The Avalon Chanter (13 page)

Fending Lance off, Crawford asked, “Have you
seen Tara Hogg?”

“
Not since eight or thereabouts, round
about the time everyone went haring off after the polis. Have you
asked at Gow House?”

“
Aye, that I have. Maggie’s saying
Tara’s at the music school, but she’s not.” The beam of the
flashlight swooped high and low, over the garden wall and across
the back of the house. Behind the shrub, Tara wrapped her arms
tightly around her chest and shrank into a ball.

A light flooded the garden and a door slammed
open. “Edwin? Lance?” Pen called from the back of the house.
“What’s all this?”

“
Sorry to be bothering you, Pen.”
Crawford all but knuckled his forehead. “I’m looking out Miss Hogg.
D. I. Grinsell wants a word.”

Another reflective jacket drifted into the
alley behind Crawford, the face above it concealed in shadow. It
was either Sergeant Darling, Jean thought, or an official wild
card.

Crawford tried again. “Pen, have you seen
Tara Hogg?”

Pen had to see Tara crouching in her flower
bed. Jean could see the young woman’s face as clearly as she could
see Alasdair’s, drawn and pale against the window.

“
Why no,” Pen said. “I’ve not seen the
lass for quite some time. It’s getting on for half past ten . . .
Oh. Hello. I’m Penelope Fleming.”

“
Detective Sergeant Rufus Darling,” he
called over the wall. “Sorry for the disturbance, madam.” Turning
to Crawford, he asked, “No joy with Elaine Lauder either, I
assume?

“
Niamh’s already put her to bed. Poor
old thing’s not fit for an interview in any event.”

“
Well then.” Darling made a wagons-ho
gesture. “Inspector Grinsell’s agreed there’s no call chasing wild
geese in the darkness. We’ll have another go tomorrow. The boat’s
staying the night—weather’s too thick to be out in the shipping
lanes unless needs must, but our passenger’s in no
rush.”

“
Aye, sir.” Crawford fell into step
beside Darling and the sound of their shoes on the damp pavement
was absorbed into the voices and music from the pub. The light in
the garden winked out and the back door shut with a solid
thunk.

By the time Jean’s eyes adjusted to the
sudden darkness, the garden gate had creaked open and clicked shut
and both Tara and Lance were gone. To Gow House? There was no
better place to hide than one that had already been searched. “What
did poor Darling have to do to get Grinsell to give it up for the
night? Sacrifice a virgin?”

“
I’m hoping he appealed to logic and
procedure. No matter. If Grinsell finds Lance was hiding Tara, as
was Pen, come to that, he’ll be having their guts for
garters.”

“
He’d take a chunk or two out of us for
not blowing the whistle.”

“
Aye, but no one knows we were watching
save the cat here.”

“
True.” Jean backed away from the
window and realized she still held
Hilda,
the Enchanted Prioress of Farnaby
, her fingertips
moist against the slick paper. “So was Tara in the pub after all,
and didn’t hear Maggie’s text come in? And then Crawford came
looking for her? If so, Lance did some fast thinking. And fast
side-choosing. So did Pen.”

“
Trust Grinsell to set everyone in the
village against him. That said,” Alasdair went on, “the body’s
almost sure to be older than Maggie, never mind Tara. She’s got
nothing to fear from an interview.”

The show over, Hildy jumped down and wended
her way toward the door.

“
You didn’t hear how Grinsell treated
Maggie,” Jean retorted. “You didn’t hear what he said about Tara
without ever having met her.”

“
She’s making the eventual
confrontation even worse, for no good reason.”

Jean reminded herself again that Alasdair was
a cop. A male cop. “We’re only guessing about her reason. What if .
. . Whoa! What if Tara took the chanter out of the grave? I saw
someone walking toward the priory right before we went to eat,
remember? Maybe she’s trying to protect her mother and
grandmother.”

“
Ah.” The furrow between Alasdair’s
eyebrows deepened. “If so, she’s making it worse for them as
well.”

