The Avalon Chanter (7 page)

“
So far she hasn’t presented any
evidence one way or the other. All she’s discovered is a dead body,
and she sure didn’t plant that.”

“
No, that she did not. Consider her
timing reporting the body, though.”

Jean spread her toiletries out on the
bathroom counter, marveling that this bathroom had a counter,
unlike many. She could only assume that Brits were capable of
making their hygiene and beauty aids levitate beside the sink.

Her image in the mirror made her grab for her
hairbrush—the wind had caused her naturally surly auburn locks to
become openly hostile. “No surprise she’d put off calling
Crawford,” she said toward the other room, “until access to Farnaby
was closed. She’s lucky she’s in a place she could keep outsiders
away and the situation under control. Not that you and I aren’t
outsiders, but we got here after the other reporters had left—that
was a serendipitous shortcut making a long delay, wasn’t it?”

“
We’re owning to good credentials, to
say nothing of Miranda’s good word.”

“
Miranda’s magic tongue could open the
gates of Fort Knox, no doubt about it.”

“
Still,” Alasdair replied, “Maggie
could not be keeping the truth under wraps forever.”

“
Couldn’t she? She could have replaced
the slab on the tomb and gone on her way. Especially if Tara wasn’t
there this morning helping her out and she had no witnesses. The
hue and cry from the double-crossed media would die out eventually.
Loony Lauder . . .
Hmm
.” Jean
walked out into the room. Alasdair had turned off all the lights
except for a dim bedside lamp and now peered out of the right-hand
window.

The view swept down to the harbor and out to
sea. Crawford’s small boat bobbed up and down next to a fishing
boat, but Jean saw no sign of any other official forces staging a
landing.

“
Too soon,” he told her, and went on,
“If Tara’s Maggie’s daughter, she’s not making a reliable witness,
one way or the other.”

“
We’ll have to take their word for
it.”

“
You’ll have noticed the American
accent, still quite strong.”

“
Not like Rebecca’s, with more serial
numbers filed off all the time. My accent’s going that way, too, I
bet. It’s a braw, bricht, nicht . . .”

“
You’ve got a ways to go,” Alasdair
told her. “With Tara calling Maggie ‘Mags,’ not ‘Mum’ or the like,
I’m guessing she was adopted at birth and they’ve only lately been
reunited. Not to mention Hogg being a fine Borders
name.”

“
It’s a fine Texas name, too. Maybe she
went to her father’s family, presuming her father is the dead
lover, but that’s not a given.”

“
Not a bit of it.”

“
So if the body is Maggie’s biological
father, then Elaine maybe potted a lover, too. You said yourself,
bagging the unfaithful lover is a traditional sport. Or bagging the
rival—the death might be Wat’s doing.”

“
No obvious gunshot wounds. Cannot tell
whether the man was bagged at all.” Alasdair had an annoying and
yet endearing habit of taking her metaphors literally. “We’ve got
no reason as yet to assume it’s a murder.”

“
I don’t see any way it could be a
death by misadventure. What? The guy crawled in there playing hide
and seek and pulled the slab closed?” Jean shuddered, sensing a
crushing wave of claustrophobia. “Or a robbery. What robber would
go to such effort to hide his victim?”

“
Come to that, we’ve got no ‘we’ at
all. It’s Grinsell’s case, for better or worse.”

The acid trickling suddenly through his tone
caused Jean to dart a sharp look at his face. His great stone face.
“Alasdair, who’s George Grinsell? And I don’t mean a D.I. from
Berwick or Cumbria or wherever. I mean . . .”

“
. . . What’s he to me? Nothing
personally. We’ve met is all. But there was a right old stramash
some years ago with him following a female suspect across the
border into Scotland and harassing her once he caught her up, even
though Lothian and Borders Police was on the scene and in charge of
the situation.”

“
There’s another fine old tradition for
you, a border leaking all sorts of people back and forth and
squabbles over territorial imperative.”

“
Aye, but the days of the Border
Reivers and their ilk are long gone. We’re now living the days of
bureaucracy and political correctness.”

