Jean turned on Brenda. “Fergie says you’ve got the photos of the bones found in the garden near Dunasheen chapel. And the associated artifacts.”
“Oh aye, so we do.” Brenda stepped over to a nearby filing cabinet and dug around in a drawer.
“Ah, that,” said Alasdair. “After yet another wild goose, are you?”
“Quack,” Jean replied. “Or honk, or whatever geese say. Although this time I’m hoping to find one already cooked.”
“Here you are.” Brenda produced an antiquated portfolio and a scruffy cardboard box that had once held candy, and handed them to Jean. “This puir soul was loved by someone. Putting a name to him would be a good deed.”
The front door opened and Sanjay Thomson made his entrance, every bit of insignia on his uniform shining. The two ladies and the hikers fell abruptly silent, their faces turning toward the emblem of authority. His smile brighter than any insignia, he called, “Auntie Brenda? Oh, hullo there, Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn,” and everyone went back to eating and drinking.
Brenda confided, “He stops by about four o’clock, most days. A young lad’s needing his provender. I’ll leave you with the evidence.” Returning Sanjay’s smile, she conducted him to the food counter. The teenage server colored prettily and switched her body language from upright professional to girlish flirt.
Suppressing something between a chuckle and a groan, Alasdair plucked the box from Jean’s hand. “Let’s have a look at the remains.”
She opened the portfolio to reveal several sepia-toned photos on thick paper, closeups of a skull and long shots of an entire skeleton, pieced together in more or less anatomical fashion on a canvas cloth.
“Narrow pelvis, heavy brow ridges, strong jaw,” said Alasdair. “That’s a man.”
“A lot of wear on the teeth,” Jean said. “And some of them are missing, though they could still be in the ground. Look, the growth fissures in the skull are shut tight. He wasn’t young.”
Alasdair arranged the contents of the box on the glass top of the display case. “Four good-quality brass buttons. A buckle. Two pennies with a young Queen Victoria, never so dour as the old one. Someone’s cleaned these up. Not much to be done with this, though.” He held a strip of dirty, moldy cloth between thumb and forefinger.
“All that’s left of the man’s waistcoat?” hazarded Jean. She poked at a dark mound of material that might just as well be a dead mole. “Is that the bonnet Fergie mentioned? How could they tell?”
“Likely it was spread out, then. Now it’s too far gone. But this, and this as well . . .” Delicately he stirred what looked like several thin toothpicks, the needles from a defunct Christmas tree, and tiny spheres like wrinkled olive pits. “Sprigs of juniper, oh aye. These are the berries. And I’m thinking this here might just be a hackle.”
“If this was a military tam o’shanter, not a civilian one, shouldn’t there be a badge?”
“An enterprising gardener might nick himself a silver badge tarnished from a few years in the ground, knowing it would clean up nicely. Or melt down, come to that.”
They looked at each other, two minds, one thought. Jean put the thought into words. “Could this be Tormod himself? The sea lanes between here and Down Under run both ways. Most men do wear hats of some sort, in this climate, and an old military tam o’shanter would work just fine—we saw Colin wearing his this morning. Juniper’s the clan badge of the MacLeods. A bit of nostalgia for the returning emigrant, tucking juniper into his bonnet? You’d expect Australian coins, but then, if Tormod came back he’d have picked up some local currency.”
“Australia was a British colony, and not one that went haring off on its own, like you lot. I’m not so sure it had its own currency ’til this century.”
“I bet he came back, years later, as an old man, after his Australian wife died and their children grew up. Maybe he stayed with family that was still here in Kinlochroy, and asked them to bury him where he and Seonaid had been happy, at the chapel. Maybe he just lay down and died there. Whatever, we saw Seonaid walking toward his grave.”
“There’s high romance for you,” Alasdair said. “A Hollywood-style ending, their ghosts going into the west hand in hand.”
“There’s a reason Hollywood endings are so popular. Although, like I told Brenda, I’m not sure this story has ended.”
“We’ll never be proving any of it, not with no more evidence than these things and a ghost.”
“I know. It’s just an educated, maybe enlightened, guess.”
“Coincidence.” Alasdair looked up at the speaker embedded in the ceiling above their heads.
Jean realized that the disembodied voice was reciting “A Canadian Boat Song,” the lament of the emigrant Scottish Highlander in many more countries than Canada. The words might be wistful but they carried a sting, about mountains and seas dividing, and yet the blood being strong and the heart Highland, and how in dreams we can behold the Hebrides.
