The Avalon Chanter (19 page)

At last Darling said, “P.C. Crawford said
last night there was no chanter in the grave.”

“
He said he didn’t see it,” Jean
corrected. “Or that he wasn’t sure what it was. Something like
that, anyway. He left himself a fudge factor.”

“
Covering up that it was stolen on his
watch,” added Alasdair.

Darling’s forehead creased in doubt. “A dark
night, the mist and all—someone who knew the grounds of the priory
could have crept in behind his back.”

The quirk of Alasdair’s eyebrow acknowledged
not only the truth of the statement, but that Darling’s crease
intensified into another grimace. “Aye. And?”

“
Crawford was having himself a cuppa in
the kitchen whilst the technician told me of his findings. Likely
he overheard. Shouldn’t matter to him one way or the other if he
never saw the chanter to begin. Might not even have made the
connection—I’m thinking the man’s a bit, well . . .”

Slow? Jean finished for him. Not too bright?
But reticence could just be reticence.

“
Right,” Alasdair said.

“
Is anyone going to care about Thomas
Seaton, now?” Jean asked again.

This time Darling answered. “The reason
Inspector Grinsell came here at all was to investigate the
body.”

Jean looked at Alasdair. He looked at
Darling. “Sergeant, we’re needing to have us a good chin-wag about,
ah, historical matters.”

“
Yes, sir.” The forehead creased even
further, going from doubt to puzzlement.

A distant screech was either Hector wrestling
with his pipes or the ferry dropping its gangplank. A metallic thud
confirmed the latter. So did the murmur of multiple voices and
footsteps, along with the roar of a car engine or two.

The back door of the Angle’s Rest opened,
emitting Crawford. Along with the police tape, he now carried a
small insulated bag decorated in a green and yellow paisley
pattern. This time he had gone to Pen for sustenance, then, as
she’d expected him to do the night he waited at the priory for
Grinsell’s arrival. Now the woman herself waved from the doorway
before abruptly disappearing into the house.

Several human figures surged up Cuddy’s
Close. By diving out of the garden gate and stepping out briskly
with his long legs, Crawford gained the lead and outdistanced the
three people who chose the rutted drive to the tower. Good luck
getting a statement from P.C. Taciturn.

Two others headed for the chapel. Hadn’t they
gotten the word yet? Surely Rob the Ranter couldn’t be as
interesting as a coshed policeman. Whatever, Maggie would deal with
them. She’d asked for them to begin with—and her snowflake of a
news conference had started an avalanche.

“
Are you needing a bite of lunch,
Jean?” Alasdair asked.

“
Lunch.” They needed to put Darling in
the picture. They needed to talk to any number of people—Clyde,
Lance, James, anyone who might have seen the light Hector saw. But
Pen had probably darted back inside because Michael, Rebecca, and
Linda had arrived on her doorstep.

That spot beneath her ribs that an hour ago
had been a roiling pot of acid was now hollow. Torn in several
directions, Jean defaulted to making sure she’d be able to
investigate them all. Or at least able to intelligently discuss
Alasdair’s findings after he and Darling did some investigating. “I
saw a tea room near the Co-op. Y’all go on ahead—I’ll do something
with Rebecca and Michael.”

“
Come along then, Sergeant,” said
Alasdair. “A sandwich and a cuppa, eh? My shout.”

“
That’s very kind of you, sir. A cuppa
would go down a treat, right enough.”

They walked through Cuddy’s Close and came
out onto Farnaby St. Mary’s one street. Across the bay, Bamburgh
Castle’s towers and battlements rose into the tentative
sunlight—and a second later were swallowed whole by the rolling fog
bank, leaving not a wrack behind.

The thick mist, the sea fret, the haar seeped
inexorably across the bay. Two small boats moored in the harbor
winked out. The far end of the street and the hairpin turn went
under. The breakwater disappeared. And then the murk smothered the
corner of Cuddy’s Close, so that Jean and the two men stood in a
chill pocket hemmed in by blurry gray walls.

She told herself it was only water vapor, a
cloud on the ground, not a suffocating nightmare. Still, she
shivered.

They were marooned on Farnaby Island with a
very contemporary murderer.

