Chapter Nine

 

 

Jean walked off beside Crawford and his flashlight, grateful his long legs were taking slow steps, so she wouldn’t have to hurry and fall over something. Or into something, although she suspected she’d already fallen into something. And she’d been so worried they wouldn’t get here in time for the opening of the grave.

She looked back at Alasdair. He held his cell phone before his face. In its thin, pale light, his features seemed harsh and cold as a glacier, layer after layer of snow compacted into ice. It had been a long time since she’d seen his temperature dip quite so far below zero.

Who was he calling?

She turned her eyes front in time to avoid colliding with Lance Eccleston. He stood alone, in his bulky down jacket, looking like a young troll cast out from his bridge. She dodged around him. He didn’t react.

Beyond the glow of the village, past the dark gulf of the sea, the mainland seemed to blend with the now overcast sky. Jean could only tell which was which by the distribution of lights.

The slightest of breezes whispered in the grass beside the flight of steps down to Cuddy’s Close. The plants in back of the B&B stood motionless behind their protective wall. The undulating mirror of the harbor shimmered like watered silk. When she stepped through the door Crawford opened for her, the sudden light made her wince.

It came from a fluorescent bulb fixed to the water-stained ceiling of a long, narrow room. Off-white walls were smudged by traces of signs. Torn shag carpet, its original color something between periwinkle and mud, revealed a dirty but otherwise attractive stone floor that continued on through a partly open door at the back. Through it Jean glimpsed little more than darkness, although one anemic beam of light did illuminate a tilting shelf scattered with what looked like old newspapers, cardboard file folders, and several hardcover books without dust jackets.

What had someone once sold here? Books? Clothing? Fishing gear? Had they gone broke, retired, moved on to a shop somewhere else?

The room’s musty, stale smell and its aura of better days long gone fitted Grinsell’s rancid expression. Jean sat down in the folding plastic chair he indicated, next to a folding plastic table, trying not to look closer into his face now that it was fully illuminated.

His brown, beady eyes held no such compunction. He stared at her. One side of his mouth lifted in distaste. “Mrs. Cameron. Oops, sorry, that’s Miss Fairbairn, isn’t it? Or Ms.” He dragged out the “S” so that the title hissed.

Again she wanted to blurt, It’s not our fault, if not something considerably stronger. Instead, she said, as evenly as she could, “Either Miss or Ms. works fine.” No good adding fuel to his flame by telling him she was also Dr. Fairbairn, thanks to that Ph.D.

Crawford opened the door to admit Maggie, who was almost as tall as Sergeant Darling beside her. The murky light didn’t do either of them any favors, although Jean estimated that Darling would clean up nicely—and lose several years—once his square jaw and high forehead released their hunted expression. At least his cap of dark hair seemed to be a natural brown, unlike Maggie’s purple and red streaks.

She looked even worse than she had earlier, like death not warmed over but left out in the rain to mildew. As she sat down in a second chair, shooting a curious glance at Jean, Jean caught a whiff of her breath. She’d found at least some of her supper in a bottle. Like daughter, like mother, except Maggie hadn’t been drinking anything so mild as Tara’s beer. Jean tried an encouraging smile, but it withered on her face.

Grinsell continued to stand, no doubt so he’d be taller and therefore dominant. At five foot three, Jean knew all about occupying as much space as possible in order to be taken seriously, but there was a difference between dignity and hostility.

“Well then.” Fishing in his pocket, Grinsell pulled out a cellophane packet enclosing what Alasdair would have called digestive biscuits and Jean would have called a cross between a cracker and a cookie. He tore it open, bit, chewed, and smiled, brown paste matting his long, yellow teeth. “Here we are.”

Darling produced a notebook and pen and took a chair to one side. Crawford assumed his parade rest position by the door.

Jean sat back and thought of Alasdair.

Grinsell prompted, “Miss Lauder.”

“Dr. Lauder,” she informed him.

“Lah-de-dah, aren’t we posh, then? You found a body, didn’t you, dearie?”

Despite the flash in her eyes, Maggie’s voice came from her lips so dull and quiet Darling leaned closer. She told the tale, including the features Jean and Alasdair had figured out for themselves: The preliminary look into the tomb before the press conference. The surprise discovery. The impromptu lecture in the church to deflect the scrutiny of the reporters. The call to Crawford as the tide slipped away.

Grinsell finished his cookies and threw the wrapper down. He turned to Jean. “You’re a reporter.”

“More of a journalist. Great Scot does history and travel articles, not current events.” She waited for him to make some remark about how she’d been participating in current events since her move to Scotland, but either he wasn’t up on recent Scottish murder investigations or preferred another angle of attack.

“American, are you?”

“Yes.”

He sucked on his teeth. His eyes grew even harder. “Cameron couldn’t find himself a wife in the UK? Or would no one have him?”