With her own bittersweet smile, Jean slipped the photos back into the portfolio. Maybe death was a dream. Maybe life was. Maybe it all flowed on together, no now, no then. That would explain synchronicity, ESP, and ghosts in one fell swoop.
Here came Brenda back again, having done her bit for law enforcement and family as well. Jean looked past her to see Thomson, his hat tucked beneath his arm, raising a steaming cup toward his lips. He tossed it down what must have been an asbestos-lined throat—an inheritance from both sides of his ancestry, no doubt—and inhaled a rich, raisin-studded cake called a black bun, all the time chatting affably with the winsome lass across the counter.
“What do you make of that lot?” Brenda indicated the remnants atop the glass.
“Well now,” said Alasdair, and gave Brenda their analysis of the photos and the boxed relics, if omitting the clue of the cheerful ghost.
She listened in increasing amazement and gratification, leaning forward at each sentence, until she had to take a quick step to keep from falling over. “Tormod himself, is it then?”
“Perhaps,” Alasdair cautioned. “We’ve done no more than make a guess.”
“Entire industries have been built on guesswork, inference, and extrapolation,” said Jean, without giving the Bible History Research Society as an example.
Thomson ranged up beside them, not one crumb marring either his chin or his uniform, and Alasdair repeated the explanation, concluding with the same caution.
“A pity,” Thomson said, “that Greg MacLeod never knew of this.”
“I’d not be so sure of that,” said Alasdair, and, before Thomson could ask him what he meant, went on, “What have you learned asking round the village? Any strangers about?”
Folding her arms over her embroidered flowers, Brenda settled in to examine this evidence, too.
Thomson began, “Lachie at the Co-op’s saying a man with an accent—Londoner, most likely—stopped in yesterday, buying some bits and pieces as though for a picnic, though it’s hardly picnicking weather. Yon hikers, now, they’re young, warm-blooded, but this man was not so young.”
“A picnic,” said Alasdair.
Jean knew he was seeing a bag of potato chips beneath a pew in the chapel, and the lock to the vestry door picked. “Did Lachie say whether the man was wearing a hat?”
“No, why should he, most men hereabouts are wearing hats.”
Not Alasdair. The perpetual motion of his brain kept his head warm. “A toe rag, perhaps? A vagrant, unemployed or not quite right in the head? Or a native son who’s been working away, making a visit to the home ground? No matter—he’s a potential witness to the murder.”
“Or the murderer himself,” said Jean, without delving into the difficulties of motivation.
“I’ll be keeping a lookout,” Thomson said, and went on, “Most folk hereabouts are gey predictable. Lionel Pritchard, now, he’s in the pub most every day, same as Rab Finlay. But not yesterday. He’s stated he was in Portree.”
“Is he well liked in these parts?” asked Alasdair.
“He’s not disliked, save when he’s giving in to the incomer’s curse, telling us we should be conducting our business the way his folk do in England. He and Rab, like chalk and cheese.”
“Let me guess,” said Jean. “Pritchard thinks everything should change and Rab keeps talking about how things were better in the old days.”
“They were, in a way. Then, entire families were supported by the estate. Now most of the young men, like Rab’s own brother-in-law, are obliged to work away. Fergus is the odd man out, coming instead of going, eh? Still, Rab’s loyal to the MacDonalds, and he and Pritchard work for them, so there are times they make common cause.”
Brenda called, “Cheerie-bye!” Thomson turned to wave at the older ladies, who’d gathered their shopping bags and were heading out into the night.
“Common cause, like the day Rab, Pritchard, and a couple of pensioners started fighting with Colin?” Alasdair asked.
“They didna aim at fighting,” Thomson replied. “Colin stopped by the pub to buy himself a bottle of whisky, and the pensioners took notice of him. They were going on about their own war, and, for once, how things were worse then. Pritchard’s not got much use for Colin, thinks he’s got his own chance with Diana.” He snorted a demurral. “And Rab, he’s thinking Colin’s not right in the head, and is causing trouble for the family. They joined in the ragging, and Colin, well, he’s thinking the best defense is offense, eh?”
“Puir lad, Colin,” said Brenda. “Diana’s got a good heart to take that one on. Although he’s got something to offer, I’m sure.”
Jean wasn’t going to touch that line. “Is Fergie the only person in town not to know the, ah, full extent of their relationship?”