Chapter Eighteen

Jean glanced dubiously from the B&B’s
dining room out to the garden below the window. The closest plants
were visible, including the shrub that had provided an impromptu
haven for Tara, but the back wall was blotted out as though by a
giant eraser. No matter. There were places to go and investigations
to conduct.

She looked around to see Michael stacking the
plates and Rebecca corralling the plastic tubs and wrappers. Funny
how much the thirty-something couple looked like each other, both
sharp of glance and easy of smile. Even Rebecca’s long brown hair
had adopted a reddish tinge, to closer match Michael’s considerably
shorter but more auburn cut, even though her intelligent brown eyes
were still her own, as his astute blue eyes were his.

Or maybe Rebecca now used a color
rinse, the better to look like her ginger-topped child’s mother.
Jean remembered seeing a performance of
Riverdance
in Dallas some years earlier. She’d
never seen so many red-haired people in one place—until she
emigrated to Scotland.

Rebecca unstrapped little Linda and eased her
out of the plastic seat Pen had produced from a closet. “Did the
nice lady bring you crackers?”

Linda gurgled an affirmation, the crumbs from
Pen’s water crackers still clinging to her mouth. Jean dragged her
mind away from images of cracker crumbs, focusing instead on how
Linda’s cheery little face had drawn a similarly cheery smile from
Pen. Although with Pen’s face, the cheer was supplemented by an
application of rosy blusher.

“
Ta for getting the sandwich makings,”
Michael told Jean.

Rebecca said, “Sorry you missed eating with
Alasdair and Sergeant What’s-his-name.”

“
Sergeant Darling. I wonder if he’s
related to the famous Grace Darling from down the coast. You know,
the lighthouse-keeper’s daughter who convinced her father to row
out with her and rescue several shipwrecked sailors.”

“
Sailors who suspended their
nineteenth-century opinions about the weakness of women till she
got them back on shore, at the least.”

Nodding agreement, Jean continued, “Sergeant
Darling had enough on his lunch plate without an audience. By the
time I walked back with the food and looked into the tea room
window—you’d have thought it was a movie screen. They sure know how
to light up a room here, must use five-hundred-watt bulbs . .
.”

“
Go figure.” Rebecca shot her own
dubious look toward the fog-shrouded window.

“
. . . he had made room on the table
for his notebook and was taking notes. Poor kid—going from working
with Grinsell to working with Alasdair has to cause
whiplash.”

“
So Grinsell and Maggie have a history
of sorts,” Michael said. “That’s complicating matters.”

“
Does Pen know about that?” asked
Rebecca.

“
I have no idea. Every time I suggested
talking to her—not giving her the third degree, just chatting, you
know—Alasdair would say no, it’s Grinsell’s case.”

“
It’s Alasdair’s case now.” Rebecca set
the toddler on the carpet and stood over her as she immediately
assumed the all-fours position and crawled off into the living
room.

Michael stuffed the waste into one of the
plastic Co-op sacks. “He’s still expecting you to leave it to him
and Darling, I reckon, no matter how brilliantly you’ve contributed
in the past. The polis, they’ve got their methods.”

“
Boys,” Jean told Rebecca. “They always
hang together.”

Neither Campbell-Reid replied
Better than hanging separately
, so
her joke, weak as it was, evaporated unnoticed.

“
The chanter you and Alasdair and all
saw in the grave,” said Michael. “Was it the sort fixed to the bag
of the pipes?”

“
Oh, well . . .” Jean thought back. The
dark muck. The sightless eyes. The scabrous arm. “It was a black
tube with a flattened end. Maggie said it was probably African
blackwood.”

“
My pipes are blackwood, aye, that’s
the traditional sort—it’s a very dense material. If I’d not
inherited them I’d have never had the money for them. But a
flattened end—sounds to be a practice chanter. An older one, since
they’re making fine plastic ones the day. Were the holes recessed
or flush?”

“
It had holes, but I couldn’t tell
whether they were in a row, let alone recessed or flush. It looked
pitted is all.”

“
No metal keys, then, I’m thinking. Not
from a set of small pipes, whether Northumbrian or
Irish.”

