The Adept (35 page)

For several breathless heartbeats, all three of them waited—Adam and Peregrine with blades still poised, McLeod standing defiantly between them, his arms spreading the protection of the Fairy Hag across their shoulders. But then, to their infinite relief, the tornado whirl of the Faerie Host slowly began to unwind, the column lifting gradually above their heads.

However, the host did not disperse. Instead, the dancing motes of light spread along the water’s edge like a diaphanous ribbon of emerald separating earth and sky, keening softly. The surface of the loch had gone flat, and an eerie silence fell, pregnant with expectancy.

“They’re waiting for something,” McLeod muttered in Adam’s ear. “What in the
world
could they be waiting for?”

Above the loch, pale lightning was flickering erratically among low-lying clouds. By its light, out on the loch, they could still make out the shape of the fleeing speedboat, laboring southwards. The low rumble of its diesels was clearly audible above the rising, whistle of the wind, and off to the left new lights were approaching—not the expected police backup from Fort Augustus, If it came from that direction, but two smaller craft, no doubt attracted by the pyrotechnic show of the last little while. Their searchlights lanced across the gloom, first one and then the other eventually spearing the escaping craft in their beams—though their quarry had the advantage of speed, and was starting to draw away toward the south.

But then an odd thing happened. All at once, an eye-searing bolt of greenish lightning struck the water directly in front of the fleeing speedboat, accompanied by a simultaneous crack of thunder. For just an instant, the dark waters of the loch lit up in an eerie, fluorescent green all around the boat.

Abruptly the speedboat lost power, all systems knocked out by the near lightning strike. Off to the left, still several hundred yards away, the other two boats had also lost their engines, and the focus of their searchlights became more erratic as the occupants bent their attention to balky mechanical devices.

But there was nothing mechanical about what was happening in the vicinity of the first boat. As it drifted to a stop on the tossing swells, dead in the water, its two stunned passengers began shouting and frantically trying to restart the engines—for not far astern, between them and the shore, the dark waters were beginning to boil. Illuminated only sporadically by the now random bobbing of the searchlights, and more dimly by the luminescent waves, a dark, triangular head smoothly broke the surface, rearing upward on a long, powerful neck to turn two eye-points of fire in sentient scan of the surrounding darkness.

“Bloody, bloody hell!” McLeod breathed, almost reverently. “Does everyone else see what I see?”

Neither Adam nor Peregrine answered, but the Faerie Host greeted the creature’s appearance with shrieks of malevolent glee. For a moment the creature hung there in the verdant gloom, almost as if listening to the sound of voices only it could hear. Then the great head dipped as if in acquiescence, and the basilisk gaze turned purposefully toward the stalled speedboat.

Majestically the great neck crested, the motion rippling along dark, serpentine coils that seemed to have no end. Then, with a languid sweep of its mighty tail, it began moving in on its chosen prey, bearing down with ever-increasing speed.

“Oh, my God!” Peregrine whispered. “They’re sending it after the boat!”

The speedboat rocked and bobbed as its two occupants frantically renewed their efforts to start the engines. The searchlights still swept the area randomly, but the occupants of the other boats did not seem to realize what was happening. In a
vee
of luminescent emerald wake, the creature drove toward its target. One man snatched up the Uzi and started firing wildly, but the great head merely submerged and the
vee
kept coming.

It never rammed the boat, though. In the end, it was the great, dark coils of the creature’s body that surged upward, under, and around the vessel, swamping the helpless craft and sucking it under. The man with the Uzi disappeared without a trace, but faint screams carried thinly over the water as the other man surfaced and tried to swim away, thrashing in blind terror—until white water burst around him and he, too, disappeared from sight.

As those ashore watched in fascination mixed with awe, the great head broached once more, a weakly straggling human form pinned in its jaws. But then man/monster and the shattered remains of the boat disappeared in a whirlpool of foam as the creature bent its neck and sounded, carrying its struggling prey into the bottomless depths of Loch Ness. As the churning waters subsided, utter silence settled on the leaden surface of the loch, finally broken by the diesels coughing back to life aboard the other two vessels, searchlights tentatively beginning to quarter the dark waters for survivors who did not appear.

