The Avalon Chanter (29 page)

“
Not the woman with the concertina in
Liverpool,” Maggie replied. “Our Niamh was in the main room with
us. She sang ‘Foggy Dew.’ ”

“
She told me she felt a headache coming
on,” said Tara. “She went back to the house.”

Hugh stepped again to Elaine’s side. “Was the
singing too stressful for her? She seemed nervous, didn’t she now,
and was staring out at you, Maggie.”

“
No,” Maggie said, “she stared just
past me. At Lance, perhaps.”

Crawford settled his cap beneath his arm.
“Niamh’s not at Gow House. I left here when she finished singing
and waited for her at the gate of the school.”

“
Maybe she slipped past in the fog,”
Darling suggested. “Maybe she’s back at the house having a
lie-down.”

“
I’ll go check on her.” Tara set her
mug on the table, grabbed a cookie, and headed out. At Alasdair’s
gesture, Darling hurried after her.

With a tap of his finger against the
side of his nose—
I’m doing my bit, Mr.
Cop
—Hugh escorted Elaine and Maggie down the table to
where Pen poured more boiling water into a teapot.

Drawing Crawford toward a vacant corner,
Alasdair asked, “Why did you go looking up Niamh, then?”

“
I found the weapon used to cosh
Inspector Grinsell,” Crawford replied.

Alasdair’s eyebrows shot up approximately the
same distance Jean’s jaw dropped. “Did you now?” he asked.

“
Well, I’ve found the missing torch.
Maggie’s big one, that I borrowed yesterday afternoon. There’s a
bit of the metal rim round the lens broken off, right enough, and
what’s likely blood caked beneath. I reckon the forensics lads will
sort out any fingerprints on the barrel.”

“
Where was it?” Jean asked.

“
Lying alongside the path leading up to
Merlin’s Tower. I was walking back down, as per Sergeant Darling’s
instructions. The fog cleared for an instant. The sunlight
reflected off something in the trough running between the fence and
the path, below several broken weeds. I had me a look, and there
was the torch.”

You’d almost believe in divine intervention,
Jean thought, with the sun coming out the exact instant Crawford
walked by.

Alasdair chose a more earthly conclusion.
“Chucking the torch down where it would be easily found, if not so
quickly as it should have been—we walked right on by it, didn’t we?
Well, it’s either making a careless villain or a clever one meaning
to put Maggie in the frame. Where’s the torch now?”

“
On my boat. Thought that would be the
safest place. I wrapped it in the plastic sack Pen gave me
earlier—not with the sandwiches, mind you. I ate them.”

Jean reassessed her original estimate—and
Darling’s too, now that she thought about it—of Crawford being too
slow to have earned any promotions. He wasn’t slow. He was
deliberate.

He went on, “I knew I’d handed that torch in
to Niamh last night, right before I brought Miss Fairbairn here
down to the incident room.”

“
What torch were you carrying then?”
Alasdair asked.

“
I collected the one from my boat soon
as Inspector Grinsell arrived at the priory.”

“
Niamh’s saying she put Maggie’s torch
away in the cupboard, but Maggie’s saying it was not
there.”

“
Maybe Elaine took it,” Jean suggested.
“Maybe she dropped it beside the path.”

Elaine now peered intently into the mug of
tea she held between her hands—by tilting it back and forth, she
created waves and swirls—while Hugh and Maggie chatted with a
couple of the students and Hector. Pen opened another carrier bag
and laid out a row of sweet-smelling fruit tarts.

“
The poor old dear,” said Crawford.
“Pen’s telling me she found Elaine sitting outside the pub last
night, listening to Niamh singing, barely got her home before the
balloon went up.”

So Pen got Elaine back to Gow House right
before the police from Berwick arrived, Niamh returned from the
pub, and Crawford collected Maggie from her post by the garden
gate. None of that answered the question of who took the
flashlight.