He didn’t want an answer to that. Jean didn’t offer one. She dropped her gaze to the hands clasped in her lap and willed her shoulders, tucked defensively up around her ears, to relax. He’d think the lowered eyes meant surrender. Let him. Bullies took a defensive response as encouragement.

With a condescending smirk, Grinsell focused on Maggie. “You’ve got good reason to be careful of reporters, haven’t you now?”

“If you’re referring to the old murder trial, yes.”

“What else would I be referring to? Don’t mess me about!”

Maggie bridled. “I’ve done nothing wrong, Inspector. I opened a medieval or earlier tomb on my own property is all. I have the proper permits to do so. I’ve got nothing to do with the recent body. It’s been there for a good many years, perhaps since before I was born.”

Easy, Jean beamed at her. Don’t put words in his mouth.

“How do you know that?” murmured Darling from the side of the arena.

“I’m an archaeologist. It’s my business to know that.”

“All right then, since you’re such a clever wee girl,” Grinsell said, “who is the body in the tomb?”

For a nanosecond Jean thought he was asking who Maggie theorized had been originally buried there, the intended object of the grand reveal. But no, that wasn’t Grinsell’s business.

Maggie closed her eyes, perhaps imagining herself somewhere else. Somewhen else. “I don’t know.”

“For the love of God. Crawley, er Crawford! She identified the body as who?”

The constable said from the door, “Her father, sir.”

“Your father.” Grinsell leaned across the table, as close as he could get to Maggie’s face without actually lying on the plastic surface. “Here’s me thinking your father was a man named Walter Lauder, musician. That’s never him in the tomb.”

“No.” Maggie looked up. She sat up. She tilted forward, matching Grinsell stare for stare. “My mother, Elaine Lauder, is suffering from dementia. She’s been going on about having a lover, one she calls Lancelot the Fair. We’ve thought it was the illness speaking. And yet—and yet, there’s evidence pointing to her having had a lover, once, years ago. A piper, a member of my father’s band, who one day went and disappeared.”

Oh. Jean remembered meeting a handsome young piper last year, one who’d spoken of Gallowglass. Some melodies echoed down the years, the refrains to the same old songs. Lancelot. The handsome young knight who tempted Queen Guinevere away from King Arthur. The young knight who fathered Galahad on a woman named Elaine.

“Lancelot? There’s a bloke in the village named Lancelot, isn’t there, Crawford?”

“Lance Eccleston,” replied the constable. “He’s in his twenties. Not the same man.”

“Don’t take the name literally, Inspector. My mother’s a scholar and no doubt meant the name symbolically . . .”

“Never you mind what I’m taking, other than you as an uncooperative witness. So your mum’s gone doolally, has she? A convenient excuse for avoiding questions. Wants bracing up, most likely.”

Whoa, thought Jean.

Maggie snarled, “I assure you . . .”

“This lover of your mum’s—runs in the family, eh?—this piper. He had a name, hadn’t he?”

“It’s all conjecture . . .”

“A name.” Grinsell’s fists fell onto the table like Norman maces onto the heads of uncooperative Saxon serfs.

If Maggie’s gaze had been any sharper, it would have pierced Grinsell’s hide from front to back and stuck quivering in the wall behind. “I’ve heard, I’ve been told, that his name was Thomas Seaton. He was a piper from Cape Breton, Canada. He played the Great Highland pipes and the Northumbrian small pipes as well. My father, Wat, he wanted to make him a member of Gallowglass.”

“Get to the point.”

“I am getting to the point. One day Tom was gone. Everyone thought he’d taken the ferry for the mainland. No one heard from him ever again.”

“Well then.” Straightening, Grinsell reached for another packet of biscuits.

Jean couldn’t resist asking, “All this happened before you were born, right? Who told you about it?”

“I told you to keep your gob shut,” Grinsell snapped.

Jean sank back in her chair, thinking of happy things like chocolate cake and kittens.

Maggie answered Jean’s question. “Pen Fleming, mostly. She was sixteen or so when Mum and, and Wat came here. She helped Mum round the house and looked after me, even after she married. They were great friends. Still are, as much as, well, as much as possible.”

“Another Fleming?” asked Darling.

“James does the pub,” Crawford explained. “His wife, Penelope, she does the B and B.”

His mouth full, Grinsell asked, “Have you any real evidence that this Tom Seaton is your father, other than the chin-wagging of local women?”

“The dates,” replied Maggie. “Mum always said I arrived prematurely, and I was quite small, yes. If I was a full-term baby, however, then I was conceived whilst my parents were undergoing a trial separation. Dad was touring Down Under, Mum was researching here on Farnaby. Mind you, I only—I only started looking into this recently, after Mum started going on about the lover.”

