The Avalon Chanter (27 page)

“
Of course she said yes.”

“
Not exactly. Crawford’s already got
the couch, but she’s saying there’s a second bed in Hugh’s room, if
he’s all right with sharing. If not, she’ll be asking the
Ecclestons for the use of their spare room.”

Two arched gleams in the mist, like surprised
eyes, had to be the pointed windows of Gow House. “Maybe we could
plant Darling at Maggie’s house,” said Jean. “Get him to do some
eavesdropping. Now that Pen’s given it up, it seems. Now that it’s
your case you’re no longer reluctant to ask her questions, are you?
You must think her knowledge of Farnaby trumps her participating in
any plots.”

“
Oh aye. It’s by way of being my case,
for the moment, and I’ve got no toes to be stepping on. As for
plotting, my instincts are telling me Pen’s knowing more than she’s
letting on of the seventy-one case.”

“
Maybe it’s a matter of having
suspicions rather than actually knowing anything.”

“
Either way, she’s most likely meaning
to protect Elaine.”

“
Your instincts are more finely honed
than mine—go figure—but yeah, I think you’re right. She’s been
sounding out how much we know and weighing whether the attack on
Grinsell means she needs to open up those closets and drag out the
skeletons, hypothetical or otherwise. So far honey is working
better than vinegar with her. You have to wonder whether honey
would have worked better than vinegar with Niamh’s mother way back
when.”

“
The vinegar worked a treat, that’s the
problem. Ah. Here we are.”

Headlights sent shafts of luminescence toward
the glowing windows of the school. Human shapes materialized from
the fog. Alasdair and Jean followed them into the brightly lit
interior of the building, and followed their noses to a canteen
area, complete with small kitchen, tables, and chairs. There
another comfortably upholstered lady of the island arranged a
variety of baked goods on a crisp checkered tablecloth, accompanied
by the enthusiastic if tuneless whistle of a tea kettle.

Leaving Pen’s carrier bag and Jean’s coat,
they moved on down a plain, functional hallway to a plain,
functional room at the back of the building. Rows of chairs faced a
low stage. Electric cords snaked hither and yon, from the
instruments sitting ready to an array of speakers and back to a
sophisticated control panel, all its tiny levers manned—or
womanned—by a lissome lass wearing a Gallowglass T-shirt and long
denim skirt.

Spectators crowded the room, but Jean spotted
Rebecca to one side of the back row, Linda’s stroller parked on her
left, two empty chairs on her right. Jean and Alasdair claimed the
chairs and sat down.

Sergeant Darling sat in the front row,
working the tiny screen of his phone. He glanced back and sent
Alasdair the half-salute due to a half-cop. Alasdair returned an
encouraging nod.

Detecting a jangle from her chunky necklace,
Jean gave it an experimental waggle. Yes, it was a noisemaker, but
not enough to compete with ordinary fiddles or guitars, never mind
amplified ones. And, she thought as Michael and Hector walked onto
the stage, their inflated bagpipes ready beneath their arms,
nothing competed with the Great Highland pipes, whose original
purpose had been to direct troop movements on a battlefield. As
soon as the program started, Linda could wail to her heart’s
content.

However, the little girl now reposed in that
delightfully boneless sleep only a small child could achieve. “Must
be nice,” Jean told Rebecca.

“
Unconsciousness can be appealing,”
Rebecca returned.

Alasdair gazed up at the open framework of
the ceiling. The patterns of light and shadow made by the rafters
were the room’s only decoration beyond a few posters and album
covers mounted between the windows. Jean whispered, “You have to
wonder what the school would have looked like if Wat had followed
through with his original plans and renovated Merlin’s Tower.”

“
That tower on top of the cliff, where
the helicopter landed, right?” Rebecca replied. “Everyone on the
ferry took notice of that, even Linda. She grabbed at it like it
was a dragonfly . . . Ah, here we go.”

“
One two three!” shouted Michael. He
and Hector launched into “Johnny Cope,” their fingers dancing on
their chanters. Scottish regiments used that fiery tune for
reveille. The skirl of the pipes probably roused folk in the
cemetery up the road, although little Linda, a piper’s daughter,
barely stirred.