The fairies, meanwhile, seemed appeased at last. Rising in joyful chorus, the dancing green motes of the Faerie Host careened in mad circles above the heads of the three men left standing alone on the shore—though for one breathless instant, Peregrine feared they might be gathering to renew their assault.

But then, instead of attacking, the fairy vanguard suddenly wheeled about and streaked back toward the mouth of the cave. The rest of the host followed. They poured into the tunnel in a rushing torrent, carrying rock and soil after them in the gale-wind of their passing. As the last of the host swept into the cave, the cave mouth closed up behind them with a crack like a clap of thunder. In the brittle silence that followed, the sky overhead began to clear, a bright galleon of a moon emerging from behind scudding clouds.

McLeod sat down heavily on the nearest boulder, looking more than a little drained, then slowly and carefully began lifting the tatters of the Fairy Flag from around his shoulders, Peregrine had sunk to his knees in trembling after- reaction, clutching his wounded hand and the skean dubh to his chest. Adam, with a wordless glance at the sword in his hand, turned toward the fairy cave, now visible only as a raw depression in the face of the cliff.

For a moment he stared at it, giving silent tribute to the powers that had spared them. Then he lifted the blade in grave salute, ending by thrusting the point into the pebbled beach at his feet. As he released it, the basket hilt swayed slowly back and forth like a heavy pendulum. Beyond, the dark waters of Loch Ness had settled under a moonlit sky, giving lie to the violence only minutes past. The two small boats continued to search the waters fruitlessly, and off in the south, new tights were approaching.

“I think we’re about to have more company,” Adam said, bending wearily to take the skean dubh from Peregrine’s unresisting hand. “Your police backup, perhaps?”

McLeod craned his neck to look southward, then slumped back on his rock as the sound of very large engines drifted across the loch and searchlights criss-crossed the water ahead.

“
Now
they get here!” he muttered, easing out of his slicker and using it to wrap around the loosely-folded Fairy Flag. “Not that it would have made any difference, if they’d gotten here sooner. In fact, it’s probably best they didn’t.”

Adam took the
skean dubh’s
sheath out of his pocket and slipped it back on the blade, then tucked the whole back inside his coat, still looking out at the approaching lights. Seen by the moonlight and the reflection of her own searchlights, the newcomer was a stout forty-foot cruiser with a canopied upper deck.

“She looks like a pleasure boat,” Peregrine observed, trying not to think about his throbbing hand.

“Aye, she is,” McLeod rose to have a better look, then turned back to them, shaking his head. “She’s called the
Queen of Alba
. During the tourist season, she operates as a tour boat out of Fort Augustus. But she gets seconded for Coast Guard duty every now and again, if a police vessel’s needed in the area. Christ!” He slumped back down on his rock and shook his head. “How am I going to write the report on this? If I write what I really saw, they’ll haul me off to the department shrink—no offense, Adam.”

“None taken,” Adam said with a distracted smile, taking out his pocket torch and crouching down to reach for Peregrine’s wounded hand, “How about holding this light for me? I’d like to see what the damage is to Peregrine’s hand, before we get inundated with people asking difficult questions.”

Peregrine’s heart was still pounding in after-reaction to what they all had seen, but now a new fear gripped at his heart as McLeod took the torch and Adam carefully began uncurling the bloody fingers.

“Adam, I’m an artist,” he whispered shakily, squinting against the glare of the light in McLeod’s hands. “I can’t feel anything in my fingers.”

“Good, then it won’t hurt as much as I straighten them out. Yes, indeed...”

“Adam, I’m going to pass out,” Peregrine managed to gasp.

“No, don’t do that.” Adam peered at the hand and nodded. “Come over here closer to the water and let me rinse off some of the blood,” he said, helping the younger man move. “You’re fine. Just take a good, deep breath. You’re not going to faint. This isn’t going to hurt nearly as much as you think. The water’s cold. Good man!”

He sluiced the hand in the icy water and took a closer look, pressing around a shallow gash across the heel of the hand and part of the palm, then carefully worked his ring off the third finger, also slightly lacerated, and passed the ring to McLeod.

