Chapter Ten

 

 

When she looked around, Maggie stood several paces up the street, tapping the glowing screen of her phone. Warning Tara about the ill-tempered detective, the way Tara had warned her earlier about the intrusive journalists?

With a frustrated shrug—no reply?—Maggie jammed her phone into her pocket and stamped away up the street. Jean scurried to join her. “Are you all right?”

“Yeh,” Maggie said over her shoulder. “They’re all like that, aren’t they? Abusive. Insufferable.”

Well no, neither male police people nor men in general were all like that, but this was no time to debate gender politics.

The lighted windows along the seafront made smeary rectangles in the thickening mist, and the few street lamps had haloes. Two human shapes walked down to the harbor, where the large police boat was illuminated brightly, its luminescence bleeding off into the haze. A couple more shapes moved around on board, preparing to take the body to Berwick-upon-Tweed for examination.

With a reasonable officer in charge—one like Alasdair, to choose a random example—as soon as the Scene of Crimes team had thoroughly checked over the tomb, Maggie would be cleared to get back to Plan A, the original burial. With Grinsell in charge, who knew when Maggie would be able to get back to her work?

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, not what Jean had been expecting to hear. “This isn’t half what you bargained for when you came here, is it?”

“It’s not what you bargained for when you opened the tomb.”

“No. I intended to make headlines of an entirely different sort.”

“By revealing the burial of Arthur or Merlin? Not Lancelot. I don’t care if Bamburgh’s just over there.” Jean waved vaguely out to sea. “His story is pretty much fantasy, and was added onto the original legends later.”

“And came from France at that. Yes. Quite.” Maggie brushed irritably at her straggling hair. “You’ve read my mother’s The Matter of Britannia, have you?”

“Yes, of course. It’s a . . .” Jean stopped before she uttered the truth, that Elaine’s magnum opus was a mish-mash of half-baked and yet intriguing theories not about Arthur but about his wife. She liked that sort of thing, an amusement park ride careening from historical fact to historical myth and back again, spiced with feminist theory and wry asides. Compared to Elaine’s earlier work, however, it was poorly thought-out and awkwardly presented. Rebecca’s news that Elaine had claimed to be communicating with the dead came as no surprise. It was while reading Britannia that Jean had first suspected the derangement of Elaine’s scholarly mind.

Her sentence still dangled in midair. “It’s a basic reference,” she concluded, and put into words what she’d suspected ever since she’d heard about the press conference. “You think the historical Guinevere was buried at Farnaby Priory, don’t you? You think it’s her chantry chapel, with the attribution changed between the Romano-British-Celtic period and the Norman one, from Guinevere to Genevieve. The two names do sound alike. You’re hoping to prove your mother’s theories.”

“Well done. Got it in one.”

“It’s an educated guess.”

“That’s what I’m making, an educated guess about the origins of the chapel. I’ve seen Roman lead coffins perforated in similar patterns to the one in the tomb. It might well date back to Romano-British times, even before Aidan came to Lindisfarne. Fifteen hundred years or more.”

A guess, Jean asked herself, or a bet, a bet with both Maggie and her mother’s academic reputations at stake?

Light and a babble of voices and delectable aromas spilled from The Queen’s Arms. So did the music of a fiddle, Hugh playing “Prince of Darkness.” The edgy song about working in the coal mines would suit Niamh’s voice, but presumably Niamh was caring for Elaine back at Gow House.

Maggie peered through a window, her eyes catching the glow from within, then turned away. Tara must not be inside. “James named the pub for Mum’s theory. It was The Percy Arms when I was a child, after the local posh folk in their castle in Alnwick.”

“But in Britannia,” Jean persisted, “Elaine never makes any claims about Guinevere’s burial place. I mean, some legends say she entered a nunnery and died in Amesbury, near Stonehenge. Some say she was buried at Meigle in Perthshire, in Scotland, although her reputation there is hardly saintly.”

“Pictish propaganda,” said Maggie. “There’s good evidence the real Arthur was a Romano-British cavalry leader who lived and fought his battles on the Scottish borders. The Picts never forgot he was their enemy. The Saxons and the Angles did, and claimed him for England.”

The Saxons. The Southrons. The Sassenach.

“Merlin was also a historical figure who lived in the Borders. As my mother proved in her reading of Gildas and other writings of the time period and later, he had a sister named Gwendeth. All she did was equate Gwendeth with Arthur’s wife. A political marriage—par for the course, then.”

“But ‘Gwen’ just means ‘fair,’ you see it all the time.”

“Mum found other evidence—well, her next book would have moved on from Guinevere’s life to her cult after death, which she believed was centered here on Farnaby.”