“I’m thinking so,” Thomson said. “He’s a fine man, Fergus, no airs and graces, none of this incomer rubbish like Pritchard, and he’s doing his best for Dunasheen, but . . . well, dinna go taking this wrong, but he’s got his own ways of thinking and doing, and there’s times he’s seeing what wants seeing, and there’s times he’s seeing only what he’s wishing to see, if you follow my meaning.”
Alasdair followed his meaning just fine, Jean estimated. So did she. “And Diana?”
“She’s here shopping from time to time, giving the school prizes, having a blether at the pub,” said Brenda. “Lovely girl, Diana. A bit posh for us plain folk, but polite to a fault.”
Now the hikers started collecting their gear. With no customers, Brenda would want to close early, it being New Year’s Eve. As quick on the uptake as ever, Thomson pressed on. “Mr. and Mrs. MacLeod likely drove straight through the town without stopping yesterday. No one’s seen them at all. The Americans, the Krums, they stopped here.”
“Here,” said Brenda, pointing at the floor. “The father bought a book and a sweetie for the lass whilst the mother, well, I thought at first the drains were giving off a bad smell, then decided that’s just her way.”
“Yes,” Jean said, “that’s just her way.”
“Yesterday,” said Thomson, “they spent an hour or more in the pub—I was by way of seeing them myself when I stopped in. The father went away, and then the mother. The two Morrison lads saw Scott walking to and fro with his phone. Mairi Macaulay met the mother, Heather, outside the Co-op, thinks Heather was asking her if she’d seen Scott, but Mairi couldna quite understand the woman’s lingo, and Heather couldna understand Mairi’s, so they both gave it up as a bad job.”
“Bottom line,” said Alasdair, “is that both the parents were out and about at the time of the murder. And Dunasheen’s gates were standing open then.”
“Oh aye. They’re always open. I didna know they would shut, to tell the truth, but Pritchard, he put his back into it. Closing the gates to the barbarians.”
Jean reminded herself that she might be a journalist, but she was no barbarian. Her relief at Dakota’s story about the pub being confirmed was tempered by her guilt for pumping the child to begin with.
Thomson went on, “The Krums are in the pub just now, after walking up the lane beyond old Calum’s cottage for the lass to have a look at the sheep, and then back round to the harbor. They stopped in at the Co-op to buy sweets and day-old bread to feed the gulls.”
Who needed a Protect and Survive surveillance system in Kinlochroy?
“Cheerie-bye!” Brenda called to the hikers, and, as the door shut behind them, “You’ll be excusing me please, Mr. Cameron, Miss Fairbairn, the lass is needing help with the clearing up.”
Behind the counter, the lass started from her reverie and reached for a dish cloth.
“I’d best be away to the castle,” Thomson said, his dark eyes with their bright gaze targeting first Alasdair and then Jean. He touched his forefinger to the side of his nose. “Fergus is asking me to play the first foot. I’ll be seeing you at the bells, then, carrying my lump of coal, my tin of shortbread, and my bottle of whisky—Fergus has already given me them, just to make sure.”
The bells of midnight. The cusp, the turning point. How many events were marked by bells—death, marriage, or no more than the passing of the hours? Jean’s gaze fell on a framed print hanging on the wall, Dunasheen in the sunshine, its towers and gables rising above a lawn covered with daffodils. Spring would come, no matter what else happened. “We’ll see you then.”
“Thank you, constable,” said Alasdair, and as Thomson walked away settling his hat on his head, “It’s time we were getting back as well, Jean. Fergie’s expecting us in the library at six.”
“Yeah, the whole artifact and article thing is one of the reasons we’re here. Exploiting history is why everyone’s here, in a way.” Jean didn’t mention their own bottom line—speaking of the devil of wedding cancellation might make it appear.
Alasdair called to Brenda, “Thank you kindly.”
“It was nice meeting you,” Jean added, and braced herself for the cold and the dark outside.
Despite the dark and cold, warmth emanated from the buildings, probably the psychological effect of all the lighted windows. Night had erased the Cuillins and muted the gleam of the sea. But Dunasheen Castle glittered bravely, even stubbornly, behind its wall and beyond its naked trees.
Leaning close together, Jean and Alasdair walked across the street and looked through the front window of the pub. Yes, the Krums occupied the settle closest to the fireplace, Scott gazing into an empty beer glass as though into a crystal ball, Dakota wrapped around a paperback, Heather writing with a thick pen in a small book.