“Well, the ring’s going to have to be redone,” he said lightly, probing at the bones in the area around the wound, “but whatever else it may have done for you, I do believe it’s saved you two fingers. Have a look at what the band stopped.”

A little dazedly, Peregrine glanced at the ring McLeod proffered on the palm of his free hand. The heavy band had a deep gouge in the gold, angled where the blade of the Hepburn Sword had struck.

“You’re lucky nothing’s broken,” Adam said, rinsing the hand again and then wrapping it with a handkerchief that McLeod offered. “You’ll need a few stitches, but I don’t think you’ll even have much of a scar. Now, if only the rest was going to be as easy to explain...”

On the loch beyond, the whoop of a police siren announced the approach of the
Queen of Alba
, one of her searchlights lancing through the darkness to spotlight the three crouching on the beach.

“Ahoy there!” came an authoritative voice, amplified by a loud-hailer. “This is the police. Who are you?”

Chapter Twenty-Three

THE DISCOVERY
that MacLeod was a senior police officer, well out of his own jurisdiction, produced more confusion than clarification at first—though the sergeant aboard the
Queen of Alba
soon realized that it was McLeod whose garbled call had summoned them. After ordering the two remaining boats to stand by, the
Queen of Alba
touched in at the tour dock north of the castle, long enough to disgorge several officers, then joined the boats still searching the waters offshore for any survivors of what already was being described as a freak accident. During the next hour, reinforcements began arriving from Inverness: half a dozen police cars, a forensic van, and an ambulance.

McLeod’s statement that he had been pursuing the thieves who stole the Fairy Flag seemed to come as no great surprise to his police colleagues. They had heard about the theft through normal police channels, and did not seem to think it at all odd that a MacLeod had managed to trail the thieves to Urquhart with it, following a “hunch.”

The conjecture that McLeod himself presented was that an unidentified group of ne’er-do-wells had stolen the Fairy Flag of the MacLeods for reasons yet to be determined. He did not attempt to explain the murdered woman back at Dunvegan.

As for the pyrotechnic display reported by the occupants of the small boats—though interestingly, to McLeod’s way of thinking, they offered no speculation regarding what had actually sunk the speedboat—McLeod pleaded uncertainty, due to being stunned by a fall of earth during an exchange of gunfire—a claim substantiated by the police surgeon who examined him and the recovery of expended shell casings in the area where he said he had fallen. Based on the scant evidence emerging in the pre-dawn hours, the theory was evolving that the gang who had stolen the Fairy Flag, desperate enough to murder and attempt murder—for reasons of their own—had somehow gotten themselves killed in pursuit of some likewise unknown objective.

“Sounds like a little more than a Hallowe’en prank gone wrong, if you ask me,” one officer was heard to remark.

Satisfactory answers to the questions of “how” and “why” continued to elude them, however. And there was a limit to how much information Adam was prepared to offer in the interest of making matters clearer.

“I believe that Inspector McLeod was called in privately, by the Chief of the MacLeods, after the Fairy Flag was stolen,” Adam told the sergeant taking his statement as they stood in the shelter of the forensic van. “The inspector knew of my concern for the preservation of Scottish national treasures, through a long-term personal friendship, so he invited me along.”

“And this Mr.—ah—Lovat?” the sergeant asked, referring to his notes.

Behind them, Peregrine was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance, having his hand looked at. Before the first officers came ashore from the
Queen of Alba,
the three of them had agreed on” the basics of the story they would tell.

“Oh, Mr. Lovat is an artist,” Adam replied glibly. “He’s been doing some sketches for an article I’m writing, on the lesser-known treasures of Scotland. We’d been going over some of them when Inspector McLeod rang. So naturally, he asked to come along.”

“Hmmm, right,” the sergeant murmured, scribbling busily in his notebook. “And you say he cut his hand on some glass?”

“That’s correct. In their rush to get aboard the boat and escape, the thieves dropped the Fairy Flag, shattering the glass and utterly destroying the frame. Naturally, we were concerned that this priceless artifact would be damaged by the rain, so we tried to rescue it. Unfortunately, Mr. Lovat’s zeal was not matched by his dexterity. In helping to extricate the Flag and get it out of the weather, he cut himself rather badly.”