“
She is, yes—the missing chanter gave
Grinsell another opening to harass Maggie. If only the mist hadn’t
stranded him . . . Oh, no—where’s he staying? Not here, not in
Michael and Rebecca’s room. Pen will have to fumigate it before
Michael and Rebecca can put the baby in there tomorrow.”

“
Surely this is not the only B and B.
There’s the hostel as well.”

From several rooms away came Pen’s voice.
“Puss, puss—there you are.”

Hildy meowed.

“
A bit of cream? I’ll warm it for you,
shall I?” A door shut.

She who must be obeyed, Jean thought.
Surprising herself with a smile, she walked over to the sofa and
retrieved her mini-backpack. “Poor Tara. The way she feels about
Lance, and then having to take any port in a storm.”

Alasdair switched off the electric fire.
“Eh?”

“
The romantic triangle. I told you
earlier.”

“
When?”

“
In the pub, right after Tara broke the
glass and Niamh checked her hand.”

“
Oh aye, James came running with
bandages. Seems unlikely, though, with James being so much older
and married to boot.”

Jean laughed. “Not James. Lance has a crush
on Tara, but she doesn’t reciprocate. Didn’t you hear what they
were saying to each other right before we got in the car to drive
up to the priory? He called her a proper little bitch and she told
him to stuff it where the sun don’t shine.”

“
Ah,” Alasdair said. “Hardly a love
triangle, then.”

“
Okay then, it’s a frustration polygon.
The third angle is Niamh. The way she looks at Lance, I bet she has
a crush on him. I bet she called Lance while we were on the ferry,
wanting to meet him in the pub. He wasn’t thrilled but couldn’t
avoid it.”

Alasdair hadn’t blinked.

“
Missed the whole thing, didn’t you?
And you call yourself a detective.”

“
A detective, not a lonely-hearts
columnist. A right weary detective at that, thinking he’d best have
himself a good night’s sleep before it all starts up again.”
Alasdair bowed Jean toward the door. “And before you go wasting
your breath reminding me, aye, we’re never knowing what’s evidence
and what’s not, so your romantic triangle’s worth
observing.”

“
It’s not
my
triangle,” was all Jean replied, without
adding that the elusive nature of evidence was Grinsell’s
justification as well, never mind his nasty remarks about
chin-wagging women.

Jean led the way upstairs and plunged into
the evening routine, washing the taste of Grinsell out of her mouth
with a fierce squeeze of mint toothpaste. By the time she lay down
in the bed beside Alasdair he was already asleep, his furrowed brow
almost smooth again. She blew him a kiss and picked up the
booklet.

The real Hilda of Farnaby had not been
clothed in the intricate medieval habit of the cover illustration.
She had probably worn a simple wool shift and veil, her wonders to
perform. Almost unhinging her jaw with a yawn, Jean flipped quickly
through the book, pausing at a sketch of Hilda levitating over the
sea to Lindisfarne to visit her opposite number at that priory.
Quite the mystic, she had protected her followers from various
physical and spiritual dangers and died peacefully in bed
surrounded by admirers.

Surely it had occurred to Maggie that the
original tomb, later superseded by a Norman chantry, could have
been Hilda’s. But if Maggie was trying to justify her mother’s work
. . . Jean promised herself to have another look at the grave slab
tomorrow. Who had said something about horsemen? Tara?

Had she taken the chanter? Realistically,
anyone on the island could have taken it—assuming the bush
telegraph operated as efficiently here as it did in other small
communities and word of the body and the chanter had made the
rounds before Grinsell’s arrival.

You’d have to have a strong motive to
poke around in that grave, in the dark, alone. Jean put that image
out of her head and considered the booklet’s title page:
By Elaine Lauder
. The same name was
handwritten below, in a firm, classical script, with the
words,
For Pen and James, who know where
the bodies are buried.

Literally? Surely not. Elaine would hardly
have autographed the book with those words if so. She only meant
that Pen and James were good friends dating back many years.

Poor Elaine. A living ghost haunting
Farnaby.

Jean set the book on the bedside table,
switched off the light, and settled down against the crisp, fresh
pillows. Yawn or no yawn, she knew it would be one of those nights
when she was too tired to stay awake but too wired to sleep.

