The Avalon Chanter (21 page)

“
Why is a magazine named
Great Scot
interested in England?”
asked Tara.

“
Northumbria wasn’t always England. The
kingdom of Bernicia once extended from the Tees to the Forth,
straddling today’s border. This area’s been known as ‘South
Pict-land.’ And don’t get me started on the role of the Celtic
church based at Melrose and on Iona, both in Scotland.”

“
Okay,” said Tara, dragging out the
word.

The sound Maggie made would have been a laugh
if it hadn’t been quite so strangled. “Tara’s telling me she can’t
ask me to pass the salt without my giving her a historical lecture.
My mum was the same way.”

Jean introduced her friend. “This is Rebecca
Campbell-Reid. She’s a historian at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh.
Her husband Michael’s a historian, too, and a piper, and is going
to play at the concert tonight.”

“
Maggie Lauder,” said Maggie. “My
daughter, Tara Hogg.”

“
Hi,” Tara said.

“
Nice to meet you,” returned Rebecca.
“Michael’s back at the B and B with our little girl. She’s not even
a year old yet, so we didn’t want to bring her out in the
haar.”

Maggie looked at Tara, perhaps seeing her as
a little girl she never knew. She said, “The more the merrier. The
reporters who stopped by earlier skived off to the pub once they
found the, ah, associated body was gone. Said they’d come back
round when there was something to see.”

“
What do you want to bet they’re hoping
for another totally gruesome body?” said Tara.

“
Anything you like.” Maggie went back
to work, tapping the hammer against the chisel so that it cut
through the deep gray surface—a much cleaner surface than it had
been yesterday, revealing the punched decorations to be straggling
loops and lozenges. She now worked on the head end, assuming the
occupant of the grave was buried Christian-style, so that when
Judgment Day arrived, he or she would sit up and face toward the
east, ready for the Resurrection.

The slightly wobbly black gash left by the
chisel skipped over four inch-wide strips that Maggie had left
intact, holding the lid so it wouldn’t plummet onto the contents.
The remains. Yes, the lead was very thin. Was it the weight of the
man’s body that had caused it to buckle and tear in several places?
Jean visualized poor Rob, Tom, whoever, being rolled
unceremoniously over the edge and falling with a sickening thud
onto the coffin.

Rebecca knelt. “Some years ago I worked on
the excavation of Rudesburn Priory. Can I help?”

“
Please,” said Tara. “I’m a web
designer. I am so clueless when it comes to this stuff.”

“
By all means,” Maggie told Rebecca.
“Although what I’m doing here is no more elegant than opening a tin
of sardines. Quite a bit less, actually. Air leaked into the coffin
donkey’s years ago as the ground shifted and the Norman priory was
constructed. There’ll not be a great deal preserved, of the body or
of any artifacts. Still, it’s worth a go. If you’d clear away the
metal bits, I’d be obliged.”

Tara handed over the brush, and Rebecca
started removing tiny scrolls of lead from the track of the
chisel.

Fascinated as she was by archaeology, Jean
was more experienced in detection. She sidled around the dais the
way little Linda had sidled around the coffee table and approached
the broken grave slab leaning against the wall. The surfaces of the
two pieces definitely had been carved. She could just make out the
ghosts of curving lines, rows of lumps, various nubbles. “This
looks a bit like one of the so-called pillow-stones from
Lindisfarne—eighth century, aren’t they? The ones with the incised
cross pattern and Day of Judgment motif. But this one’s
rectangular, not rounded. Could I borrow your flashlight for a
minute?” she asked Tara.

Tara shrugged. “That big one? I don’t know
where it went after Mags gave it to Edwin yesterday.”

“
He had one with him all evening.” Jean
tried to remember whether he’d been using Maggie’s flashlight all
evening or whether he’d picked up a police-issue torch. If he’d
changed to the latter, though, he’d have returned the former. She
had no idea—it was the light that had been important, not the
implement that produced it. Not, at least, until Darling theorized
that a large flashlight had been the weapon used to bash in
Grinsell’s head.

