The Blue Hackle Read online

  The last memory of warmth and light drained through Jean’s cold feet into the unforgiving ground. There was only one reason Alasdair, and Tina with him, would have left Greg alone.

  Chapter Four

  The flashlight beams flared and clashed. Jean squinted. Then they settled, and she saw Tina’s face. Illuminated from beneath, it resembled a mask of tragedy, mouth hanging open, mascara smeared beneath empty eyes, skin like clay.

  Every line of Alasdair’s features was carved in Skye basalt. The vapor of his breath rose and blended into mist. “Jean, Fergus. P.C.—”

  “Thomson, sir. Sanjay Thomson, Kinlochroy.” And, before Alasdair could react as Jean had to his first name, “Where’s the injured party?”

  Tina let out a moan like a collapsing accordion and buckled. Thomson grabbed her other arm. Spasms rippled through her body and her curls trembled.

  Fergie took the blanket, threw it around her shoulders, and pulled her into his own arms. “Come along, dear. Let’s get you back to the house. A cup of tea will go down a treat. Maybe a wee drop of brandy as well.”

  “Greg,” Tina said in a tiny voice.

  Greg. Jean felt shivery, sick, numb, and she’d barely met the man. She could imagine—but didn’t want to—how Tina felt.

  With a quickly suppressed gulp, she took one of Alasdair’s flashlights from his bare and therefore icy hand and exchanged it for Fergie’s carrier bag. A thermos bottle sloshed at its bottom, next to several plastic cups. Of course. Any emergency situation in the British Isles could be mitigated by tea—warmth, caffeine, and sugar. But no amount of tea was going to bring Greg MacLeod back.

  Fergie guided Tina’s stumbling feet toward the gantlet of the enceinte path, and beyond it the oasis of new Dunasheen. His voice, murmuring sympathies, faded into the rhythm of the wind and waves, a rhythm much slower than Jean’s own heart.

  Alasdair introduced himself to the constable and shook his hand. “Sanjay.”

  “My grandad was stationed in India and my granny’s from Delhi.” The constable replied just as patiently as he had with Jean—no doubt he’d had lots of practice—and in a return-of-serve asked, “That’s the Alasdair Cameron, ex-D.C.I. at Inverness?”

  “Aye, one and the same,” Alasdair replied cautiously.

  “I’ve swotted up on the Loch Arkaig and Loch Ness investigations. Brilliant detective work, Chief Inspect—Mr. Cameron.”

  “Thank you, constable, but I was no more than part of a team.” Alasdair’s face remained stony, although a glint in his eye, directed toward Jean, acknowledged her role as partner and gadfly in both of those cases as well as two others. “Let’s be getting on with this investigation, shall we?”

  “Yes, sir.” Thomson started off, his feet creaking across the small stones of the shingle beach. “This way, sir?”

  “Aye, straight on.” Even as he spoke, Alasdair’s gaze tarried on Jean’s, and the glint in his eye wavered like a candle in a draft.

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did he lose his footing, or did a stone turn beneath his shoe, or what?”

  “I’m thinking or what.”

  Jean’s heart slumped downwards. “But how. . . .” She’d find out soon enough.

  Alasdair pulled his gloves from his pocket and onto his hands, but not before Jean glimpsed the mottled rust-red on his fingertips. Bloodstained ground. The MacDonalds and the MacLeods went at it like billy-o.

  She glanced back to see the glow of Fergie’s flashlight moving across the bridge and up the hill and then fading away, a MacDonald now giving aid and succor to a MacLeod.

  Alasdair was off after the pale shiny blur of Thomson’s coat, so fast Jean had to hustle to keep up. No telling what was lurking out here to pick off stragglers. And she’d be thinking that even without Alasdair’s dire or what.

  The beam of Thomson’s flashlight swept back and forth, from the rocky hillside with its thin skin of turf across the beach to the waves rolling forward, falling back, rolling forward again. “The tide’s coming in. How far above . . . ah. There he is, poor chap.”

  Three rays of light converged on a long shape, inert as driftwood. Greg lay diagonally across the pebbles, feet to the land, head to the sea, one arm flung out as though reaching for something that exceeded its grasp. Just beyond his fingertips lay the flashlight Alasdair had given him, glass broken, bulb extinguished.