“
Which can certainly be carried to
extremes, though I gather that’s not the case with
Grinsell.”

“
He’s having none of that nonsense, no.
He made some statements at the time of the border dispute that had
folk in both England and Scotland calling for his resignation, if
not his head on a pike above Carlisle Castle. Sounds as though he’s
merely been moved sideways, from the Cumbrian Constabulary to the
Northumbria Police.”

“
Let’s hope he’s mellowed a
bit.”

Alasdair sighed. “It’s none of our affair,
lass.”

“
Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one
before.” Shaking her head, Jean crossed the room and checked the
view from the opposite window. This one overlooked the ruined
priory, which now, in the cloud-shrouded twilight, seemed no more
than charcoal sketches upon shadow. A ghostly fluorescence moved
through the grounds. She extended one tendril of her sixth sense
and
listened
, but detected
nothing, no hint of the spirit or soul or discorporate presence she
and Alasdair had sensed there earlier.

What she saw was Crawford, his jacket
reflecting the lights of the village and the backspatter of his
own—well, he had Maggie’s—flashlight. Its beam swept across the
window-wall and the gaping maw of the chapel door. He had strong
nerves, to stay out there alone. But then, not everyone was as
given to populating the darkness with phantoms as Jean. Crawford
didn’t strike Jean as being the imaginative sort, let alone one of
the rare people cursed by an allergy to ghosts.

An even less decipherable shape walked toward
him, up the road from the direction of the church. Jean hoped it
was Tara or Maggie or the red-haired nurse consoling the constable
on duty with a cup of tea and a sandwich. By leaning into the
window bay, she could see the almost invisible shape of the church
and the lights of Gow House, puny against the swallowing night.

Alasdair picked up her backpack from the bed
and handed it to her. “There’s a pint in the pub with my name on
it, and a plate of food with yours.”

“
Oh yeah. But speaking of Miranda, I
need to call her before the news people get on the scent. I can see
them all turning around and speeding back to the ferry
slip.”

“
The tide will be coming back in and
going out again before dawn tomorrow. The island’s well closed till
noon or so.”

“
Whenever, this time Maggie won’t be
able to buy them off with a lecture on Arthur or Genevieve or
anyone except Rob the Ranter.”

“
Who?”

“
The chanter in the grave made me think
of the line from ‘Maggie Lauder,’ the one about Rob the Ranter. We
don’t have any other ID for the dead man.”

Alasdair said, “Just because the chap was
buried with a chanter does not mean he was a piper.”

“
Yeah, but wasn’t the chanter why
Maggie suspected she knew who it was?”

“
That’s her inference, aye, though
we’re compounding her guess with ours.”

“
An experienced guess,” Jean told
him.

He shrugged with his eyebrows rather than his
shoulders. “Best you be making your calls whilst you’re
vertical.”

“
Assuming my phone didn’t go belly-up
hours ago.” Great, it only now occurred to her that while they were
hardly at the edge of the world here—they’d been farther from
civilization on Skye last New Year’s—they might be off the grid.
Lance had cell phone reception on the ferry, but he lived here and
no doubt had his phone set up accordingly. Jean dived into her bag.
The phone was buried at the very bottom, as always.

Yes. She had a minimal collection of bars.
She tapped Miranda’s name.

Chapter Seven

“
Miranda Capaldi here,” said her friend
and colleague’s smoky voice. “I’m out and about, who knows where or
why. Leave a message and I’ll make my way to you in due
course.”

Jean left a message. “It’s probably best if
you call me back, because it hasn’t hit the media yet—I know you’re
media yourself, but unless you’ve developed ESP—let’s just say
Maggie cancelled the news conference for a very good reason and
Alasdair and I are—well no, we’re not exactly on the case, but
we’re here. Bye.”

“
I’m sure she’ll be finding that very
informative,” said Alasdair from the desk, where he was now
perusing the breakfast menu.

“
We speak the same language,” Jean
returned, and tapped “Campbell-Reid.”

