Chapter Twenty-eight
“Mr. Cameron? Miss Fairbairn?” Crawford stood several feet away, his massive torch casting a beam of light as bright as a searchlight at a Hollywood premiere.
Alasdair cleared his throat. “Aye, Constable. Just having us a look at the priory in the moonlight.”
Jean expected Crawford to say, “Right.” But he said nothing, merely turned again toward the village.
Here came another figure across the parking lot, carrying a smaller flashlight, shimmering yellow jacket flapping. “Crawford? Mr. Cameron?”
“We’re here, Darling,” Alasdair replied.
The sergeant skidded to a halt. “D.C.I. Webber phoned, sir. D.I. Grinsell died ten minutes ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Alasdair didn’t turn a hair.
Jean turned several hairs as the wind blew cold down the back of her neck. She crossed her arms and said, “I am, too.”
“And I,” added Crawford.
After a suitable moment of silence, punctuated by voices rising from the waterfront, Darling went on, “I walked Tara from Gow House to the pub, but she insisted on going back to the school on her own, with the fog clearing out and all. I’ve been asking about the town, the student hostel, the tea room. Niamh—Miss McCarthy—no one’s seen her.”
Alasdair hadn’t told him to search for Niamh, but it wasn’t a major leap of inference that he’d be doing so in the immediate future. All he told Darling now was, “We’re away to Crawford’s boat, to be having us a look at Maggie’s torch. At the murder weapon, as it is now.”
“You’ve found it then?”
“Crawford did, aye.” Alasdair took off at a brisk pace, finally stretching his limbs after being forced to mince around in the fog.
It was Jean who now minced along in her heels, following the vision of Alasdair’s kilt, its colors flashing boldly in the beams of the flashlights. At the top of Cuddy’s Close, he brought the parade to a halt and turned back toward her. “Sorry, Jean.”
“Tell you what,” she replied. “I’m going to dart up to the room and change clothes. I’ll meet you at the boat.”
“Good idea,” said Alasdair, and, as he led the other two men through the close and out onto the main street, “Constable, if you’d be so good as to fill in the sergeant here on our discussion of your father’s death?”
“Oh,” Darling said faintly. “Ah.”
“Well, sir . . .” Crawford’s flat voice died away as Jean diverted to the Angle’s Rest.
The moment she was inside she dumped her shoes and ran up the stairs in her stockinged feet. She changed into serviceable jeans and walking shoes in record time, and paused in her return trip only long enough to pay respects to Hildy, who stretched out in her spot on the upstairs windowsill.
The cat’s fur felt warm and soft to Jean’s hand. A quiet purr vibrated in her throat. But her ears were raised like semaphores, signaling something of interest outside. Leaning forward to block out any reflections, Jean registered three people strolling left to right through the parking lot and two ambling toward the now dark and silent priory, none of their shadowy figures revealing any identifying features.
In other words, damned if she could tell if any of them were Niamh.
Several more people appeared from the right—the post-concert greet-and-eat at the school had no doubt reached a conclusion. One stocky figure wore what looked like a skirt but had to be a kilt, since he walked very close to a woman in a dress, a white blotch on her arm that Jean knew to be a dish towel. Hector with Pen, making sure she and her injury made it safely to the Angle’s Rest.
She couldn’t see Gow House, whether the lights were on or what, but surely Tara and Maggie had escorted Elaine home.
With another stroke of Hildy’s soft fur, Jean headed down the stairs. The wail of a fretful child came from the room at the end of the hall, along with the soothing murmur of parental voices. She thought of Crawford’s parents, and Niamh’s, and all parents having to choose between their own wishes and the needs of the child.
Silence fell. A door opened and shut and Michael appeared in the hallway. “Jean! I was expecting you and Alasdair to be sleuthing at the school yet.”
“No, we’ve moved operations to the harbor. Want to come along, get an update on the case—the cases—in progress?”
“Aye, but . . .” He cast a wary eye behind him. “I promised Rebecca I’d bring us each a wee dram from the pub.”
“You can do that, too.”
“Temptress. I’ll have a word with the womenfolk.” He hurried down the hall, whispered something through the doorway, hurried back again. “I’ve got formal permission to join you, mostly because Rebecca’s as curious as I am. I’ve been told off to mind that wee dram as well.”
“We’ll all end up in the pub drowning our sorrows,” Jean told him.
He opened the door for her, asking, “What’s on with Crawford, then?”
“You’re not going to believe this angle.” Once again outside—and in the free air, not in the oppressive fog, all right!—Jean brought Michael up to speed. When she finished with Grinsell’s ghost appearing from the mirk, he winced. “Poor sod.”
“Yeah.”
At the harbor, lights blazed and people milled. A tour boat with a seat-lined back deck and an open cabin took on passengers, twelve or fifteen people who flocked forward so eagerly the scene reminded Jean of the famous photograph of the helicopter perched atop the American embassy in Saigon, a line of desperate evacuees snaking up toward it.
Crawford’s small, sleek number was moored on the opposite side of the concrete breakwater, next to a fishing boat and well down a slimy wall spattered with shells and weed. But then, if the tide had been in, the Ecclestons would no doubt be running the actual ferry.
Glad she’d changed her shoes, Jean picked her way along a water-worn set of steps, across the deck of the fishing boat, and down onto the police boat. Michael followed. She averted her eyes from his billowing tartan, even though she suspected that like Alasdair, he felt no need to air any gender differences and wore proper undergarments beneath his kilt.
