The Avalon Chanter (30 page)

“
I’d be eager to find out what happened
to him, wouldn’t I then? I’d hardly be concealing evidence. But I
never—yesterday, standing there by the grave—I never thought it
could be . . .” His already pale complexion fading to a faint
green, he frowned so fiercely Jean expected his face to break. His
cap fell from beneath his arm and thudded to the floor.

Again, Jean rescued it. As she stood up she
saw Elaine had crept to within earshot, her blue eyes bright as
buttons, tea sloshing out of her mug as she let it tilt heedlessly
to the side. But it had to be cold by now. “Athelstan. Used to stop
in. Haven’t seen him for a while. He played at being—the wizard.
The enchanter. Merlin. Athelstan was a romantic sort of chap. Gave
him my token, my glove, didn’t I?”

“
Romantic?” repeated
Crawford.

Maggie stepped forward, took the cup from
Elaine’s hand, murmured, “Mum, it’s all right.” Not that Maggie had
any clue what Elaine was talking about, Jean estimated from her
puzzled expression.

“
No, it wasn’t all right.” Elaine said.
“Athelstan played at Medraut, but Medraut was killed at—it’s never
Camelot.”

Camlann, Jean filled in. She’d always
wondered if the similarity in names was more than coincidence.

“
Arthur was wounded. No. Arthur’s—with
the wheels, room in the back—it slipped off the road.”

“
Medraut?” Alasdair
repeated.

“
Another version of Mordred,” Jean told
him, without adding,
that’s the name on the
back of the card, written in Elaine’s handwriting and then
erased.

A short scream and a crash sounded from
behind the table. Everyone spun around. Pen gripped her own arm,
her face white as her dish towel. The tea kettle lay at her feet.
“I—I—I was careless—butter on my fingers, wasn’t holding the kettle
properly—the hot water splashed on my arm.”

Or did one heck of a penny fall when Pen
heard first Alasdair and Crawford, then Elaine, talking about
Athelstan? Did she just realize she’d known all along who’d been
hidden in the grave? Jean started forward, then stepped back as
Hector materialized at Pen’s side.

He grabbed the cup of cool tea from Maggie’s
hand, turned it out onto the cloth and pressed it onto Pen’s arm.
“I need cold water—if you people have anything here, it’s cold
water. Ice water, straight from the faucet.”

Maggie leaped to the sink, seized another
cloth, and held it under the tap.

“
Where’s Niamh?” Hector asked. “She
must have some anesthetic ointment.”

“
Niamh isn’t at the house,” answered
Tara. “I called her phone, but it went to voice mail. I checked at
the pub—you can’t stir the place with a stick, it’s so crowded, but
she’s not there. Lance says he hasn’t seen her. He says he’ll help
look for her if he doesn’t have to take the boat out.”

Maggie gave Hector the cold cloth and put her
arm around Pen, making soothing sounds. Hector peered beneath the
cloth. “It’s not too bad a burn.” Elaine stood awkwardly,
uncertain.

“
Damn.” Alasdair’s mouth tightened into
a thin line. Jean knew what he was thinking—not that it was
unfortunate poor Pen was relatively unscathed, but that he’d let
Grinsell’s assailant get away. He’d let the woman he thought was
Grinsell’s assailant get away, rather. If only he’d assigned
Darling to walk with Niamh tonight, too. But she’d stolen away by
herself. You’d think she was trying to hide.

Someone slammed down the hall—Jean recognized
the volunteer sheep wrangler from Merlin’s Tower—and announced to
all and sundry, “The fret’s breaking up at last. Too late for the
sun, more’s the pity, but there’s a grand moon rising.”

Islanders milled around the scene of the
accident, while various visitors faded discreetly away. Including
the Campbell-Reids, Jean saw. Taking Alasdair’s do-not-disturb
expression to heart, they set out with baby and bagpipes and a wave
indicating a resumption of conversation at the B&B.

Hector and Maggie helped Pen to a chair.
Never mind the honey—maybe some aloe vera and sympathy would do the
trick. Although what she needed most was time and space and peace
to work it all out in her own mind, and then work up the courage to
approach Alasdair.