  His face was turned away from the probing lights. That, as far as Jean was concerned, was a very good thing. And yet even her shrinking gaze discerned that below the red cloth of his jacket glistened a smear of crimson, and a crimson thread wove its way between the pebbles toward the lick of the waves.

  Thomson set aside his first-aid kit and squatted down to inspect the body, the physical shell of a human soul. Alasdair hunkered down beside Thomson. Jean tucked her arms as close to her body as she could and still train her flashlight on the scene, but she was cold with more than the temperature. The wind tugged at the scarf around her head and its soft wool tickled her cheek.

  “I’ve phoned Doctor Irvine,” said Thomson. “He’ll be here soon as may be.”

  “Good,” Alasdair replied. “He can do the preliminaries. Me, I’ve phoned D.C.I. Gilnockie at Inverness C.I.D.”

  “Criminal investigation? But he fell.”

  “If he fell, what did he go falling from?”

  The young man shone his flashlight right and left, back and forth. “Oh. There’s nothing high enough just here, is there? Did he go falling from the castle wall and crawling away—away from the house, though, I’d be expecting him to crawl toward it, looking out help. And if he’d died from a fall, his head would likely be cracked open or his neck twisted round.”

  Alasdair said, “Very good.”

  Jean wondered if Thomson realized what high praise he was getting, Alasdair suffering idiots and fools just about as gladly as he suffered biting insects like the infamous West Highland midge. She flexed her knees and took a step back, then forward again, so as not to miss anything. So as not to show disrespect to the dead.

  “The shingle,” Alasdair went on, “is less likely to show marks of him crawling than sand, aye, but I had me a good look-round whilst Tina, well, whilst Tina ran to and fro, and saw nothing. Gilnockie will order a full work-up. I’ve likely missed a scuff mark or two in the dark, or, if we’re lucky, footprints. In any event, I’m thinking he died where he fell—or fell where he died, rather, just here.”

  Thomson considered that a moment. Then, gingerly, he knelt down and placed his flashlight and his cheek almost on the pebbles, all the better to sight along the trickle of red. “The blood’s coming from his chest. His jacket’s torn.”

  “Oh aye. The wound’s in his chest, or as near as I can tell save rolling him over. And his jacket’s not torn but sliced.”

  “A slice, is it? Could he have fallen on a bit of flotsam or . . . He didna fall. It was no accident.” Thomson’s eyes sparked and abruptly he sat up and back.

  Alasdair waited.

  “He was stabbed and the weapon carried away.”

  As superfluous as Thomson’s kit, Jean offered no comments aloud. Silently, though, she said to the constable, Go ahead, change that passive voice to active—someone stabbed him, someone carried away the weapon. It was . . .

  “A murder? Here? On my patch?” Thomson’s voice swooped to a higher register. Then his body seemed to grow heavier and more compact, and his voice sank again, finding its specific gravity. “Well then. Visitor or local makes never mind, we canna have murders, now, can we? What are you thinking happened, sir?”

  Jean read Alasdair’s nod as a repeat of her own Good lad. Tucking her flashlight beneath her arm, she reached into the carrier bag for the thermos.

  “He was alone no more than twenty minutes,” Alasdair said. “From the time we saw him on the battlement—and he did not fall, he let himself down carefully—to the time we met Tina was no more than fifteen. And it was perhaps five more minutes before we heard her scream.”
/>   “How long did you talk to Ian at the office?” Jean poured tea into a plastic cup, the warmth searing through her gloves, and handed it to Alasdair.

  “Ah, ta. Twelve minutes, according to my phone.”

  Jean poured Thomson a cup as well. Steam coiled upward in the glow of the flashlight.

  “Thank you kindly, madam. Mr. MacLeod here, he was after seeing the old ruined church, you were saying?”

  “So he was telling us,” Alasdair answered over the edge of the cup. “He had no time to get there, though. Likely he never even reached the wee promontory. He met up with someone else and they did not stand about talking. One, maybe two thrusts, and the killer was off along the beach and past the church. Whether he then circled round the estate to Kinlochroy or went on along the coastline—well, we’ll leave the evidence-gathering for the C.I.D.”