The school might have no particular
architectural ambience, but all you had to do was close your eyes
and the music provided plenty of atmosphere. Not that Jean did
close her eyes, not with kilted musicians on the stage.

She recognized Michael’s blue-and-green
Campbell tartan, but the identity of Hector’s navy blue, hatched
with thin lines of red and yellow, eluded her. McCrimmon, she
assumed, after his mother’s family. And didn’t that name have its
origins in a Norse word for “protector”? Fitting for a paramedic.
Fitting how his last name, Cruz, was similar to Crozier, yet
another Borders name, both based on the Latin for “cross.”

The pipers segued into “Hector the Hero,”
demonstrating how the flip side of Caledonian bravado was
Caledonian lament. The Hector of the title had been a Scottish
general, but that name, too, fitted both cultures.

Names. Place-names, legend-names. Hector as a
Trojan warrior. Arthur as a Dark Age cavalry bloke or an
overprotective husband.

Lance Eccleston rose from the audience,
seated himself on stage, and with a stubby drumstick began thumping
a rhythm on the leather head of a bodhran, creating a heartbeat of
grief and regret.

For a long moment Jean enjoyed the contrast
of small, dark Hector with big, blond Lance, like a rematch of
Roman and Celt. Then she wondered whether the young ladies of Gow
House were impressed by the indefinable air about a musician, what
Rebecca had called catnip in sound.

They were seated in a row at the far front of
the audience. Jean could see only their heads above the crowd,
Niamh and Tara’s shades of ginger, Maggie’s tragicomic streaks,
Elaine’s shining crown, white as a nun’s wimple. If either girl
swooned over Lance or even Hector, she couldn’t tell, although
Niamh was much the twitchier of the two. Nervous about singing in a
formal setting, perhaps?

The medley finished, everyone applauded.
Hector retired to the wings and Lance back to the audience. Hugh
took their place on stage and told a couple of stories about his
early days as a roving musician. Then he seated his fiddle beneath
his chin and swooped into a series of jigs and reels. His bow moved
so fast Jean was surprised it didn’t set the strings on fire. The
audience clapped along.

Even as his hands kept the rhythm, Alasdair’s
head swiveled back and forth, inspecting the crowd. Jean knew he
was not only picking the visitors out from the islanders by their
clothing, more stylish than practical, but subdividing them into
families of the students—they leaned forward eagerly, clutching
cameras—and stranded reporters, who did neither.

Right behind the ladies of Gow House, for
example, a woman in a crimson vinyl jacket and lipstick to match
leaned back fussing with the cuticle on a talon of a fingernail.
She probably worked for a fairly prestigious paper, while the man
beside her, wearing a cheap, frayed coat, scratching idly at his
arm . . . Was the reporter from the ferry slip, Jean realized,
without his iPad and his attitude. Some men spent a fortune on
products designed to make their hair stand on end. This man’s
thinning strands—not white like Elaine’s, just colorless—stuck out
from his scalp like flexible pick-up sticks.

Several fiddle students walked out onto the
stage to enthusiastic applause and a flicker of flashes from
cameras and phones. Hugh led them in a rousing rendition of the
“Harvest Home” hornpipe, his own skilled playing smoothing over the
odd awkward squeak.

Jean glanced back to see Pen swaying back and
forth in the doorway, her bleached white dish towel signaling
surrender to the beat of the music, her brilliant smile all the
more cheerful for having been absent the last twenty-four hours.
Her flowered dress would have made a dandy bedspread, and on her
ample figure resembled one. She eclipsed P.C. Crawford in his dark
uniform, who stepped out of the hallway holding a mug between his
hands—heat as well as sustenance, no doubt.

The smile dropped from Pen’s face. She pulled
so urgently at Crawford’s arm he had to make a quick, offsetting
move with his tea, and started speaking to him even before she’d
dragged him back into the hall and out of sight.

Jean shot a glance at Alasdair. Either his
instincts or his peripheral vision had drawn his attention to the
door. He leaned over so that his lips moved against her ear and his
breath stirred her hair. “I’ve likely made a mistake showing Pen
the card, if she’s warned Crawford off any questions about his
father.”

