Beyond that, I looked up to see the ancient oak, unmistakable in its majesty. There was no sign of Lily, or of anyone else. I bent down panting, hands on my knees, gazing at the tree, an aged emperor asleep in the watery morning sun, crutches propping up low branches thicker than most of the other trees in the wood. “It” was not a pronoun that came to mind. He was recognizably the same tree as the one pictured on Lily’s tarot card. Around him, the air was golden and heavy and silent, thick not only with a strange heavy sleepiness, but with something old and anguished, even angry, despite the sweet haze of autumn.
Three trees left, from the primordial forest that had once covered much of central Scotland. Three trees, set apart from their fellows by something more than sheer size. Like creatures from an elder world, I thought, and caught my breath as I recognized the phrase. It came from Holinshed, Shakespeare’s source for Macbeth, talking about the weird sisters.
There had been three of them, too.
“You really think it was her?” asked Ben.
I nodded.
“Who was the bloke?”
“Don’t know.”
Where could they have gone?
As Ben scanned the ground for tracks, I gazed at the tree. What about this tree—or this place—had drawn Sir Angus?
Wind stirred its branches, which creaked and groaned. I slid down the bank and put a hand on the tree, trailing around it; its trunk must have been at least ten feet in diameter. A hollow gaped in the far side, opening into a room I could stand up in. It smelled of damp and decay.
As I ducked out, I felt a drop on my hand and looked down. It wasn’t rain; it was red. A splatter of blood.
Backing from the tree, I looked up and my voice caught in my throat. Glancing over, Ben slid quickly down toward me. All I could do was point. Twenty feet overhead, just where the trunk began to branch and entirely invisible from the path, a body was hanging, swaying a little in the wind, which made the branch creak.
It was an old woman with wild gray hair. Auld Callie. Someone had clearly looked at a tarot deck before arranging her. Auld Callie’s hands were tied behind her back, and her left foot had been tied up behind her right knee, making the shape of a 4. But she was not the Hanged Man, upside down, with a mask of serenity on her face. She hung by her neck. Her abdomen had been slashed through her dress, dripping blood in slow, heavy drops, and her face looked as if she had died cursing all the demons of hell. She was Odin, pierced with a sword and screaming.
“Call the police,” said Ben, brushing past me and hoisting himself into the tree. He reached her in what seemed like no more than three moves. Holding himself to the tree with one arm, he felt for a pulse. But from the crook of her neck, it was pointless. She was dead.
15
I CALLED THE police and told them about Auld Callie and her link to the mess on Dunsinnan Hill as well. We were told in no uncertain terms to stay right where we were.
And not to cut the body down.
Which was just as well, as we had no knife that would cut that rope.
The knife from the hill would do it, I thought suddenly. But it was in Lady Nairn’s safekeeping.
The day before, Auld Callie had pulled me from the hill as I’d run down the path with the knife in my hands, and seconds later the dark-haired man had cantered by. She’d quite possibly saved my life. And now she was dead.
No one, surely, would kill Auld Callie just to torment Lady Nairn. That seemed to rule Lucas Porter out, at any rate. What about the reverend Mr. Gosson?
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
“There’s a paper here,” said Ben quietly. “Clipped to her dress.” He pulled it loose. It was a single sheet, folded loosely in quarters. He let it go, and it floated slowly downward, eddying and bouncing a little in the air like an oversized butterfly, landing gently in the dying bracken at my feet.
I stared at it warily. There was a smear of blood across it, already dried to brown. Beneath that, someone had written my name. Kate Stanley.
I bent and picked it up, my fingers shaking a little. It was a single sheet of thick buff-colored paper. My name was written on the otherwise blank reverse. Inside the folds, the front was thick with ink. The top third was covered with tiny writing in old ink faded to brown. The bottom was blank—or had been, until someone had filled it with a drawing in pen, deep black ink, and wash: A fierce-looking Shakespeare in doublet and hose reached in a fencing lunge toward a kilted Scottish King. Both figures wielded leafy branches instead of swords.
Beneath the picture, in the same ink as the drawing, someone had scrawled a line from Macbeth:
Who can impress the Forrest, bid the Tree unfix his earth-bound root?
The impish curves of the drawing and the proud folly of the expressions were one-of-a-kind. I was staring at a Max Beerbohm caricature, an original by the looks of it, probably penned sometime during the nineteenth century’s fitfully wanton fin de siècle. For all that, it was the cramped writing above the caricature that riveted me.
