The Avalon Chanter (26 page)

Only connect
.
What was the rest of the quote from E. M. Forster? Something about
connection robbing the monk and the beast of the isolation each
thrived on. A criminal would be a beast, she got that, but the
isolation of monks and nuns produced music, manuscripts, mysticism.
Maybe Grinsell was the beast and Hilda the monastic, he isolated by
temperament and she isolated by time.

A quick search turned up all the latest
headlines, from a few passing mentions of Maggie’s revised press
conference to several more emphatic mentions of the mysterious body
in the chantry chapel. The less sober news agencies offered
headlines such as “The Piper’s Grave.” As far as they knew, the
chanter was simply an associated artifact, not a possible murder
weapon. They didn’t know it had taken on the status of lost
treasure, either.

Most of the relevant headlines shrieked
about the vicious attack on one of England’s finest, George
Grinsell, Detective Inspector based in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Jean
clicked on a video of D.C.I. Webber making a statement outside the
hospital. He turned out to be a handsome middle-aged man, his
close-cropped black hair going gray at the temples. His chocolate
complexion seemed dulled and the slight West Indian lilt in his
voice weighed down by what she knew to be conflicting
emotions:
Grinsell’s an obnoxious
so-and-so, but he’s our obnoxious so-and-so.

Was Webber’s ancestry the reason Grinsell’s
anger-management courses only made the chip on his shoulder larger?
However, one sort of prejudice didn’t necessarily imply
another.

No other reporter had made the same
connection between the name “Maggie Lauder” and “Rob the
Ranter”—never mind the hard work of groups like Gallowglass, many
of the old songs were sadly moribund. But the name “Maggie Lauder”
had produced a different variety of connection.

Under the main banner of
The Daily Dish
opened the headline,
“At it again?”

The first photo wasn’t Maggie’s publicity
picture, a flattering studio portrait. It was a snapshot of her
standing in front of a church window, no doubt taken during her
Plan B press event in the church yesterday. Her expression wasn’t
that of a deer in the headlights but one already dressed out and
searing in a skillet.

Much more space was given to a summary of the
Cambridgeshire case, illustrated by a picture of a young Maggie
escorted into court by a woman police constable. Her face would
have made that of a mannequin in a shop window look animated,
although otherwise the resemblance to Tara was unmistakable.

A second picture of young Maggie showed her
sitting on a broken column in front of a sunlit Farnaby Priory.
Here she smiled, although her posture was only marginally more
relaxed than it had been when she’d been waiting on the same column
drum yesterday.

Next to her sat an even younger woman,
beaming broadly. She looked familiar. According to the caption, her
name was Lisa Fleming . . . Oh. Fleming. Pen and James’s daughter,
Pen’s affable smile glowing from her face. Two of the photos on the
mantel downstairs were of her, too, now that Jean thought about it,
one as a teenager, one as an older woman with two children in front
of Bamburgh Castle.

From downstairs echoed Michael’s, Rebecca’s,
and Linda’s voices, all talking at once. The front door opened and
shut. The voices faded into the fog.

Behind her the bathroom door opened.
Alasdair’s footsteps paced across the room. Jean didn’t look
around—she was busy, wasn’t she? She had work to do.

Once again she opened
The Matter of Britannia
to “Guinevere
the Christian Goddess.” The card was still there, and the message
written in a firm, rather splashy hand, all sprawling loops and
dark slashes.
Athelstan Crawford. Granite.
Classic Roman 2. Letterbox.
And on the back the
cryptic, “Merlin.”

She typed the descriptive words into the box
of her search engine and considered the answers: Mailboxes. Roman
columns. Stone posts. Gravestones. Inscribed granite gravestones,
like Wat and Elaine’s double-header.

She sensed Alasdair’s presence at her back.
“What’s this?”

“
It was in the book.”

“
Crawford?”

“
Yep.” She typed in
Athelstan Crawford + Northumbria
. The first hit
brought up the archive of the
Northumberland Gazette
, a newspaper based in
Alnwick down the way. “Whoa,” she said, and read aloud, “October
tenth, nineteen seventy-one. Athelstan Crawford, noted local
architect, died last week in a tragic accident on Lindisfarne. A
memorial service will be held at the parish church of St. Michael,
Alnwick, on Thursday next. Crawford is survived by his wife, Mary,
Lucy, aged two, and Edwin, an infant.”

