The Avalon Chanter (23 page)

“
Empty?” Darling repeated. “Whyever’s
it empty?”

No one answered. Each of the other
women sat up as well, and one by one clambered to her feet,
adjusting hair and jackets and brushing off denim knees on the way.
The men stepped forward, glanced into the pit, stepped back again.
Darling’s gaze rested much longer on the elusive Tara. She tried a
tentative smile and a subtle shrug.
Sorry.

Maggie’s eyes gleamed with something that
might be stubbornness or might be fanaticism. “The coffin’s got no
bottom. It’s a table tomb, set over a grave in the ground below.
I’ll keep digging. I’ll sort it.”

“
Right,” said Alasdair, and to Jean he
said, “I stopped in at the B and B. Michael was telling me you and
Rebecca were having yourselves a look at the excavation. Good job
you came walking over here together. I never thought to warn you
against walking about alone.”

“
It’s easy to get lost in the fog,”
Jean returned.

“
More than that, there’s someone
violent in the area. I’m hoping the villain had himself a wee
grudge against Grinsell, or at the least against policemen, not
against anyone crossing his—her—path. But till we’ve laid the
villain by the heels, I’m advising caution.”

Jean thought of P.C. Crawford holding a
lonely vigil at the crime scene. Well, he had his phone, and his
cautious nature—she could see him setting his back against one of
the monolithic stones—and probably companionship in the occasional
looky-loo hoping for the sight of bloodstains.

Alasdair went on, “Sergeant Darling here
spoke with Grinsell’s sister in Cambridgeshire. She recognized the
name Maggie Lauder, said she’d heard it before. Her brother’d rant
about the Phillips murder, a female barrister getting a female
defendant acquitted.”

“
I’ve heard him talk of it myself,”
said Darling, “every time we’ve dealt with a female
suspect.”

“
Has a vendetta against women, has he?”
Maggie demanded. “Because of me?”

“
I imagine your case reinforced
existing prejudices, is all,” said Alasdair.

Darling stated, “Ah, he bullies everyone.
D.C.I. Webber’s sent him for anger management courses and the like,
but they’ve done no good, only made him stroppier.”

Testosterone poisoning, Jean thought. But
that was too easy an appraisal. “You’re using the present tense
about Grinsell.”

“
Webber’s telling me he’s still alive,
if barely. If he survives, he’ll be incapable of caring for
himself.”

Cosmic justice? Jean asked herself. The bully
reduced to dependence? Or a fate worse than death?

Maggie eyed her own feet, her jaw tight, her
hand banging the small flashlight against her thigh. Tara looked at
her, expression unreadable. Alasdair looked at the flashlight.
“Where’s your large torch?”

“
I suppose Edwin’s still carrying it
about,” Maggie said. “Why?”

So Niamh hadn’t passed on Darling’s
guess about the weapon. She stood with her arms crossed, gazing at
the ruined window.
Somewhere else
. . .

Alasdair said to her, “Miss McCarthy, P.C.
Crawford’s telling Sergeant Darling here that he handed the torch
in at Gow House last night. That he gave it to you.”

Whoa
,
Jean thought, as every face turned toward Niamh.

Her eyebrows, fine as an angel’s feathers,
crinkled. “I tidied it away into the cupboard by the door. Wasn’t
it there this morning, Maggie? Tara?”

“
No,” said Maggie, just as Tara said,
“Nope. Sure wasn’t.”

“
Perhaps Elaine’s got it. I’ll have a
look through her things after the rehearsal, shall I?”

“
Please,” Alasdair told her. When his
gaze released her, she took a long step back and crossed her arms
even more tightly, making a protective breastplate. Jean could
hardly blame her.

Alasdair asked, “What’s in that tray,
Rebecca?”

She hoisted the tray of tools, carried it out
from behind the grave, and presented it to him. Instead of taking
it from her hands, Alasdair merely glanced into it. “How many
dental picks are you using, Professor Lauder?”

“
I’ve got no idea. I’ve been
accumulating tools for years now. Why?”

Dental pick
,
Jean repeated to herself.
The wee scraper
from the crime scene.

