The Avalon Chanter (38 page)

“
Slow down, Jean. Breathe. What are you
saying?”

Jean forced a ragged breath into the vise of
her lungs and went through it again, more slowly if equally lacking
in punctuation.

“
Where’s he been then?” Alasdair
demanded.

“
Oh shit,” Maggie said again, this time
holding up her key ring with its ghostly Statue of Liberty. “The
key to the church. It’s not on the ring. It was there yesterday
morning when I opened up for the press conference. Parkin—Donal was
there, wasn’t he? He saw me with the key. He had Niamh take it off
the ring and bring it to him.”

“
He’s been hiding in the church,” Jean
told Alasdair. “He was right under our noses. He and Niamh, they’ve
been here all along—you mobilized everyone too fast for him to get
off the island.”

“
That was you and your thinking,
connecting Parkinson to McCarthy.”

Jean waved her free hand. “Whatever, he’s
backed into a corner now.”

Alasdair’s voice issued rapid-fire orders.
When it came clearly to her ears again, he said, “Darling had a
look at the church. Both the front and the vestry doors were locked
up tight.”

“
He has a key. He sat there waiting
until everyone fanned out over the island and then went after
Maggie. Except she’s here at the B and B.”

“
He saw me leaving Gow House—where’s my
knife?” Maggie disappeared into the dining room. Rebecca reappeared
in the hall. “Michael and his group are hurrying back, but they’re
a good half-mile away.”

“
Alasdair,” Jean asked, “where are
you?”

“
Just beyond Merlin’s Tower. We’re
running as fast as we can. I’ve alerted Darling. Stay clear of the
scene.”

Yeah, right, like anyone would be able to
stay clear of the scene.

Alasdair’s breath came in short bursts.
“Jean, are you hearing me?”

“
I’m hearing you. I hope I’m seeing you
real soon.” And the connection broke. It was only then Jean
realized Alasdair had actually complimented her loup of logic.
Maybe he owed her three pence for her thoughts, even.

In the living room, Pen had Elaine tucked up
on the couch, a small blanket wrapping her legs and feet, Hildy
installed on her lap as combination hot water bottle and soft toy.
Elaine’s blue-veined hands clutched a cup but she stared into it,
not drinking.

If Pen had been sixteen, say, when the
Lauders came to Farnaby, she was about six years younger than
Elaine. Now Elaine looked twenty years older, rocking back and
forth, muttering under her breath. “Wat. He’s in a frightful
temper. Arthur. Lost his—the thing with a point, sharp. Sword.
Excrement. That’s its name.”

“
Excalibur,” Pen told Elaine, and to
Jean, “Like old times, her running down here. Save it’s not like
old times at all.”

“
I found it. Not in a stone. Beneath
it. In a—the place you bury a man. Buried Lancelot, not Merlin,
dead and buried. The queens live on whilst the king’s a dreadful
mess. Dreadful.” Releasing the cup—Pen snatched it before it
fell—Elaine produced a small flashlight from the pocket of her
robe. “I don’t know where I got this. It’s a—it’s not a candle. It
lights up the corners.”

“
Niamh gave you that,” said Maggie from
the sideboard. She ran the edge of the knife across her thumbnail,
testing its sharpness. “Are they both there at the house, Mum?
Niamh and Tara both? With Wat?”

“
Arthur.” Elaine switched the
flashlight on and off. Hildy looked up, intrigued by the moving
point of light but too comfortable to leap down and chase it.
“Wat’s Arthur. Athelstan’s Merlin. Medraut. I gave him my glove.
Dreadful mess.”

Glove, Jean thought. Love with a G-spot.

“
What did you do with the sword?” Pen
collapsed on the edge of the couch. “Did you take it to Athelstan’s
office? Is that where it belongs, where, erm, Merlin
works?”

Elaine played with the flashlight. “Medraut.
He had a sword. They said he killed Arthur. But it was Guinevere,
it was the queen of Avalon. Without her, nothing.”

Maggie turned to the door. “We’ll sort this
later, if we can. In the meantime . . .”