Farnaby’s complement of police officers huddled together over a locker at the back of the boat. The two arrivals pretty well filled up the rest of the open area. Darling and Crawford looked around—they’d been expecting Jean to arrive solo—but when Alasdair introduced Michael and drew his attention to the object under discussion, they offered polite greetings. “Any road,” Darling said, obviously completing a sentence already begun, “I’ve got no doubt that rim of metal we found at Merlin’s Tower will fit a treat.”
With a wary glance over the low side at the black water spangled with reflections, Jean inched closer to Alasdair. Pen’s gaudy carrier bag lay open on a narrow seat. Inside, wrapped in a cut-open plastic sack, rested a massive flashlight. Even though Jean herself had momentarily held Maggie’s light over the grave, she’d hardly noticed it. Go figure. But if Alasdair and especially Crawford, who’d also had it in their hands, were sure it was hers, she wasn’t going to argue.
As far as she could tell with the crinkled and smudged—probably with butter—plastic in the way, russet-brown stains did indeed edge the remaining metal rim like dirt beneath a fingernail. Even if some of the blood had washed off in the wet gully where Crawford found it, the barrel of the flashlight looked dirty enough to hold dozens of fingerprints, not least Maggie’s and Niamh’s.
Niamh.
Straightening, Jean peered toward the larger boat on the far side of the harbor. Clyde took his position in the small cabin. Rosalie News-of-the-North stood nearby, legs braced wide apart, arms akimbo in the power-pose. Or in the pose of Hey, I thought the hunk was going to be the pilot here.
“That’s the Ecclestons’ boat?” Alasdair asked.
“Aye,” said Crawford. “Usually it’s taking day-trippers out to the Farne Islands—Cuthbert’s cell, birds, all that lot.”
“Yon reporters came over on the ferry with us,” Michael pointed out. “I mind the woman in the plastic coat in particular, was havering the whole time about being sent to purgatory or Siberia or the like. Their cars are still in the car park near the causeway.”
“I reckon Clyde is aiming to dock in Seahouses south of Bamburgh. There’s a taxi service.”
“Better than spending the night here on Farnaby. Or so the reporters are thinking.” Darling made a deprecatory gesture even though none of the people within earshot were islanders.
“It seems like it’d be easier to take a small boat straight over to the seaward side of Lindisfarne and have someone pick you up there,” Jean said. “But it’s a better deal for the Ecclestons to move a bunch of people at once.”
She felt Alasdair’s laser-like gaze on the side of her face. Surely what she’d said wasn’t that foolish. She looked askance at him. Yes? He raised and lowered his shoulders beneath the epaulettes of his jacket. Move along, nothing to see here.
On the pier, Lance untied the tour boat and gave a go-ahead wave. The engine emitted a deep-throated rumble. The smooth black water churned, drowning the reflections in a silvery froth. Jean squinted, searching for Bill Parkinson among the passengers, but she couldn’t see all of them clearly. She didn’t see a certain head of red hair, either. “Y’all don’t suppose Niamh’s on that boat?”
“Oh, good thinking!” said Darling.
Not really. She hated to suggest Niamh had made a break for it. Conventional wisdom had it that you didn’t run away if you were innocent, but conventional wisdom often came closer to clichéd assumption.
Lance sauntered toward the street, not without an inquisitive glance down to the crowded police boat, which heaved up and down in the wash of the larger vessel. Everyone took a steadying step or two but no one went overboard. No lifeguarding required and questions not likely to be answered, Lance walked on.
Five pairs of eyes watched until the boat cleared the jaws of the breakwater. Finally, Alasdair said. “I’m not seeing Niamh on the boat, no. Could be Clyde is hiding her, like Lance was . . .” Hiding Tara, Jean concluded silently when Alasdair stopped dead. The active-duty officers, who had been actively pursuing their duty last night, didn’t need to know he and Jean witnessed her escape.
“Crawford,” Alasdair said, “have you got the number of Clyde’s mobile?”
Stepping into the cockpit, Crawford pulled out his phone. Darling squatted down to close the insulated bag, tuck it deep into the locker, and slam the lid.
“Niamh’s your prime suspect, then?” queried Michael.
“Afraid so,” Jean told him, and asked Alasdair, “What if Niamh’s only guilty of lying about putting the flashlight, the torch, away in the cupboard? What if she gave it to someone? I don’t mean someone at Gow House. Maggie or Tara or even Elaine could have picked it up on her own.”
“Who’d she give it to, then?” he challenged. “Why?”
“I don’t know. Lance? She likes Lance.”
Darling turned a key in the lock and stood up. “Has she got a boyfriend, then? Could be she’s away with him.”
“No, Tara said she broke up with a guy in Newcastle. There’s Lance, yeah, but he’s not a big fan of hers and anyway, he’s right there in front of us.”
Darling nodded, but didn’t quite keep the look of vague relief and delicate speculation from his face.
So the romantic triangle had become a chain, Jean noted. Lance had a thing for Tara, Niamh had one for Lance, Darling was working on one for Niamh. Now if Tara developed something for Darling . . .
“Lance hasn’t got a motive,” Alasdair stated. “Not for bashing Grinsell, not for putting Maggie in the frame with both the torch and the wee pick from the tool tray.”
Jean replied, “No motive that we know of.” But what she did know was that she was grasping at straws.
“Would a random passerby,” Darling said, “go into Gow House and help himself to a torch? Why not take jewelry, silverware, electronics? They’ve not reported anything stolen.”
“No sir,” said Crawford, pocketing his phone. “Niamh’s not on the sightseeing boat.”
“Let’s be getting ourselves back on terra firma, then.” Alasdair boosted Jean out of the chill damp of the harbor up onto the fishing boat. She walked across it, then hauled herself up onto the pier and climbed the damp steps. Funny, she thought, how sometimes footsteps in the darkness behind you could be downright comforting.