Alasdair replied, “The scene-of-crime team
found a dental pick in the weeds near Grinsell’s bod—near where
Grinsell was attacked. It was too shiny to have been lying there
long, was not lost when those trenches were being cut into the
turf. It might have fallen from the assailant’s pocket.”

“
Well then, Chief Inspector Cameron,”
Maggie snapped, “my fingerprints are on file.”

Jean sent a thought wave toward
Maggie—
he’s not out to get you, he simply
wants the truth
—but telepathy hadn’t worked last night
and it didn’t work now.

Maggie kept on, a flush like a rash mounting
on her face. “You’re thinking I thumped him? He needed getting out
of the way so I could get on with my work, is that it? Or was I
after protecting myself and my daughter from his abuse? He may have
had some sort of filthy fixation on me, but I’d never heard of the
prat before yesterday.”

Alasdair’s eyes shone the cold blue of a
glacier, layer upon layer of compressed snow. “Right.”

This time Jean tried beaming thoughts
to him:
Cut Maggie some slack
already!

Every face pointed in a different direction.
The silence inside the chantry chapel seemed as thick as the fog
outside. Jean opened her mouth, closed it, bit her tongue, and then
thought of a topic that was no less fraught, but was at least less
immediate. “Did you ask Clyde about whether his father ferried
Thomas Seaton off the island?”

Alasdair turned his gaze on Darling.

“
Oh, ah, yes,” the young man said.
“Seaton left Farnaby in October of nineteen seventy-one. Mr.
Eccleston was a schoolboy at the time, and remembers his father
making a meal of it. He remembers as well his father saying Wat had
asked him for discretion, so the meal was made only in the
Eccleston family. Seaton left under some sort of cloud, made off so
quickly he left bits and bobs behind—or so he told Eccleston
major—but he did leave the island.”

“
Wat could be a fearsome old devil,”
Maggie said faintly. “Makes you think Tom had a guilty conscience .
. . Half a tick. You’re satisfied that he left?”

“
The question’s moot,” said Alasdair.
“Some bright spark up and about in Halifax phoned Berwick a couple
of hours since to say that he’d spoken with Thomas Seaton’s son.
Seaton studied piping in the UK, aye, and returned home in nineteen
seventy-one, and was known to the local Highland Games and
traditional-music circuit for the rest of his life.”

“
He died three years ago,” Darling
added. “Liver cancer. These musicians, they like their
drink.”

Whisky not as the water of life, Jean
thought, but as the water of death.

“
I was born in December of seventy-two.
Tom wasn’t my father.” What color Maggie had in her face leached
slowly away. Tara set her hand on her mother’s arm. Rebecca caught
Jean’s eye and shrugged. Niamh looked at her feet, pigeon-toed on
the flagstones like Tara’s had been yesterday. It wasn’t her fault
either.

No one had to say aloud,
That’s not Thomas Seaton in the grave.
Since it wasn’t, though, then a whole new can of worms opened
up, in addition to the barrel of snakes of the attack on Grinsell.
To say nothing of the worm-eaten issue of the bottomless
grave—which, okay, wasn’t a matter of life and death. Not in this
century, anyway.

“
The chanter,” Maggie said. “I thought
it belonged to the victim. Maybe it belonged to the murderer. Maybe
Thomas ran off because he killed a man.”

Alasdair shifted his weight, relaxing his
stance, if still frosty of expression. “The medical examiner in
Berwick is thinking the dead man to have been over six feet tall
and between thirty and forty years old—a bit old to be one of Wat’s
young students, but he could have been a musician brushing up his
skills.”

“
The doctor was able to turn out the
body’s pockets,” said Darling. “He found a pre-decimal half crown
and a two-penny coin as well as a small pad of paper—little more
than pulp now, unreadable—and a propelling pencil.”

“
A mechanical pencil,” Jean translated
under her breath.

“
Buttons and a trouser zip. No jewelry.
Two gold teeth and fillings in several others, which would be right
helpful if we had the least inkling of whose dental records to be
looking over.”

“
Funny how often you find coins.” Jean
offered Alasdair the merest hint of a smile.

“
Everyone carries coins,” he
replied.

“
We changed over to decimal currency in
nineteen seventy-one.” Darling had no need to add,
well before my time.
“I looked it
up.”

