The Avalon Chanter (31 page)

“
You can do that, too.”

“
Temptress. I’ll have a word with the
womenfolk.” He hurried down the hall, whispered something through
the doorway, hurried back again. “I’ve got formal permission to
join you, mostly because Rebecca’s as curious as I am. I’ve been
told off to mind that wee dram as well.”

“
We’ll all end up in the pub drowning
our sorrows,” Jean told him.

He opened the door for her, asking, “What’s
on with Crawford, then?”

“
You’re not going to believe this
angle.” Once again outside—and in the free air, not in the
oppressive fog, all right!—Jean brought Michael up to speed. When
she finished with Grinsell’s ghost appearing from the mirk, he
winced. “Poor sod.”

“
Yeah.”

At the harbor, lights blazed and people
milled. A tour boat with a seat-lined back deck and an open cabin
took on passengers, twelve or fifteen people who flocked forward so
eagerly the scene reminded Jean of the famous photograph of the
helicopter perched atop the American embassy in Saigon, a line of
desperate evacuees snaking up toward it.

Crawford’s small, sleek number was moored on
the opposite side of the concrete breakwater, next to a fishing
boat and well down a slimy wall spattered with shells and weed. But
then, if the tide had been in, the Ecclestons would no doubt be
running the actual ferry.

Glad she’d changed her shoes, Jean picked her
way along a water-worn set of steps, across the deck of the fishing
boat, and down onto the police boat. Michael followed. She averted
her eyes from his billowing tartan, even though she suspected that
like Alasdair, he felt no need to air any gender differences and
wore proper undergarments beneath his kilt.

Farnaby’s complement of police officers
huddled together over a locker at the back of the boat. The two
arrivals pretty well filled up the rest of the open area. Darling
and Crawford looked around—they’d been expecting Jean to arrive
solo—but when Alasdair introduced Michael and drew his attention to
the object under discussion, they offered polite greetings. “Any
road,” Darling said, obviously completing a sentence already begun,
“I’ve got no doubt that rim of metal we found at Merlin’s Tower
will fit a treat.”

With a wary glance over the low side at the
black water spangled with reflections, Jean inched closer to
Alasdair. Pen’s gaudy carrier bag lay open on a narrow seat.
Inside, wrapped in a cut-open plastic sack, rested a massive
flashlight. Even though Jean herself had momentarily held Maggie’s
light over the grave, she’d hardly noticed it. Go figure. But if
Alasdair and especially Crawford, who’d also had it in their hands,
were sure it was hers, she wasn’t going to argue.

As far as she could tell with the crinkled
and smudged—probably with butter—plastic in the way, russet-brown
stains did indeed edge the remaining metal rim like dirt beneath a
fingernail. Even if some of the blood had washed off in the wet
gully where Crawford found it, the barrel of the flashlight looked
dirty enough to hold dozens of fingerprints, not least Maggie’s and
Niamh’s.

Niamh.

Straightening, Jean peered toward the
larger boat on the far side of the harbor. Clyde took his position
in the small cabin. Rosalie News-of-the-North stood nearby, legs
braced wide apart, arms akimbo in the power-pose. Or in the pose
of
Hey, I thought the hunk was going to be
the pilot here.

“
That’s the Ecclestons’ boat?” Alasdair
asked.

“
Aye,” said Crawford. “Usually it’s
taking day-trippers out to the Farne Islands—Cuthbert’s cell,
birds, all that lot.”

“
Yon reporters came over on the ferry
with us,” Michael pointed out. “I mind the woman in the plastic
coat in particular, was havering the whole time about being sent to
purgatory or Siberia or the like. Their cars are still in the car
park near the causeway.”

“
I reckon Clyde is aiming to dock in
Seahouses south of Bamburgh. There’s a taxi service.”

“
Better than spending the night here on
Farnaby. Or so the reporters are thinking.” Darling made a
deprecatory gesture even though none of the people within earshot
were islanders.

“
It seems like it’d be easier to take a
small boat straight over to the seaward side of Lindisfarne and
have someone pick you up there,” Jean said. “But it’s a better deal
for the Ecclestons to move a bunch of people at once.”

