Chapter Three

 

 

The ferry followed the police boat around the headland and into a bay that was little more than a shallow scoop lined with one curving street and its assorted buildings. Farnaby St. Mary.

Like the ancient settlers of Bamburgh building their fortress on a defensive promontory, the seventh-century founders of Farnaby Priory had chosen their ground wisely, setting their thatched huts into the concave south face of the island where they would be protected by rising land on the north and east. Not that Jean’s searching eye could see the priory from the harbor. It must be concealed by the village, its broken walls not as tall as those on Lindisfarne.

The police boat disappeared into a relatively modern harbor, passing between slab-sided concrete and boulder breakwaters that looked like the jaws of a huge pair of pliers. By standing up, Jean could see the tops of several other boats tucked away inside, of the fishing and sailing variety. Two bright red kayaks rested atop the breakwater amid odds and ends of ropes, nets, boxes, and mysterious items her landlubber eyes couldn’t identify.

The ferry angled straight for the beach, slowed, and with a bump that caused Jean to sit back down again, Alasdair’s hand on her arm, came to a halt against a concrete ramp. The gangplank screeched and landed with a thud. Lance galloped down it and threw a coil of rope over a waiting post.

“So what do the villagers do if they need to get off the island while the tide is out?” Jean asked.

“Take a small boat to the back side of Lindisfarne or some other place along the coast,” answered Alasdair. “And you could be landing a small boat on one of its beaches even at low tide.”

“Ah.” Mysterious were the ways of sea-going peoples. Jean and Alasdair gathered up their things and, with a wave at Clyde in his command center, regained terra firma. She threw a thank-you at Lance as they passed.

He made no response. He knotted the rope so slowly his movements seemed almost sensual, his fingertips gliding over the nylon coils. Jean followed the direction of his gaze to see an elderly Land Rover coming to a halt at the top of the ramp. From it stepped a young woman. On her slender, graceful body, the muddy wellie boots, mud-splashed camouflage pants, and mud-spattered denim jacket looked like Paris couture. What had probably started the day as a sleek chin-length haircut was now a russet tousle. She stood, legs apart, hands on her hips, head thrown back, her delicate features turned toward a point far beyond the island.

Jean glanced around and saw nothing more than the sun continuing to sink, as the sun tended to do late in the afternoon. It touched a layer of clouds, spilling a wash of pink and peach over them. “Now there’s a five-pound view.”

Alasdair abandoned his scrutiny of the young woman, glanced at the clouds as though inspecting them for Claude Monet’s signature, said, “Aye, lovely that,” and, “Who’s the girl?”

“Not a clue. If she’s waiting for us, we’re about to find out.”

Yep. The—well, let him call her a girl; she could hardly be older than twenty—the vision looked down at them. The words of a song of Wat Lauder’s era came to Jean, about roses in a garden bowing and asking a young woman’s pardon. But no. This young woman’s blooming complexion was dusted with gray, the lush pink lips were braced tautly, and the startlingly blue eyes were hooded with caution.

Her polite smile touched only her lips. In a thankfully mild variation of the adenoidal screech young women used for voices these days, she asked, “Ms. Fairbairn? Mr. Cameron? Ms. Capaldi called and said you were running late.”

Good thing Jean had confessed to Miranda, who captained the Great Scot ship, that they’d wandered off-schedule. “Guilty as charged,” she replied, and then winced, telling her unruly subconscious to get off the matter of Maggie’s scandal, already.

The smile acknowledged no double meanings. “I’m Tara Hogg. I’ll run you to your B&B.”

“Professor Lauder’s graduate student?” Jean hazarded. “Research assistant?”

“Her daughter.”

Daughter? Maggie Lauder had a daughter? Jean’s glance at Alasdair noted the scrunch of his calculating eye. So much for tiptoeing around Maggie’s past. Tara was the right age to date from the episode of the murdered boyfriend. Lover, rather. But for a last name she bore the screamingly inappropriate—to her appearance, not the locale—Hogg.

Maggie’s daughter, blood-related to the peculiar Lauder clan. No wonder she watched the sinking sun signal the end of a stressful day.

A movement in the corner of Jean’s eye resolved itself into Clyde stepping down the gangplank of the ferry and regarding his son, who still lingered over the knotted rope, with a look of something between impatience and disgust. Not that Lance saw him. He was still focused on Tara. It was hardly the first time a strapping young warrior had been reduced to jelly by a beautiful woman.

Jean managed to shape her smile of amusement into one that mirrored Tara’s courtesy. “Thank you. We were hoping to go straight out to the priory and the excavation.”

“Sorry,” said Tara, “but there’s a problem with that.”

By this time Jean was almost dancing with curiosity—not least because she detected an American accent in the young woman’s voice. Beside her, Alasdair’s alert stance mimicked that of a cat at a mouse hole. He asked, “A problem with the excavation, or with us seeing it?”