“
Yeah, I’m coming.” Jean spotted a set
of fireplace tools at the end of the hearth. Judging by the trace
of ash on their tips, they’d only recently been demoted to
decorative purposes when Pen and James installed the electric fire.
She pulled the poker from the rack and tried bending it. Thick,
sturdy, black iron.

What the hell she thought she could do with
that, or Maggie with the knife, she had no idea. But there was
something very satisfying about that cold iron clasped in her
hand.

“
Take care,” Pen told them. At least,
that’s what Jean thought she said, with her voice stopped up in her
throat.

Silently, her face stern, Rebecca brought
Jean her coat and walked her and Maggie to the back door. She
opened it and then shut it behind them. Jean stood beside Maggie in
the sudden cold air and listened to the key turn in the lock. She
didn’t look back into the lighted house. She looked over the garden
wall toward Gow House, its gables and chimneys defined by cool
moonlight, its windows by warm incandescent light.

Footsteps and voices converged on it from
every direction. If the shadowy figures had been carrying burning
torches instead of the electric kind, they’d have resembled a mob
from a horror movie.

Jean and Maggie slipped through the garden
gate into Cuddy’s Close and found themselves walking beside Hugh,
whose face was even darker than when he sang songs about bigotry
and injustice.

On his other side, Rosalie chattered away. “.
. . so this McCarthy chap was on trial . . .”

“
Haud your wheesht, woman!” he snapped,
marginally more polite than “Shut up!” in that she probably didn’t
understand broad Scots dialect—no doubt why he was using it, as an
arcane way of swearing.

Jean’s distended perceptions registered
moving lights in the harbor, as though a UFO was coming in for a
landing. They detected a ripple of unease from the priory, the
strong emotions of the gathering crowd vibrating the sheer membrane
between everyday and paranormal. Mostly, though, her senses focused
on the house behind the low wall, past the wrought-iron gate, over
the nodding leaves of Elaine’s garden.

Every curl and scallop of the Gothic Revival
carving along the eaves of Gow House seemed tense, spines bristling
in alarm. No one moved behind the arched windows. The lighted porch
was an empty cube.

Almost everyone stopped on the blacktop of
the parking lot. Jean and Maggie kept going, edging between the
now-silent watchers until they stood between them and the gate. On
the right the school loomed like a hard-edged hillock. On the left,
beyond the mound of the church, the priory lay like a filigree of
stone. Overhead the moon looked like a hole punctured in the
darkness, the light of another universe shining through.

Except for the slight shuffle of feet and
Maggie’s breath ragged beside her, the parking area was so quiet
Jean heard the clock strike inside the house. She counted down the
deep-throated dongs from one to twelve.

Then a rattle of footsteps became Alasdair
running along the face of the throng, holding his phone so that its
glowing screen illuminated his cold, keen face. “. . . at the
house, aye.”

His sideways glance registered Jean
standing at the front of the group of people. His mouth tightened.
His peremptory gesture to her, to Maggie, to everyone was a clear
command:
Get back, dammit!

Like a giant amoeba, the gathered islanders
and visitors oozed back. Jean took a couple of steps after them.
Maggie stood her ground.

Darling pushed through from the direction of
the village, his own phone in one hand, something small and black
in the other. He passed that off to Alasdair.

A gun. Jean hadn’t seen Alasdair with a gun
in his hand since they’d first met. Where on earth had Darling . .
.

Another, bulkier man stepped up between
Darling and Alasdair, the glow of the house reflecting off his
mahogany complexion. Oh. The lights in the harbor. Not a UFO, the
police boat from Berwick, with D.C.I. Webber personally in charge.
Good man.

From her peripheral vision Jean saw a dark
figure slipping along behind the cemetery wall. Another one picked
his way along the hillside behind the house. The moonlight glinted
from something long and thin in his hands. More guns, rifles with
long barrels. It wasn’t exactly the cavalry arriving in a cloud of
dust—they were easing onto the scene with cat-footed stealth—this
might not be a battle that could be won by force of arms.

“
. . . cannot storm the house unless we
know what’s going on inside.” Alasdair’s breath rose before him but
didn’t soften his features.

“
No one’s answering any phone number
we’ve got,” returned Webber, “including the one off Grinsell’s
phone that must be McCarthy’s own.”