  Thomson was looking more starstruck by the moment, his tea forgotten, steam dissipating, in his hand. He dragged his gaze away from Alasdair’s face to his surroundings. “If the killer had come away along the path, you’d have seen him. By sea, well, it’s a rough night.”

  You could tell, Jean thought, what a landlubber she was. The concept of water as highway hadn’t occurred to her. And yet there was a reason the formal entrance of the new castle faced the loch. Passable roads were late coming, here. The early peoples of this area hadn’t felt they were on the rim of civilization at all, when such a broad highway connected them to the world.

  “What’s further up the coastline to the north?” Jean asked. “More beaches? Or cliffs?”

  “Cliffs,” replied Thomson. “No proper beaches, and no proper roads save the one leading to Keppoch Point and the lighthouse. The works are automated, but there’s a hermit lives there. Or so folk are saying of him. I’m thinking he just prefers the company of the birds and the sea creatures. No harm in that.”

  “Usually not, no.” Alasdair drained his cup.

  Jean envisioned the beautifully drawn map of Dunasheen Estate posted on the website. The house or new castle and its dependent buildings lay to the west of Loch Roy, south of the old castle on its islet. The extensive garden with its smaller segments lay on the sheltered southwest side of the house, otherwise there would have been nothing but gorse and heather lining the forest walk leading to the new—newer, newish—church. Whereas the old church was outside the walls, almost outside the estate entirely, northwest of the house.

  Light flashed in the corner of Jean’s eye and she looked around. Two beams of radiance preceded two humanoid blobs down the hill and onto the bridge. They didn’t indicate the Scene of Crimes Officer, unfortunately—more likely the blobs were Rab Finlay and the doctor. Instead of pouring herself a cup of tea, she screwed the top back on the thermos.

  What had Greg said? Oh yes. “He said something about having time for a squint at the old castle. I thought he meant having time before it got dark.”

  “But what if he had an appointment with someone at the church?” asked Alasdair.

  Two minds, one thought. Go figure. “If that person wasn’t the murderer, then maybe he or she saw something.”

  “Aye,” said Thomson.

  “And look here,” Alasdair went on. “He fell with his head a wee bit closer to the castle, as though he was turning and going back to it. Or as though he was trying to escape his killer. And yet he was stabbed in front, not in back. Could be he turned about to strike out with his torch.”

  Thomson nodded, remembered his tea, and swallowed it in one audible gulp. Jean collected the cups. Yeah, the female ran the refreshment services, but it wasn’t as though she had anything more to contribute, not right now, anyway.

  “Hullo!” called a man’s voice, and the two dim shapes squeaked across the shingle, the occasional raindrop like a nano-comet streaking down through the beacons of their flashlights.

  Yes, the man in the lead was burly Rab Finlay. His tweed cap was pulled down low and his gray-shot black beard bristled upward, so that his cheeks reddened by weather and nose reddened by the weather’s antidote—anti-freeze, Tina had said—seemed squashed between. He tucked his flashlight beneath his arm, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and bellowed, “Can a man not sit at peace by his own fireside without being called out in the cauld and wet?”

  “The man’s hardly got himself murdered just to be troubling your evening,” Thomson said.

  “Murder?” repeated Rab, the r’s rolling into the darkness like cannonballs down a staircase. “No guid will come of that.”

  Young Dakota Krum, thought Jean, would probably have added “duh.”

  She less than cleverly deduced that the other man was Dr. Irvine. But she could make out very little of him beyond a wizened form wrapped in a raincoat, with two bright eyes and a nose sharp as a hatchet beneath a floppy-brimmed hat.

  “What have we here?” he asked. “A corpse, is it? And an Aussie corpse at that, Rab’s telling me. You’re thinking it’s foul play? Well now, let’s have a look.” He knelt down, positioned his flashlight, and opened his bag.

  Again Jean stepped back, and this time stayed back and partially turned aside while Alasdair introduced himself, gave Irvine her name without designating her as partner, intended, or thorn in the side, and proceeded with as much chapter and verse as was available.

  “Well,” said Irvine, “the man’s dead, I’ll testify to that—and will, I expect—and I agree that a stab wound’s the likely cause. But under these conditions even the pathologist would be hard put to tell you more.”