“We could give you a tour tomorrow. It’s almost sunset . . .”

“Sunset’s at half-past seven. It’s hardly half-past six.”

“Mags wants me to bring P.C. Crawford out.”

Alasdair went inexorably on, “Miss Capaldi wouldn’t have bothered making our excuses if Professor Lauder weren’t expecting us for the entire weekend, as distinct from the day-trippers who came only for the press conference.”

Tara opened her mouth and shut it again. She turned away, presenting them with her shoulder.

An American accent, definitely. Had Maggie given Tara up for adoption, way back when? And now . . . Jean almost felt sorry for her. Still, she bumped Alasdair’s chest with her own shoulder: Thanks. His bland expression was mitigated by the merest lift of a brow-end and the slightest tuck of a mouth-corner: Once a cop, always a cop.

The cop on active duty emerged from the enclosure of the harbor, duly wearing a lime-yellow reflective jacket over his uniform and a billed cap with a checkerboard band. Tara beckoned and took a couple of steps toward him.

So did Alasdair, extending his hand in the tall, lanky man’s direction. “Alasdair Cameron. Detective Chief Inspector, Northern Constabulary, retired. Currently head of Protect and Survive, Edinburgh. My wife, Jean Fairbairn of Great Scot.”

“Ah.” Crawford stopped dead. His narrow, nearly ascetic face, polished red by the wind from the North Sea, reminded Jean of someone, but she couldn’t think of whom. He shook Alasdair’s hand as cautiously as though he expected to find a buzzer concealed in the palm. “P.C. Edwin Crawford. Bamburgh. Sir.”

“Now then, Constable.” Alasdair might be four inches shorter and more or less the same age, but he was definitely In Charge. “What is it about this problem with the grave that’s requiring the police? Can I be of assistance, in either of my capacities?”

Crawford said, “Ah.”

“She’s a reporter,” murmured Tara, ducking her head toward Jean.

“I do history and travel articles, not . . .” Go ahead, say it, she told herself. “. . . scandals and gossip. I’m a former history professor myself, a colleague of Professor Lauder’s.”

Crawford’s features seemed to narrow even further, like the gap between a closing door and its frame.

“Your luggage,” Tara said, her voice positively deflated. “You need to take it to the B and B.”

“No problem.” Jean turned toward the father-and-son team of Ecclestons, who had stopped even pretending to work and were watching the scene before them like spectators at a rugby match. Flipping her backpack around, she reached inside. “Lance, could you please take our bags to the Angler’s Rest B and B? They told me it’s a few steps from the ferry terminal. It doesn’t look like anything in Farnaby St. Mary is more than a few steps from the ferry terminal.”

Lance blinked like someone suddenly waked up. “Angler’s Rest?”

“That’s The Angle’s Rest,” Clyde said. “Angles, Saxons, that lot. The Angles landed here, set themselves up a beachhead, way back when.”

“Oh,” said Jean. Well, she supposed people fished here, too. No matter. She held out a five-pound note. “For your trouble.”

“Ta.” Lance’s stroll up the ramp was too stiff to be casual. He accepted the bill and seized the handles of the two small suitcases. “The B and B’s just along here.”

“Thank you,” Alasdair told him.

Lance took advantage of his proximity to Tara to lean in close. “Proper little bitch, aren’t you now?”

Well, Jean thought, that was hardly a sweet nothing.

“Stuff it where the sun don’t shine,” Tara hissed back.

Alasdair, at his most expressionless, opened the back door of the Land Rover and Jean climbed in before the parade passed her by.

With an unintelligible mutter under her breath, Tara plucked a smartphone from her pocket. She swiftly keyed in a text as she slipped behind the wheel, no doubt warning Maggie about the two stubbornly inquisitive, if hardly unexpected, new arrivals.

Crawford removed his hat and claimed the front passenger seat—riding shotgun, an American would say. His face was so utterly blank, Jean was impressed. Very few people could do a great stone face as effectively as Alasdair could. Unless Crawford’s blank face indicated no one home behind it. That might explain why a man who had to be over forty still served as the constable in a small seaside community. Although, to be fair, he might be content where he was, with no ambitions to move up the ladder. Unlike Alasdair, who’d climbed the ladder so quickly he came down with a nosebleed.

She shoved a couple of electronic umbilical cords and a muddy trowel out of her way. The nylon of the seat was spattered with mud, but every now and then you had to sacrifice your clothes for a story. She was glancing around to see what was piled in the back of the vehicle—more digging implements, folders of computer printouts, a bin holding mud-caked items of the pottery shard type—when Alasdair clambered into the other side.

Surreptitiously Jean offered him the flat of her hand. We’re in! Kudos to the team! Instead of returning a high five, though, Alasdair shot her a stern look. She retracted her hand and tried a sheepish shrug instead. No, he didn’t like pulling rank, not when his purpose for doing so was still undefined.

Tara fired up the engine and took off, flinging Jean against the seat back.