She felt Alasdair’s laser-like gaze on
the side of her face. Surely what she’d said wasn’t that foolish.
She looked askance at him.
Yes?
He raised and lowered his shoulders beneath the epaulettes of
his jacket.
Move along, nothing to see
here.

On the pier, Lance untied the tour boat and
gave a go-ahead wave. The engine emitted a deep-throated rumble.
The smooth black water churned, drowning the reflections in a
silvery froth. Jean squinted, searching for Bill Parkinson among
the passengers, but she couldn’t see all of them clearly. She
didn’t see a certain head of red hair, either. “Y’all don’t suppose
Niamh’s on that boat?”

“
Oh, good thinking!” said
Darling.

Not really. She hated to suggest Niamh had
made a break for it. Conventional wisdom had it that you didn’t run
away if you were innocent, but conventional wisdom often came
closer to clichéd assumption.

Lance sauntered toward the street, not
without an inquisitive glance down to the crowded police boat,
which heaved up and down in the wash of the larger vessel. Everyone
took a steadying step or two but no one went overboard. No
lifeguarding required and questions not likely to be answered,
Lance walked on.

Five pairs of eyes watched until the
boat cleared the jaws of the breakwater. Finally, Alasdair said.
“I’m not seeing Niamh on the boat, no. Could be Clyde is hiding
her, like Lance was . . .”
Hiding
Tara
, Jean concluded silently when Alasdair stopped
dead. The active-duty officers, who had been actively pursuing
their duty last night, didn’t need to know he and Jean witnessed
her escape.

“
Crawford,” Alasdair said, “have you
got the number of Clyde’s mobile?”

Stepping into the cockpit, Crawford pulled
out his phone. Darling squatted down to close the insulated bag,
tuck it deep into the locker, and slam the lid.

“
Niamh’s your prime suspect, then?”
queried Michael.

“
Afraid so,” Jean told him, and asked
Alasdair, “What if Niamh’s only guilty of lying about putting the
flashlight, the torch, away in the cupboard? What if she gave it to
someone? I don’t mean someone at Gow House. Maggie or Tara or even
Elaine could have picked it up on her own.”

“
Who’d she give it to, then?” he
challenged. “Why?”

“
I don’t know. Lance? She likes
Lance.”

Darling turned a key in the lock and stood
up. “Has she got a boyfriend, then? Could be she’s away with
him.”

“
No, Tara said she broke up with a guy
in Newcastle. There’s Lance, yeah, but he’s not a big fan of hers
and anyway, he’s right there in front of us.”

Darling nodded, but didn’t quite keep the
look of vague relief and delicate speculation from his face.

So the romantic triangle had become a chain,
Jean noted. Lance had a thing for Tara, Niamh had one for Lance,
Darling was working on one for Niamh. Now if Tara developed
something for Darling . . .

“
Lance hasn’t got a motive,” Alasdair
stated. “Not for bashing Grinsell, not for putting Maggie in the
frame with both the torch and the wee pick from the tool
tray.”

Jean replied, “No motive that we know of.”
But what she did know was that she was grasping at straws.

“
Would a random passerby,” Darling
said, “go into Gow House and help himself to a torch? Why not take
jewelry, silverware, electronics? They’ve not reported anything
stolen.”

“
No sir,” said Crawford, pocketing his
phone. “Niamh’s not on the sightseeing boat.”

“
Let’s be getting ourselves back on
terra firma, then.” Alasdair boosted Jean out of the chill damp of
the harbor up onto the fishing boat. She walked across it, then
hauled herself up onto the pier and climbed the damp steps. Funny,
she thought, how sometimes footsteps in the darkness behind you
could be downright comforting.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Jean waited in the dark patch between two
streetlights, admiring the shine of the moon on the sea and on the
village—the seaside crescent resembled a drawing etched on a silver
plate, the shadows inked densely in. Picturesque, neither purgatory
nor Siberia. The scene of two murders.

That’s why Darling and Crawford were there.
Even in their glow-in-the-dark jackets, they seemed ho-hum compared
to Alasdair and Michael in kilts. She felt quite posh being
escorted by two bekilted men. All she had to do was add Hector and
she’d have a trifecta.