  “Right.” Alasdair began issuing orders. “Fetch a tarpaulin to cover the body, if you please, Rab,” the even if you don’t please implicit in his tone. “Doctor, I’d be obliged if you’d take as many photos as possible, allowing for conditions.”

  “I’ve got no cam—” Irvine began.

  Alasdair pulled his own small camera from his pocket. “Here you are.”

  “Very good then.” The doctor trained his flashlight on the camera, assessing the buttons.

  “P.C. Thomson, stay with the doctor just now, please. A team from Portree’s on its way, but they’ll not be here soon. Sooner than Gilnockie and his team from Inverness, though, lest they come by helicopter, and in this murk . . . Well, in any event, we’re in for a long night.”

  Momentarily, Jean flashed back to Glendessary House, how she’d spent an eternity waiting for the police to come. Waiting for Alasdair to walk into her life, had she but known, and so forth.

  “Aye, sir.” Thomson peered into the heaving shadow that was the ocean. “There might be marks at the waterline, the scrape of a boat, footprints, or the like. I’ll have a keek, shall I?”

  “Good idea,” said Alasdair. “Well done.”

  Thomson grinned, then quickly reversed his expression back to somber.

  “Oh, and Thomson,” Alasdair added, “we’ve got no time for a lesson in public relations. Suffice it to say, the media will be following the police like the night the day. Mind how you go.”

  “The media,” repeated Thomson, and despite the dim light, Jean could swear he paled. “Aye, sir. Just the facts. Courteous but firm. No worries.” He started slowly off across the shingle, illuminating each step.

  Alasdair rubbed his hands together, perhaps less to warm them than in pleasure at finding a disciple. Turning away from the sea, he spotted Rab still contemplating the body, his breath a vapor of steam and beer. “Rab, the tarpaulin?”

  Wordlessly, grasping his flashlight in a gnarled hand, Rab turned back toward the castle. His profile in the gloom was that of a troll searching for a bridge to live under. But his little light went on across the footbridge without establishing residence and vanished over the hill.

  The flash of the camera seemed like an explosion. Jean stepped back even further and tucked the thermos up against her chest, but its exterior was no more than lukewarm. That’s why it was a thermos.

  If she felt cold, Alasdair was half-frozen. He’d been out here all this time. But then, he was Highland
-born and bred, unfazed by chill. And he was a cop, unfazed by—or at least, undemonstrative at—sudden death.

  That she’d seen too much sudden death over the last year wasn’t his fault. Together they had dealt with criminals exploiting the romance of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the pseudo-science of the Loch Ness monster, the claims made by a bestselling novel about Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel, and tales of witchcraft in colonial Virginia.

  The mist thickened into a mizzle, droplets gathering on Irvine’s and Alasdair’s shoulders to glint in the lights the way the diamond in her ring had glinted.

  She supposed Tina had a diamond ring, too. And a wedding band. Maybe she and Greg had matching ones, engraved like the ones waiting for Jean and Alasdair with their initials and the date of their wedding.

  To wed. To join. To espouse. To unite in a knot that could be cut abruptly asunder.

  An hour ago Greg had been laughing, complaining about his wife’s shopping, asking about a two-centuries-old murder and anticipating exploring the ancestral ground. Now he was a cold slab of meat lying on that ancestral ground, pawed over by hands that would infinitely rather be holding cups and glasses of holiday cheer.

  An hour ago Tina had been anticipating a drink and a Hogmanay party. Now she was alone and bereft, an entire planet between her and home.

  To fall in love was to risk everything.

  “Jean.”

  She jumped, jerked back to the scene, lights puny against a dark sky and a dark land joined by a dark sea, Alasdair’s voice in her ear and his presence at her shoulder.

  “Let’s you and me be getting ourselves back to the house,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  Chapter Five

  Jean paced up and down in front of the fireplace in the sitting room of the Bonnie Prince Charlie suite, the best in the house, Fergie had assured them.

  At least Charlie really had set foot on Skye, conducted by the intrepid Flora MacDonald. Who was probably no relation to Fergie—MacDonalds were thick on the ground here. But, with the other interesting ancestries turning up this evening, why not?