echoing off the vaulted ceiling and from the void of the fireplace. The hearth still held traces of ash and bits of charcoal from fires long dead. Supposedly ashes cleaned out of the household fireplaces on New Year’s Eve could be read like tea leaves, foreseeing the future. But Jean saw nothing—unless the future was dark.
She tried visualizing Alasdair’s charcoal gray Argyll jacket, the one he wore with his kilt for special occasions. Like the dinner party where they’d first connected. Like his upcoming wedding.
He took a step away from Gilnockie. “Well then, Patrick . . .”
“I’m just joining the team at the beach—the sunlight’s a blessing, no doubt of it—I’d be obliged if you’d come along as well. At the back gate in five minutes, eh?” He ambled toward the coat rack beside the outside door, stopping en route to inspect and approve each assembled work station.
Alasdair stared after him, his expression no doubt intended to be inscrutable. Jean drifted toward him. “For once you’re trying to give up the police work and you can’t get rid of it. And I was worried you’d be clashing antlers with him.”
Alasdair’s eyes narrowed in irritation, but they were still turned toward Gilnockie.
“If you’re at the beach you can avoid Fergie. And Diana—she’s gone to Kinlochroy, cutting through the reporters like an icebreaker. You heard what Pritchard said about the Krums, right?”
“I’m afraid so.” His irritated gleam shifted to the door leading to the main house. So many fires to put out, so little time. And his hoses and axes mothballed. Decisively, he headed up the flight of steps, Jean matching him stride for stride.
In the hallway, she said, “I’m going to check out some things on Fergie’s computer. And I’ll take the phone, please, so I can check in with the reserve troops in Edinburgh. I’ll meet you at the old church in what? An hour? We can walk back by the new one—which, by the way, was built in 1822.”
“I’m not surprised.” Alasdair pulled the phone from his pocket and handed it over. “Half past eleven at the old church,” he said, and almost managed to get away before she caught his shake of the head and roll of the eye. But she did catch them, and indulged in her own shake and roll at his disappearing back.
Then a crash and a woman’s harsh shout sliced through the silence.