It was interesting, though, that Elaine had
been wandering around while Crawford stood watch at the priory.
During the same time period the chanter went missing. But was she
capable of slipping past him, either purposely or by luck? How
about digging into the open grave—surely she’d be bewildered by it
all . . . The thought stabbed into Jean’s mind like a knight’s
lance through his opponent’s armor: no one had a better chance to
take the chanter than the man who’d been guarding it.

But while Crawford seemed to have quite a
busybody streak, he had no apparent motive for taking the chanter.
He’d been a baby when the body went into the grave. Just because
the M.E. had found a mechanical pencil in its pocket didn’t mean it
was that of an architect. Athelstan hadn’t even died on Farnaby,
and his remains were accounted for. Weren’t they?

Jean glanced again at Pen, whose cheeks were
less rosy than crimson in the steam from the kettle and from the
closeness of the room. And perhaps from hearing the dry rattle of
bones in a closet, or the twitch of dirty linen inching toward open
air.

On the way back to eyes-front she intercepted
a spark in Alasdair’s eye—his thoughts were heading in the same
direction, if marching rather than louping. “Elaine was accounted
for the rest of the night?” he asked. “And all day the day?”

“
So far as I know,” said
Crawford.

“
Well then, she had the chance to pick
up the torch, but not to be chucking it away. Or using it on
Grinsell, come to that.”

“
Here, sir, you can’t be thinking . .
.”

“
I’m considering every angle,
Constable. It’s Niamh I’m wanting to speak with.”

“
That’s what I was thinking, sir.
That’s why I went knocking on her door.”

Jean realized that like Niamh, she hadn’t
seen Lance since the end of the concert. Presumably he was at the
pub fending off Rosalie, girl reporter. Or perhaps not fending her
off, but Jean wasn’t going to worry herself about his virtue.
Niamh, now, Niamh had a thing for Lance that had to be more
substantial than Rosalie’s passing flash of lust. Had she been
distracted while singing because he’d finally arranged an
assignation with her? Where had he been sitting while she sang?
Somewhere on that side of the audience was all Jean could
remember.

Having come full circle in his
quasi-interrogation, Alasdair drew Crawford farther into the
unoccupied area at the end of the tea table and opened the next
item on the agenda. “Your father, Constable. Athelstan
Crawford.”

Crawford didn’t so much as blink. Yes, Pen
had warned him to expect the Scottish Inquisition. “My father,
sir?”

“
Could you be telling me about him,
please?”

“
I never knew him. He died when I was
the age of the wee lass yonder.” Crawford’s nod indicated little
Linda, who now resided in her mother’s arms, fed morsels of scone
by her father. “He was an architect specializing in historic
buildings. Give him an old tower house or a timber bothy and he’d
shore it up and add in the mod cons. He’s best known for working
with the teams renovating Alnwick Castle and Cragside.”

“
And Wat Lauder asked him to draw up
plans for Merlin’s Tower?”

“
Wat did that, aye—the place is in good
nick, considering its age. My father organized a part-time office
here on Farnaby, thinking the job was his chance to show what he
was capable of doing and set himself up on his own. My mum kept the
drawings till the day she died. My sister’s got the portfolio
now.”

“
That’s all that ever came of it?
Drawings?”

“
Aye.”

“
Were there hurt feelings when Wat
never went ahead with the project?”

“
I don’t know, sir.”

“
Was your mother ever saying just why
Wat changed his mind about the renovation?”

Crawford’s eyes rolled in Jean’s direction.
She tried to look as solemn as was possible for a bump on a
log.

Alasdair prodded, “Could Wat not get the
money to pay for the work? Did he even pay for Athelstan’s time
drawing up the designs?”

Crawford turned back to Alasdair, sucked on
his lower lip, then said, “I heard Mum once say to her sister, my
Auntie Lucinda, that all my father earned from Merlin’s Tower were
some photographs and a lady’s glove.”

“
A glove?” asked Jean. “Like a favor
given to a knight?”

“
Most likely. Mum said my father had
himself some good times here on Farnaby, playing at Camelot whilst
she sat home in Alnwick with my sister no more than two and me on
the way. She was a wee bit put out, I expect.”

