The Adept (15 page)

At first his thoughts were still dominated by Julia Barrett and the events at Dunfermline. But as the minutes ticked away, his musings unaccountably took a darker mm. In retrospect, mentally moving among the pavilions and the botanical gardens, he saw that though all was light and life and movement inside, outside the mist-shrouded grounds were haunted by shadowy figures with grasping, long-fingered hands . . .

A wave of fog rolled over the scene, masking it behind a smothering curtain of cloud. When the cloud thinned again, Peregrine found he was no longer surveying the botanical gardens. Crooked gravestones jutted upright among the grassy mounds of a medieval churchyard, and a dim, skeletal figure was lurching unsteadily toward a gap in a high stone wall . . .

Peregrine sat up with a start and groped for his watch. To his surprise, the time was ten minutes past six. He shook his head, realizing that he must have drifted off to sleep in the midst of his imaginings. He was about to lie down again, when he heard somewhere off in another part of the house the sudden, urgent ringing of a telephone.

By the time Humphrey knocked at the door of his apartment, Adam was already out of bed, tying on a burgundy wool dressing gown. One glance at his manservant’s face told him that something important was afoot.

“I’m sorry to disturb you so early, sir,” Humphrey said.

He too wore a dressing gown, hastily donned over striped pyjamas. “It’s Inspector McLeod, calling from Melrose.”

“Melrose?” Adam was all at once aware of a pricking in his thumbs, “I’ll take it in here,” he said, as he moved toward the extension telephone on the table beside the bed.

Humphrey paused by the door. “Shall I wait, sir?”

“I think so.” Adam lifted the receiver and spoke without preamble. “Here I am, Noel. What is it?”

The police inspector’s voice came gruffly through a crackle of static on the line.

“My apologies for calling you at this unseemly hour, Adam, but we’ve had a rather peculiar incident down here at Melrose. I’ll not go into details over the phone, but it’s something that I think you’ll agree requires your most particular attention.”

Requires?
McLeod’s choice of words, along with a subtle shift in the tone of his voice, conveyed unspoken volumes.

“Indeed?” Adam said, his own inflection carefully noncommittal. “In that cause, I shall certainly come along to tender my opinion. Is there a particular place that you’d like me to meet you?”

There was a weighty pause. “Make your way to the abbey ruins,” rumbled the voice from the receiver. “You’ll see the police lines. If I’m not there when you arrive, one of my men will know where to find me.”

McLeod clearly was taking precautions in case unauthorized ears might be listening in—which again pointed to something beyond the usual scope of police expertise.

“I’ll make the abbey my starting point then,” Adam said with apparent lightness. “It’s—what?—a quarter past six,” he went on, with a glance at a clock on the mantel. “It should take me—perhaps two hours. Fortunately, it’s Sunday, so there won’t be much traffic. I’ll be there as quickly as I can, though.”

“A man can’t ask for more than that.” McLeod sounded more than a little relieved. “Thank you, Adam.”

“Not at all.”

As McLeod rang off, Adam turned to face Humphrey, his dark eyes glinting keen as a hunting hawk’s.

“I think I’d better take the Jaguar,” he said. “And I’d like to be out of here in the next half hour. From the sound of things, the sooner I’m in Melrose, the better.”

Humphrey nodded. “You’ll want the top up, then, sir.

It’s a raw day outside. Shall I see to it?”

“Please do,” Adam said, heading for his dressing room.

“I’ll want some tea and toast, too, if you can manage it quickly. But before you do any of that, I’d be very much obliged if you’d go and wake Mr. Lovat. Tell him what’s afoot, and say I’d like him to come with me, if he’s willing. I’ve a shrewd suspicion he’s about to come into his own.”

Chapter Ten

WELL WITHIN
the half hour Adam had specified, Peregrine found himself sitting in the passenger seat of Adam’s blue Jaguar. The gloved hands of the laird of Strathmourne were steady on the wheel as he piloted the powerful car south in the direction of Edinburgh. Still a little breathless from having to get ready so quickly, Peregrine eased his portable sketch box off his lap onto the floor between his knees. Adam had instructed him to bring it, but something in the older man’s manner just now made him hesitate to ask the reason why.

It was nearly seven o’clock, but the fog and overcast made it seem much earlier. The Jag’s headlamps did little to illuminate the gloom, and the lights of occasional oncoming cars dazzled in the mist. The motorway was mostly deserted, as Adam had predicted, but the fog and occasional drizzle made it necessary to pay particular attention to his driving, if he hoped to make good time. Nonetheless, he found a part of himself speculating, even though Noel McLeod’s telephone call had given him nothing whatever to go on besides sheer intuition. Despite all reason to the contrary, he could not help the vague, foreboding suspicion that one mystery was about to lead him and his associates into the heart of another, even more dangerous than the first.

