The Avalon Chanter (24 page)

Tara gathered up the tools while Rebecca used
her phone to snap a few photos of the grave slab. When Maggie
switched off the lights, the dim gray mist, a palpable thundercloud
hugging the ground, closed in around them. Jean could hardly see
Maggie collecting the battery packs.

Even if Alasdair had his old reflective
jacket, she thought, almost no light was available to reflect from
it. She wondered if he missed it. It was, after all, a sort of
badge of office.

In a group they picked their way out of the
church to the graveyard wall. Wat’s headstone was a domed shape in
the murk, the words unreadable. Maggie paused to gaze at it. Was
she convinced that he was her father after all? Or, now that she’d
given in to the child’s fantasy of being left in a basket on the
doorstep of unsympathetic strangers, would she ever be
satisfied?

She stated, “The concert’s at half past six,”
and, with Tara at her side, she followed the low stone wall toward
Gow House and disappeared into the fog.

Chapter Twenty-two

Alasdair, Jean, and Rebecca started slowly
across the parking lot toward a looming density, the row of houses
that made up Farnaby St. Mary. Somewhere a door slammed. Somewhere
else a dog barked, short and sharp. A set of footsteps crunched
across the blacktop, seemingly unattached to a human form.

Only when the short stairway down to Cuddy’s
Close materialized before them did Rebecca speak. “Well. That was
interesting. But things are usually interesting when I’m hanging
about with the pair of you.”

“
How,” Alasdair asked, “did Tara and
Maggie know about the chanter possibly being the murder
weapon?”

“
Pen knows about it,” answered Jean.
“Maybe Crawford told her when he picked up his picnic lunch. And he
might have told Maggie and Tara when he collected the crime scene
tape from the chapel. I guess he’s had to give up pretending it was
never there at all.”

“
Local constables,” Alasdair said with
a sigh. “Being part of the community, they’re sources of
information for the investigation, but the information’s flowing
the other way as well. I’d hate to think we’ve got a bent copper
here.”

“
Crooked? I could buy him being curious
over and beyond the call of duty, and a gossip, too, when he’s
speaking at all, but where’s his motive to be crooked? He’s been
straight as an arrow with the contemporary case. The only doubt
we—you—have about him concerns the cold case.”

Alasdair’s only reply was a mutter about
keeping options open.

They groped their way between the pub and the
B&B, ignoring the voices and scents of food emanating from the
former and stepping into the brightly lit entranceway of the
latter. This time the predominant aroma was baking meat and pastry
with a whiff of furniture polish.

From down the hall came the sound of
Michael’s voice. “Chanter. Chan-ter.”

Linda replied in a two-syllable gurgle.

“
Aye, that’s it. Chanter. Drone.
Bag.”

“
The bagpipes are going to be ready,”
said Rebecca. “As for Linda, if she never took a nap, the evening’s
going to be as interesting as the afternoon, just a lot noisier.
And I don’t mean musical noise.” With a frown of maternal concern,
she started toward the room. “Hugh asked Michael to be at the
school at six. See you there, eh?”

“
See you there,” Jean called, and
Alasdair waved.

Jean nipped into the sitting room for
the copy of
Britannia
and saw
that no,
Hilda
hadn’t flown
back into place. Upstairs, Hildy the cat was still in hiding, her
windowsill vacant.

Tucked safely away in their room, Alasdair
and Jean sat down with hot cups of tea and a basket of
cellophane-wrapped nibbles. “Too much to be sweeping the place for
bugs, I’m supposing, but still . . .” A sip of the sugary, milky
tea eased the cogitational crease in his forehead but didn’t smooth
it out.

Jean opened a package of
chocolate-covered digestive biscuits and did not think of Grinsell.
Instead, she offered Alasdair the second biscuit and launched into
a rough draft of the afternoon’s events, from Michael’s essay on
the missing chanter to Pen’s and Maggie’s reminiscences, from the
disappearance of
Hilda, the Enchanted
Prioress
to the state of the half-sisters Niamh and
Tara.

“
I was thinking the ‘McCarthy’ no
coincidence,” Alasdair replied, even as he ate the biscuit. That
didn’t smooth the crease, either.

