The Avalon Chanter (18 page)

“
I reckon so. He’s young is all. Good
job Crawford’s here as well, as a steadying influence.”

“
But Crawford seems to have lied about
the chanter in the grave. Or is anyone going to care about that and
Thomas Seaton and everything, now?”

“
There’ll be an inquest, still, but
quite a lot’s depending on whether the attack on Grinsell’s related
to the body in the chapel.” Alasdair scanned the indigo haze that
lay like a stroke of paint along the northern horizon. “Maggie,
now, Darling’s telling me Maggie threatened Grinsell.”

“
She did? Oh. Well, she told him to
treat her daughter with respect or she’d something unspecified.
Darling and I grabbed her right then and she never finished her
sentence.”

“
Close enough. She was after keeping
him from harassing Tara.”

“
So was Lance. And Pen. That’s hardly a
motive for murder.”

“
I’ve heard tell of men murdered for a
five-pound note.”

“
Not Maggie, not even for a long-lost
daughter—no. Just no.” Jean’s memory emitted a crystal-clear image
of Maggie switching on her industrial-strength flashlight and
bending over the open grave.
No.

Alasdair had to be visualizing the same
image. But his profile against the sky communicated as much as the
stones of the fort.

Jean realized she heard a faint thrumming
sound. Her own heartbeat, still racing?

Several people turned toward the north and
pointed. The thrumming became a thumping, growing louder and
louder. A black dot appeared in the haze, grew into a
yellow-and-black helicopter, and swooped down on Farnaby. Seabirds
and land birds alike ricocheted into the air. The sheep galloped
away down the field.

The beat of the rotor blades reverberated in
Jean’s head. She clapped her hands to her ears and braced herself
against the blast of wind as the helicopter settled onto the far
end of the grassy area.

It had barely landed before a door opened and
two flight-suited figures—men, women, Martians, Jean couldn’t
tell—piled out. Hoisting a stretcher, they ran toward Crawford, the
only person in uniform. Alasdair started forward, stopped,
recalibrated, and began effecting crowd control. Within what seemed
like two minutes the twin flight suits were carrying the stretcher
with Grinsell’s body . . . Not a body, Jean reminded herself again.
A man. A man-shaped bundle of blankets and bandages.

The helicopter’s doors slammed shut. The
rotors whined and beat a rhythm simultaneously. Like a giant metal
bumblebee, the helicopter lifted off and headed toward
Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Alasdair had gotten his wish: Grinsell was
well on his way to Berwick before the island shut down.

Crawford’s cap blew off and rolled away, but
he didn’t chase it down. He stood watching the dwindling form of
the helicopter. And Jean recognized who he reminded her of: A
narrow upturned face, a rawboned jaw, a beak of a nose—the statue
of Saint Aidan in the churchyard on Lindisfarne.

What? Was there a certain look in the
Northumbrian genetic structure? But hadn’t Aidan come from Ireland?
Not that it mattered—the statue on Lindisfarne dated from the
twentieth century.

Hector emerged from the tower using a
moistened wipe to clean the blood from his hands. Niamh walked
behind him, closing up the medical kit with fingers still splashed
crimson. Niamh McCarthy was an Irish name. So was Donal McCarthy.
Did that matter?

A ripple passed through the people
gathered on the headland, multiple shoulders slumping, a variety
of
What now?
looks passing
back and forth. So Grinsell had been whisked efficiently away. That
resolved nothing.

Jean retrieved Crawford’s cap from where it
lay against the wall and handed it back. There. She’d made a
contribution, albeit a microscopic one.

“
Thank you kindly, madam.” Crawford
settled his cap so far down his stubble of hair that his eyes
looked out from the shadow of the visor like those of the bouncer
in a speakeasy through their slot.

Alasdair paced back toward the entranceway.
“Thank you,” he told Niamh and Hector. His polite but stern nod
swept across the sheep-wranglers and the grass-searchers as well.
Crawford’s subtle shooing motions reinforced the message.

