the unforgiving ground. There was only one reason Alasdair, and Tina with him, would have left Greg alone.
Chapter Four
The flashlight beams flared and clashed. Jean squinted. Then they settled, and she saw Tina’s face. Illuminated from beneath, it resembled a mask of tragedy, mouth hanging open, mascara smeared beneath empty eyes, skin like clay.
Every line of Alasdair’s features was carved in Skye basalt. The vapor of his breath rose and blended into mist. “Jean, Fergus. P.C.—”
“Thomson, sir. Sanjay Thomson, Kinlochroy.” And, before Alasdair could react as Jean had to his first name, “Where’s the injured party?”
Tina let out a moan like a collapsing accordion and buckled. Thomson grabbed her other arm. Spasms rippled through her body and her curls trembled.
Fergie took the blanket, threw it around her shoulders, and pulled her into his own arms. “Come along, dear. Let’s get you back to the house. A cup of tea will go down a treat. Maybe a wee drop of brandy as well.”
“Greg,” Tina said in a tiny voice.
Greg. Jean felt shivery, sick, numb, and she’d barely met the man. She could imagine—but didn’t want to—how Tina felt.
With a quickly suppressed gulp, she took one of Alasdair’s flashlights from his bare and therefore icy hand and exchanged it for Fergie’s carrier bag. A thermos bottle sloshed at its bottom, next to several plastic cups. Of course. Any emergency situation in the British Isles could be mitigated by tea—warmth, caffeine, and sugar. But no amount of tea was going to bring Greg MacLeod back.
Fergie guided Tina’s stumbling feet toward the gantlet of the enceinte path, and beyond it the oasis of new Dunasheen. His voice, murmuring sympathies, faded into the rhythm of the wind and waves, a rhythm much slower than Jean’s own heart.
Alasdair introduced himself to the constable and shook his hand. “Sanjay.”
“My grandad was stationed in India and my granny’s from Delhi.” The constable replied just as patiently as he had with Jean—no doubt he’d had lots of practice—and in a return-of-serve asked, “That’s the Alasdair Cameron, ex-D.C.I. at Inverness?”
“Aye, one and the same,” Alasdair replied cautiously.
“I’ve swotted up on the Loch Arkaig and Loch Ness investigations. Brilliant detective work, Chief Inspect—Mr. Cameron.”
“Thank you, constable, but I was no more than part of a team.” Alasdair’s face remained stony, although a glint in his eye, directed toward Jean, acknowledged her role as partner and gadfly in both of those cases as well as two others. “Let’s be getting on with this investigation, shall we?”
“Yes, sir.” Thomson started off, his feet creaking across the small stones of the shingle beach. “This way, sir?”
“Aye, straight on.” Even as he spoke, Alasdair’s gaze tarried on Jean’s, and the glint in his eye wavered like a candle in a draft.
“What happened?” she asked. “Did he lose his footing, or did a stone turn beneath his shoe, or what?”
“I’m thinking or what.”
Jean’s heart slumped downwards. “But how.…” She’d find out soon enough.
Alasdair pulled his gloves from his pocket and onto his hands, but not before Jean glimpsed the mottled rust-red on his fingertips. Bloodstained ground. The MacDonalds and the MacLeods went at it like billy-o.
She glanced back to see the glow of Fergie’s flashlight moving across the bridge and up the hill and then fading away, a MacDonald now giving aid and succor to a MacLeod.
Alasdair was off after the pale shiny blur of Thomson’s coat, so fast Jean had to hustle to keep up. No telling what was lurking out here to pick off stragglers. And she’d be thinking that even without Alasdair’s dire or what.
The beam of Thomson’s flashlight swept back and forth, from the rocky hillside with its thin skin of turf across the beach to the waves rolling forward, falling back, rolling forward again. “The tide’s coming in. How far above…ah. There he is, poor chap.”
Three rays of light converged on a long shape, inert as driftwood. Greg lay diagonally across the pebbles, feet to the land, head to the sea, one arm flung out as though reaching for something that exceeded its grasp. Just beyond his fingertips lay the flashlight Alasdair had given him, glass broken, bulb extinguished.
His face was turned away from the probing lights. That, as far as Jean was concerned, was a very good thing. And yet even her shrinking gaze discerned that below the red cloth of his jacket glistened a smear of crimson, and a crimson thread wove its way between the pebbles toward the lick of the waves.
Thomson set aside his first-aid kit and squatted down to inspect the body, the physical shell of a human soul. Alasdair hunkered down beside Thomson. Jean tucked her arms as close to her body as she could and still train her flashlight on the scene, but she was cold with more than the temperature. The wind tugged at the scarf around her head and its soft wool tickled her cheek.
“I’ve phoned Doctor Irvine,” said Thomson. “He’ll be here soon as may be.”
“Good,” Alasdair replied. “He can do the preliminaries. Me, I’ve phoned D.C.I. Gilnockie at Inverness C.I.D.”
“Criminal investigation? But he fell.”
“If he fell, what did he go falling from?”
The young man shone his flashlight right and left, back and forth. “Oh. There’s nothing high enough just here, is there? Did he go falling from the castle wall and crawling away—away from the house, though, I’d be expecting him to crawl toward it, looking out help. And if he’d died from a fall, his head would likely be cracked open or his neck twisted round.”
Alasdair said, “Very good.”
Jean wondered if Thomson realized what high praise he was getting, Alasdair suffering idiots and fools just about as gladly as he suffered biting insects like the infamous West Highland midge. She flexed her knees and took a step back, then forward again, so as not to miss anything. So as not to show disrespect to the dead.
“The shingle,” Alasdair went on, “is less likely to show marks of him crawling than sand, aye, but I had me a good look-round whilst Tina, well, whilst Tina ran to and fro, and saw nothing. Gilnockie will order a full work-up. I’ve likely missed a scuff mark or two in the dark, or, if we’re lucky, footprints. In any event, I’m thinking he died where he fell—or fell where he died, rather, just here.”
Thomson considered that a moment. Then, gingerly, he knelt down and placed his flashlight and his cheek almost on the pebbles, all the better to sight along the trickle of red. “The blood’s coming from his chest. His jacket’s torn.”
“Oh aye. The wound’s in his chest, or as near as I can tell save rolling him over. And his jacket’s not torn but sliced.”
“A slice, is it? Could he have fallen on a bit of flotsam or… He didna fall. It was no accident.” Thomson’s eyes sparked and abruptly he sat up and back.
Alasdair
