The Avalon Chanter (12 page)

“
And pregnant.”

“
Oh aye. Some decades earlier that
would have told against her. But in the nineties, it worked for
her. She was no slut, she was a lass poorly treated by the
menfolk.” His tone made all the social commentary
necessary.

Okay, so dinosaurs existed in the eye of the
beholder. “The social pendulum swings, huh? And the media
overreacts, trying to dumb it all down into an episode of a TV
show, with a climax before every commercial.” Jean tried to
remember Crawford’s words beside the tomb, when he’d first
mentioned Grinsell’s name. It had happened a few hours ago, not
last month . . .

Aha.
“Crawford
said—or implied, to be accurate—Grinsell had volunteered to come
out to Farnaby. Otherwise the chief inspector in Berwick, Webber,
he would have just sent a sergeant. I mean, it’s not exactly a
recent death. I bet Grinsell recognized Maggie’s name. He may have
known her connection to Farnaby all along. I bet he sees himself as
some sort of crusader, out to avenge an old miscarriage of justice
and set an example for uppity women in the future.
Sheesh.”

Jean settled back into her nest beside
Alasdair, her ears echoing with Maggie’s,
Justice? What do you and your ilk know of justice?
There was a concept that cut two ways.

His arm tightened around her. “Good job I
left Miranda a message of my own, laying out the situation and
asking her to be checking up on the particulars.”

“
I’ve got my computer—I could do
that—but that’s Miranda’s area of expertise. If she had any
patience with academia and peer review and so forth, she’d make a
great social scientist.”

“
She would that.” Alasdair saluted the
absent Miranda with his glass, then drained it. He set his cheek
against Jean’s forehead, lightly, so as not to scratch her skin
with what by now was his ten-o’clock shadow.

From the front of the house came the
rattling-trash-can noise of an old banger. “Grinsell commandeered a
rattletrap of a pickup from Clyde,” Jean explained, “and sent
Crawford to bring Tara and Elaine back to the incident room. I bet
he’s coming back all alone.”

“
Elaine? Is Grinsell not aware of her
condition?”

“
He’s aware, all right. He doesn’t
care.” Jean could see Grinsell dashing himself against Elaine’s
illness like a boat against a cliff. She could see him ditto
against Crawford’s stolidity. “Maggie texted Tara the minute she
got out of Grinsell’s sight—called him ‘horrid.’ Go figure—probably
warned her to lie low.”

“
Horrid, aye, but even so, you’re
saying Grinsell was asking all the right questions.”

“
Oh!” Jean jerked around, Alasdair
dodging before her skull knocked his nose askew. “When Maggie
mentioned the chanter, Grinsell said it wasn’t there.”

“
The chanter lying next the dead
man?”

No need to reply tartly,
No, the one Hector was playing as we drove
by.
Alasdair was being a cop. “Yes. I drew Grinsell’s
fire by backing Maggie up, saying we saw it, too. But he thinks she
was lying.”

The telltale crease appeared between
Alasdair’s eyebrows—cogitation in progress.

“
Crawford’s claiming he never saw the
chanter at all, that the light wasn’t right or whatever. What’s up
with that?”

“
Better denying the chanter was there
at all than taking stick for letting it go missing on your
watch.”

“
But who knew the chanter was there?
Who had the chance to take it? And the biggie: Why?”

“
It’s a clue. And some villain is
hoping to pervert the course of justice by hiding it.”

“
But it’s a clue to a crime that took
place decades ago.” And whose side was Crawford taking, anyway, now
that the situation had devolved into taking sides?

Footsteps in the front hall made them both
look around. Hugh, calling it a night at an unusually early hour?
No—the outside door hadn’t opened. Unless someone else was walking
around the B&B, someone they didn’t know about, the steps had
to be Pen’s. Perhaps she was looking for something else to
clean.

No one passed the door. In the depths of the
house, a telephone bleated, once, twice, three times. Pen’s voice,
heavier than it had been earlier, answered and carried on an
unintelligible conversation.

Dropping her own voice so far Alasdair had to
lean into her face to hear it, Jean detailed the story of
Elaine’s—theoretical, hypothetical, alleged—phantom lover, the
piper Thomas Seaton, the Lancelot to Wat’s Arthur.