“
Your mother sounded the alarm?”
Alasdair asked Maggie.

“
She was asleep, but she doesn’t sleep
well—seems to be the voices woke her up and she got herself out the
side door. I shouldn’t have gone off without her. I should have
sent Tara away earlier today.” Her face contorted.

“
How’d McCarthy get into the
house?”

Maggie’s voice cracked as she forced out
words. “It’s normally never locked, but Niamh has a key. She’s
working with him, isn’t she? She’d have had both parents if not for
me. She knows that.”

Gently Jean reached out and pulled Maggie
back. Her entire body trembled so hard the vibrations ran up Jean’s
arm and made her teeth rattle and the poker in her other hand thrum
like the drones of a set of pipes.

Someone stepped up beside them. Hector, his
black eyes gleaming. “I’ve got her.” He drew Maggie from Jean’s
hand and wrapped a strong arm firmly around her quivering
shoulders.

Breathing like a threshing machine, Clyde
popped out of the crowd and came to a halt on Maggie’s other side.
“Pen’s telling me Lance is in there.”

“
Yes,” she replied, “he turned up with
an old shotgun. Says it’s one you’ve had locked in the safe for
years. Some chap left it behind after a wildfowling
trek.”

“
Ah. That one. It wasn’t loaded, but
we’ve got shells put by for the trippers.”

“
When I left, he was standing on the
porch with it.” The rest of her sentence,
but he’s not there now
, twisted slowly in the icy
breeze from the sea.

The porch light winked out. The front door
cracked open, showing a thin strip of illumination.

A murmur ran through the crowd. Several
people pressed forward, only to have a couple of uniformed figures
push them back again.

The lights in the windows faded to dim glows,
as did the stripe beside the door. And in the sudden shadow, the
door opened.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Two human shapes, standing very close
together, stepped out onto the porch. Blinking frantically against
the darkness, Jean made out Donal’s colorless hair and pasty
complexion. Tucked in beside his cheek, Tara’s chin-length russet
hair framed red, swollen eyes now devoid of all expression.

Her wrists were hidden behind her back—he
must have tied them. His arms pressed her body tightly against his,
his hands holding the shotgun upright and pointed at her chin. An
awkward posture, that, requiring him to stand in a half-crouch if
he wanted to keep his fingers on the trigger. Triggers, maybe. To
fire, he’d have to press them down rather than pull them up. His
body was off-balance. But then, he’d always been off-balance, and
was all the more dangerous for it.

Maggie rocked back against Hector. The white
knuckles of her hand clutching the knife looked like old bone.
Beneath her breath she murmured a litany of distress. “Oh my little
lass. I’m so sorry. I should never have brought you here. I should
have left well alone and never found you, never sucked you into all
this. You were free. Without me, you were free.”

Clyde’s bellow shattered the silence.
“Where’s Lance?”

“
Having himself a bit of a kip,”
replied Donal. “Niamh’s looking after him. Angel of mercy, that’s a
good girl.”

Hector said under his breath, “Dang it,
Niamh. Why?”

From the darkness, Darling replied, his tone
bleak, “She’s his daughter, that’s why.”

“
Seriously? Crap-tastic.”

Instead of speculating how the romantic chain
seemed to have acquired another link, Jean told herself that
Donal’s saying Lance was napping meant he was unconscious.
Hopefully he was no more than unconscious, although a concussion
bad enough to cause unconsciousness tended to be serious.

A shape, an image sketched in shadow on
twilight, moved in the window to the left of the door. A slender
female shape. Niamh. Yes, she must be helping him. All the years of
seeing other girls with fathers but having none, that would build
more than curiosity, that would build resentment, maybe even a
desire for revenge.

Alasdair looked at Webber. Webber made
a slight gesture.
It’s all yours.
Tucking the gun into the pocket of his coat, Alasdair stepped
forward, hands raised. But before he could speak, a tall, lanky
figure pushed through the crowd and stepped in front of
him.

Crawford. He’d broken out of detention . . .
That’s right, Alasdair had said something about relieving him of
duty when Berwick arrived. Berwick had duly arrived, but Webber had
either been in a forgiving mood or realized the occasion demanded
all hands on deck.