The civilians headed back to the village.
Hector opened the gate for Niamh, and she waited for him to pass
through it and join her. “. . . multiple-car pile-up on the freeway
in a sand storm,” he was telling her. “We had to leave the
ambulance on the access road and climb up . . .”

He wasn’t callous; he was accustomed to
dealing with the suffering of strangers. Not that Niamh was
listening to him. The thoughts processed behind those delicate
features had nothing to do with sand storms and freeways. Jean
remembered Tara when they met her waiting at the ferry, gazing
toward a point far beyond the island. She thought of Maggie sitting
in front of Grinsell and imagining herself somewhere else.

Behind her, Alasdair and Darling conducted a
conference with the scene-of-crime technicians. She caught
something about footprints and bloodstains, something about
trampled nettles. “. . . aye, the investigation’s rushed, no help
for it—good job finding that wee scraper, now—the question’s how to
best be keeping gawpers from overrunning the scene.”

Standing apart, Crawford gazed out to sea,
even as his ears seemed to twitch backwards like a cat’s. As the
low man on the totem pole, he no doubt awaited orders to pitch a
tent and spend the night on guard.

Her own ears simply chilly, Jean looked past
the roofs of the village, past the island itself, to see the
ash-gray billows of fog inching closer.

Chapter Seventeen

The ferry emerged from the shadow of
Lindisfarne, its wake frothing white behind it. Clyde had put the
pedal to the metal, Jean told herself.

The deck was crowded with passengers, people
planning on attending the concert at the school tonight, no doubt,
and reporters onto the story of the unidentified body who would
soon discover an even more exciting story underway. Or had they
seen the helicopter from the ferry? Were they phoning Berwick to
find out what was going on? Any reporter worth the name would have
a mobile phone fully supplied with the numbers of sources from law
enforcement officials to friendly criminals, if that wasn’t a
contradiction in terms.

Squinting, Jean could make out a stroller,
confirming the presence of little Linda Campbell-Reid and,
therefore, her parents. Good. Reinforcements. Friends she could
trust. Funny how even Pen’s affable face now seemed to be hiding
plots. Maybe everyone in Farnaby St. Mary had worked together to
dispose of Grinsell, so that the answer to “Whodunit?” was
“Everyone.” Alasdair and Darling couldn’t arrest the entire
village.

Well, knowing Alasdair, if he had to, he
would.

She looked around to see the technicians
taking off down the path, clutching their little bags of evidence,
their samples and photos, such as they were. The footprints and
scrapes on the path itself would be useless now, after so many
people had come and gone.

“
P.C. Crawford,” said
Alasdair.

“
Aye, sir?”

“
Collect the crime-scene tape from the
chantry chapel and bring it up here, then close off the entranceway
as best you can, please.”

Crawford didn’t blink.

Darling weighed in. “I know, a strip of tape
won’t keep gawpers from messing the scene about. Bring yourself a
thermos—anything you think you’ll want—and keep an eye out till
sunset. Plan on spending the night on the island as well.”

“
The reporters will be doing a smash
and grab, so to speak,” Alasdair added. “Here’s hoping the haar’s
clearing and the ferry’s running the lot of them back to the
mainland before the tide turns. The folk arriving for the concert,
well, could be they’ll not feel like trekking up here and will be
contenting themselves with having a look at the chapel on their way
to the school.”

“
Aye, sir.” Crawford turned toward the
path.

“
Oh, and Crawford . . .”

“
Sir?”

“
The sergeant here’s telling me he sent
you home to Bamburgh for the night. Did you go, then?”

Crawford’s duty-and-country expression didn’t
shift in the slightest. “No, sir. Pen kindly offered me an empty
bed.”

“
Very good. Carry on.”

Crawford marched off through the gate.

“
So he was here the night. Is that
significant, sir?” asked Darling.

From the twitch at the corner of
Alasdair’s mouth, Jean suspected he wanted to reply,
Damned if I know.
But all he said
was, “Let’s have a care what information we’re disclosing round the
local folk, and I’m counting Crawford as local folk.”