“
Well then,” Alasdair murmured, “till
we’ve got evidence to the contrary, let’s be drawing the simplest
conclusion and saying he’s aye the chap in the grave.”

“
Works for me. No way am I speaking for
Grinsell.” Jean went on, “Maggie said she heard this from Pen, who
was—who is—a great friend of Elaine’s. Until then, she’d thought
the lover was a manifestation of the dementia.”

“
And now Maggie’s doubting her own
paternity, thinking the chanter’s a clue to that. Is someone else
thinking it’s a clue to murder?” Alasdair’s warm, whisky-scented
breath tickled Jean’s cheek. Dark lashes edged his cool blue eyes.
She wondered what poor Rob the Ranter, Tom, Lancelot, whoever, had
looked like in life. She lassoed her brain before it louped off
into wondering what Alasdair would look like in death.

“
We don’t know Tom was murdered,” she
said. “He could have suffered a heart attack or stroke or at any
rate died of natural causes. If that had been the case, there’d
have been no reason to hide his body.”

“
There’d have been reason enough if he
died at an inconvenient time, say, whilst having sex.”

“
Okay, sure, but you don’t pick up a
body like a sack of groceries and carry it over to the nearest
medieval ruin. More than one person had to be involved in getting
him into the tomb.”

“
Unless Tom was in the priory when he
died, with or without Elaine.”

“
That wouldn’t be my first or even
tenth choice for a tryst.”

“
Needs must, I’m supposing. Mind you,
though, I’m no expert.”

Jean had to laugh at that, if dryly. He was
no expert in illicit trysts. In, um, trysting itself, he was very
accomplished indeed. She thought of a seventeenth-century poem,
where the poet woos his reluctant lover by pointing out how the
grave was a nicely secluded place but no one ever embraced
there.

The lovely room upstairs made a nice,
secluded place for the living and their life-affirming activities.
She had been anticipating not a cinematic clinch on the beach,
exactly, but inspiring moments set to the rhythm of the sea. And
now the stimulating weekend jaunt had turned sinister. Too many
moments in their lives together turned sinister, as if their
happiness was ransomed by other peoples’ pain. Perhaps working to
balance the scales of justice was payback enough. “What goes around
comes around,” she said.

“
Thinking of Grinsell?”

“
Not necessarily. Just thinking. You
know, tuppence for my thoughts.”

His laugh was more of a soft chuckle.

The orange bars of the electric fire sent a
glow over the semi-darkened room and emitted not only warmth but a
gentle hum. Overhead marched a row of ceramic pieces, not only the
china dogs that sat on every respectable British mantel, but a
shepherdess and her male counterpart, a Toby jug in the belligerent
image of Winston Churchill, a Mickey Mouse, and a little blue baby
Krishna. Photos ranged among the knickknacks—a teenage girl; the
same girl a decade later with two children in front of Bamburgh
Castle; the same children, older now, at the music school. One
small frame showed a slimmer, smoother Pen and a smiling Elaine of
the book-cover era.

Hildy’s ears perked up. She stretched, tested
a claw by plucking at the fabric of the chair, and then headed for
a window on the side of the room facing the garden and the priory.
Clearing a lamp and a candy dish with millimeters to spare, she
settled down on the sill, a lump behind the lace curtains.

Voices rose and fell in the night. Women’s
voices, chanting in Latin. A wave of perception rolling forward,
inundating everything in its path. Sacred songs persisting long
after the throats and tongues that had vocalized them decayed into
dust and became one with the sand and soil of Farnaby Island.

Chapter Twelve

No sooner did Jean feel the burden of the
supernatural settle on her shoulders, along with the weight of
Alasdair’s arm as he, too, sensed as much as heard the voices, than
the sensation ebbed. For once she hated to see it go. The music was
the aural equivalent of the star she’d seen at sunset, a reminder
of eternal peace and beauty.

With a sigh, she finished her whisky. Its
warmth glistened like quicksilver in her living veins.

“
I’m thinking any of Grinsell’s folk
still watching the priory were not hearing a thing.” Alasdair’s
voice caught in his throat, brushed against the grain.