Even with Adam’s skillful driving, it was’ well past nine by the time they reached the outskirts of Melrose, Sunday traffic this early remained light, especially with the weather, but roadworks forced several detours, carrying them many miles out of their way. Round about Galashiels, the fog gave way to a cold, drizzling rain, verging on sleet. Adam adjusted the defoggers and increased the speed of the wipers as they approached the town of Melrose, cruising past the imposing facade of the Waverly Hotel and then reducing speed as they carried on along Waverly Road and entered the lower end of the High Street.

By-passing the police station on their right, which seemed to be a bustle of activity for a Sunday morning, they turned left into Buccleuch Street and made directly for the abbey, as McLeod had suggested. In the abbey car park, directly across the street from the main entrance to the ruins, Adam was not surprised to see a pair of white police cars, a police van, and several other unmarked vehicles, probably police as well. A barricade had been set up before the entrance itself, manned by a sturdy young constable in a yellow mackintosh with
“
Police
“ stenciled across the back.

With him was a second man in plain clothes.

The Jaguar turned heads as Adam nosed it into the car park. A number of curious townsfolk were milling about outside the barricade, peering and pointing from under their dripping umbrellas, and they shifted their attention to Adam as he eased the car into a space beside one of the white police vehicles. Beyond the barricade and the black iron fence that closed off the abbey grounds, Adam could make out lines of fluorescent yellow tape strung like cobwebs among the ruins. More anonymous figures in rain-slick macs were moving around among the abbey’s crumbling walls.

“Lots of activity,” Peregrine observed, craning his neck.

“Do you suppose there’s been a murder?”

“Nothing so conventional as that, I fancy,” Adam said grimly, switching off the ignition, “though perhaps something every bit as serious.”

Retrieving a tweed motoring cap from behind the front seat, he eased open the door and got out of the car, hunching under its shelter and that of his taupe leather trenchcoat as he squinted against the fine, penetrating screen of mingled rain and fog. Peregrine, looking more than a little dubious got out from his side and pulled up the collar of his duffel coat, scowling up at the sky.

“I wish I’d had the sense to bring a cap,” he grunted.

Adam settled gloved hands deep in his pockets and gestured toward the car with his chin.

“There’s an umbrella under the front seat,” he told Peregrine. “And don’t forget your sketchbook.”

They locked the car, and together picked their way through the puddles to the abbey’s entrance, eliciting less interest from the bystanders as they got farther from the car.

The young constable came to attention as they approached the barrier, starting forward as if to warn them off, but he paused when the plainclothes man laid a restraining hand on his shoulder and muttered something in his ear.

“Come right through, Sir Adam,” the man in plain clothes said with a grim smile. “I should ha’ known, from that great, purrin’ beast of a motorcar, but wi’ yer hat pulled down like that, I almost didnae recognize ye.”

“Well, Melrose is hardly my usual stomping ground,”

Adam said with a smile, as he and the man exchanged handshakes. “Good to see you, Hamish. Incidentally,” he added, as the plainclothes man ushered them past the barrier, “this is my associate, Mr. Lovat, Peregrine, this is Detective Sergeant Hamish Kerr, one of Inspector McLeod’s best men.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Kerr murmured, also extending a hand to Peregrine.

“So, is the inspector anywhere about?” Adam went on, casting about with an inquiring look as they moved on past the constable.

“Not here, sir. He went on up to the Angler Hotel about half an hour ago. Shall I send one of my lads to fetch him down for ye?”

Adam shook his head. “He’ll want me to have a look around first, I’m sure. Can you tell me briefly what happened?”

An odd, guarded look came over the detective’s face.

“It’s an odd one, it is, sir. The lads have cordoned off an area inside the ruins, right up at the front. Forensic chaps were there for more’n an hour. Damnedest thing I ever saw—pardoning the language, sir.”

Adam controlled a droll smile. “Why, Hamish, I do believe you’re shocked—a police officer of your experience and acumen!”

“It—wasn’t natural, sir,” Kerr muttered. “I dinnae like it at all.”

“So I gather.” Adam glanced around casually, noting Peregrine’s strained look of curiosity. “Well, why don’t we start by letting me read over the incident report, and then Mr. Lovat and I will take a look around. You and I have worked on odd cases before, Hamish.”

“Och, aye, sir, that we have.”

Without further ado, the sergeant conducted them into the shelter of the entrance kiosk behind the gate. The abbey’s custodian was sitting on a stool behind the counter, complaining to a constable in uniform.

“It makes honest, God-fearin’ folk wonder what this world’s coming to,” he was saying.
“I’ve
never seen anything like it.”

The constable merely shrugged. Sergeant Kerr reached around his subordinate and plucked a paper-laden clipboard off the counter top.

“Here’s the report, Sir Adam,” he said as he handed it over. He added with a grimace, “If ye ask me, somebody’s been watching too many late-night horror videos. Who’d have thought we’d wind up with a grave-robbing in a quiet, law-abiding place like this?”