If any reporters had taken refuge there, they were gone now. A few locals sat at tables or stood at the bar, while the publican minded his post between a fence of knobby beer spigots and a wall of bottles and glasses. A pop song played in the background and leaked out onto the sidewalk, making less of an impact on the silence than the everlasting murmur of the sea.
Alasdair and Jean turned away from one of the town’s sanctuaries and walked toward another, the white-painted church at the end of the street. Its windows were dark arrowheads in its pale flanks, and the array of monuments behind its surrounding wall looked in the gloom like a thicket of stone. The peaked roof of a small building rose to one side. “Fergie’s family mausoleum.” Alasdair’s breath seeped in a sparkling cloud toward the graves and vanished.
“I guess Norman the Red and Seonaid are lying side by side. Seonaid’s physical remains, at least. And their son, and his son, and so on down to Fergus Mor and his brother the laird, primly and properly arranged for eternity. Or for Judgment Day, whichever comes first.” Jean caught Alasdair’s quick gleam, but he didn’t dispute her theology.
A door slammed, and voices echoed down the tunnel of the street. One of them spoke with a familiar accent, its flatness emphasized by its underlying whine. “. . . I deserve it, that’s why,” Heather was saying. “Journaling relieves stress. What’s a good pen and a nice book, to relieve stress?”
Scott probably had an answer to that, but he didn’t vocalize it. He and Heather, Dakota at their heels, passed within several yards of Alasdair and Jean.
Alasdair called, “Hullo there.”
The three shapes spun around. “Whoa,” said Scott with a forced laugh. “I thought for a minute we were hearing voices from beyond the grave.”
“Sorry,” Alasdair told them. “You’re away to the house, then?”
“Yeah. The whole Hogmanay thing gets going at seven, Fergus said.”
They walked away en masse, Heather adding, “About time. So far just about the only entertainment is the whole C.S.I.: Dunasheen thing.”
“Entertaining?” demanded Scott. “There’s a guy dead . . .”
“Too much information for the k-i-d,” Heather retorted, as though Dakota couldn’t spell. “You know what I mean. Cut me some slack for a change, will you?”
Maybe Heather meant We don’t know them, so they don’t matter. Jean caught Dakota’s eye and smiled encouragingly. Dakota smiled back, then shrank into her muffler as the group approached the gates, iron looping and swirling against the lights of the house.
But the news vans had gone, leaving a solitary constable on guard, his dark clothing shadowed so that his yellow reflective jacket seemed to be disembodied.
Heather flashed a grin. Thumbs upraised and forefingers pointed, she pretended to draw from the hip and fire shots at him. His face went from bored to deliberately blank, and he spun toward the gate. Everyone hurried through the narrow opening so quickly Heather had to break into a jog to avoid being left behind. “Thank you, constable,” Alasdair enunciated, and the gate clanged shut.
The driveway ran into the deep shadow between village and house. Jean directed her steps closer to Alasdair and eyed the black bulk of the garden wall, of Pritchard’s cottage, of the trees spaced across the lawn. Someone could easily be hiding there, watching them. Just because the gates were shut didn’t mean the estate wasn’t easily accessible.
A few paces further on, Dakota stopped dead. “Wow! How did they do that?”
Oh. Jean crawled up from the primordial sludge of her doubt and dread to see stars strewn across the sky, luminous freckles on the face of God. Some were hard points of icy light, others were smudges. Groups of stars made smears of radiance that faded near the glowing puddle of the moon—and in the west, blotted by thin streamers of cloud.
“How did who do what?” asked Scott.
“Those are special effects, right? There aren’t really that many stars.”
Definitely a city kid, Jean thought. “Yes, there are that many. You just can’t see them when there are a lot of other lights. Street lights, lights of buildings.”
“Oh. Cool.” Her head tilted back, Dakota wobbled along, her mother’s hand on her shoulder keeping her if not on the straight and narrow, at least on the driveway.
Scott, too, looked upward, so that when a black lab and a white terrier rushed toward him from the darkness he almost fell over them. “Hey! Oh, hi, guys.”
Rab Finlay trotted along after the dogs. “Bruce, Somerled, get back here you sons of . . . Hullo there. Just walking the dogs.”
“Looks like they’re walking you,” said Heather.
“They’re that eager to be off, slipped their leashes whilst I tied my trainers—the polis took my wellies, much good that’ll do them, and here’s me, heading for the nearest patch of glaur and ice.” The dogs capered on across the lawn, “Somerled! Bruce! No free run tonight, lads, there’s things doing at the house, get back here with you!”