“
I’m wondering whether Elaine really
was speaking with a ghost.”

He nodded toward the coffee table,
where his reading glasses sat next to a booklet. “I found that on
the shelf next some books on Farnaby and Lindisfarne and
Elaine’s
The Matter of
Britannia
. Why Britannia, by the by? I was thinking
the Arthurian stories the Matter of Britain.”

“
Elaine focused on Guinevere, though.
Britannia, the Roman goddess, the female symbol of Britain. The
distaff side.”

“
So to speak. Britannia’s always
pictured with weapons and armor. A proper Amazon.”

“
That was Elaine’s point, Guinevere as
a strong figure in her own right, a ruler, a priestess, maybe even
a warrior. That’s not the most novel of concepts—think what
Hollywood’s done with it—but Elaine’s twist is that Guinevere is
Gwendeth, Merlin’s sister. She intended writing a second book about
how Farnaby’s chantry chapel is the center of her cult.”

“
Her evidence being the testimony of a
ghost?”

“
We don’t know that, not for sure.”
Jean set down her glass and picked up the small book. The shiny
cover sported the title,
Hilda, the
Enchanted Prioress of Farnaby
, and a rough medieval
woodcut of a nun. Her tiny oval face was no more than a sketch of
humanity encompassed by wimple and veil. “The magical
prioress?”

“
You were saying the legends were
likely no more than the usual stories of saints and miracles, but
this lady was no saint, for all she was a contemporary of Saint
Aidan.”

“
She comes from the era of Saint Hilda
of Whitby, too, then, but it sounds as though they have only the
name in common.”

“
I’ve not finished reading the story.
I’m thinking she’ll come to a bad end, accused of
witchcraft.”

“
The early Celtic church wasn’t nearly
as dogmatic about that, and local foundations had a lot more leeway
than when the Roman church took over, so maybe not.”

On the windowsill, the cat jerked upright,
making the curtains billow. Racing steps and urgent voices sounded
from outside.

“
. . . in here,” said a male voice, and
something thumped.

“
Thanks,” a woman said breathlessly.
“What Mags said—I swear, if that’s how your cops treat people . .
.”

“
Hush.”

In a coordinated move worthy of Rogers and
Astaire, Jean and Alasdair leaped from the sofa to the window and
bumped heads over the cat’s alert ears.

Alasdair radiated warmth onto Jean’s temple.
The glass radiated chill onto her forehead. In the mist-matted
darkness beyond the window, nothing moved. She closed her eyes,
opened them, and then made out the gravel path between Pen’s tidy
flower beds, a bench, a bird feeder. A clothesline dripped
moisture, each droplet a quick gleam. Beyond the garden wall the
priory seemed no more than arched implication.

“
I don’t . . .” she said, her breath
misting the glass, just as Alasdair’s hand clamped down on her arm.
“There.”

Using Hildy’s ears as a sighting device, Jean
spotted a slender female shape crouching against the wall between
the garden and Cuddy’s Close, almost concealed by a shrub whose
bare branches stitched shadow across the pastel fabric of her
jacket. A white bandage glinted on her hand. Tara.

Footsteps moved in stately rhythm down the
alley. A burst of light illuminated the broad shoulders and blond
hair of Lance Eccleston, his back turned, facing the far end of the
wall. Answering—no, from the vantage point of the window Jean could
see he only pretended to answer a call of nature.

“
Here!” P.C. Crawford’s reflective
jacket seemed bright as a solar flare.

“
Hmm
?” Lance’s
hands moved, but he wasn’t actually zipping up. He turned around,
his step less steady than it would be strolling across the deck of
the ferry in a heavy swell. His words came lazily, a bit slurred.
“Oh, it’s you, Constable. You’re missing a grand session at the
pub.”

“
The pub has loos,” Crawford said
coldly.

“
The gent’s was engaged. And I was
wanting a breath of air.” He clapped Crawford on the shoulder and
leaned into his face. From the way Crawford recoiled, Jean deduced
that breath was indeed the issue. “I thought you’d be well away
home by now. Your shift ended hours ago.”