Jean in turn set her lips against Alasdair’s
ear. “Why wouldn’t he answer questions about his father?”

Muttering something about local
constables, Alasdair sat back in his chair and sent a truculent
glance toward the back of Darling’s head—
why did you not sit in the back?
The younger man
shifted uneasily but kept right on working his phone.

Hugh and the students launched into two
reels, perhaps on the theory that missed notes would be much more
easily concealed in speedy tunes. Then, after a round of applause,
the students trooped away and Hugh picked up his guitar.

Niamh, back in her off-hours garb of
military-style boots, jeans, sweater, and hair like liquid flame,
took her place on the stage. Lifting her hands, she opened her
mouth and emitted music. This time her remarkable voice was not
interrupted, but reverberated in the room as though the building
itself was a bodhran.

Vinyl-jacket woman sighed and started playing
with her phone. Darling tucked his away and leaned forward.
Bad-haircut guy did, too, no longer scratching but sitting
motionless.

Gazing fixedly at Maggie, Niamh sang of
defiance and alienation, of hearts sore with grief, of parting with
valiant men, of praying for the glorious dead. When the song came
to an end and the last vibration died away, the room was so silent
that a door shutting in the front of the building sounded like an
explosion.

Please, Jean thought, don’t let that be
Crawford taking off with some vital clue.

Wild applause, from Hugh as well. Niamh
blushed prettily and returned to her seat, where she sat with her
head bowed. Why direct the song to Maggie? Even if Niamh blamed her
for her parents’ divorce, hadn’t the two women reached a truce over
the last months?

Or was Niamh visualizing Grinsell, and a
descending flashlight, and a pick placed nearby to implicate the
ultimately guilty party? Two birds brought down with one stone.

Three students with Northumbrian small pipes
filed onto the stage, collected themselves, and at Hector’s signal
launched into a sprightly melody. The occasional squeal was almost,
if not quite, lost in the general sound, lower in volume and more
mellow in tone than that of the Highland pipes—something to do with
the keys, Jean supposed, which ranged down the length of the
chanters like metallic vertebrae.

On the other side of the room, Elaine stood
up, edged past Maggie into the aisle, and started to dance. The
pipe tunes ended with a skirl and a flourish and Elaine’s cracked
voice filled the hush. “. . . and the ravens of Avalon carry the
word, the king is gone but the queens live on . . .”

Niamh picked up the song, Hugh stepped
forward with his guitar, and within a minute half the people in the
room were singing “The Ravens of Avalon.” Jean and Rebecca leaned
together, so that between them they remembered all the
lyrics—blood, revenge, betrayal, and love gone wrong. Even Alasdair
hummed. Maggie had said Elaine wrote the song to begin with, and
Wat had appropriated it. Now her thin but vital voice led the room
. . . And died away, leaving Niamh and Hugh to finish.

Maggie rose, put her arm around her mother,
and guided her back to her seat. Behind her bad-haircut looked down
into his lap. Vinyl-jacket wriggled uncomfortably.

Hugh herded all the musicians back onto the
stage for a finale, the lass at the control panel managed to keep
the volume from blowing out the windows, and what with the work of
clapping and hooching—the equivalent of a shouted “testify!” at a
religious revival—the moment the concert concluded everyone in the
room surged toward the food and drink.

Chapter Twenty-five

Clyde sat at the door of the
classroom-cum-café collecting pound coins and making change, while
Pen, a smile settled comfortably on her face once again, supervised
the food-and-tea table. A searching look around informed Jean that
while Crawford might still be in the building, he sure wasn’t in
the room.

Clutching cups and bits of pastry either
savory or sweet, she, Alasdair, and Darling put their heads
together in one corner. Jean swore Darling stood at least two
inches taller now that he no longer hunkered down like a dog
expecting a blow. “I’ve texted our forensic accountant,” he said.
“I found her at home on a Saturday night—but then, she’s an older
lady.”

Probably my
age
,
Jean thought.

“
She’ll look into the Lauders’
financial records and get back to us.”

“
Well done,” Alasdair told him, and set
out the latest in full outline form, starting with “McCarthy,
Niamh, person of interest” and ending with, “Constable, local,
possible complications of.”