The Avalon Chanter (34 page)

“
And now?” Miranda asked.

“
We’re running around considerably
better organized than that headless chicken. More cops are on their
way from Berwick to help. Alasdair has people going door to door in
the village, since that’s something we can do in the dark.” There
was that
we
again. She’d
probably be more helpful going back to the Angle’s Rest and
strapping on an apron.

“
I’d best be getting myself back to the
bean-feast, then. Try texting me again when there’s anything else
wants researching.”

“
Will do. Thanks.”

Chapter Thirty-two

Ending the call, Jean checked the time. Ten
o’clock. She could have sworn it was already tomorrow, and well
into it. Biting her lip, she tucked her phone back in her bag.

Alasdair said, “No one goes searching on his
own. If anyone’s catching a glimpse of either McCarthy or Niamh,
call for help. Donal’s dangerous.”

“
Is he armed, sir?” Crawford
asked.

“
I’m hoping not, since he went using a
torch as a weapon, but let’s not be making assumptions. In any
event, he’s desperate. Sergeant?”

Darling responded on cue. “Berwick had a look
at D.I. Grinsell’s phone, with a message from ‘Bill Parkinson,’
first saying he appreciated Grinsell’s work back in Cambridgeshire
to get at the truth about Maggie Lauder and her trial. Then he said
he’d met Donal McCarthy in prison and learned some bits of evidence
against Maggie that never came out, what with feminist prejudice
and all. He said Donal and Maggie had worked together to stage the
murder but then she’d turned against him.”

“
Grinsell believed that?” asked Jean,
and answered her own question. “He wanted to believe that. Still,
isn’t there some sort of double jeopardy rule or something that
would have kept Grinsell from charging Maggie again?”

“
Up till quite recently there was,
aye,” Alasdair said. “Nowadays, though, here in England, new
evidence might could be leading to a new trial. Failing that, he’d
be crowing to the media that he was right all along. He could have
recreated the scandal just when Maggie was aiming for a major
scholarly achievement. Revenge and vindication, all in one
go.”

Crawford nodded. Jean wondered if he thought
what she was thinking, that a man with an ego like Grinsell’s was
shockingly easy to trap. Donal had probably been brooding for years
about the situation. So had Grinsell. She’d thought at the
eat-and-greet after the concert that the two men would have gotten
along.

They had not missed each other after all. Oh,
to have been a raven on the wall at that confrontation, when
Grinsell realized who he faced. When he realized he’d been had . .
. No, Jean corrected herself. Having seen the results, she was glad
she’d skipped the encounter.

“
In the event,” Alasdair went on,
“Donal lured Grinsell to the Tower, hardly meaning to have a
friendly blether. He set a trap with an eye to murder. Now he’s
looking at being sent down again, this time for the rest of his
life, which would not be long, not if the other old lags are
suspecting he’s a snout.”

“
Is he holding the lass hostage?” asked
James.

“
We do not know whether she’s with him.
If she is, we do not know her state of mind.”

Jean considered the dark back room. She
remembered Hugh looking for the missing chanter among all the
chanters at the school, and Tara going back to Gow House after
Crawford had already looked for her there. She aimed her forefinger
at the half-open door and asked over her shoulder, “Alasdair, has
anyone searched this room?”

Alasdair looked around, his expression
shading from
Say what?
to
Oh crap
. “Crawford?
Darling?”

James answered. “The back door’s locked.
Leastways, it was the last time I checked.”

“
When was that?” Jean asked.

“
Last year. Maybe the year before. But
then, several folk have keys,” he conceded. “The lock’s the same
one it was when your dad had an office there, Edwin.”

“
Mum kept his key along with the
drawings,” replied Crawford. “It’s an old metal skeleton key. Seems
to me Wat was saying he had one as well.”

“
Then Donal might have had that off
Niamh.” Darling, chin set, hands curled into fists, took three
swift steps toward the half-open door and kicked it open. The crash
sent dust wafting down from the ceiling in the front room and the
shelf in the back tilted even further. Every eye followed as the
stack of old newspapers slumped in slow motion over the edge and
fanned out across the floor.