“
I told you there was no harm in
talking to Pen. She volunteered a lot of information about Thomas
Seaton.”

“
That hardly matters now.”

“
Okay then, she volunteered information
about the dynamic at Gow House way back when, like how Maggie’s
probably hoping Wat
isn’t
her
father. She called him ‘a fearsome old devil’ there in the chapel.
But then, it’s his—artistic? passionate?—temperament that made his
music so good.”

“
Hugh’s told us of Wat’s temper
already.”

“
So Pen corroborated what he said. Not
that Hugh isn’t trustworthy, but people’s memories do get skewed
around.” Jean took a swig of her caramel-colored tea, hoping to
sweeten her growing irritation with her beloved, and then had to
swish the liquid around her mouth before it burned. Swallowing, she
went on, “Neither Pen nor Hugh thought Wat was capable of murdering
anyone, not in a premeditated fashion, anyway. But as Maggie
pointed out before you got there, killing someone with the thrust
of a chanter does suggest a crime of passion. An argument gone to
extremes.”

“
Maggie’s right about the chanter—it
could have belonged to the murderer, not the victim. It’s possible
Thomas Seaton is our man. Was our man. How’d he do it,
though?”

“
When Michael and Rebecca and I were
talking to Pen right after lunch, she suggested the murderer
sneaked up on the victim while he was playing the chanter. That way
it would already be in his mouth.”

“
That would be requiring some strength,
enough to stun the victim into not fighting back.”

“
I’ve seen photos of Wat,” Jean said.
“He was a big man. I wonder if Thomas was big, too.”

Alasdair said nothing.

“
But Wat played Arthur in Farnaby’s
Camelot,” Jean went on. “He proposed and everyone else disposed.
Not that he ordered someone to rid him of this troublesome, er,
Rob. But a confrontational manner breeds more of the
same.”

Alasdair opened a package of cheese crackers.
“Aye, we’re back to the body being your Rob the Ranter. But that’s
all by way of being secondary just now.” He bit and chewed, gazing
toward the blank panes of the far window.

From downstairs came a toddler’s shriek,
whether happy or upset was beyond Jean’s ken. A door opened and
shut and Pen’s voice called something about juice and the concert,
to be answered by Rebecca’s. So Pen, having delivered her scones
and sympathy, was back from Gow House.

“
Yes,” Jean told Alasdair, “the major
issue is who attacked Grinsell. Please don’t tell me you think it
was Maggie.”

“
All right then, I’ll not be telling
you that, if that’s not what you’re wanting to hear.”

Steps came up the stairs and a quiet knock
sounded on the door. Jean found Pen still wearing a purple padded
jacket, her pin curls wrapped with a flowery scarf. “I’m so
sorry—please forgive me for intruding—have you seen Hildy? She’s
not touched her food and she’s not in her basket next the Aga
cooker.”

“
Oh.” Jean raked back through her
memory. “The last I saw of her was when she ran upstairs while we
were eating lunch with the baby.”

“
Ah. Well then. It’s as I feared—I
found the back door off its latch. James, likely, carrying supplies
across to the pub, didn’t quite shut it . . . I’ll ask about. I’m
sure she’ll come back.” The lines of her face seemed out of kilter,
like a portrait by Picasso, stress warring with her usual sanguine
temperament. With a “Cheers,” she headed back
downstairs.

“
We’ll watch for her,” Jean called, and
turned back to Alasdair’s chill blue gaze.

“
Have a look at the evidence for
yourself,” he said. “Grinsell was likely thumped with a big torch.
Maggie cannot account for hers. There was a wee scraper, a dental
pick, at the scene, identical to the ones she’s using.”

“
Careless of the bad guy to drop it,
wasn’t it?”

“
You’d not believe the carelessness of
criminals—and a good job they are. Makes our lives
easier.”

Our.
The
police. When it came to war stories, she had nothing. Instead, she
asked, “That tray of tools had to have been in the chapel when we
were there yesterday.”

“
I did not notice, having other things
to be noticing.”