“Yes, I see,” the sergeant said patiently, convinced—as intended—that Adam’s involvement, if a trifle eccentric, was certainly innocent. After all, he
was
a respected member of the medical profession.

“Now, you mentioned the getaway boat, Sir Adam,” the sergeant continued. “I believe Inspector McLeod said he thought it must have hit something in the water. Can you verify that?”

“Well, I should imagine it
must
have hit something—a submerged log, perhaps, or something like that.”

The sergeant glanced up at him, pen poised.
“Did
it, sir?”

Adam arched one eyebrow and allowed a faintly mocking smile to touch his lips. “Come, now, my good man. I’m a psychiatrist. You surely don’t expect me to tell you that I saw the Loch Ness Monster sink it?”

The sergeant grinned, shaking his head as he ducked it to write in his notebook again.

“You’d be amazed at the stories I hear, sir. I’ve been working out of Inverness for nearly twenty years, and I drive along this loch almost every day. Sometimes I think the place
attracts
loonies!”

“Hmmm, some places
do,”
Adam agreed.

“So. You think the boat hit a submerged log?” the sergeant said, still writing.

“I honestly can’t say—though it must have been
something
of that sort. Actually, I was a bit preoccupied with Mr. Lovat’s hand. It’s rather a nasty cut, you know, and he’s an artist.”

“Yes, well, thank you, Sir Adam,” the sergeant replied, closing the cover of his notebook with a sigh.. “We may want to ask you some further questions, later on, but for now, I think the ambulance blokes have got some hot coffee. You look like you could use some.”

The real investigation could not start until first light, of course, though the
Queen, of Alba
and the other boats continued their sweep of the loch, looking for anything they could find of the wrecked speedboat and its occupants, and police secured the area around the south end of the castle. With the dawn, they could begin combing the beach, searching for any minute clue as to what might have happened.

By noon, the sum total of evidence was minimal and grisly: McLeod’s expended shells, shattered pieces of wood and fiberglass, shreds of torn clothing, fragments of lacerated flesh, and splashes of dried blood. It was the new depression of raw earth below the castle-walls that eventually gave rise to a theory of sorts: that there had been some kind of an explosion, perhaps Involving a live hand grenade.

“I suppose the cave area
does
look a bit like a shell crater,” Peregrine remarked dubiously to Adam. “But now they’re thinking in terms of a
terrorist plot!
What’s to terrorize, at an ancient monument? It isn’t as if Urquhart is even a symbol of Scottish nationalism, or something like that.”

They were drinking coffee in the back of one of the police cars from Inverness, having just returned from having Peregrine’s hand sutured. The attending surgeon had done a masterful job, surpassing even Adam’s exacting standards; but the local anesthetic had worn off more than an hour ago, and the hand gave a twinge as Peregrine remembered, too late, not to try using it to open the window a crack. In the car park beyond, a police van and several more police vehicles were drawn up at odd angles, and yellow police tapes were stretched across both entrances to the car park, with a constable assigned to keep the public out.

Watching the constable pace back and forth before the farther entrance, Adam took a sip from his styrofoam cup and glanced speculatively at Peregrine.

“I’ll grant you that a grenade sounds a bit far-fetched—to
us.
But it’s the tale—however improbable—that best fits the facts as the police know them. People have learned to cope with the notion of terrorism, however distasteful that might be. How do you think the general public would react to the truth?”

Peregrine fingered the bandage on his right hand and grimaced, suddenly aware that even the truth of how he had gotten his injury would only raise questions that none of them were prepared to answer.

“I suppose I take your point,” he said, after a moment. “Still, they might have done better than to give out that the speedboat cracked up on a floating log.”

“Ah, but such things do occasionally happen,” Adam said. “Back in the fifties, a chap named Campbell hit a log while trying to establish a new speed record, in a boat called
The Bluebell.
At least everyone
said
it was a log. Eyewitnesses to another racing accident described a sudden turbulence in the water ahead of the boat, just before it capsized and exploded.” He gave Peregrine a sardonic grin.