Someone coughed. Alasdair said, “Do not scare
me like that, Jean.”

“
Scare
you
?” She crept toward the open door, pretending
not to hear Darling’s unmistakable sigh of relief. Still in the
penumbra of fluorescent light, she looked inside the door frame for
a light switch. Ah—there it was.

A single incandescent bulb in the ceiling lit
up, revealing a room empty except for the shelf, a few tatty
cardboard boxes, and a broken chair. The back door, an ancient
wooden-framed number, was closed. Taking a deep breath of the
chill, musty air, Jean made the journey of five steps across the
room in four, set her hand on the icy knob, and turned it.

The door was locked. No—Jean reversed
her push to a pull and narrowly avoided hitting herself in the
face. It opened inward, not outward. And it was emphatically
not
locked.

She gazed out onto a narrow passage between
two stone walls, its moist, mossy cement floor littered with
indefinable bits of flotsam and jetsam. At the far end, past a gate
hanging from one hinge, rose the hillside behind the village. If
she leaned out and looked to the right, past the back of the next
building—the student hostel, with lots of lighted windows—she could
see the priory sketched in quicksilver and ebony on the velveteen
grass.

Tiny lights wavered in the church and gleamed
through the windows of the chapel. The ghostly nuns were restless
tonight—or were they ghostly candles at all, not the flashlights of
search parties? Jean considered the hair on the back of her neck,
perkier than normal if not exactly at full alert.

Someone stepped up beside her and she
jumped.

“
Sorry, madam,” said
Crawford.

“
You’ve searched the priory already,
haven’t you? Or not you in person—someone.”

“
Aye, that we have.”

“
I—ah—I thought I saw lights there a
minute ago.” She saw them now, and wondered if they counted as
corpse-candles.

“
A trick of the moonlight. Or the
headlamps of a car in the car park. In any event, it’s all dark
now.”

Saying
yes it
is
wasn’t an outright lie, but still Jean stepped back
into the room without speaking and let Crawford inspect the door
and then shut it behind them.

“
Looks like a fresh scratch or two on
the lock,” he said. “Someone fumbling with the key in the dark,
most likely.”

Donal’s hand fumbling in the dark, Jean
wondered, or Niamh’s?

Her moment of inspiration—if you could call
it that—had not produced either of the fugitives. Standing there
dithering or chewing her nails wouldn’t either. She turned to the
newspapers spread out on the flagstone floor and gathered them up.
Instead of stacking them back on the shelf, she dumped them against
the wall beneath it. Their headlines were five years old—they were
probably leftover packing material from when the last shop moved
out.

The bland spines of the jacketless books were
mottled with damp. Using only her forefinger, Jean angled one away
from its mates and saw that it was an accounting textbook. So were
the other two. Delicately she opened the one on the end to the
flyleaf and saw again Elaine’s steady, youthful handwriting: Elaine
Lauder. Gow House, Farnaby Island. 1971.

“
Nineteen seventy-one,” Jean murmured.
So Elaine studied accounting as well as literature? Interesting
combination. But perhaps Wat needed help with the Gallowglass
accounts. If so, though, why were the books here instead of at
their home?

Jean moved on to the cardboard file folders.
Both were empty. Both bore the same label: Athelstan Crawford.

Athelstan Crawford’s son stood by the door
into the front room. She asked him, “Have you seen these?”

“
Aye, madam, that I have. My wife and
I, we had a quick look round when the last shop closed down. Those
folders were tucked away in a corner with the books. Nothing in
them save a receipt or two and a note from Elaine Lauder thanking
Athelstan for the gift of a wee book of poetry. We took those with
us, gave them to my sister to add to the portfolio of
drawings.”

“
Crawford!” called Darling.

“
Aye, sir.” He stepped through the
doorway.