“
He was P.C. Crawford’s father,
then.”

Jean swung around to see Alasdair’s face
still cool, rimmed with frost, but set in thought rather than
rancor. “Is he the architect Wat consulted?” she asked. “Is that
why the tower was never renovated, the guy died? A tragic accident.
I wonder what happened? Nineteen seventy-one. Just when we—when
you—when the police think Rob the Ranter went into the tomb.”

“
It’s saying he died in a tragic
accident on Lindisfarne, not disappeared on Farnaby. It’s worth
asking for details, though. The corpse had a propelling pencil, for
one thing.”

“
The name Merlin’s written on the back
of the card—see? That might be Elaine’s handwriting. If she called
Thomas Seaton Lancelot the Fair, was Merlin her Arthurian name for
Athelstan? Maybe something to do with Merlin’s Tower.”

“
Looks to be a fuzzy patch where the
name’s written.”

Jean angled the card back and forth. “Yeah.
Something else was written there and erased, pretty forcibly. M.
Another M-name. Mordred?” Jean stared at the card as though it
would suddenly stand up and explain itself. It didn’t.

“
Aye, but Mordred’s by way of being the
villain of the piece.” Alasdair walked back across the room to the
dresser and picked up his phone. “Time’s moving on.”

The time on the screen and the time on the
bedside clock agreed. Straight up six. Powering down the computer,
Jean grabbed her clothing and catapulted into the bathroom. She
assembled shoes, skirt, blouse, cardigan, and jewelry while
hovering inside the door, listening to Alasdair’s side of the
conversation.

He hadn’t called P.C. Crawford but D.S.
Darling, who had apparently survived escort duty. “. . . still at
the scene, is he? Time to be bringing him back to the village,
then, long as he’s thinking the interest’s died down and he can
leave the tower be.”

Ah. Alasdair wanted to talk to Crawford about
his father’s death in person. Good call.

“
. . . Lauder’s finances. He was going
through a bad patch in seventy-one, needing cash. Aye.”

His footsteps tracked across the room.

“
. . . at the school, half past six.
Are you now? Good man. Cheers.”

The door opened. His steps walked down the
stairs on the other side of the bathroom wall. His voice called,
“Mrs. Fleming? A word?”

Jean brushed her hair into submission and
slap-dashed some makeup onto her face. No one would look at her,
not with the attractions on stage. Still, despite the chill- and
anger-induced roses in her cheeks she looked almost as pale and
wan—Alasdair would say peelie-wally—as Maggie. There. When it came
to inventions, eyeliner and lipstick were almost equal to the
internal combustion engine.

She grabbed a coat, turned off the lights,
and hurried down the stairs as fast as she could go in her dizzying
inch-high heels. She didn’t dare wear heels any higher—she knew she
was clumsy. A friend who studied tai chi once told her she was top
heavy because she carried most of her energy in her head, which
made sense. Sometimes she visualized her feet as marble carvings,
heavy, steady.

Cornering the landing, she saw Alasdair
walking along the hall, and at the full-frontal vision she stopped
dead.

Ah, the Scots variant of business-casual: The
Argyll jacket, the heathered tie, the red-and-green Cameron tartan
kilt, the leather sporran, the tall beige socks with their red
flashes. The outfit suited any man, of any shape. On Alasdair’s
compact, upright body, it was the stuff dreams were made of.

“
Ready?” He set his hand on the knob of
the front door. Only now did she notice his other hand held an
insulated bag like the one Crawford had carried away, this one
patterned with orange starbursts.

Instead of falling at Alasdair’s feet, she
got herself down the stairs in the usual fashion and fell in beside
him. Much as she wanted to, she did not lean up to steal a kiss
from his sober face and set mouth. She’d wait until the music had
warmed him up enough her tongue wouldn’t stick to his icy carapace
like a daring child’s to a flagpole.

“
Here’s us away, then.”