With, Jean reminded herself, information
about the body in the grave, Rob the Ranter, Athelstan, whoever.
Not the attack on Grinsell. That would never have happened without
Maggie opening the grave. That would never have happened if Elaine
had gone ahead and opened the grave way back when. Or kept it open,
rather.

“
Come along then,” Alasdair snapped to
Crawford. “Let’s have us a look at the torch. On your boat, you’re
saying?”

“
Aye, sir.” He collected his cap from
Jean and set it on his head, his manner once again laconic to the
point of aloof. Or it would have been laconic if not for the faint
hum of gears turning and cogs meshing behind the expanse of his
forehead.

Claiming her coat, Jean hustled down the
hallway. Crawford hoisted a flashlight even bigger than
Maggie’s—this one was presumably his own—and opened the door. At
Alasdair’s after-you gesture, Jean stepped out into a faceful of
fog. “I thought it had cleared up.”

“
Clearing up, the chap was saying.
There’ll be pockets for a while yet.” He shut the door and with it
cut off the light.

Earlier the sinking sun might have polished
the fog into a silver sheen, but now it was simply opaque, dull,
dark, scented with sea-salt and engine exhaust. The light from
Crawford’s torch cast a glare on the vapor and illuminated nothing
but the ground at their feet.

He angled right to follow the sequence of
fences, gained speed, and became no more than a spectral shape in a
moving halo. The echoing thuds of his footsteps faded as he
outdistanced their slower gait.

Jean glimpsed the sign in front of the
church. She glimpsed the gate to Gow House, but no lights from the
neo-Gothic windows. Either Tara had turned them off or the fog was
simply too thick.

The mossy stone fence along the cemetery
seemed to run on forever, like that path to hell paved with good
intentions, or the paths of glory that lead but to the grave, or .
. .

She and Alasdair stepped out of the fog like
stepping through a theater curtain. “Whoa!” She stopped so abruptly
her mini-heels slid on the blacktop.

Beside her Alasdair looked left, across the
parking lot and down to the houses of the village, their dark
facades broken by the squares of lighted windows. Beyond the
battlement-like edge of the roofs an aisle of the sea glimmered
between banks of fog. Above it all shone a star-scattered sky, a
golden-pale radiance seeping into it from the east.

Jean looked right. They stood at the corner
of the cemetery wall. Part of the priory cloister ran up to, and
then disappeared beneath, an uneven wall of fog sparkling with
water crystals.

More than a sea breeze tickled the back of
Jean’s neck as the fog retreated further.

By the time she set her hand on his arm,
Alasdair had already turned to face the priory. They listed
together under the weight of perception, small ships seeking safe
harbor—sensations colder than ice trickled down her back—a feeling
of doom pushed her down, doom, despair, confusion.

A man didn’t emerge from the fog before them,
the fog rolled back to reveal him standing there, small and alone.
It wasn’t Crawford. It was George Grinsell.

The image seemed perfectly solid, clearly
defined, illuminated by the lights of the village and yet unreal
all at once, like a CGI effect in a film.

His reddish hair now had no color at all. His
sour slit of a mouth hung slackly open. His eyes were no longer
canted sideways but stared straight ahead, struck wide by
confusion—not an expression Jean had ever seen on the living
face.

But this face was not alive.

The cold wind freshened, rolling up the fog
and pushing it away. For another fraction of a second the ghost
stood there, a lost soul if ever there was one. And then it was
gone.

The broken walls and arches of the priory
seemed to move forward rather than the fog retreating, each stone,
each column base emerging in sequence. The glow of the moon draped
some in light like thin Lindisfarne mead, others in velvet
shadow.

A row of candles glided in disembodied hands
toward the church, the nuns—the spirits of the nuns—on their way to
vespers. The weight fell from Jean’s shoulders and she
straightened, her necklace chiming softly as the memory of bells.
Voices began to sing. Women’s voices. The queens bearing to Avalon
the body not of Arthur but . . .

Elaine had never met Grinsell. She’d never
given him a nickname from legend.

Jean tried to inhale but the breath caught
like a thistle in her chest. Beside her Alasdair emitted a long
sigh that carried words with it, ones that she sensed rather than
heard.

