The Avalon Chanter, page 5
“Jean, please.” She leaned closer to the picture hanging next to the bathroom door, a close-up of the tower atop the headland. In the tenuous spring light of the photo—light much like today’s—the massive stones of the bailey wall surrounding a small roofless keep seemed brutal, laid down by giants in some antediluvian era. “What’s this tower? Is it a fort?”
“Oh, aye, mostly dating to Tudor days, like the fortlet on Lindisfarne that’s now Lindisfarne Castle. Though Elaine went poking about there once upon a time and thinks the foundations are those of a watchtower dating to the Viking raids.”
“I can see the priories on Farnaby and Lindisfarne setting up an early-warning system.”
Alasdair stepped up to take a look. “This one’s not been renovated into a mansion, though.”
“No, and more’s the pity,” Pen replied. “The Castle is lovely now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Jean.
“Elaine and Wat were going on about a similar job on Merlin’s Tower.”
“Merlin’s Tower?”
Pen shrugged. “Elaine’s thinking the name’s no older than Victorian times. Any road, she and Wat were planning to renovate the tower after he retired. Even had an architect in from Alnwick. The place is habitable, but only just. Music, though, it’s like the priesthood, you never truly retire.” Pen’s slight frown segued into a firm smile that rejected images of Wat taken before his time and ailing Elaine. “Is there anything else?”
“Can we have ourselves a meal in the pub next door?” Alasdair asked.
“Oh my, yes—James has all the basics—James, he’s my husband, call us the Trumps of Farnaby St. Mary, real estate moguls, right?”
“Right.” Judging by his grin, even Alasdair was charmed. “Cheers.”
They should bottle this woman and spray her over various government assemblies, not to mention ranting talking heads. She was not only infectiously good-natured, she now backed away toward the door without demanding further conversation. “Breakfast is at eight unless you’d rather have it earlier. There’s a bit of a menu just there on the desk. Ta ta for now.” And the door shut.
Jean glanced not at the list of foods on the menu but at the name at its top. “Not only did I say Angler’s Rest to Lance, when I first booked the place I read it as Angel’s Rest. You’re always seeing ‘angel’ for ‘angle’ and vice versa.”
“You and your proofreader’s eye.” Alasdair opened his suitcase.
“Angles. Saxons. Jutes. And later on, Vikings and Danes. Some people called them pirates, but they saw themselves as bold explorers, opening up new lands, never mind people were already living there. Kind of like Attila and his Huns.”
“Eh?”
“Saint Genevieve supposedly saved Paris from Attila the Hun in the fifth century. That was a time of barbarian invasions into the old Roman Empire, the era of a historical King Arthur . . . Well, Maggie’s got to have more going for herself than a connection that slender, I don’t care how ambitious she is.”
“Eh?” Alasdair repeated, a little louder.
Jean started pulling items from her suitcase, beginning with her tablet computer. “Earlier you were wondering if it was a coincidence Maggie moved back to Farnaby to help her parents and still managed to make a brilliant discovery.”
“Oh aye, coincidences happen, but it’s her finding a grave worth presenting a press conference, in her own garden or so nearly as makes no difference, that’s making me itch.”
“You and me both. Farnaby isn’t the end of the Earth, Pen to the contrary, but Maggie still might feel as though her career’s been put on hold here.”
“There you are, motivation for—well, I’m not suggesting she’s salted the dig, just that she’s making a mountain from a molehill.”
“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.
The signboard fixed to the front of The Queen’s Arms sported a generic crown, not a portrait of either of the Elizabeths or even Mary, Queen of Scots. Considering the nearby priory, the eponymous queen could be Mary, Queen of Heaven. Or the queen of a chess set. Right now Jean didn’t care. The door of the pub stood open, allowing a bright streak of light to fall invitingly across the pavement, and windows shone behind baskets filled with wind-buffeted flowers. Voices and the clink of glassware echoed from inside.
Within minutes she and Alasdair had introduced themselves to James Fleming behind the bar, obtained alcoholic beverages, ordered meals, and found a bench in a corner as quiet as a pub was likely to provide.
Jean sipped cautiously at her Lindisfarne mead, sweet but potent honey wine, and decided that if bees drank this, she was signing up for the hive. Taking a good swallow, she assessed her surroundings.
If she hadn’t already known James was Pen’s husband, she would have thought he was her chubby, cheery, and mustachioed male twin. In fact, the pub seemed to be the male principle to the B&B’s female, perfumed with potatoes instead of potpourri, equipped with all the traditional comforts but on the shabby rather than the sparkling side.
The clientele seemed similarly easygoing, probably because they hadn’t yet heard the news from the priory—although a couple of heads were bent together in sotto voce speculation about something. Maybe they were discussing football scores or the spring bird count.
Jean recognized two faces. Lance fidgeted on a stool not far from the beer taps, gazing balefully at Tara, who occupied a tiny table across the room. She already had one empty pint glass in front of her and was starting in on another, to the accompaniment of what looked like a shepherd’s pie. She must have fled here instead of eating her tea at home, assuming she called Gow House home.
