The Avalon Chanter (11 page)

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.

Chapter Eleven

One corner of Alasdair’s mouth tucked in, not
quite a smile. Jean wasn’t fooling him one bit. She never could. He
reached out an arm and she tucked herself into his embrace. Funny
how she fit so well against his side. How many years had they each
hung stubbornly onto loneliness before fate threw them together?
If, as feminists once said, a woman needed a man like a fish needed
a bicycle, then Jean would keep right on pedaling away, fins and
all.

“
I’ve phoned an acquaintance in the
Cumbrian Constabulary,” Alasdair said, “one who knew Grinsell at
the time of the Borders stramash. He sent me on to a friend of his
in the south.”

“
Looking up his background, huh?
There’s a nice tasty sauce for the gander. Plus, if he thinks
you’re interfering then you might as well interfere.”

“
There’s interfering, and there’s
minding truth and justice and all. Long story short”—his voice went
dry and distant—“Cumbria was not the man’s first stop on his tour
of Britain’s police agencies. He came originally from
Cambridgeshire.”

“
Cambridgeshire?” Jean sat up so
abruptly Hildy opened an eye. “Maggie’s trial was held in
Cambridge. Was he one of the cops involved in that?”

“
No one in the area could have missed
out having an earful about the case and the subsequent trial.
Trials. A chap was eventually convicted of the crime.”

“
Yeah, you said they finally found the
murderer . . . Well, being convicted doesn’t mean he was the
murderer, but the authorities had to have had a good case to
convince the jury.”

“
Exactly. They were after having a good
case against Maggie as well. Being found innocent does not mean she
was.”

“
I know.”

“
Any road, that’s why I was thinking
her name familiar. Two Cambridgeshire detective constables were
threatening to resign the force if she was found not guilty, saying
the trial was political correctness and radical feminism run
amok.”

Jean rolled her eyes. Only twenty years
ago, and dinosaurs had still been stomping through the legal
swamps.
Being found innocent does not mean
she was.
“Grinsell was one of the objectors, right?
And they didn’t resign.”

“
Hollow threats, one and all, as you’d
be expecting—although Grinsell ended by being transferred to
Cumbria. Still, my friend’s friend in Cambridgeshire is saying that
loads of media, not only the tabloids, were putting it about that
Maggie was guilty at the least of conspiring with the chap who was
later convicted. That she was found innocent for no more reason
than being young and beautiful.”