“
It’s by way of being a murder case
now.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

“
Mr. Cameron? Miss Fairbairn?” Crawford
stood several feet away, his massive torch casting a beam of light
as bright as a searchlight at a Hollywood premiere.

Alasdair cleared his throat. “Aye, Constable.
Just having us a look at the priory in the moonlight.”

Jean expected Crawford to say, “Right.” But
he said nothing, merely turned again toward the village.

Here came another figure across the parking
lot, carrying a smaller flashlight, shimmering yellow jacket
flapping. “Crawford? Mr. Cameron?”

“
We’re here, Darling,” Alasdair
replied.

The sergeant skidded to a halt. “D.C.I.
Webber phoned, sir. D.I. Grinsell died ten minutes ago.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that.” Alasdair
didn’t turn a hair.

Jean turned several hairs as the wind blew
cold down the back of her neck. She crossed her arms and said, “I
am, too.”

“
And I,” added Crawford.

After a suitable moment of silence,
punctuated by voices rising from the waterfront, Darling went on,
“I walked Tara from Gow House to the pub, but she insisted on going
back to the school on her own, with the fog clearing out and all.
I’ve been asking about the town, the student hostel, the tea room.
Niamh—Miss McCarthy—no one’s seen her.”

Alasdair hadn’t told him to search for Niamh,
but it wasn’t a major leap of inference that he’d be doing so in
the immediate future. All he told Darling now was, “We’re away to
Crawford’s boat, to be having us a look at Maggie’s torch. At the
murder weapon, as it is now.”

“
You’ve found it then?”

“
Crawford did, aye.” Alasdair took off
at a brisk pace, finally stretching his limbs after being forced to
mince around in the fog.

It was Jean who now minced along in her
heels, following the vision of Alasdair’s kilt, its colors flashing
boldly in the beams of the flashlights. At the top of Cuddy’s
Close, he brought the parade to a halt and turned back toward her.
“Sorry, Jean.”

“
Tell you what,” she replied. “I’m
going to dart up to the room and change clothes. I’ll meet you at
the boat.”

“
Good idea,” said Alasdair, and, as he
led the other two men through the close and out onto the main
street, “Constable, if you’d be so good as to fill in the sergeant
here on our discussion of your father’s death?”

“
Oh,” Darling said faintly.
“Ah.”

“
Well, sir . . .” Crawford’s flat voice
died away as Jean diverted to the Angle’s Rest.

The moment she was inside she dumped her
shoes and ran up the stairs in her stockinged feet. She changed
into serviceable jeans and walking shoes in record time, and paused
in her return trip only long enough to pay respects to Hildy, who
stretched out in her spot on the upstairs windowsill.

The cat’s fur felt warm and soft to Jean’s
hand. A quiet purr vibrated in her throat. But her ears were raised
like semaphores, signaling something of interest outside. Leaning
forward to block out any reflections, Jean registered three people
strolling left to right through the parking lot and two ambling
toward the now dark and silent priory, none of their shadowy
figures revealing any identifying features.

In other words, damned if she could tell if
any of them were Niamh.

Several more people appeared from the
right—the post-concert greet-and-eat at the school had no doubt
reached a conclusion. One stocky figure wore what looked like a
skirt but had to be a kilt, since he walked very close to a woman
in a dress, a white blotch on her arm that Jean knew to be a dish
towel. Hector with Pen, making sure she and her injury made it
safely to the Angle’s Rest.

She couldn’t see Gow House, whether the
lights were on or what, but surely Tara and Maggie had escorted
Elaine home.

With another stroke of Hildy’s soft fur, Jean
headed down the stairs. The wail of a fretful child came from the
room at the end of the hall, along with the soothing murmur of
parental voices. She thought of Crawford’s parents, and Niamh’s,
and all parents having to choose between their own wishes and the
needs of the child.

Silence fell. A door opened and shut and
Michael appeared in the hallway. “Jean! I was expecting you and
Alasdair to be sleuthing at the school yet.”

“
No, we’ve moved operations to the
harbor. Want to come along, get an update on the case—the cases—in
progress?”

“
Aye, but . . .” He cast a wary eye
behind him. “I promised Rebecca I’d bring us each a wee dram from
the pub.”