Jean heard a faint echo in the back of
her mind, Maggie saying how Niamh had been a toddler when she and
Donal began their affair. That was the problem, wasn’t it? The
laying of the baby’s keel took only a few moments. The actual
launching of the adult ship came years later, on an ocean of
accumulated blood, sweat, and tears. Yes, raising a child was hard
work. A shame so many men focused on the preliminary
hard
rather than the ensuing
work
.

She saw Michael solicitously wiping Linda’s
rosy little cheeks and reminded herself that the vast majority of
men acquitted their responsibilities with competence and grace.

Crawford was still speaking. “. . . Mum also
told Auntie Lucinda my father fancied Elaine more than was good for
either of them, what with Wat being the jealous sort and stroppy to
boot. Not to speak ill of the dead.”

Hmm.
Jean
noticed another spark in Alasdair’s eye. They kept coming back to
Wat’s possessiveness, reinforced by his temper.

He asked, “How old was your father when he
died?”

“
Thirty-five.”

“
What happened to be causing his
death?”

“
He went wildfowling off Lindisfarne
with two of the chaps from his office. A sea fret came up and their
boats were separated. The other two chaps and the guide came to
shore here on Farnaby, and glad they were to find land, but my
father, well—the boat with all his kit was found floating far out
to sea several days later. He, himself . . .” Crawford looked down
at his shoes, noted their flecks of mud and vegetation, and lifted
each one in turn to polish it on the back of a trouser
leg.

“
His body was never found,” Alasdair
stated, doing an admirable job of keeping the
aha!
out of his voice. But then, he clutched at a
chain of happenstance, not evidence, with wide gaps such as: How
did Athelstan part ways from his boat? How did his body end up in
the grave in the chapel?

If it had. But every instinct Jean possessed
told her they’d finally found the answer to at least one
question.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Finally, Crawford looked up. “No, sir. His
body was never found. In time Mum went ahead with the memorial
service and all, and in due course he was declared legally
dead.”

“
Wat intended to put up a monument here
on Farnaby?”

“
Pen once said something of the sort.
She found Wat’s notes to that effect on a card Elaine was using as
a bookmark, if I’m remembering correctly. But, again, I was an
infant when my father died. All I know is hearsay from Pen and
James and all.” Crawford drew himself up. “Begging your pardon,
sir, but why are you asking me all this?”

Tara appeared in the doorway, with her
features creased in a frown but without Darling in her wake. She
beelined for Maggie. Pen sidled around the end of the table, wiping
out several mugs and arranging them on the checkered
tablecloth.

“
What do you know of Berwick’s
preliminary exam of the body from the chapel?” Alasdair
asked.

“
I’ve not heard a word about
it.”

Without saying,
that’s a first, then
, Alasdair went on, “The
experts are saying the deceased was over six feet tall, between
thirty and forty years old. Coins in his pocket are seeming to date
the burial to nineteen seventy-one. He was carrying a wee pad of
paper and a propelling pencil.”

Crawford’s long face contracted and his gaze
turned inward.

“
The chanter lying beside the body in
the grave. You were telling D.I. Grinsell you were not sure that it
was really there.”

“
I wasn’t sure what I saw is all I
meant.”

“
What were you thinking you’d seen,
then?”

“
A bone, a shadow, a strip of cloth. An
optical illusion.”

“
Or a chanter, either one from a set of
pipes or a practice chanter?”

Crawford said, “It’s possible.”

“
You’ve heard Sergeant Darling’s
account of a long, thin object being the murder weapon?”

Crawford nodded. Jean could almost hear the
pieces sliding into place in his brain.

“
Constable, last night, whilst waiting
for Berwick’s arrival, did you take the object—chanter,
whatever—from the grave?”

With a start, Crawford focused. “Eh? Whyever
would I do that, then?”

“
You’re Athelstan’s son. If that’s
Athelstan’s body in the grave, the means of him getting there would
be of concern to you and your family. And your friends here on
Farnaby.”