“What is it?” Ben asked quietly.
“A page from a diary, I think.”
“Can you read it?” asked Ben.
“Not easily.” The hand was seventeenth-century, at a guess, and the messy scrawl of a voluminous writer on top of that: someone who wrote too much and too fast to bother with neatness. A magpie who recorded everything as he heard it, without any attempt at organization or culling.
At the top of the page a single legible line stood out:
I once heard Sir William Davenant say that the Youth who was to have first taken the parte of Lady Macbeth fell sudden sicke of a Pleurisie and died, wherefor Master Shakspeare himself did enacte in his steade.
I was staring at a page from the notes of the prattling seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey. A page that scholars had never found, but Max Beerbohm had. A page that said the origin of the play’s curse was not a hoax after all.
A page on which someone had written my name. Who? And why?
I glanced up at Auld Callie, thinking of Odin hanging for nine nights from his tree. Not for love or release from death, like Christ, though he was sometimes compared to Christ. For knowledge. All for the sake of knowledge, in the shape of runes. I looked back down at the page trembling in my hands. What had Auld Callie been so brutally made to toss back, screaming, from the underworld?
Ben dropped beside me, and I became aware of a whirl of sirens in the distance and booted feet pounding down the path.
What are you trying to tell me? I asked Auld Callie silently. And then I folded the page and shoved it into the pocket of my jacket. Someone meant for me to see this; I had no intention of handing it over to the police till I’d had a chance to do so.
Ben raised one eyebrow. “I take it we are not mentioning the knife, either.”
We, I thought. Was this what it took to bind Ben and me together into the first-person plural? Murder?
Aloud, all I said was “Not yet.”
“And Lily?”
“Leave her out of it.”
“Do we know she was in it?”
He wasn’t really looking for an answer, and I didn’t give him one.
16
THE WOOD WAS quickly teeming with police. Forensic officers in white suits and blue gloves tented off the tree as best they could, while uniformed officers cordoned off the path for a long way in both directions. Plainclothes detectives from CID, or the Criminal Investigations Department, weren’t far behind. A sergeant took down our names and information.
Detective Inspector Sheena McGregor arrived from Dunsinnan House, marching straight for us with a face of cold contempt. In her late thirties or early forties, she had short brown hair, a wiry build, and brittle eyes; she smelled of cigarettes and coffee. She already knew who we were, and her questions were blistering. Why hadn’t we waited, as asked, atop Dunsinnan Hill, and what in God’s name did we think we’d been doing tramping into a crime scene at the Birnam tree?
“We didn�
��t know it was a crime scene, Detective Inspector,” said Ben, all solemn contrition.
“What sort of fool do you take me for, Mr. Pearl?” she said coldly. “You took one look at the slaughterhouse arrangement on top of that hill and drove straight here. Why?” She looked from him to me.
She must have seen the tarot card. She couldn’t be asking, “Why Birnam Wood?” She’s asking, “Why you? Why come?” I felt my chin going up. “We thought we were looking at an ugly prank. We didn’t expect to find murder.”
.
“A prank,” she said, her face tightening in displeasure. “That’s a lot of blood for a prank, Ms. Stanley.”
“We were up there to read Macbeth.”
Her eyes narrowed. “A bloody prank for a bloody play, eh?”
“It’s said to be cursed. I don’t expect you to believe that, but a lot of actors do. Someone had already tweaked the cast’s jitters on that subject. I thought this was another…tease.”
Her foot tapped impatiently on the ground. “Come with me,” she said suddenly, striding down the bank.
A forensics squad had shielded much of the tree from the path, but the way the body was placed, there was no way to tent it entirely from view. From the riverbank, Auld Callie was still plainly visible, dangling from a high branch, her crooked knee bumping against the trunk, her grizzled hair lifting, now and again, in the wind. A wide streak of reddish-brown blood spilled down her dress, falling in a long vertical stroke down the trunk of the tree. With camera flashes going off and white-suited crime-scene officers swarming up and down ladders, the scene looked like a surreal film shoot.
“That doesn’t look like a prank to me,” said DI McGregor. “That looks like ritual murder.”
What’s a ritual knife for but ritual? Lily had asked the night before. Only, the ritual knife had not been anywhere near Callie; it had been under my pillow, or safe in Ben’s and then Lady Nairn’s possession.