This time she hit a home run. “Hello, Jean,”
said Rebecca’s voice. “How are things on Farnaby?”

“
Funny you should ask.” Jean gave her
friend a rundown of events, edited for running time and discretion,
concluding, “It’s not like the case in Edinburgh in February. There
we had a possible ID right from the start.”

“
I wish I could say I was gobsmacked by
it all, but knowing how you and Alasdair attract this sort of thing
. . .” After a moment of silence, Rebecca went on, “I understand
Maggie trying to reinvent herself, but by now I reckon she’s
wishing she’d left well alone.”

“
I bet she is. But that leads me to a
not unrelated question. You’re more in touch with British academic
circles than I am. Have you ever heard Maggie called Loony
Lauder?”

Alasdair, now standing by the door, mouthed,
“Does that matter?”

“
You’re always saying we don’t know
what matters and what doesn’t,” Jean mouthed back.

In her ear Rebecca said, “No, not Maggie, but
it seems to me ‘Loony Lauder’ was going around about Elaine several
years ago.”

“
Elaine?”

“
The Matter of
Britannia
alone earned her a few cat-calls. Then she
told an interviewer she was basing the sequel on psychic
revelations about Farnaby Priory. Rather like Bligh Bond at
Glastonbury, who said he was getting messages through automatic
writing from one of the old monks. But no matter. Not now. When
word went round about her dementia, everyone who’d called her
loony, even about
Britannia
,
crawled away red-faced.”

“
Well yes, I should think so. Except .
. .”

“
. . . Except I’m more than
occasionally picking up images, vibes, stray emotions from the
past, and I’m not demented. Nor you and Alasdair and your
ghosts.”

“
Exactly. Dementia is too easy an
answer.”

Alasdair mimed pouring a drink down his
throat, followed by eating motions.

“
Well,” Jean said with a
down boy
gesture, “I’ll let you go.
You’re going to love the Angle’s Rest, by the way.”

“
Good! Michael and I will pack the baby
and the bagpipes and be seeing you tomorrow afternoon,
then.”

“
Safe journey.” Jean switched off and
let Alasdair usher her out the door.

She opened her mouth to fill him in, then saw
Hildy the tabby cat still ensconced on the window seat. Now,
however, she sat upright, ears perked forward, tail twitching, nose
pressed to the window, which from this angle was little more than a
mirror. “What is she looking at?”

“
What are cats ever looking at?”
Alasdair found a light switch and pressed it.

The sitting area plunged into shadow rather
than complete darkness, but even as they zeroed in on the window
seat the illusion of the mirror cleared. Peering past the cat, Jean
remembered the old wives’ tale that if you looked between a cat’s
ears you’d see a ghost. Funny about old wives’ tales, how many of
them had some basis in reality.

Although what she saw now was nothing
paranormal, just a large, blond, very much alive Lance Eccleston
stamping down the alley outside the four-foot-tall garden wall.
“That’s not who I saw walking up to the priory,” she said.

“
That’s Crawford at the priory,” said
Alasdair beside her, his breath misting the glass.

Hildy looked up at him, then at Jean, and
made a hasty retreat first to the floor and then down the
stairs.

“
Yeah, I know. You can see his jacket
reflecting the light. A little while ago he was shining the
flashlight on that wall of windows and now it looks like he’s
sitting on the bench in the cloisters. But also a little while ago
I saw someone walking up the road toward him, not in anything
reflective and without a flashlight.”

“
Good way to go falling into a trench,
with no torch. How’d you know it wasn’t Lance, in the dark and
all?”

“
Not as large. I thought it was Tara or
the redhead from Gow House.”

“
No good judging size in the darkness,”
Alasdair stated.

“
Yeah, well . . .” Jean’s stomach
grumbled. “Come on. Let’s stop stalling around and get some
food.”

She allowed Alasdair his roll of the eyes,
which he pretended to hide as he turned the light back on. He
followed her down the stairs, out the door onto the street, and
across Cuddy’s Close.