“
Same here. What I do know is that
neither Maggie nor Tara carried it away when we all left. Maybe
someone else pocketed a pick?” That didn’t sound right. Jean paused
to mull over the word “pickpocket”—no, that wasn’t what she
meant—then plunged on. “Someone sneaked in behind Crawford’s back
and took the chanter. Maybe that someone also took a pick and
planted it at the crime scene to implicate Maggie. Or maybe it was
two different people.”

“
A lot of folk sneaking about,
then.”

“
Even Elaine was out and about last
night—Maggie says she slips out. Although that was later on in the
evening.”
Or was it?
Jean
asked herself.

“
How many folk with diverging motives
are we talking about?”

“
We all have agendas.” Speaking of
which, she had to say it. “Alasdair, I know you’re not happy seeing
a policeman attacked. I know you’re not happy having this case
dumped on you. Or maybe you are. Maybe that’s it.”

“
What’s ‘it’?”

“
You’re being such a pill with Maggie.
You’re not as bad as Grinsell. I’m not saying that.”

Frost gathered on Alasdair’s cheekbones and
his eyes took on the color of arctic ice. When Jean’s phone trilled
with “Hail to the Chief,” she leaped to answer it. Give the man a
chance not to cool down, but to warm up.

“
Hi, Miranda. How’d the golf game
go?”

“
Par is still a far and distant goal
for me, but it was a lovely outing,” Miranda replied. “The sun’s
shining and the Forth is gleaming.”

“
Meanwhile we’re socked in here. Thank
goodness for mega-watt light bulbs.”

Miranda’s sultry voice was accompanied by the
chime of cut glass on crystal, probably a cut-glass whisky decanter
counting coup on the rim of a crystal glass. “I see you’ve had a
much more recent casualty.”

“
No kidding,” Jean replied, and angled
the phone toward Alasdair so he could hear.

“
It’s no coincidence, I’m supposing,”
said Miranda, “that the police detective struck down there on
Farnaby is the same one involved in Maggie’s case. George
Grinsell.”

Jean’s brain whirred like a tire in a
pothole. “What do you mean, involved in Maggie’s case?”

“
He was by way of being the detective
who ended by proving someone else was the murderer, not her at all.
In a way, he had her acquittal to thank for his promotion from
detective constable to sergeant.”

“
He’s never shown her any gratitude.”
Alasdair’s tone was dust-dry.

Jean still had no traction. But he’d said,
but she’d said.

“
I’ve had a further look into the
details,” Miranda went on. “Grinsell’s the Cambridgeshire detective
who broke Donal McCarthy’s alibi by intimidating his wife, Annie,
into giving information. She gave evidence that he wasn’t with her
at the time of Oliver’s death, as he’d claimed. As well, he’d come
back from his secret outing with muddy wellies and a coat smudged
with what she took to be soot, but which on further investigation
by the police turned out to be gunpowder residue. Once they had his
fingerprints, they were finally able to isolate one on the
gun.”

“
Oh,” said Jean, but it came out more
as a squeak. During Miranda’s original phone call, they had all
hared off down the fork in the road of Maggie’s reproductive life,
hadn’t they? That was the problem with these investigations, not
just forks in the road but also interchanges of the sort the
British called “spaghetti junctions.” Go with the flow of traffic,
she told herself. “I can see Grinsell intimidating Mrs. McCarthy.
Browbeating her. Although her daughter said this afternoon—the
nurse, Niamh. We mentioned her—that she wasn’t about to stand by
her man.”

“
She’s the daughter, is she? Fancy
that! Aye, at the end of the day Annie divorced the villain, and
she also filed a complaint against Grinsell. Since he broke the
case, the Cambridgeshire force had a bit of a balancing act in
dealing with him, I reckon, hence the promotion and the transfer at
one go.”

A disturbance in the police
force.
Was that what she’d said to
Alasdair?

Plopping herself down on the edge of the bed,
Jean returned the phone to her ear and walked Miranda through the
events of the afternoon. The empty tomb and Maggie’s
disappointment. The body not being Tom the Canadian Enchanter after
all. The coins proving that the body was not Maggie’s father,
either.