Chapter Twenty-three

 

 

Finally, Jean said dully, “You told me last night Grinsell had solved cases because of his abrasiveness. You meant he solved the Phillips case by strong-arming Niamh’s mother. You knew that all along.”

“Aye, that I did.” Alasdair still gazed out the window, not that there was anything to see. He was probably gazing at the reflection of the room and her small figure huddled on the bed. “I did not know any names other than Maggie’s, not till Miranda phoned this morning. The chap in Cambridgeshire was going on about Grinsell’s particulars, not those of the case.”

“Right.” Jean turned Alasdair’s verbal tic back on him. Unlike him, however, she couldn’t stop with the one word. “But when I asked whether Grinsell was involved in Maggie’s case you fudged. You flanneled. Why? Because I was already on the warpath about Grinsell and you didn’t want to add any more arrows to my quiver by defending him? Please let’s not get into an argument about ends justifying means.”

“That’s not my intention at all.”

“I know arguing isn’t your intention. What is?”

“Last night my intention was getting at the truth with a minimum of fuss, when you and Maggie and Grinsell were already fussed. Without giving you ammunition to confront Grinsell or defend Maggie or anything of the sort. But then, last night I did not know he’d himself be the case today, did I now? You’re identifying yourself with her, never mind you’ve got no more in common than your academic career and your age—your court case was nothing like hers. You weren’t being impartial with Grinsell or Maggie as it was, and you’re not being impartial with me now.”

“No, I’m not. I’m never really impartial, and this time is worse than most, but dammit, Alasdair, it’s hardly fussing to give someone the benefit of the doubt. The presumption of innocence.”

He turned around and fixed her with his best—his worst—stern look. She was mildly surprised his words didn’t fall and shatter like shards of icicle. “Maggie has a motive for attacking Grinsell. Full stop. Niamh does as well. I’m not arresting either of them. I’m not playing the macho cop harassing the wee inoffensive lassies. They’re persons of interest, that is all.” He might as well have closed, over and out.

“I know that. Don’t insult me.” Jean waved her hands, but the right words didn’t materialize in them. “Niamh. Grinsell cost her parents their marriage, sort of. He sent her father to prison. Okay. Fine. You didn’t hear her talking about it in the chapel. She realizes it was Donal himself who’s to blame. She may not even know what Grinsell’s role was.”

“Even if Annie never mentioned the name—and I’m not betting tuppence on that—I cannot believe Maggie’s not been going on about the man ever since her interview last night.”

Jean saw Maggie, Tara, and Niamh sitting around the table at Gow House, caring and sharing. If Alasdair wasn’t right so much of the time, fighting with him would be a lot easier.

“Explain this,” he went remorselessly on. “Crawford’s saying he left Maggie’s big torch with Niamh. Niamh’s saying she put it away. Maggie’s saying it’s not there. Which one’s telling the truth?”

“Maybe both of them. Maybe—someone else—Elaine . . .” Jean felt as though the bed was sucking her down like quicksand. She jumped up and cast one way, then the other, but found nowhere to run.

“Last night you saw someone walking along the road between Gow House and the priory. Niamh could have helped herself to one of Maggie’s tools and planted it at Merlin’s Tower. You were suggesting something of the sort yourself.”

“I suggested some mysterious someone, not Niamh. And why would she take the chanter?”

“I’m not saying she did that. I’m saying she might well have gone pushing or tripping Grinsell into the nettles and bashing him whilst he was down, then keeping her head and working to save his life when Crawford brought her along to the scene. She could hardly be doing otherwise, no slipping him the wrong drug or the like, not with Hector looking out for him as well.”

“So if Niamh used the flashlight on Grinsell, where is it now? Did she throw it over the cliff, like you originally thought? Did she keep it because she needed the light, like Darling said? Tara heard the car stuck in the pothole—did she hear Niamh leave the house about the same time? How did Niamh lure Grinsell up to the tower anyway? Tell him she had something new on Maggie’s case?”

“All grand questions,” Alasdair conceded.

“How about this one: Do you really think she did it?”

Breaking eye contact, he glanced toward the bedside clock, then strode across the room to the closet. From inside he said, “Time I was changing myself into my glad rags for the evening.”

“Answer me.”

He emerged carrying the customized bag for his kilt and its accessories. “I’ve worked half my life for the Northern Constabulary. Their motto is Dion is Cuidich. Protect and serve. Now I’m head of Protect and Survive. You’ll be sensing a theme here.”

“Law, order, and protection. Yeah. Funny how Maggie said that secrets hurt, even when they’re meant to protect. It seems to me what you’re interested in is protecting yourself from fuss.”

With an incoherent growl, Alasdair vanished into the bathroom. He closed the door so quietly she didn’t even hear the latch snap shut.

No, she wasn’t being fair. The situation when they’d been talking last night wasn’t the same as it was now. Instead of worrying about Grinsell’s tactics, now he worried about the case itself. If he found her feminist fuming unhelpful, well, she could excuse that. But she wasn’t going to let go of her righteous indignation that easily.