“Are you intending a correspondence between Farnaby and Avalon? Except it’s not Arthur carried away by the grieving queens, it’s the queen herself.”

“Mum thought something of the sort, yes. But these early legends, they’re like inkblots.”

“Everyone sees something different. Everyone sees what she wants to see. Tell me about it.”

But Elaine would never tell anyone about it, would never write that next book, evidence or no evidence. Now Maggie had taken up her mother’s torch, only to find her own family’s history taking precedence over Arthur’s.

Headlights flashed and an engine roared. A small pickup truck in dire need of a tune-up clattered past the corner of Cuddy’s Close, Jean glimpsing Crawford’s hooked nose behind the windshield. The twin red dots of its tail lamps dwindled down the length of the street and disappeared around the hairpin curve.

“Clyde’s old banger,” Maggie said. “He sells package deals for wildfowlers and twitchers. Kill the birds or count them, no matter to him.” She took a couple of steps up the alley. “Tara. I shan’t let that horrid detective rubbish her as well. I’m accustomed to it, more’s the pity. She’s an innocent bystander, had nothing to do with any of it. As for Mum, well, if Grinsell means to interview her, he can come to the house, and good luck to him.” Her laugh sounded more like a cackle, and disintegrated as soon as she released it.

“Good night,” Jean said, but her words bounced off Maggie’s swiftly retreating back.

A raindrop plunked onto her head. A burst of bagpipe music sounded from somewhere down the street—the student hostel, probably—a slow piece, a lament for love lost and heroes faded. Someone on the police boat shouted something to someone on shore, words that Jean couldn’t decipher, but assumed were not, “Quick, put out to sea and leave Grinsell behind.”

Pondering Maggie’s reference to Farnaby as Alcatraz—stone walls alone did not a prison make—Jean walked into the B&B. This time she didn’t smell baking bread but fabric softener, accompanied by the screeching whir of a British washing machine, like a tiny jet taking off.

“Jean,” said Alasdair’s velvet-on-steel voice. “In here.”

She swerved from the staircase to a door across from it. Ah, a dining table and chairs, and beyond them a lounge provided with overstuffed seating, a flat-screen TV, and shelves of DVDs, books, and boxed games. Hildy, the resident cat, curled on a chair. She raised a languid paw to acknowledge Jean’s arrival. Alasdair leaned over the fireplace, switching on the electric fire. “Sit yourself down. You’re frozen. There’s a whisky for you on the coffee table.”

Jean plopped down on the chintz-covered sofa, dumped her mini-backpack, and seized one of two small glasses sitting on a round bar tray. Take-out from the pub. A sip of amber ambrosia filled her mouth with smoke and sunshine and shot tendrils of warmth through the knots in her tendons. When the flare in her senses subsided, she said, “I’m too mad to be frozen. Mad-angry, although mad-crazy is in there too. What a rat bastard that man is. A hyena. A skunk. I see what you mean about his head on a pike.”

“That would be an improvement, wouldn’t it now?” Sitting down beside her, Alasdair reached for the other glass.

In Jean’s present mood, she assessed that glass as half-empty, not half-full. “I understand why Cumbria shipped him off to Northumberland. What I don’t understand is why he’s still employed, period.”

“He’s a reasonably good detective, has done effective work despite the abrasive manner. Because of the abrasive manner, in some cases.”

“Okay, so he asked the right questions, but really, Alasdair, I don’t care if he solved the Jack the Ripper murders, his behavior is indefensible.”

Alasdair’s cool blue gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not defending him, I’m stating the facts. If he was having a go at you, I’ll be backing your complaint. Though the sergeant was not recording the interview, was he now?”

“Oh. No, he wasn’t. Go figure.” Jean sipped again, swallowed, exhaled. “Grinsell wasn’t picking on me by comparison to what he was doing to Maggie, harassing her about the old murder case on top of interviewing her about finding the body today. Is her case common knowledge among British cops? You knew about it.”

“I looked her up when you told me we were coming here, because I was thinking the name familiar.”

“So did Grinsell look her up on the way here? Crawford must have told him who found the body. It’s just that . . .”

“Aye?”

“Grinsell knew Maggie never married and that Tara’s her daughter.”

“Crawford again. Or Grinsell had Darling researching the name. Previous track is important.”

“The previous track of a suspect, not the person who finds the body . . .” The background of a witness was important. Jean remembered when she’d first met Alasdair her own previous track had been an issue, and Alasdair had proceeded accordingly.

She drank again, cutting her anger loose from its moorings and letting it slip away before she transferred it to Alasdair for also being a cop.

Before she identified too strongly with Maggie.