Dakota stood still, her expression swinging between puzzlement and alarm.
Her folks are gonna love this. Jean whipped out the phone and punched Thomson’s number. Kudos to Alasdair for thinking of programming the phone with that, otherwise they’d have to run down to the beach looking for him—and for Gilnockie, okay, it was still his case.
The readout displayed the time. 11:45. Where was Alasdair, anyway?
“P.C. Thomson.”
“This is Jean Fairbairn. Are you with Alasdair and Inspector Gilnockie?”
“Oh aye, that I am, if you’d like . . .”
“I’ve found the—well, the missing regimental dirk, not necessarily the murd—” She saw Dakota’s ears growing like Dumbo’s beneath her earmuffs. “It’s with the grave slabs in that shed next to the old church. Y’all need to get up here ASAP.”
“Aye, madam, I’ll spread the . . .”
Word, Jean concluded, when Thomson ended the call a bit too quickly. News. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket, she peered once again into the shed. Was that mud on the knife blade or the dark rust-red of blood?
Now Dakota’s eyes were growing larger, the mind behind them evaluating acceptable responses. Jean told her, “Let’s go around to the other side of the church, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Are you getting cold?”
“A little.”
A minute ago, Jean would have said the same thing. Now, if she unbuttoned her coat a cloud of steam would escape. “We’ll go back to the house as soon as the others get here.”
“Okay.” And, after a moment punctuated by the brush of grass against denim, Dakota said rather than asked, “The man who died, he was killed.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe with that knife. That’s what the police have to find out. Okay?”
Well, no, it wasn’t, but . . . a shadow ran swiftly over Jean’s face. She looked up, but saw nothing. A bird must have come between her and the sun. It wasn’t a blip in reality.
Dakota was looking not up but down. Jean followed the direction of her gaze.
From this side of the church, they could see into the ravine separating the hillside shelf from the steep slope leading to the lighthouse. The bridge spanning the rocky stream at the ravine’s bottom was identical to the one spanning the moat at the old castle, as though Fergie’s uncle, the old laird, had found them at a two-for-one sale.
And just as Jean and Alasdair had stood on the one bridge yesterday evening, this morning Diana and Colin Urquhart stood on the other. Except this couple wasn’t sharing a joke but a passionate kiss, the silk scarf tied around her blond hair tucked in close to his dark tam o’shanter. They couldn’t have been entwined any more closely if they’d been wearing the same coat.
But they weren’t. Diana’s coat was a beautiful lilac tweed. Colin’s was a bulky camouflage jacket . . . that’s what he’d been wearing when Jean saw him last night, a black hooded sweatshirt beneath a military jacket treated with waterproofing and fire retardant chemicals that shimmered in the light.
Clasped together, they swayed back and forth as if to silent music, oblivious to their audience. Colin, Jean saw, knew his way around Dunasheen’s daughter as well. She was going to have to reassess that “vestal virgin.”
Dakota asked, “Are they having sex?”
“No, they aren’t!” Jean grasped the child’s narrow shoulders and this time spun her quickly toward the church wall with its empty, bird-nested windows. “Look there, see how the stones in the wall aren’t too well dressed, they’re still kind of lumpy, except for the ones at the corners, which are squared off, they’re called quoins.”
“Dressed? Coins?”
From the corner of her eye, Jean saw a human figure duck back into the exit of the smaller garden path, the one leading from the kitchen yard. Pritchard? The shape was masculine, and too slender to be Rab’s. Had he been afraid she and Dakota would steal the totem pole? Or was he keeping an eye out for Diana?
Here came the cops up the brae from the beach, Gilnockie and Alasdair at point. Here came Diana and Colin up from the bridge, walking a demure three feet apart. Maybe no one had been home at the lighthouse when Thomson knocked on the door this morning. Maybe no one had answered the knock. Or maybe . . . surely the constable hadn’t lied, but then, he was Diana’s childhood friend and Colin’s defender, not an impartial observer.