Grasping at the incongruity of Niamh either taking the chanter or trying to kill Grinsell or both, clinging to the knowledge that she and Alasdair had clashed over issues of crime and criminality before and come through to the other side, Jean stamped up and down several times. Then she stacked the tea cups on the tray with such solid dings she was afraid for a moment she’d cracked them.

A knock on the front door below reverberated in the floor. Footsteps, and Pen’s voice was raised in concern and pleasure. “Hildy! Where’ve you been, puss?”

A masculine aw-shucks mutter clarified into Lance saying, “I found her outside the pub flirting with one of the day-trippers, a reporter fellow eating a bacon sandwich.”

“She was flirting with the sandwich, I expect. Thank you ever so much—come along, Hildy.” The door shut and Pen’s steps moved back down the hall. One crisis had been averted. Lance had proved himself quite the protector of damsels-in-distress.

Peace fell downstairs. Another round of the room, and Jean spotted her computer sitting on the desk next to The Matter of Britannia. She pounced on it, booted it up, opened her word-processing program, and stared at the blank expanse of white encapsulated by blue bars and arcane icons.

“Northumbria, The Doubtful Shore,” she typed. “Northumberland belongs to both England and Scotland and to neither. It’s a place of lost kingdoms, lost saints, and lost treasures such as the ruins of Farnaby Priory.”

She clicked on “Save” and stared again. Most readers would be more interested in her adventures with the body that was in the tomb than the body that, so far, wasn’t. But writing about that skirted close to true crime, not Great Scot’s demographic. Besides, she’d always avoided revealing anything about the cases she and Alasdair had been involved in and she didn’t intend to start now.

She wasn’t, she realized with a muffled groan, going to start anything until she had more historical speculation and less true crime staring her in the face.

Internet? Were you there? Yes—whatever passed for wi-fi on Farnaby connected.

Only connect. What was the rest of the quote from E. M. Forster? Something about connection robbing the monk and the beast of the isolation each thrived on. A criminal would be a beast, she got that, but the isolation of monks and nuns produced music, manuscripts, mysticism. Maybe Grinsell was the beast and Hilda the monastic, he isolated by temperament and she isolated by time.

A quick search turned up all the latest headlines, from a few passing mentions of Maggie’s revised press conference to several more emphatic mentions of the mysterious body in the chantry chapel. The less sober news agencies offered headlines such as “The Piper’s Grave.” As far as they knew, the chanter was simply an associated artifact, not a possible murder weapon. They didn’t know it had taken on the status of lost treasure, either.

Most of the relevant headlines shrieked about the vicious attack on one of England’s finest, George Grinsell, Detective Inspector based in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Jean clicked on a video of D.C.I. Webber making a statement outside the hospital. He turned out to be a handsome middle-aged man, his close-cropped black hair going gray at the temples. His chocolate complexion seemed dulled and the slight West Indian lilt in his voice weighed down by what she knew to be conflicting emotions: Grinsell’s an obnoxious so-and-so, but he’s our obnoxious so-and-so.

Was Webber’s ancestry the reason Grinsell’s anger-management courses only made the chip on his shoulder larger? However, one sort of prejudice didn’t necessarily imply another.

No other reporter had made the same connection between the name “Maggie Lauder” and “Rob the Ranter”—never mind the hard work of groups like Gallowglass, many of the old songs were sadly moribund. But the name “Maggie Lauder” had produced a different variety of connection.

Under the main banner of The Daily Dish opened the headline, “At it again?”

The first photo wasn’t Maggie’s publicity picture, a flattering studio portrait. It was a snapshot of her standing in front of a church window, no doubt taken during her Plan B press event in the church yesterday. Her expression wasn’t that of a deer in the headlights but one already dressed out and searing in a skillet.

Much more space was given to a summary of the Cambridgeshire case, illustrated by a picture of a young Maggie escorted into court by a woman police constable. Her face would have made that of a mannequin in a shop window look animated, although otherwise the resemblance to Tara was unmistakable.

A second picture of young Maggie showed her sitting on a broken column in front of a sunlit Farnaby Priory. Here she smiled, although her posture was only marginally more relaxed than it had been when she’d been waiting on the same column drum yesterday.

Next to her sat an even younger woman, beaming broadly. She looked familiar. According to the caption, her name was Lisa Fleming . . . Oh. Fleming. Pen and James’s daughter, Pen’s affable smile glowing from her face. Two of the photos on the mantel downstairs were of her, too, now that Jean thought about it, one as a teenager, one as an older woman with two children in front of Bamburgh Castle.

From downstairs echoed Michael’s, Rebecca’s, and Linda’s voices, all talking at once. The front door opened and shut. The voices faded into the fog.

Behind her the bathroom door opened. Alasdair’s footsteps paced across the room. Jean didn’t look around—she was busy, wasn’t she? She had work to do.