He’d probably dropped off Pen and gone on to
the pub, which, Jean saw when she looked around, might have been
crowded earlier but now bulged at the seams. Never mind that one
heavy-drinking contingent was now headed out to sea, the musicians
and their families had filled in the gaps. People sat on
windowsills both inside and out, and others were gathered on the
street corner beside the Angle’s Rest. A couple of fiddles lilted
above the clamor of voices, playing Hugh’s “The Best of the
Barley.”

Michael passed Jean and kept on going. “I’d
best be getting that wee dram for Rebecca whilst there’s still
whisky in the jar. Be seeing you inside?”

“
If you have a shoehorn.” Jean admired
the sway and swing of his kilt as he walked away. The motion didn’t
have the same connotations as Alasdair’s, though. And the red of
the Cameron tartan glowed like embers even in the moonlight, while
the blue-shaded Campbell sett seemed muted.

She cast an eye along the street. When
Crawford stopped nearby she asked, “You said Athelstan, your
father, set up an office here on Farnaby, thinking the job
renovating the tower would make his reputation. Where was it, do
you know? The office, not the tower.”

“
Which case are we working just now?”
asked Alasdair, more diplomatic than a blunt,
Do the whereabouts of his office matter?
in front
of Athelstan’s son.

Who replied, “It was yon empty shop,
Inspector Grinsell’s incident room. It was a book and stationery
shop at the time. My father hired a space in the back.”

That’s right, Maggie had said something about
making a lab out of “the old book shop” if she’d been able to lift
the entire coffin—not knowing at the time the coffin was as empty
as the store front. “It looked as though it’d been vacant a long
time.”

“
Aye, the book shop went bankrupt a
good many years since. Then it was a wool and craft shop and . . .
Well, nothing took hold.”

Alasdair’s profile, turned toward the shop,
the incident room, seemed etched in steel rather than silver.
Darling stood with his hands in his pockets, rolling a pebble back
and forth beneath his shoe, his face concealed. Jean wished she’d
brought a hat—nothing glamorous, just something to keep her ears
warm in the cold and yet soft night air.

Grinsell, she thought. Lying there at the
tower, cold, damp, alone. Hopefully unconscious, unaware of his
slow, sad death. He hadn’t deserved that. No one deserved that. No
more than Athelstan deserved a chanter thrust into his brain by an
irate husband. Had Wat’s offer of a memorial stone been the
equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon weregild or blood money?

Jean wondered if D.C.I. Webber would turn up
tomorrow morning—given a lack of any more fog—and take control of
the case for himself, relieving her and Alasdair both of any need
to stay on. She wondered if Alasdair would insist on staying on and
seeing both cases to their ends. She wondered what she would do,
presented with a choice between answers and escape.

That was a minor issue compared to whether it
was better for Grinsell’s murder to have a resolution than for
Athelstan’s. The statute of emotional limitations never ended, it
only wasted away.

Alasdair turned to his two canary-coated
minions. “Let’s have us a look at the time line. Even if the light
Hector Cruz saw at Merlin’s Tower had nothing to do with the
murder, even if Cruz’s light came from another torch entirely, the
murderer had to have picked up Maggie’s torch late last night or
early this morning in order to go bashing Grinsell with it. Niamh
was saying earlier she’d have a look for it amongst Elaine’s
things. We know now she cannot have found it. She’s avoiding
questioning.”

Where’s Niamh
? Jean
thought. The Farnaby edition of
Where’s
Waldo
?

“
If she’s scarpered,” said Darling, the
words slipping out beneath a stiff upper lip, “she might well be
taking a small boat across to Lindisfarne, as you were suggesting,
Miss Fairbairn.”

“
Oh.” How about that? She’d said
something helpful.

Alasdair looked narrowly around the
harbor—the same two kayaks were lying on the breakwater, but he
could have no better idea than she did what watercraft were
normally there. “Are all the island’s boats kept here in Farnaby
St. Mary?”

“
I expect there are a few in coves
round the island,” Crawford replied.

“
Have Lance Eccleston help you make an
inventory of the island’s boats, then.”