Now Thomson, Young, and two white-suited crime scene technicians beelined for the shed while Gilnockie and Alasdair beelined for Jean.
Spotting the advancing police people, Colin stopped. He put one foot behind the other as if about to spin around and run. Diana shot a level glance from Jean and Dakota to Gilnockie and Alasdair. She settled her mesh shopping bag on her left arm and took Colin’s hand with her right. Victoria couldn’t have claimed Albert with any more dignity.
“What’s wrong with his face?” asked Dakota.
Good question. Half of Colin’s face was set in handsome, symmetrical lines. The other half consisted of taut patches of scar tissue. As Diana drew him closer to the others, Jean saw that his good eye was the same startling cornflower blue as hers. But Colin’s other eye glinted dully from a nest of shattered flesh.
No telling what scars laced the body beneath clothing that Jean now saw was too large, the coat hanging off his shoulders, the trouser legs sagging over scuffed military boots. He’d lost weight. A long grueling hospital stay would do that. As for the cause . . . “He was hurt in the war,” Jean whispered, but Dakota, staring in horrified fascination, didn’t respond.
Neither did Diana. Anyone else would have looked frumpy with a scarf wrapped around her head, but on Diana, the scarf made a fashion statement. Her complexion would have abashed a rose. The words “beauty” and “beast” materialized in the back of Jean’s mind, and guiltily she dismissed them.
Gilnockie stepped forward, greeted Diana, and introduced himself and Alasdair to Colin, who said nothing. A slight breeze riffled the red hackle on the bonnet pushed forward over his forehead. Black Watch. Another distinguished regiment.
The side and back of his head were also scarred, so that the crew-cut dark hair grew in patches above a pristine but achingly vulnerable nape. His hands knotted at his sides and his entire body seemed to shrink, coiling like a compressed spring, poised for fight or flight. Oh yes, he was a reclamation project. In spades. Was that why Fergie thought Colin wasn’t good for his daughter? Was the broken man asking, or was Diana offering, too much?
Jean thought of him standing outside the house last night. He’d thought Jean in her window was Diana. Some people might interpret that sort of thing as stalking, but not Diana.
Gilnockie said, “We’ve been hoping to have a word with you both,” which was a typical Gilnockian understatement.
Alasdair’s sharp gaze moved from face to face, ending at Jean’s. His eyebrow shivered, almost infinitesimally, not at any beasts or beauties but at her little shadow. “Hello there, Dakota. You’d like to be getting on back to the house, I reckon. It’s going on for noon. Diana . . .”
“Luncheon will be served at one,” said Diana, her rasped red lips smiling imperturbably. She relinquished Colin’s arm and extended one handle of her mesh bag, revealing, yes, potatoes and other edibles. “Dakota, can you help me carry the shopping?”
“Thanks for coming with me,” Jean said to the child. “I’ll see you later.”
Shrugging—inscrutable were the ways of adults—Dakota took the proffered handle and walked off beside Diana, the bag hanging lopsided between them. “What’s for lunch?”
“Mrs. Finlay’s laid on a mulligatawny soup. Do you know what that is?” The two figures, one tall, one short, disappeared into the garden.
Alasdair’s and Gilnockie’s heads turned in unison, from Diana back to Colin.
“Would you be so good as to walk back to the house with me, Mr. Urquhart?” Gilnockie and his long shadow gestured toward the beach. “Let’s go this way, shall we?”
To see, Jean added silently to herself, how Colin reacts when he passes the site of the murder. In medieval times the authorities might have had all the suspects lay hands on the body, to see if it started bleeding again at the touch of the murderer.
Colin cast a quick glance toward Thomson, who offered a gesture that was part greeting, part reassurance. He cast a slower one at the crime scene techs easing the dirk into a plastic bag, then set off down the brae. Young fell in behind Gilnockie and his—well, not prisoner, person of interest—and with a nod of satisfaction rather than encouragement followed.
Exhaling as the pressure, not to mention the heat, went out of her chest, Jean turned to Alasdair.