“For that matter, during the Second War, a high-speed Royal Navy launch is said to have hit precisely what we all know we saw last night. In trying to explain the damage to the bow, I believe the captain described what he hit as ‘soft and squelchy.’ Hardly a log–but boats
do
hit logs sometimes. At least often enough to lend credence to
this
incident.”

As Peregrine considered these incidents, Adam allowed his gaze to stray across the castle car park once more. Down by the south entrance, the grey Volvo from Dunvegan was parked on the tarmac. A crash recovery truck had towed it out of the ditch an hour earlier. Apart from a liberal coating of mud and festoons of weeds trailing from the underside–and the broken headlamp McLeod had noted at the time – it seemed a little worse for the mishap.

Beyond the car, McLeod was deeply engaged in conversation with a tall, distinguished-looking man in a well-cut tan trenchcoat. A police car had brought him in half an hour before. Following Adam’s attentive gaze, Peregrine noticed for the first time that McLeod’s companion was wearing a Balmoral bonnet with three eagle feathers brooched on the band–the designation for a full Highland Chief.

“Adam,” he murmured,” is that who I think that is?”

Adam nodded, a faint smile playing about the corners of his long mouth. As they continued to watch, McLeod carefully took a flat, plastic-wrapped bundle from the breast of his borrowed waxed jacket coat and tendered it to the Chief. To mere vision, it appeared to be only a folded lump of beige fabric, flecked with bit of vermilion, but to Peregrine’s inner sight, even in the sunshine, it seemed to shimmer still with the pale, greenish glow of fairy magic.

The tall man received it with the same sort of reverence they had observed in the inspector, what seemed like a lifetime ago, as he lifted it from its shattered frame. Then, after shaking McLeod’s hand warmly, he stood aside to let the driver’s door be opened for him, slipping behind the wheel and carefully depositing his treasure on the seat beside him as McLeod firmly closed the door.

McLeod stood back as the man in the highland bonnet started up the engine and eased the big car out of the car park, past the police barricade, raising a hand in farewell as it made the turn onto the main road and headed south, on the return route to Dunvegan. He joined them a moment later, slipping into the front passenger seat with a sigh of mingled weariness and satisfaction.

“Wasn’t that evidence we just saw you give away?” Adam said, smiling, as the inspector poured himself a cup of coffee from the flask in the front seat.

McLeod snorted and took a sip of his coffee, making a face at the taste.

“Faugh! How can you two drink this stuff? What evidence? It was recovered property, apt to sustain further damage if it wasn’t, put into responsible hands. I’ve signed for it. Besides, we couldn’t have the entire West Highland Constabulary going up in smoke—other than MacLeods, of course.”

“Would
they have?” Peregrine asked. “I mean, did that man
really
go up in a puff of smoke when he touched the Fairy Flag?”

McLeod laid his arm languidly along the back of the seat and gave Peregrine a droll glance across his shoulder.

“You’re asking
me? You’re
the one who saw it, my friend.
I
was having a nap under some rocks and earth. Of course, the official version is that the chap met with a nasty mishap involving a grenade.”

He started to take another sip of his coffee, then thought
better of it and cracked his door open to dump the contents of the cup outside.

“Oh, and by the way, Mr. Lovat,” he added, glancing back over his shoulder at Peregrine as he closed the door again, “you didn’t do too badly last night. Just remember to follow orders next time.”

“Next
time?”

As Peregrine’s eyes widened behind his spectacles, Adam gave a contented chuckle.

“Noel is having a little fun with you, Peregrine,” he said easily. “He means you’ve passed your entrance exam.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You may recall that I told you, several days ago, that I had several functions besides being a psychiatrist. Noel and I are part of a small group of—shall we say, specialists?—whose responsibility it is to deal with affairs of this kind: criminal cases involving elements of what the uninitiated would call the supernatural. I suppose one might call us a kind of—ah—occult police force.”

Peregrine had gone very still and quiet, and he could not seem to take his eyes from Adam’s.

“You—you aren’t joking, are you?” he whispered.