Momentarily, Jean flashed back to Glendessary House, how she’d spent an eternity waiting for the police to come. Waiting for Alasdair to walk into her life, had she but known, and so forth.
“Aye, sir.” Thomson peered into the heaving shadow that was the ocean. “There might be marks at the waterline, the scrape of a boat, footprints, or the like. I’ll have a keek, shall I?”
“Good idea,” said Alasdair. “Well done.”
Thomson grinned, then quickly reversed his expression back to somber.
“Oh, and Thomson,” Alasdair added, “we’ve got no time for a lesson in public relations. Suffice it to say, the media will be following the police like the night the day. Mind how you go.”
“The media,” repeated Thomson, and despite the dim light, Jean could swear he paled. “Aye, sir. Just the facts. Courteous but firm. No worries.” He started slowly off across the shingle, illuminating each step.
Alasdair rubbed his hands together, perhaps less to warm them than in pleasure at finding a disciple. Turning away from the sea, he spotted Rab still contemplating the body, his breath a vapor of steam and beer. “Rab, the tarpaulin?”
Wordlessly, grasping his flashlight in a gnarled hand, Rab turned back toward the castle. His profile in the gloom was that of a troll searching for a bridge to live under. But his little light went on across the footbridge without establishing residence and vanished over the hill.
The flash of the camera seemed like an explosion. Jean stepped back even further and tucked the thermos up against her chest, but its exterior was no more than lukewarm. That’s why it was a thermos.
If she felt cold, Alasdair was half-frozen. He’d been out here all this time. But then, he was Highland-born and bred, unfazed by chill. And he was a cop, unfazed by—or at least, undemonstrative at—sudden death.
That she’d seen too much sudden death over the last year wasn’t his fault. Together they had dealt with criminals exploiting the romance of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the pseudo-science of the Loch Ness monster, the claims made by a bestselling novel about Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel, and tales of witchcraft in colonial Virginia.
The mist thickened into a mizzle, droplets gathering on Irvine’s and Alasdair’s shoulders to glint in the lights the way the diamond in her ring had glinted.
She supposed Tina had a diamond ring, too. And a wedding band. Maybe she and Greg had matching ones, engraved like the ones waiting for Jean and Alasdair with their initials and the date of their wedding.
To wed. To join. To espouse. To unite in a knot that could be cut abruptly asunder.
An hour ago Greg had been laughing, complaining about his wife’s shopping, asking about a two-centuries-old murder and anticipating exploring the ancestral ground. Now he was a cold slab of meat lying on that ancestral ground, pawed over by hands that would infinitely rather be holding cups and glasses of holiday cheer.
An hour ago Tina had been anticipating a drink and a Hogmanay party. Now she was alone and bereft, an entire planet between her and home.
To fall in love was to risk everything.
“Jean.”
She jumped, jerked back to the scene, lights puny against a dark sky and a dark land joined by a dark sea, Alasdair’s voice in her ear and his presence at her shoulder.
“Let’s you and me be getting ourselves back to the house,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s going to be a long night.”
Chapter Five
Jean paced up and down in front of the fireplace in the sitting room of the Bonnie Prince Charlie suite, the best in the house, Fergie had assured them.
At least Charlie really had set foot on Skye, conducted by the intrepid Flora MacDonald. Who was probably no relation to Fergie—MacDonalds were thick on the ground here. But, with the other interesting ancestries turning up this evening, why not?
Taken together, the suite’s rooms—living, bed, dressing, and bath complete with tub, shower, and toilet—had almost the square footage of Jean’s flat in Edinburgh. Since August she’d been sharing that space not just with her cat but with Alasdair. None of them had particularly sharp elbows, but still, independent spirits demanded room of their own. Hence their purchase of the recently vacated flat next door. Add the expense to that of combining the two dwellings into one, and neither Alasdair nor Jean had any grounds to criticize Fergie’s spending habits.
He might be investing in his estate, but we’re investing in the state of our matrimony.
Fergie and Diana hadn’t gone overboard fixing up this suite. While the fabrics were fresh and cheery and a brand-new clock radio sat by the bed, every surface and wall was decorated with the sort of flea-market stuff dealers called collectibles—vases and figurines, a peeling set of Walter Scott novels, stuffed birds, horse brasses, and wicker baskets.
Likewise, the furniture was a miscellany gleaned from the recesses of the house. It ranged from a curlicued Georgian desk to a heavy Victorian wardrobe that—Jean had checked—did not open onto Narnia, to a single Louis some-teenth chair spun out of sugar and gilt that had been claimed by Dougie since neither of the humans dared sit on it.
The little gray cat was now disguised as a tea cozy, paws and tail tucked, whiskers furled. His iridescent golden eyes watched Jean. Another criminal investigation?
“Don’t ask,” Jean told him. She’d already answered Alasdair’s questions on the way back from the beach, despite nothing much having happened at the house in his absence. But then, like the non-barking dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, even absence was evidence.
Feeling every year of her accumulated forty, Jean turned the back of her lap toward the electric fire whose three glowing bars were giving their all. The appliance looked like an alien crouching in the interior of the four-hundred-year-old stone fireplace. But places like Dunasheen no longer housed more servants than guests, including maids whose purpose in life was to lay coal fires and set them alight when the gentry returned from gallivanting across the moor.
Her hands and feet tingled in the heat. Her head fizzed, thoughts rising and popping like bubbles in a flat soda—motive unknown, opportunity a very narrow window, means a knife in the dark.
When Alasdair walked through the doorway from the bedroom, she could tell from the vertical furrow between his eyebrows that he was ticking off the same list.
She knew his expressions, his face, and his form as well as her own. His short-cropped hair, a ripple of golden grain tipped by frost. His regular, unremarkable features, planes and angles assembled like a geometry proof, rational and elegant. His armor of reserve, claiming privacy rather than secrecy, that had once fooled her into thinking he felt no emotion. His broad shoulders, slender hips, strong hands, compacted into a relatively small frame. The angle of his head, tilted in consideration of a Fergus MacDonald painting over the mantel, and the solidity of his tread. Some men sagged into middle age. Alasdair stood all the straighter, especially when facing trouble.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he returned.
“I’ve