“
Yes, sir. Um . . .” Darling grimaced.
“Yes, sir.”

Crawford’s lanky figure diminished down the
path. At its far end, two female figures walked just as
purposefully through the car park, past the cemetery, and onto the
grounds of the priory, each of them holding objects unidentifiable
from this distance. Maggie and Tara. Niamh had returned to Gow
House, then, and told them they were safe from Grinsell’s
attentions, if not from those of a greenhorn sergeant and a
reluctant Scottish detective.

“
Right,” said the detective, and held
out his hand to Jean. “Off we go.”

Off they went, through the gate and toward
the village. A chill breeze rustled the hedges. The seabirds had
returned to their regularly scheduled program, and coasted around
the headland or dived into the sea, depending on the species. A
coven of oystercatchers gathered in a nearby field.

Jean, Alasdair, and Darling reached the
parking lot in time to hear the rumble of engines that heralded the
departure of the police boat. They stood in a row, watching between
and over the buildings as it glided out of the harbor, rounded the
end of the island, and, skirting the fog bank, sped north.

At the back of the Angle’s Rest, a window
closed and a shape faded into the shadows of the room. Her and
Alasdair’s room, Jean realized. The shape moved subtly through the
next window over, the one in the sitting area at the top of the
stairs. Hildy, holding down the sill with a sphinx-like posture,
looked around and then turned back to the scene outside.

It was a B&B, Jean told herself. The
owner came into their room and cleaned things up and aired the
place out. Nothing even remotely suspicious about that.

Darling eyed Clyde’s pickup still leaning
drunkenly into the pothole, Clyde having more lucrative matters to
deal with. “Why was Grinsell out and about so early? What was he on
the go about?”

Neither Jean nor Alasdair had any answers.
Alasdair tried another question. “Had he any enemies? Ones
motivated to be attacking him, that is. Ones after killing
him.”

“
Any policeman’s got enemies, and
Grinsell more than most, I reckon, but surely an enemy’d find it
easier to attack him in the streets of Berwick.” Darling partly
shook his head and partly shrugged, so that the gesture came out
more of a shudder.

“
Does he have any family?” Jean
asked.

“
A sister in Cambridgeshire’s all he’s
ever mentioned. He’s never seemed particularly fond of her, is more
than a bit scornful of her and her doings.”

“
That’s a shame. No surprise, but a
shame.”

Still in a row, like a stunted line of
Rockettes, they turned around and faced the priory. Crawford was
rolling up the blue-and-white police tape that had been draped from
column base to column base. A faint gleam of light shone from
inside the chapel, accompanied by the uneven
dink-dink
of metal hitting metal. Had Maggie
decided to plunge ahead and open the coffin before anything else
happened? Jean took a step forward, then back again. She, too, had
more pressing matters, and would have to leave her historical
curiosity tip-tilted and stalled. For the moment.

Darling’s face was getting its color back,
even if it was still set like concrete. “One of the technicians was
telling me over breakfast that he whiled away the nighttime hours
by inspecting the body. Something long and narrow had been forced
up through the roof of the mouth, the soft palate, into the brain
stem. Barring a bullet hole or knife wound coming to light during
the formal postmortem, that’s likely the cause of death.”

“
Whoa.” Great conversation for the
breakfast table, although Jean remembered several mealtime
discussions of forensics. You got used to it. You got hardened by
it. She visualized alternate scenarios—Tom falling onto, say, a
garden stake. “That could be an accident.”

“
Or not,” said Alasdair. “Was your
technical lad seeing any shreds of wood in the cavity?”

“
Why yes, he was. How did you . .
.”

Jean and Alasdair exclaimed simultaneously,
“The chanter.”

“
That’s why it was stolen from the
grave,” she went on. “It’s the murder weapon. Interesting, that
someone would know that, all these years later.”

“
That it is, aye.”

Here came Crawford, the tape draped tidily
over his shoulder like a gaudy military braid. He touched his cap
but didn’t deviate from his track toward Cuddy’s Close. Three pairs
of eyes watched him disappear down the steps.