A tiny crack or two opened in his countenance, the everyday personality shifting beneath the police carapace. “Well done Jean, finding the dirk.”
“Not really. It was Dakota who pointed it out to me. Y’all would have worked your way up here eventually, on your way to the lighthouse.”
“Eventually, aye, though likely we’d have had rain or a blow or something of the sort first. We’d have had our wedding as well, Gilnockie’s team dusting the aisle behind us.”
Laughing, if shamefacedly, she bumped up against his side. “Here I thought you hadn’t noticed the proximity of the crime to the wedding.”
“I’d have made a piss-poor detective observing that little.” His fierce mock frown moderated into a smile. “Just now Patrick’s having his crew dredge the water off the beach and scour the rocks on the hillside. We’ve, he’s found no evidence beyond a few scuff marks in the shingle and footprints on the path. Looks to be one set stood for a time at the head of the brae, whilst other sets ran on by. The weight’s on the toes,” he explained, “that means running. They’re all boots or shoes with treaded soles, like everyone’s wearing these days. Sorry to be letting the time get away, but . . .”
“Someone needs to keep the investigation moving along.”
“Patrick’s keeping it moving, it’s just that his head’s somewhere else. Young let slip that he’s retiring this spring.”
“And she’s planning to take his place?” Jean asked.
“She’ll be a sergeant a long while yet. Those rough edges need smoothing. I had a word with Patrick about the scene with Tina MacLeod, and he had a word in Young’s ear.”
“And now she’s pegged you as a busybody and tattletale.”
“Oh aye, she’ll have done that, right enough.” Alasdair’s grim smile indicated his lack of concern for Young’s opinion.
The sea shone the brilliant lapis lazuli of Diana’s Egyptian necklace. Waves swelled, surged forward, tripped and fell into froth, receded and swelled again, with a slow rolling thrum like the heartbeat of the Earth itself. Jean felt her own rough edges starting to smooth—and chill seeping into her body. More food, especially spicy soup, sounded like a great idea. “We have just enough time to check out the chapel again before we go to the house. I know you want to sit in on Colin Urquhart’s interview. And Diana’s.”
“As do you.”
“If you can get me in there, great.” Jean went on, “Did Fergie make his statement this morning, before we got to the incident room?”
“Aye, he did that. Patrick’s saying there’s nothing there to be going on with.”
Well no, not if you don’t ask the right questions. Jean opened her mouth to tell Alasdair about her odyssey through Fergie’s computer, then shut it again. Better to work up to that.
Shoulder to shoulder, they turned away from the sea toward the shed, where Thomson had assumed his best parade-rest position. “What happened to Urquhart?” Alasdair asked.
“Roadside bomb in Iraq,” replied Thomson. “There were four men in a lorry carrying supplies from the quartermaster’s depot. He was the one in charge, and the only one made it out.”
“That’s a shame,” Jean said, inadequately. How many Scottish soldiers had come home with posttraumatic stress, or shell shock, or whatever the horrors of war were called in their eras? Dealing with that made dealing with an allergy to ghosts a piece of cake.
Judging by Alasdair’s dour expression, he remembered police colleagues suffering in a similar way, not just from the effects of combat, but from the effects of surviving. And she’d once thought he was a reclamation project. “Is Urquhart having counseling?”
“Aye, he goes away to Inverness once a month for a session. It helps, I’m thinking, though not so much as Diana’s helping.” This time Thomson didn’t add anything about her good heart, since Jean and Alasdair had seen for themselves that more than her heart was involved. His lopsided smile, embarrassed and rueful at once, pleaded for tolerance. “Colin’s needing a job, a steady routine, but they’re few and far between.”
“Right.” Alasdair eyed the knife in the technician’s hand. “It’s got blood on its blade, has it? Let’s be hoping it’s got fingerprints as well.”
“Aye, sir,” said Thomson, as though that was an order he had to fulfill.