Us
, she
thought. Husband and wife. Domestic partners. Mutual gadflies.
“Yep,” she said. “Here’s us away.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Outside, the fret had either thinned or taken
on the glow of late afternoon. There! For a moment the murk parted
and Jean glimpsed a dazzling blue sea below a dazzling blue sky.
Then the silvery cotton-candy mist closed in again.

Jean couldn’t help but emit a heavy sigh, for
the mental claustrophobia as well as the physical. When Alasdair
offered her his arm, she took it. Between her shoes and the fog,
she’d pass on walking two paces behind him, not in submissiveness
but in appreciation of the tartan pleats dancing above the braw
Cameron calves.

She sensed his mood as she sensed his arm,
solid beneath the cool wool fabric of the jacket. His
solicitousness wasn’t apology for the sentiments he’d expressed
upstairs, it was for the rancor with which he’d expressed them. She
pressed herself against his side as they mounted the steps into the
parking area, sending her own apology.

From the insulated bag wafted a delicious
aroma. “What’s in there?” she asked.

“
Pen was asking me to carry her pies to
the school. The village ladies are putting on a supper after the
concert. Two quid apiece for food and a cuppa, all in aid of the
music.”

“
Meat pies,” Jean clarified, for her
own sake, not his.

“
Aye.”

She waited, but when he said nothing else,
she asked—quietly, who knew how many other people were groping
through the fog nearby, “What did you want to ask Pen?”

“
I was after showing her the card you
found in the book. ‘Granite’ and so forth.”

“
Yes?” she prodded.

He was teasing her now, wasn’t he? His face
in the mist was still stern as the west face of Ben Nevis, but his
eyes were no longer icy. “It’s Wat’s handwriting, likely his note
on ordering a gravestone for his friend Athelstan, for the cemetery
here on Farnaby. And Elaine’s name for him was ‘Merlin’, aye. Pen’s
got no clue what the original word was.”

“
Did Pen explain why a card from
seventy-one is stuck in a book published so much later?”

“
No, she did not, though she seemed
more wistful than surprised at seeing it.”

“
So Athelstan was buried here on
Farnaby? Or his ashes, rather, since the newspaper obituary said
‘memorial service’ rather than ‘funeral.’ ”

“
No, the stone was by way of being a
memorial. But Wat never followed through with that,
either.”

“
Even though Athelstan was a friend? A
member of the Farnaby round table, even, since Elaine gave him a
nickname. Speaking of the cemetery, watch it, there’s the wall.” As
one, they adjusted their course to the right.

“
He was no musician, Pen’s saying, but
fell in with Wat and Elaine over Merlin’s Tower. That’s why Elaine
named him ‘Merlin’, something about Merlin the Enchanter and a
castle in Wales built atop a pair of dragons.”

“
Oh yeah. The castle kept falling down
and the king sent for a lad without a father, nudge, nudge, who
turned out to be Merlin. He found two dragons fighting beneath the
foundations. But there aren’t any dragons on Farnaby, never mind
the
uxor draconis
inscription
Elaine thought she saw on the tombstone.”

“
Unless you’re counting Wat himself,
who sounds to have been a bit of a dragon. Pen’s telling me she has
photos of Athelstan with both Lauders at the Tower. She has photos
of Thomas Seaton as well, even though, she’s adding, he’s never the
body in the tomb.”

“
She was at Gow House when Maggie and
Tara got back there. You didn’t tell them not to pass on the news.”
Jean brushed her fingertips across the sign in front of the church,
sending a cold chill up her arm. “The Parish Church of St. Hilda.
St. Hilda of Whitby, since Hilda of Farnaby wasn’t a saint. Not by
the standards of the Roman church, anyway. I wonder if tomorrow is
the day the vicar comes to conduct a service? A few prayers and a
hymn or two might pull us up onto a higher plane, in a
way.”

“
Prioress Hilda’s already booked a
flight on that plane—I’m thinking that’s her I saw whilst walking
into the priory earlier.”

“
I saw her, too,” Jean said with a
smile. The man was making jokes. Better and better.

“
Never mind the vicar, if this haar
stays put, no one’s coming and no one’s going. I was also asking
Pen if Darling could doss down on her sitting room couch—he’s
telling me the visitors and reporters have filled up the other B
and Bs.”