She decided not to mention that to Maggie.
Even if she’d had a flashlight to enable a closer look, the stone
was more inkblot test than information. “The chapel still has its
roof, and yet the stone’s badly weathered. Was it brought from
somewhere else to serve as a grave marker?”

“
Or was the burial so important the
chapel was built around and over it?” Maggie replied. “The stone
could have spent as long as five centuries outside. Hutchinson
mentions it here on the grave in seventeen ninety-four, but says
nothing about the actual pattern. It was likely indecipherable even
then.”

“
Granny thought she could make out
horsemen,” said Tara.

“
She also thought the stone was carved
with a sheela-na-gig—a woman exposing her sexual organs—which is
marginally credible. You do see those occasionally, and having one
here might indicate an important female burial with pagan elements.
But she also thought she made out the words
uxor draconis
, ‘wife of the dragon.’ Guinevere,
maybe. Maybe not . . .” Her voice died away in the depths of the
tomb.

“
Seeing is believing, and believing is
seeing.” Rebecca quoted Jean’s oft-repeated motto.

Well, yes
. Jean
turned back around. “Did you talk to the SOCO or any of the team,
Maggie? Did they find anything archaeologically helpful on top of
the coffin?”

“
SOCO?” Tara repeated.

Maggie and Jean answered as one. “Scene of
Crime Officer.” After a pause, Maggie’s hand started moving again.
“No one told me anything. Grinsell’s gag order, I expect.”

Jean gritted her teeth, loosened them, and
cut to the chase. “Someone knocked Grinsell unconscious up at
Merlin’s Tower early this morning.”

Maggie’s hand didn’t stop.
Dink-dink
. “And your husband’s in
charge now. Yes, I heard.”

Tara glanced sharply up at Jean. “I wasn’t
sleeping well anyway—I kept hearing voices, but then, Granny talks
in her sleep. When I heard tires grinding away in the parking lot
around dawn, I didn’t even look out of the window. If I’d known it
was Inspector Grinsell, I’d have hidden under the bed.”

“
There not being any shrubs
handy?”

Tara’s eyes flashed. “Mags warned me about
the guy. So did Lance, after Clyde overheard him abusing Mags.
Maybe I overreacted, yeah, but I’d had a couple of glasses of beer
and would probably have told the jerk what I thought of him. That
wouldn’t have helped.”

“
It didn’t help me,” said
Maggie.

Jean said, “It was chivalrous of Lance to
help you out.”

“
I’d say controlling rather than
chivalrous. He’s okay. He’s got a temper and a sense of
entitlement. Me big blond Viking guy, me sweep fish out of water
off her feet. I mean, fish don’t have feet . . .”

“
I know what you mean,” Jean told her.
“He thought because you were new here on Farnaby you’d
need—consolation. And he didn’t like your telling him thanks but no
thanks.”

“
Funny, isn’t it?” asked Rebecca of no
one in particular. “You hate machismo, but you hate wimpiness as
well.”

“
No kidding,” Tara said. “Niamh just
broke up with a guy in Newcastle and has a thing for Lance. I wish
he’d give her the time of day.”

“
Niamh’s saying Grinsell’s in a bad
way. Good job Tara and I were still at the house when Edwin stopped
by, so she could help. She’s a grand nurse, Niamh is, never mind
her ancestry.” Maggie sat back on the stone dais.

“
Ancestry?” Rebecca asked, absolving
Jean of the need to do it herself.

Maggie didn’t ask why Rebecca knew who Niamh
was. “Her father was the same sort as my own dad. As Wat Lauder.
Handsome, smooth talker, quick-tempered, and possessive.”

“
Her father, Donal McCarthy,” said
Jean.

Maggie looked up at her, head tilted to the
side, a smile that split the difference between rueful and wistful
pulling her lips askew. The light emphasized the subtle bloating of
her features. The haze in the air—and on Jean’s glasses—softened
them into vulnerability. “You’re a reporter yourself, aren’t you
now? Thank you for not pretending you don’t know of it all.”

“
Thank you for understanding why
I—we—looked it all up.” Jean didn’t go into her usual spiel about
not
that
kind of reporter. “Do
you know Grinsell’s one of the Cambridgeshire detective constables
who made such a fuss over your acquittal?”