“
Seaton played both the small ones and
the big ones, Maggie said, for what that’s worth. But this chanter
had no metal. Or no rust, more likely. It lay in the damp for a
long time. I’m surprised anyone could pick it up without it falling
apart. A shame the crime scene people didn’t get it. They’d have
taken care of it.”

“
And analyzed it as well,” said Rebecca
from where Linda wobbled precariously around the coffee table, her
tiny hands leaving smudges on the polished wood.

Jean thought of Hector’s students practicing
with their chanters. She thought of a piper she knew back in Texas
playing a bombard, a chanter without its bag and drones. It
produced an oddly clogged and yet compelling sound, as though
pushing a pound of music through a pinhole, an explosion imminent.
“Alasdair has to be wondering the same thing I am: if the chanter,
of either sort, is the murder weapon, how did the murderer get the
victim to hold still while he jammed it up into his skull?”

“
He hit him first?”

“
The skull didn’t look like it was
crushed anywhere, and Darling’s technical pal didn’t say it was,
but then, it’s hard to tell without a full battery of equipment.”
This time she articulated her thought. “This is great mealtime
conversation, isn’t it?”

Michael shrugged with his eyebrows, Rebecca
with her shoulders. Linda made a shaky transfer from coffee table
to couch and grabbed for an appealing fuzzy pillow.

The pillow sat up with a start, whiskers
flared, ears turned back. Hildy leaped to the floor and with a
thunder of paws sprinted across the room and dashed up the stairs,
moving so fast she only touched every third step.

“
Another moggie flees for its life,”
said Rebecca. “Our Riccio’s found himself a spot high in the
bedroom cupboard and plans on staying there till Linda’s in school,
far as I can tell.”

Pen walked into the room. “My goodness, I
haven’t seen her move that fast in years.”

“
Sorry.” Rebecca plucked Linda from
causing-harm’s way and planted her back at the coffee
table.

“
Not to worry. She’s a lovely little
lass, isn’t she?” Pen blew a kiss to the baby, whose return grin
was mostly pink gum. Then, with an audible inhalation as though
steeling herself to a task, Pen went on, “You’ve come at a
difficult time, I’m afraid. Jean, Edwin’s telling me your
Alasdair’s in charge of the case now. Both cases, I
expect.”

Edwin. P.C. Crawford. The local plod, who was
maybe a lot more taciturn with the outlanders than with the people
he’d been protecting and serving for who knows how many years.
Since everyone called him by his first name, he wasn’t new on the
scene. “Alasdair’s mainly looking into D.I. Grinsell’s, ah, injury,
but the earlier case is still relevant.” Never mind Alasdair’s
cautionary torpedoes, she added to herself—he was officially
sanctioned now and they were a team. Full speed ahead. “Do you have
any idea whose body Maggie found in the tomb?”

Pen’s expression revealed nothing but
curiosity edged by a worry that the rosy spots on her cheekbones
accentuated. “They’re saying it’s Thomas Seaton. Fine piper Thomas
was, a favorite of Wat’s till, well—Wat was a bit overprotective of
Elaine. She named Tom ‘Lancelot the Fair’ as a joke, mind, but Wat
was not best pleased. One day it all came to a head and Tom found
himself on the next ferry. Or so we were thinking. Now, forty years
on, who’s to say what happened exactly? Not Elaine, poor soul.”

Jean drew out the witness with, “Maggie’s
afraid Tom is her biological father,” even though that skirted the
line between nosy and insensitive.

Michael nodded supportively. Linda sidled
around the table.

“
She’s not so much afraid as hopeful,
sad to say,” Pen went on. “She and Wat, they never got on well,
especially after her—well, the events in Cambridge. But I can’t see
it, myself. Elaine speaking of having a lover, that’s no more than
the illness. Dreadful, even so, thinking of Tom lying there all
these years, that close to Gow House.”

“
Um . . .” Jean went for broke. “Could
there have been a fight? Another student? Wat himself,
perhaps?”

“
Well, as Hugh was saying this morning,
Wat had a temper. But murdering a man with his own chanter?
Creeping up on him whilst he was playing, perhaps?” Pen frowned.
“Wat creeping about, premeditating violence—that wasn’t him. He’d
shout and glare and sulk is all.”