Once again she opened The Matter of Britannia to “Guinevere the Christian Goddess.” The card was still there, and the message written in a firm, rather splashy hand, all sprawling loops and dark slashes. Athelstan Crawford. Granite. Classic Roman 2. Letterbox. And on the back the cryptic, “Merlin.”

She typed the descriptive words into the box of her search engine and considered the answers: Mailboxes. Roman columns. Stone posts. Gravestones. Inscribed granite gravestones, like Wat and Elaine’s double-header.

She sensed Alasdair’s presence at her back. “What’s this?”

“It was in the book.”

“Crawford?”

“Yep.” She typed in Athelstan Crawford + Northumbria. The first hit brought up the archive of the Northumberland Gazette, a newspaper based in Alnwick down the way. “Whoa,” she said, and read aloud, “October tenth, nineteen seventy-one. Athelstan Crawford, noted local architect, died last week in a tragic accident on Lindisfarne. A memorial service will be held at the parish church of St. Michael, Alnwick, on Thursday next. Crawford is survived by his wife, Mary, Lucy, aged two, and Edwin, an infant.”

“He was P.C. Crawford’s father, then.”

Jean swung around to see Alasdair’s face still cool, rimmed with frost, but set in thought rather than rancor. “Is he the architect Wat consulted?” she asked. “Is that why the tower was never renovated, the guy died? A tragic accident. I wonder what happened? Nineteen seventy-one. Just when we—when you—when the police think Rob the Ranter went into the tomb.”

“It’s saying he died in a tragic accident on Lindisfarne, not disappeared on Farnaby. It’s worth asking for details, though. The corpse had a propelling pencil, for one thing.”

“The name Merlin’s written on the back of the card—see? That might be Elaine’s handwriting. If she called Thomas Seaton Lancelot the Fair, was Merlin her Arthurian name for Athelstan? Maybe something to do with Merlin’s Tower.”

“Looks to be a fuzzy patch where the name’s written.”

Jean angled the card back and forth. “Yeah. Something else was written there and erased, pretty forcibly. M. Another M-name. Mordred?” Jean stared at the card as though it would suddenly stand up and explain itself. It didn’t.

“Aye, but Mordred’s by way of being the villain of the piece.” Alasdair walked back across the room to the dresser and picked up his phone. “Time’s moving on.”

The time on the screen and the time on the bedside clock agreed. Straight up six. Powering down the computer, Jean grabbed her clothing and catapulted into the bathroom. She assembled shoes, skirt, blouse, cardigan, and jewelry while hovering inside the door, listening to Alasdair’s side of the conversation.

He hadn’t called P.C. Crawford but D.S. Darling, who had apparently survived escort duty. “. . . still at the scene, is he? Time to be bringing him back to the village, then, long as he’s thinking the interest’s died down and he can leave the tower be.”

Ah. Alasdair wanted to talk to Crawford about his father’s death in person. Good call.

“. . . Lauder’s finances. He was going through a bad patch in seventy-one, needing cash. Aye.”

His footsteps tracked across the room.

“. . . at the school, half past six. Are you now? Good man. Cheers.”

The door opened. His steps walked down the stairs on the other side of the bathroom wall. His voice called, “Mrs. Fleming? A word?”

Jean brushed her hair into submission and slap-dashed some makeup onto her face. No one would look at her, not with the attractions on stage. Still, despite the chill- and anger-induced roses in her cheeks she looked almost as pale and wan—Alasdair would say peelie-wally—as Maggie. There. When it came to inventions, eyeliner and lipstick were almost equal to the internal combustion engine.

She grabbed a coat, turned off the lights, and hurried down the stairs as fast as she could go in her dizzying inch-high heels. She didn’t dare wear heels any higher—she knew she was clumsy. A friend who studied tai chi once told her she was top heavy because she carried most of her energy in her head, which made sense. Sometimes she visualized her feet as marble carvings, heavy, steady.

Cornering the landing, she saw Alasdair walking along the hall, and at the full-frontal vision she stopped dead.

Ah, the Scots variant of business-casual: The Argyll jacket, the heathered tie, the red-and-green Cameron tartan kilt, the leather sporran, the tall beige socks with their red flashes. The outfit suited any man, of any shape. On Alasdair’s compact, upright body, it was the stuff dreams were made of.

“Ready?” He set his hand on the knob of the front door. Only now did she notice his other hand held an insulated bag like the one Crawford had carried away, this one patterned with orange starbursts.

Instead of falling at Alasdair’s feet, she got herself down the stairs in the usual fashion and fell in beside him. Much as she wanted to, she did not lean up to steal a kiss from his sober face and set mouth. She’d wait until the music had warmed him up enough her tongue wouldn’t stick to his icy carapace like a daring child’s to a flagpole.

“Here’s us away, then.”

Us, she thought. Husband and wife. Domestic partners. Mutual gadflies. “Yep,” she said. “Here’s us away.”