“Mum’s quite the goer, eh?” Again he revealed his crumb-caked teeth, not in a smile but in a leer. “Tell me why, then, you’re thinking the chap in the grave is this, this piper. Tom. Tom the piper’s son, eh?”

“Because of the chanter in the grave next the body.”

“What?”

“A chanter. The part of the bagpipes that makes the music. Rather like a recorder or clarinet.”

He crushed the cellophane and threw it onto the floor, where it shifted uneasily in a cold draft. “A chanter, a white elephant, no matter. I told you not to mess me about.”

“I’m not . . .”

“There’s no chanter in the grave. No flutes, no clarinets, no bleeding bagpipes. You stupid cow, what sort of fool are you thinking I am?”

Jean’s brain skidded. Now what?

Her face dashed of any expression, Maggie stared up at Grinsell’s smirk. The room was so quiet the scratch of Darling’s pen and a crunch of tires from outside sounded as loud as a crescendo on Hector’s Great Highland pipes.

“We saw the chanter, too,” said a woman’s voice. Oh, Jean realized. It was hers.

Grinsell turned on her. “Who’s we, dearie?”

“Alasdair, me, Tara. P.C. Crawford was standing right there.” She jerked around to gaze accusingly at Crawford, noting Darling’s raised brows on the way. Someone had been looking over her shoulder as they peered into the grave—it might have been Tara, not Crawford—but Tara had been hanging back the whole time.

Crawford gazed into the middle distance.

Grinsell’s hiss pulled Jean back around. “You don’t follow orders too well, do you Mssss Fairbairn. If I was your husband . . .”

I’d either take poison or put some in your crackers, Jean thought.

“Girls,” Grinsell concluded. “They always hang together.”

Better than hanging separately. Not that they still hanged murderers in the UK. They might still have been doing so when Rob the Ranter—whether he had been Tom Seaton or someone else—had died and been hidden away. She’d have to look it up.

“Professor Lauder’s saying she saw a chanter,” Crawford’s calm voice allowed, “but me, I’m not so sure what I was seeing. It was dark, there was only the one torch, and the light was jinking about.”

Maggie found her voice. “You’re saying it’s not there now? Edwin, P.C. Crawford, he was watching the place—someone must have taken it.”

“Pull the other one.” A moist brown blot worked its way into the corner of Grinsell’s mouth. “Rufus, Darling”—His whine emphasized the comma—“have Crawford bring in this Elaine, and Tara as well. Tara Hogg, is it? Bacon on the hoof, eh? Must be a right looker. Let’s see if she fries up as nicely as her mum and her granny.”

“What?”

“You never married. There’s a word for women like you, isn’t there? More than one for you in particular. Starting with ‘murderess.’ ”

Maggie rose out of her chair, fists clenched, face twisted with rage.

“Your mum, you, your daughter—three generations of goers, eh? Fancy that. Lucky chaps, here on Farnaby. No visiting knocking-shops in the city, then, with all the local talent.”

“You’ll show my daughter respect, you nasty piece of work, or I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what, dearie? What makes you think you’ve got any say in the matter?”

Cursing, Maggie lunged. Jean grabbed her left arm as Darling leapt forward and seized her right. “You’re just giving him ammunition,” Jean hissed, and Darling muttered, “Steady on. No good making things worse.”

“Are you asking to be charged with perverting the course of justice?” Grinsell demanded. He might as well have said, Make my day.

“Justice? What do you and your ilk know of justice?” Maggie wrenched herself away.

The door creaked slowly open. Clyde Eccleston stood in the aperture, his cap pulled low, his collar pulled high, so that his face seemed to be only stubble and a bright pair of eyes. Had he been listening in? If so, he displayed not one iota of embarrassment. “The car’s down the street a piece. Here’s the key. Ignition. No need to be locking it up, not here on Farnaby.”

Darling stepped across to take the key. “Thank you.”

Clyde stood at ease in the doorway. One beat, two . . . Grinsell snapped, “Off you go, Grandad. Keep from underfoot, eh?”

With a snort of resentment, Clyde vanished back out the door.

Maggie spun around and started across the room. “I’m going now, Inspector. You don’t have to warn me about leaving town. I hope your pea brain has noticed this isn’t a town, it’s an island. Like Alcatraz.”

“You know the drill, don’t you now, dearie? None better. Second time’s the charm.”

“Get out of my way, Edwin.”

Receiving a nod from Grinsell, Crawford got out of her way. “I’ll drive you home and collect Tara. I know Elaine’s poorly . . .”

“Naff off.” Maggie shot out into the night.

Jean saw her chance. She achieved a personal best making it through the door, moving so fast her momentum carried her across the sidewalk and over the curb into the street. The abrupt step down and ensuing stumble rattled her from stem to stern, not that she had much left to rattle.

For a minute she simply stood there and breathed deep, cleansing breaths of the cold air.