“
Is he? Is that why he acted such a pig
last night, getting his own back? Damn and blast! They’ll be
suspecting me of bashing him. I even threatened him, didn’t I? But
I didn’t bash him. I’ve been through it all once. Why would I look
to go through it again?”

“
Mags didn’t leave the house between
the time I heard the pickup stalled in the parking lot and the time
Crawford came to get Niamh. Niamh’ll testify to that, too,” Tara
added.

That, Jean told herself, begged the question
of whether it was indeed Grinsell spinning the wheels. And of whose
testimony was reliable.

Rebecca shrank into
herself—
don’t mind me
. Maggie
contemplated the coffin exposed below her. Tara arranged the items
in her tray, lining up the dental picks with the tweezers, her face
hidden by her chin-length russet hair.

A lot of redheads around here, Jean thought
again—and this time she mentally slapped her forehead with the heel
of her hand. Tara and Niamh were half-sisters, weren’t they?
Donal’s daughters, one by his wife, one by his lover.

She said, “There are protocols to be followed
when one family member is testifying for another. Or against
another. Your giving your mother an alibi doesn’t make an
open-and-shut case, Tara. And Niamh, well, if she’s Donal
McCarthy’s daughter, too . . .”

The
too
fluttered as slowly to the ground as the dropped handkerchief
signaling the start of a duel.

Chapter Twenty

Rebecca shrank another few millimeters,
although not without casting a glance up at Jean. Tara froze in
place. Maggie shifted restlessly, closed her eyes, opened them
again. “Very clever.”

“
Not particularly.”

“
Donal is Tara’s father, yes. Niamh is
the child of his marriage. She was no more than a toddler when it
all happened. It was because she was a toddler—stressful little
creatures, toddlers . . .”

Rebecca murmured agreement.

“
. . . that’s one reason Donal was on
the prowl. The other reason being that it’s in the nature of rats
to prowl. Sorry, Tara, but it’s the truth. I’d say I was a fool for
ever giving him the time of day, but he likely saved my life when
Oliver thrust that shotgun into my face. Turning the gun back on
him and pulling the trigger, now—that’s another issue. The gleam in
his eye just then will haunt me to my dying day.”

“
He never had the guts to admit to any
of it, not until he was forced to,” Tara told her, and to Jean, “My
dad is Rick Hogg from Little Rock. I never knew Donal.”

A clear voice behind Jean’s back said, “Nor
I.”

She jerked around to see Niamh emerging from
the fog the same way the phantom face had emerged earlier. But
Niamh’s fine, pale features, so much like Tara’s, didn’t dissolve
again.

Maggie started up. “Mum? Is she having
another wander? In this fog . . .”

“
Not to worry,” Niamh told her. “Pen’s
come with scones and sympathy. I stopped in to tell you I’m away to
the school—Hugh wants me to have another go at ‘Foggy Dew.’ A
little too apt at the moment.”

Jean abandoned discretion. “Elaine
wanders?”

“
Reliving her youth, I expect. We’re
trying to ensure she’s never alone, but she slips away. I can’t get
it straight in my mind that she’s a child again.” Maggie bit her
lip, then said, “In all the confusion last night she went
walkabout—Pen found her sitting on the curb outside the pub without
so much as a shawl to keep her warm. That wasn’t so bad. Last month
we found her at Merlin’s Tower. Faralot, she calls it. Farnaby’s
Camelot, although our own kitchen is where the round table sat,
with my—with Wat lording it over them all. Over us all, after I
came along. It was more Monty Python than Malory or Tennyson. I
suppose Tom Seaton would have been Tom the Enchanter.”

Maggie may have intended that as a joke, but
instead of smiling, she deflated into a slump. Women of her and
Jean’s age were sometimes called the sandwich generation. Some of
them, more aptly, were called the mammogram generation, crushed not
only between parents and children, but also between expectations
and reality.

Jean saw no need to mention that the
character in
Monty Python and the Holy
Grail
was Tim the Enchanter, not Tom, and was not an
attractive young musician.

“
Seems to be you’re holding court here
yourself,” Niamh said to Maggie. “Or are you reliving your own
youth?”