A grave-robbing?
Conscious of a prickling at the base of his skull, Adam skimmed” down the page, tilting it so that Peregrine could read over his shoulder. The account was stark in the manner of police reports everywhere. Under cover of last night’s fog, some person or persons unknown had penetrated the confines of Melrose Abbey, either by climbing the fence separating the south burying ground from an access alley or by coming through a gate found open by the main road, to the north. Once inside, they had dug up a section of the floor in the northeast chapel to unearth a twelfth-century stone coffin. The coffin, according to the report, now lay broken and empty,
“The body that apparently was
in
the coffin turned up in the wine bar up at the Angler,” the sergeant informed them.

“It’s that badly decomposed, it’s not much more than a skeleton. We’re all of us still trying to work out how the pranksters who dug it up could ha’ gotten it out of the ground and up the road, still in one piece.” He paused to shake his head. “Really makes ye wonder who’d want to do such a thing in the first place. And why.”

“Indeed.” Adam handed the report back, his expression inscrutable. “Thanks very much, Hamish. Now let’s have a look at that grave site.”

The detective sergeant led the way down through the ruins, along the nave toward the desecrated chapel by the northeast angle of the transept. As they approached the restraining lines of yellow tape strung at the crossing, Adam became aware of a subliminal chill in the air that had nothing to do with the weather.

Black Wards ahead, decaying but still potent!
By all the gods that ever were, could someone really have been so foolish as to abandon a magical operation without properly dismantling it first?

Shoving his gloved hands into his coat pockets again, Adam drew a deep breath and made an invisible ritual sign of personal warding, briefly turning then to glance at Peregrine matter-of-factly, just before they reached the barrier tapes.

“Hold up just a moment, Peregrine. Do you see that frieze back there? Yes, that one, just above the side altar.

I’d like you to make a sketch of it before we get involved with making any pictorial records of the grave-site itself.”

He was careful to make it sound like a casual request.

None the wiser, Peregrine obediently turned back and went to do as Adam had asked. With the young artist’s attention safely occupied elsewhere, at least for a few moments, Adam continued with Kerr and bent his gaze on the space the police had cordoned off, letting his subtler perceptions come into play. As he had sensed from farther back, the area immediately surrounding the opened grave was overshadowed by a lingering pall of baleful psychic energy.

So. The force of what the perpetrators had left behind was definitely on the wane, but there was still sufficient residual power in it to inflict a severe shock on anyone un-shielded yet sensible to such things, as Peregrine would be. Kerr, fortunately, was either oblivious or naturally shielded. Adam wondered what McLeod’s initial reaction had been.

“I’ll wait here, sir,” Kerr said, catching hold of the tape and lifting it so Adam could duck under. “Shall I pass Mr. Lovat, when he’s finished?”

“Yes, thank you,” Adam replied. At the same time, he reached deeper into his right-hand pocket and closed his gloved hand around a piece of lodestone the size and shape of a large wolf’s tooth. As he advanced cautiously toward the wavering wards the grave robbers had left, he casually withdrew his hands from his pockets, keeping the lodestone palmed where Kerr would not-be able to see it. He halted just short of contact to murmur an invocation that was already ancient when the great library of the Ptolemies went up in flames.

The words invested the lodestone with a spiritual potency equivalent to the drawing power of a magnet. Adam waited until he felt a lively quiver at the center of his hand, then shifted his grip. Holding the tooth-stone like a sword hilt, his first finger extended along its length, he extended it until the tip penetrated the shadowy field in front of him.

The shield imploded like a soap bubble, totally silent. He could feel the lodestone absorbing the residue of force. A moment later, all traces of malignant energy had vanished.

Grimly satisfied, ignoring Kerr’s puzzled glance, Adam pocketed the lodestone and moved forward again to the side of the grave-opening, It came as no surprise to see that the pit was circumscribed by splashes of what could only be blood. The array of burnt-out tapers and the black triangle chalked at one side of the opening bore further witness to a profane act of summoning.

His patrician face grimly intent, Adam knelt down and peered into the grave itself. The up-ended slab of granite had required no little effort to raise and prop against the side of the pit. The stone coffin it had covered was roughly trapezoidal, with a circular area cut out at the head end and a great crack splitting it in two. It was like a hundred others Adam had seen over the years, many of them in this very church yard. The one thing of which Adam was certain was that its occupant had been unlike any ordinary man.

The sound of footsteps crunching on gravel interrupted his speculation, and he glanced back to see Peregrine slipping under the tapes to join him at the side of the opened grave pit.

“Here’s the sketch of that frieze you asked for,” the young artist began, flourishing his sketchbook. “I can’t think why you wanted it—it isn’t very old—but I—”

As he fell abruptly silent, Adam rose and turned in a single fluid movement. Peregrine had stopped short in his tracks. He was fumbling with his drawing pad again, hazel eyes wide and intent behind-his spectacles as he scanned the desecrated chapel, seemingly transfixed. After a breathless moment, he whipped out his pencil and began to sketch rapidly.