Jean brushed peeling bits of paper and
binding from her fingers. She didn’t blame Crawford and his spousal
unit for not taking away either books or folders. They smelled of
wet dog.

The only area of the room she hadn’t
investigated was the corner where three cardboard boxes slouched
beside the broken chair. She took the two paces over to them and
stirred them with her toe. Something very small shot out of the far
side and vanished into a crack in the wall.

She jerked convulsively, then swallowed her
heart back into her chest and grimaced at her own nerviness. There
were worse things than mice.

Two of the boxes scraped easily across the
floor, empty. The third was heavier. Closing her nostrils against
the smell of mildew and decay, she leaned over and opened its
flaps.

Palpable shadow filled the bottom of the box.
No, that was a dusky purple fabric, its ribbed pattern making
stripes of light and dark. Good heavens—was that Elaine’s shawl
bundled into the box? Both Maggie and Crawford had said Pen found
Elaine outside the pub last night, listening to Niamh sing. One of
them had said she’d been without her shawl.

The smell was more than that of mildew. It
evoked a sharp memory of Maggie pulling back a blue tarp. Her heart
continuing on down into her stomach, Jean lifted one corner of the
shawl.

Nestled inside it lay a baton. A wand. A
long, thin, black, pitted, and scabby tubular shape with a flat
flared end.

Chapter Thirty-three

“
Alasdair,” Jean called.

The masculine voices in the other room didn’t
falter. Footsteps receded toward the outside door. It opened and
shut.

“
Alasdair!” she shouted.

A sudden quiet. “Aye?” he replied, giving her
the benefit of the doubt by using a tone more cautious than
impatient.

“
The chanter. The one Maggie found in
the grave. The murder weapon from the seventy-one case. It’s in
here, wrapped in Elaine’s shawl.”

A pause, and then a stampede. Jean found
herself standing three feet away from the box without having taken
any actual steps. Alasdair peered down at the shawl and the chanter
while Darling held a flashlight over his shoulder. James craned his
neck to see.

Only Crawford stood back, his long face
almost uncommunicative, but not quite. Jean detected a range of
emotions moving subtly beneath the stern facade, from the cringing
realization the chanter was no longer an abstract object but the
weapon that had killed his father, to a shrinking resignation that
its relocation from chapel to shop hovered over his head like a bat
homing in on a roost.

Darling handed the flashlight off to James
and lifted the chanter, still in its woolen nest, from the box.
Alasdair turned to Crawford. “You were standing watch at the priory
last night. Then you were telling Inspector Grinsell you were not
so sure you’d seen a chanter lying next to the body.”

“
Aye, sir.”

“
What were you seeing, then? Or should
I be asking,
who
were you
seeing at the priory, in the dark?”

“
Elaine Lauder, sir.”

“
And?” Alasdair prodded.

“
She has herself a wander from time to
time. If I’d seen her walking off into the fields, say, I’d have
taken her back home. But she was leaving the priory for the
village. I knew someone would be looking after her. No need to
abandon my post.”

Alasdair said nothing. Darling, clutching the
shawl and the chanter to his chest, tilted his head to the side
quizzically. James looked down at the floor, frowning—he remembered
the real Elaine, not an old, confused woman fumbling at the lock to
the back door of the shop.

Crawford remembered the real Elaine, too,
Jean told herself.

He braced his shoulders back, but his eyes
were focused on a spot beyond Alasdair’s dour face, as though the
sheer force of his gaze could open up a window in the far wall, one
into the past. “I thought she’d come for a look at the grave was
all. She worked there, once. Then, when I was showing Inspector
Grinsell the scene, I saw the chanter’d gone missing.”

“
Why were you lying, Constable?”
Alasdair’s voice was cold as a glacier about to calve several tons
of ice.

“
I wasn’t dead certain Elaine had taken
it. When I took Inspector Grinsell’s measure—meaning no disrespect,
but once I’d seen him badgering Maggie, once I’d heard him
threatening the same to Tara and Elaine as well, I—I wasn’t sure
what to do. Sir.”