“I hear you, pal.” Scott bent his knee and lifted his foot so that a pair of polished wingtips caught the light. “I wasn’t anywhere near the place when the guy, you know, but still they took my hiking boots, brand new ones. A heck of a lot warmer than these.”
“I should hope so,” said Heather. “They cost as much as designer pumps.”
Rab’s black and white beard bristled like the southbound end of a northbound badger. His eyes glinted in the shadow of his tweed cap. His silence rejecting Scott and Heather’s familiarities, he hooked the dogs’ leashes to their collars and continued on down the driveway.
“Why did the police take everybody’s shoes?” asked Dakota.
Alasdair, who had so far borne out her estimation of his speaking habits, answered. “There were footprints near the scene of the crime, prints of shoes with treads. The boffins—the laboratory technicians—are after making a match. And matching the mud and other matter at the scene with matter caught in the treads of someone’s shoes.”
“The problem is, everyone wears shoes with treads these days.” Like Brenda and her comfortable sneakers, Jean added to herself. “There must have been a dozen pairs of wellies in the cloak room, just for a start.”
“Too much information,” Heather said again, despite Alasdair’s circumspect “matter.” “Come on people, let’s get dressed for whatever’s going on tonight. I hope they have more of that wassail. That was good.”
“It sure was,” said Scott, leaping on a point of agreement. “Let’s ask for the recipe.”
The two adults swept Dakota across the gravel and into the porch. The door opened, emitting a burst of light, and shut again. In the darkness, the dogs woofed perfunctorily at the gate constable. The phone in Alasdair’s pocket rang, and the light of the display cast a greenish, alien glow on his face. “Hullo, Hugh.”
This time he angled the phone toward Jean, so she could hear Hugh’s voice. No thanks to the tiny audio circuits that it came across clear as a bell, if only half as loud—he made his living as much with his voice as his musical instruments. “I’ve got two minutes before the taxi arrives. Three, if it’s slowed down by the crowds on the High Street. But I’ve heard from my fiddler friend in Townsville, a quick message before going off to a New Year’s barbie on the beach whilst I’m freezing my nose hairs here in Auld Reekie and Darkie.”
“Any good gossip about Greg MacLeod?” Jean asked with a grin.
“She did not know him personally, but knew of him. Quite the smooth talker, she’s saying, and a clever businessman, with many a scheme, resorts, apartment buildings, suburb development, a souvenir business, your art gallery and museum of religion.”
Alasdair waded in. “Rebecca’s saying he sold an ancient inscription to the Bible History Research Society, all the time working a deal to display it in his own museum. Eating your cake and having it as well, sounds to be.”
“That’s Greg,” said Hugh, “or so she’s saying. Always selling up the last venture and starting in again, looking out the main chance. Mind you, he’s never known for churchgoing, or New Age piety, or even holding séances, nothing of the sort. It’s that with war, fire, flood, economic troubles, nowadays there’s muckle money in religion.”
“Hence a Museum of Religion and an antiquities gallery under one roof.” The side of Jean’s face next to Alasdair’s was almost warm. The other side was so cold she felt the gold studs like tiny icicles in her earlobes.
“Hope that helps,” Hugh said. “Time to go singing for my supper.”
“You’d sing for nothing,” Jean told him. “Thanks, it does help. Happy New Year!”
“’Til Saturday,” stated Hugh. “I’ll not be missing out Alasdair’s stag party.”
Alasdair twitched, a stag party not being on his list of priorities. But before he could remonstrate, the connection went silent. He tucked the phone away.
Jean leaned away from him, feeling the chill fall on her face. “I really wish we’d gotten to know Greg. He sounds like quite a character.”
“He was after the main chance, was he? So are the Krums. And Pritchard.”
“An old manor house,” said Jean, “filled with precious objects religious, secular, no one knows what, the owners in difficult financial straits, and a shady manager. Quite a setup.”
Alasdair looked up at the glowing windows. “What was Greg wanting that someone killed him to stop him getting it? What was Tina knowing that made her risk her life escaping? Was she thinking the murderer nearby, and coming for her next?”
The light streaming from the library window wavered as Diana leaned in close to the Christmas tree. Its tiny red and green lights winked on, casting a hard-edged gleam into Alasdair’s eyes.
Jean could sense his thought cycling like an electric current: Every time I think we’ve moved the investigation away from Fergie it circles back round again.
The lingering sweetness in her mouth went sour.