Good
lad
,
Jean thought.

“
The half crown was demonetized—no
longer legal tender—in nineteen seventy,” he went on. “Two-pee
coins weren’t issued until February fifteenth, nineteen
seventy-one, the day of the changeover.”

Maggie said, “The chap was keeping the half
crown as a memento, then. Or he’d not recently turned out his
pockets. Either way, the change to decimal currency in nineteen
seventy-one dates the burial.”

“
That’s a strong possibility, aye, if
not a dead certainty.” No one smiled at Alasdair’s unintended
pun.

With a shuddering inhalation Maggie went on,
“Who is he, then? Whether he meant anything to my mother, how he
died, at whose hands, why—I can’t remember anything helpful.”

Tara tightened her grasp. “No one wants you
to remember anything, Mags. You weren’t even born then, and the guy
in the tomb might have squat to do with your family. The cops won’t
even know if the chanter’s really the murder weapon until they find
it.”

Alasdair’s brows tightened. Jean
interpreted this particular furrow as,
How
does she know we’re thinking the chanter’s the murder
weapon?

“
Chance would be a fine thing,” Maggie
told Tara skeptically.

Raising her chin, Niamh turned toward the
door. “The concert. Rehearsal. The show must go on.”

“
Oh.” Maggie forced a stiff smile.
“Well done, Niamh. I’ll bring Mum along. That’s one thing not
entirely left her, the old songs.”

“
Sergeant,” Alasdair said to Darling,
“please walk Miss McCarthy to the school.”

“
The blind leading the near-sighted?”
Darling replied, if with an actual smile at Niamh.

Well, well, well, Jean thought.
He
was
a handsome lad when he
finally shook off the worried frown and the oppressed
crouch.

“
I’ll get us there,” Niamh replied, her
wry tone indicating Darling’s charms had not escaped her notice.
Side-by-side, the pair faded into the fog, which, Jean swore, had
grown thicker and heavier. Even Darling’s lime-yellow jacket seemed
dull.

Who was protecting whom? If someone with a
grudge against policemen roamed around with malice aforethought,
then Darling was in danger. But then, that someone would need the
equivalent of X-ray vision to find him.

Rebecca said, “I see a tarpaulin folded up in
the corner. We can stake it down over the hole. Unless you’re
planning to keep on digging this afternoon.”

Maggie looked around the chapel, shoulders
slouched, features sagging, exuding such fatigue, Jean felt weak in
the knees. “No good going on, not now. The batteries need
recharging. As do I. Let’s cover the . . .”

Jean waited for her to complete her
sentence.
Grave disappointment?

“
. . . dig.” She went on, muttering
under her breath, thinking aloud. “Why build a chantry over a grave
if there’s nothing in it? There could be any number of burials
here, with this simply the most prominent. It would take years of
work to excavate them all. A team. Resources.”

Maggie directed Jean, Rebecca, and Tara in
pulling the same blue tarpaulin that had yesterday concealed the
unexpected body over today’s unexpected vacancy. “. . . maybe it’s
the tomb of an unknown soldier, a cenotaph. There was the battle at
Heavenfield. The one at Alnwick—no, that was much later. This area
was the first landfall for Vikings and Danes like it was for
Angles.”

The corner Jean held slipped from her grasp.
In the instant she leaned over the cavity to reclaim it she caught
a quick sparkle, a glint in the mud where Maggie had inserted her
probe. Then the interior of the hole plunged into blue-tinted
gloom. A stray neutrino had sparked one of her nerve endings, she
told herself. It wasn’t worth mentioning. Besides, if she did call
Maggie’s attention to it, the woman would fling back the tarp and
dive in.

Tomorrow
, Jean
told herself, and instead of Macbeth’s pessimistic “Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day”
chose Scarlett O’Hara’s optimistic mantra about tomorrow being
another day. Hopefully one with light, already, in all its various
forms.

Alasdair, who had stood politely back while
the women spread out the tarp, accepted Maggie’s pointing
forefinger with good grace. Finding a hammer in the tool tray, he
drove small metal stakes through the grommets at the corners of the
tarp and into the interstices between the flagstones.