affable expression deepen to a thundercloud. What was up with him and his daughter? What had they been, if not arguing, then having words about? And where had she been right before sunset, anyway?
Jean looked suspiciously down the hall toward the back door. When she and Alasdair came back to the house, the dogs had been outside. And there’d been a wet raincoat hanging in the cloak room. It had fallen off its hook, as though it had been tossed there just moments earlier.
What was she trying to do, pin something on Diana?
Jean turned toward the staircase and jumped. Diana stood on the bottom step, her complexion no longer flushed but a dewy ivory-pink. “Hullo, Jean,” she said, but her cornflower blue eyes were fixed on something over Jean’s shoulder.
They’d heard her go down the turnpike stair. She must have gone back up one of the secondary flights while making her appointed rounds. “Hi,” Jean said, and to head off the flush she felt mounting into her own cheeks, “Sorry about everything that’s happened today. That’s still happening.”
“No need to apologize,” Diana told her. “None of it’s your doing.”
“Well no, it isn’t.”
“Do you mean to join in tonight? None of this is the Krums’ doing, either, and they’re expecting their Hogmanay activities as per the posted schedule.”
“Yes, I’ll join in. Alasdair’s going to try and make it to dinner.”
“Perhaps you could assist Father in entertaining the Krums, then?”
As in, divert their attention from the murder? “Sure,” Jean said, “assuming anyone will think my blathering is entertaining.”
She hadn’t been fishing for a compliment, and sure enough she didn’t reel one in. “Thank you. Drinks in the library at half-past-six, dinner at half-past-seven. Also, I’m sure we’ll soon be getting more attention from the media than we’d like, and to that end I’ve asked our manager, Mr. Pritchard, to close the main gates. You’re media yourself, now…” Diana paused delicately, her porcelain brow creased ever so slightly.
“I’ve never yet written about one of the investigations I’ve been involved in. I do history, travel, legends. Seeing is believing and believing is seeing—you know, how people act on what they perceive, not on what actually exists. The Loch Ness monster, the Bible imagery at Rosslyn chapel, that sort of thing.”
“Your articles are—illuminating. We appreciate your doing one about Dunasheen.” Diana didn’t need to add anything along the lines of, as long as it doesn’t mention the murder. “And Alasdair’s attention to security matters as well, most helpful.”
“Alasdair and I appreciate the holiday and the wedding.”
Only now did Diana’s gaze focus on Jean, if less on her face than on her apparel. Her full, soft lips stretched in a pained smile, she said, “There’s no need to dress for dinner,” and she wafted away down the back hall.
Jean glanced down at her oversized sweater and wilted jeans, getting the message, and started toward the stairs thinking that in order to produce Diana, Fergie must have crossed himself with a Dresden figurine. She’d have to ask Alasdair for the particulars of the late Mrs. MacDonald. All Jean knew was that she had been an Englishwoman, and that Diana had been raised in the Home Counties while Fergie manufactured soap bubbles in the advertising and public relations industries. An English childhood explained a lot…
Wait a minute. Jean made a quick about-face. Why had Diana been looking so intently at the wall opposite the staircase? Had she seen a mouse?
Jean saw a large brass-bound wooden chest, like a treasure chest, what the Scots called a kist. On it sat a small cast of Michelangelo’s David, loinclothed with a paisley-pattern silk tie, and a scarlet poinsettia dusted with glitter.
On the wall hung a couple of targes, small studded shields, set atop crossed claymores like the skulls and bones on a pirate flag. The leather sheaths of two officer’s regimental dirks, complete with tiny pockets for a small knife and fork. A fat-bladed Gurkha knife. A tier of basket-hilted swords and a wheel of pistols.
Jean had once read that an oath made on the hilt of a dirk was as binding as one made on a Bible. But she doubted if any the displayed weapons were genuine—they more likely came from the Scottish equivalent of the factory Greg had owned in Australia, and had rolled off an assembly line beside plush Nessies and plastic bagpipes.
However—she stepped closer, the better to see in the less-than-glaring light—the swords did have a certain patina, the targes had been battered around, and the sheath of the dirk on the right was…
Empty.
No. Oh no.
Her breath turned to feathers, like those of a dove caught by a hawk, and lodged in her throat. Leaping forward, she seized the sheath between thumb and forefinger and shook it, as though the eighteen-inch blade had somehow become invisible.
The carved pommel of the remaining knife was topped with a cairngorm, the smoky quartz glowing sullenly below a fine web of scratches. The silver fittings of both sheaths were discolored by tarnish, and the leather was worn. Had one dirk belonged to Fergie Mor and the other to Allan Cameron?
It didn’t matter where the blades had been. What mattered was where one had gone.
Jean managed to suck first one, then another fuzzy breath into her chest. Alasdair had programmed Thomson’s number into the phone. But he wouldn’t yet have made it to where Thomson was standing guard. And if he had, what good would it do telling him about a missing knife, when he already knew that a knife had killed Greg MacLeod? When the first thing he’d do upon arriving at the scene was set Portree—handy collective noun, that—to searching for the murder weapon?
If the murder weapon had come from inside the castle, that would cut Alasdair’s list of suspects down to just a few names.
Not, Jean assured herself, that the missing dirk was the murder weapon. The sheath could have been empty for years—she sure couldn’t testify one way or the other. Fergie, though, would know all about it. He would have a perfectly logical explanation.
So why, asked the nagging little voice of the devil’s advocate in Jean’s head, had Diana been staring at the vacancy? Coolly, unflappably, keeping up appearances very nicely, yes, but taking note of something off, something wrong, when already things had gone badly wrong.
She’d tell Alasdair about the missing weapon—and missing Diana—at dinner, before Gilnockie arrived with a full scene-of-crimes team. A team that could search for fingerprints on the silver fittings and on the leather itself. Where she’d just left her own.
Stamping irritably at first the tile floor and then the stone treads, Jean trekked back up the stairs. She plunged through the chilly ripple of sensation without stopping to analyze whether it was malice or melancholy, those being two emotions often attached to lingering souls.
Greg hadn’t wanted to play a character in a ghost story himself, and he wasn’t necessarily doing so. Still, spirits often lingered hoping for justice, even vengeance. And that, Jean thought, was where she and Alasdair came in. Not just as seekers of truth, justice, and the legal way, but also as layers of ghosts. Normally she loathed the excuse, “Because we can.” But when it came to laying ghosts, both real and figurative, those that could, had