Jean and Alasdair walked on up the garden path, the primrose path, and not for the first time, Jean thought. By the time they turned down the tree-lined alley toward the new church, she’d told him everything she knew and most of what she thought: Dakota and her allergy, and how neither of her parents had alibis for the time of the murder, and how she’d seen a dark figure in coat and hat at the gate, and there was Urquhart in his regimental bonnet.
She and Alasdair should work on learning to mind-meld. That would save a lot of jawboning. Taking a deep breath of the crisp air, she went on. If it wasn’t Urquhart Dakota had seen going through the gate, then who else was wandering around the estate in the dark? There was more than one kind of shimmery fabric in the world. Like a raincoat, although Diana’s and Pritchard’s raincoats were yellow. What if the initials didn’t stand for “Colin Urquhart” but were text-speak for “see you”? What if they meant someone was trying to frame Colin, or lure Diana out of the house by using his initials? What, for that matter, if the raincoat with the card in the pocket wasn’t even hers?
Alasdair walked along, taking it all in, gears meshing, grinding, meshing again.
“Still, you saw Diana and Colin,” Jean said. “That answers our questions about the relationship and probably explains where Diana was yesterday afternoon, why she missed the Krums’ arrival and looked so flushed when she got there.”
“Likely she and Colin were at the lighthouse at three, not killing Greg on the beach.”
“Yeah, but poor Fergie when he hears that alibi.”
This time Alasdair’s frown was perfectly genuine.
Then there was what Scott and Pritchard had said, and finding Fergie’s virtual fingerprints on the Internet, and how a motive connected to the exceedingly lucrative art and antiquities trade was perhaps coagulating from the mist, and what “something else,” in addition to the Fairy Flagon, was Fergie planning to reveal, anyway?
Alasdair’s frown deepened and his steps faltered. Before Jean could slow her own, he stepped out again, marching like a soldier. You followed the investigative path to the end, wherever it led. They’d both done that in their previous lives, despite knowing how stiff a price such ends demanded.
“I think Pritchard has a thing for Diana, too,” Jean said, “which is why he was dissing Colin last night. But then, Scott’s comment was—not the sort of thing you’d say. You’ve got me spoiled, you know. I forget how crass some guys, some people, can be.”
Alasdair’s frown moderated, without comment.
“But then, like I thought when I saw that photo of Greg with another woman, jealousy makes a good motive, too.”
“It does that, aye. Any strong passion makes a motive. Love become hate or fear makes a grand motive. Indifference, no.”
“I can’t see Tina coming all the way here just to kill Greg.”
“Something might could have happened once they reached the U.K., but no, I cannot see premeditation. Even though she’s not told all she knows, not by a long chalk.”
“Protecting Greg, I bet.”
“Oh aye. And protecting herself as well.”
The bell tower, the slate roof, the delicate buttresses and finials, the lancet windows of St. Columcille’s appeared through the trees. The small building looked like a stone wedding cake, set in a circle of mulched flowerbeds and shrubbery borders. A driveway emerged from the trees to sweep past the building. Sighting along it, Jean could just make out several of the whitewashed buildings in the village. “Come summer time, Fergie must have half the people in Kinlochroy taking care of the gardens. One of the costs of the heritage business.”
“The heritage business,” Alasdair said, “generates jobs for the locals. The old laird—the old, old laird, Norman the Red MacDonald . . .”
“Must have been a real carrot-top,” said Jean.
“. . . likely had this chapel built as make-work for his tenants. More credit to him, when other lairds were turfing them out in favor of sheep, sheep turning a more handsome profit than people.”
“There’s a passion for you. Greed.”
“Oh aye. Though I’m never saying Fergie’s greedy keeping Dunasheen afloat.”
“No way, no how.”
“I’d not be surprised if Fergie was planning to sell off a family mathom or two. There are few stately homeowners who’ve not had to sacrifice the odd Rembrandt—not that Fergie’s found any Rembrandts, more’s the pity. His uncle already sold off most of the farming and hunting land. Good job his grandfather rented the place out to a Glasgow millionaire in the twenties, else it would have no heating, no plumbing, no electric flex. Could be Pritchard was dealing with Krum on Fergie’s instructions.”