The grave did not belong to Arthur. Even
though Arthur’s followers had sent him off in a boat. With three
queens. Who had welcomed the mortally wounded man to the mystical
island of Avalon.

A mystical island. Three queens. Elaine.
Maggie. Tara.

Where did Niamh come in?

Jean hadn’t realized she’d dozed off until
she woke up with a start.

Chapter Thirteen

The bedside clock read one-fifteen a.m. From
downstairs, the kitchen, probably, came a murmur of voices. Jean
recognized Pen’s and James’s. The third, a man’s lower timbre, she
didn’t. Unless it was Clyde’s. It sure wasn’t Grinsell tracking his
victims into their domestic sanctuary.

They weren’t so much arguing as having an
urgent discussion—well, it would have to be urgent to go on so
late—and she couldn’t make out any words. Maybe one of them had
exclaimed and either that or the shushing by the others had
awakened her. Maybe one of them had let a door slam.

Whatever. She was awake now, so she threw on
her robe and tiptoed in her wool socks into the bathroom. It was
only after she flushed that she realized the sound would alert the
talkers below that someone was up and about. Not that she had any
intention of slipping down the stairs and eavesdropping on them.
They had every right to be worried about the events of the, by now,
day before.

The house fell into a silence deep and cold
as the grave . . . In the daylight she’d have laughed at herself.
Now, she turned up the collar of the robe so that it protected the
nape of her neck.

She didn’t have to make her usual check to
see if Alasdair was breathing. She could hear his slow, deep
breaths from across the room. Good. He’d need all his strength
tomorrow, biting his tongue until Grinsell, Darling, and Crawford
gave up and went away—hopefully not without sharing a preliminary
pathology report on the body.

If they were able to go away.

Lifting the curtain aside, she looked out at
the harbor. The thinning mist shimmered in the few remaining lights
of the village. The black shape of the police boat was marked with
small lights, too, revealing that it now rode high behind the
breakwaters in the company of several smaller craft. She made out
the shape of the ferry, farther down the street—it floated at the
top of the concrete ramp rather than the bottom. But the Ecclestons
had no customers in the middle of the night.

The soft blanket of perception sank onto her
shoulders. The hair on her nape lifted like antennae, collar or no
collar. Faint but unmistakable women’s voices ebbed and flowed.
Jean padded across the room to the window overlooking the
priory.

The walls and arches seemed to be draped in
gauze. She couldn’t tell whether those brief flickers of movement
were strands of mist wafting through the ruins or the ghosts of the
early nuns—whether Hilda’s or much later ones—singing the night
offices as they had in life. The scene was eerie, yes. Uncanny. And
not at all threatening. Father, son, and holy ghost. Mother,
daughter, and holy spirit. Profane time, that plodded forward
minute by minute, day by day, and sacred time, that circled rather
than passed.

The embrace of the sanctified eternal died
away, leaving her with the gooseflesh and cold feet of the present.
She hurried back to the bed and tucked herself under the weight of
the duvet, against Alasdair’s warm, living flesh. He stirred,
mumbled something, and fell back asleep.

After a while the chanting died away. After a
longer while Jean dozed again, and dreamed fitfully of cabbages and
kings, of swords and dragons, of ships on the sea and a morning in
Texas after an ice storm, the Gallowglass van spinning its wheels
on the frozen street but gaining no traction.

I know the
feeling
,
she thought in an instant of
lucidity, and then slipped into a deep and blessedly dreamless
sleep. She woke up to find the room illuminated by a watery light
and Alasdair, fully dressed, sitting on the side of the bed. “It’s
going on for eight, lass. I’ve never known you to miss
breakfast.”

“
Good heavens, no.” Buoyed by the
aromas of coffee and sausages wafting from the kitchen, Jean washed
and dressed and was ready to go in record time. On the stairs she
told Alasdair about the inscription in the booklet, and about
hearing their hosts in conference in the wee hours of the
morning.

He nodded. “Saying ‘where the bodies are
buried’ likely means nothing, aye. And yet the Flemings and Clyde
were acquainted with Thomas Seaton before he died, weren’t they
not?”