“Well, yeah,” Jean said. “Sorry. It’s not like I’m trying to implicate Fergie.”
“No need apologizing.”
They stopped beside the church, Jean admiring the play of light and shadow in the intricately carved dark gray stone. “So maybe Greg was here to buy. Maybe Scott’s here to buy. And Fergie finds it all kind of embarrassing, so is not telling us. Yet, anyway.”
“And Greg was not telling us, but went blethering on about the genealogy, Tormod MacLeod, the 1822 murder, seeing as how his business with Fergie was none of ours. Then.”
“Speaking of jealousy as a motive, the master mason was jealous and so forth, but who did kill Seonaid? And why? And yes, I know you said we already had one case, but, darn it, I want to know what happened. If nothing else, that story brought Greg here as much as his business did.”
“Oh aye,” was all Alasdair replied, his tone dropping from analytical to pensive.
Together they peered through the tall, pointed windows of the chapel. There were the wooden pews incised with leaves and tendrils, the decorative vaulting, the white-draped altar that they’d inspected with Fergie last night—before he went back to the house and they went on to the old church, the old castle, and a new crime.
Then they’d talked about flowers, candles, menus, ritual, and music. Now Jean stood outside the tiny porch and noticed how the chapel’s front door faced a break in the trees, providing a glimpse of the gable end of the old church and the sea. This new church sat at the center of a sundial, in a way. If she didn’t know how recent it was, she’d suspect that it, too, had been sited on some prehistoric place of power.
The 1822 laird, Norman MacDonald, had intended to build a folly, a mock ruin, an elaborate joke. If one of the stonemasons had murdered his wife, then he’d probably felt the place was folly indeed, in another meaning entirely.
Behind her back, Alasdair rattled the door. “It’s locked.”
“Well, yes. Can’t you just see the place littered with empty liquor bottles and used condoms? Assuming anyone from Kinlochroy would be that crass, never mind what I just said about most guys.”
“I’m not minding it, no. But look here.”
She turned around into the shadow of the porch, and followed Alasdair’s forefinger to the iron latch and lock of the door. Several scratches glinted dully in the metal. “Looks like someone was trying to pick the lock. Recently. Was it like that yesterday?”
“I’ve got no idea. Fergie was leading the way with the key. Half a tick, whilst I check the vestry door.” He hurried away around the building.
Jean trailed behind, then stopped. What was that beside the gnarled roots of a huge tree on the far side of the driveway? Several modest sculptures—an angel, St. Francis, Buddha—rose from the herbaceous borders, but this was different. Another of Fergie’s whimsical touches, such as a ceramic fairy house shaped like a toadstool?
A few paces carried her into chill dappled shadow beneath the heavy branches. No, the mound was a miniature round-shouldered tombstone, perhaps six inches of it protruding from leaf mold and lichen. Jean bent to brush away the debris, first from the stone, then from her gloves, still expecting to see another joke. Here lies the eight-track tape, perhaps. If nothing else, this might be the grave of a pet.
The weathered letters didn’t read Fido or Felix. They read, A stranger known but to God. Rest in peace.
It was a grave, all right. Of a human being. But Rab had said there were no graves near the new church.
A prickle emanated from the roots of her hair, danced across her nape, and slipped down her back like an invisible icicle. A faint disturbance in the Force, a fragile qualm, a whiff of the paranormal. Slight as it was, it was still more than she’d sensed at the old church, site of a famous mass murder. But Rab had said Seonaid was found dead at the house, not here.
The prickle had nothing to do with the grave. Slowly Jean looked around. The chapel and its grounds were so quiet she heard a car engine and birds calling in the distance, and up close the slow friction of leaf on leaf as subtle drafts played through the woods. Or was that a draft? Yet again she heard footsteps. It used to be that lairds would hire a hermit to live in their gardens. Maybe Fergie, having one of those already, had hired a Bigfoot.
Silence. Jean stood up. “Alasdair?”
The church bell rang, its bright, clear note launching a couple of gulls, squawking in surprise, from the roof into the sky. Again it rang, and a third time, sending a subliminal reverberation less through Jean’s ears than her sixth sense.
She ran toward the chapel. “Alasdair?”
The small arched door stood open. Jean stepped into a tiny room furnished with table, chair, a line of coat hooks, a couple of shelves holding candlesticks and vases. You couldn’t leave prayer or hymn books out here in the damp and cold, they’d be worm fodder. At least the place didn’t have too strong a wet-dog smell . . .
Whoa. She slumped against the table, the prickle at her neck and back thickening into lead shielding. Seonaid?
Yes. Through the door from the main part of the church walked Seonaid MacDonald, in her green dress and ringlets as solid, as real, as colorful as any living soul—except for her gaze still fixed on another world. A sunlit world, its radiance shimmering in her blue eyes as though on the surface of the sea. Her complexion might be cool and white, but her pale pink lips were parted in a smile.
She passed so close that every follicle on Jean’s body tightened and every hair twitched—the surface tension between realities touching as lightly as a kiss.
Jean was long past feeling afraid of these moments, not that she enjoyed them. But what she felt now wasn’t fear at all, not her own, not any hanging like a sour odor around the ghost. Despite the cold weight on her shoulders, her heart was buoyed upward on the scent of spring flowers.
Seonaid glided with light but measured steps out into the afternoon. With a creak like that of rusty machinery, Jean turned her head and watched.
Seonaid cast no shadow, even though she walked through the shadow of several trees—through the shadow of the valley of death—to the stump of the marker. For a long moment she stood over the grave. And then she was gone, transported between one second and the next into another dimension.
Warmth flooded back into Jean’s body. Her shoulders lifted and she straightened her spine. She shook herself the way Dougie would shake off water, spraying the room with motes of perception. If ghosts were bits of strong emotion caught in time like a fly in amber, then, unusually, Seonaid’s strong emotion wasn’t fear or grief, but joy. Jean felt her face relax into a smile. Wow.
Heavy footsteps thumped up to the inside door and Alasdair plodded into the vestry as slowly and heavily as though chill had penetrated deep into his bones. And yet he, too, was smiling. His voice brushed against the nap, wavering oddly, he said, “You saw her, then.”
Jean’s voice seemed to be transmitted through helium. “She brushed right by me. Can you still get that whiff of flowers?”
“Oh aye. No sackcloth and ashes for that one. Right cheery ghost, I’m thinking, for all she was murdered.”
“She was murdered at the house. Here, she’s happy. Why she’s here, as in, on this plane of existence, though, is the question.”
“She’s not after revenge. Nor identification.”
“No.” Jean stretched, reveling in the pulse in her own body. “Did she ring the bell?”
“Aye, she did that. I was reaching beneath a pew when I heard the bell ring. By the time I’d looked up, there she was, up the aisle and away.” With a stretch of his own, Alasdair peered out through the doorway. “She went outside, did she?”
“Yeah, and vanished at the grave.”
“What grave?”
“I’ll show you. I don’t see any way it could be her own grave, but . . . Why were you reaching under a pew?”
“Everything’s tidy inside, save for this. An empty bag of crisps.” Alasdair held up a gaudy plastic bag. “The lock on this door was picked, not expertly, but effectively. I’ll be having a word with Fergie about installing ones a bit more complex. And perhaps adding an alarm system, but then, there’s no electricity here, he was blethering on about lamps and candles and the like yesterday.”
“So someone breaks into the church, eats a snack, and then leaves again, closing the door. Fergie said he found Colin Urquhart here once, but . . .”
“But.” The smile ebbed from Alasdair’s face. “Time we were getting ourselves back to the house and having words with more than the laird.”