Lily, on the other hand, was another story. Was it her I’d seen scurrying into this wood? What was she doing here, and where had she gone?
McGregor was looking at me with a strange mix of distaste and grim triumph. Ritual murder was probably what she lived for. Solve this case quickly, and she’d move up from detective inspector to detective chief inspector in a blink.
One of the white-suited forensics officers approached, pulling McGregor aside for a moment. They were ready to remove the body. Turning back to us, she motioned over one of her underlings. “I’ll have more questions for you presently, but in the meantime you will wait, please, with my sergeant. But I should like to have one thing straight, first. I’ve heard a bit about you. Both of you.” She took a step toward me. “If you know anything—anything at all—about what happened up on that hill or in this wood and are withholding it, you will do time for it. I will see to it personally. Is that clear, Ms. Stanley?”
The page from Aubrey’s diary seemed to tingle and flare in my pocket, the letters of my name scrawling across the page in lines of fire.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
There wasn’t much we could tell them about Auld Callie’s death beyond the time when we’d found her and the eerie emptiness of the wood when we had. Other witnesses told of a man and a woman ducking into the trees before us; there was no point in denying that. The police didn’t find any more trace of them than we had, however. About Lily, both Ben and I remained mute. If McGregor and company wanted to draw the same inference that I had based on reports of a redheaded woman, there was nothing I could do about it. Meanwhile I saw no need to point them in her direction. Not yet.
She was fifteen years old. Whatever she was up to, it couldn’t be murder, I told myself. It was one thing to relish the beauty and power of ancient pagan ritual. It was quite another to participate in a ritualized kill.
Was it a sacrifice? Who had clipped the page from Aubrey’s diary to her dress and marked it “Kate Stanley”? The urge to look at it was so strong that at times I had to find something else to do with my hands, to keep them from drawing it out of my pocket of their own accord.
DI McGregor had no intention of letting us go easily or soon, however. The sun rose in the sky and curved toward the west again before she would release us. Only the obvious fact that Auld Callie had been dead a few hours before we arrived stalled her from arresting us both for the murder, I thought glumly. Even then, we were sent home like naughty schoolchildren. She’d declared the entire verge at the end of the bridge, including Ben’s car, part of the crime scene. It was a stretch, but not one Ben was willing to contest. “Let her look,” he said quietly to me. “There’s nothing for her to find, and it won’t do us any harm to cooperate.” We were driven back to Dunsinnan House in the back of a police car.
It was a quiet ride.
17
LATE SLANTED LIGHT had fired the battlements of Dunsinnan House to gold by the time we arrived. We were ushered into the hall, where the police, under the orders of DI McGregor, were still working their way through what seemed like interminably thorough statements from everyone in the company. Apparently, the statements Ben and I had given at Birnam Wood were not going to excuse us being last in line at Dunsinnan. Two crime scenes, McGregor said briskly. Two statements. We were asked, politely but firmly, to remain in the hall until we’d been seen to.
Lady Nairn had fresh tea brought in, serving it herself from a pot of Georgian silver. “I thought I saw Lily earlier,” I said quietly. “Going into the wood. I don’t know what she’s up to, but she’s not safe.” for an instant, her hand stilled. Then she nodded. “Point taken,” she said, leaving me with a rich, steaming cup of tea.
She’d canceled the trip into Edinburgh to see the Samhuinn fire festival. Sybilla, Jason, and Eircheard, as the three leads, were still going, as were one or two others. Most everyone else had given their statement and quietly departed for home; raucous celebration did not have quite the right ring to it in the face of murder.
Jason had driven off before we returned. Sybilla, however, was waiting for Ben. As dusk draped blue shadows across the lawn, she began to get restive. Scudding across the room, she came to a stop before the table where McGregor sat. “I have a performance,” she announced.
“And I have a murder,” said DI McGregor, glancing up from a clipboard. “In any case, no one is stopping you.”
“You are stopping Ben. And he is driving me.”
“find someone else.”
“He’s my bodyguard,” said Sybilla.
I almost choked. Who did she think she was, Whitney Houston? I glanced over at Ben. A lot of men would have been mortified; he clearly thought the whole scene was funny.
Sybilla never wavered. “There are ten thousand people massing along the royal Mile in Edinburgh,” she said, her voice low and silky, “waiting to see the Samhuinn fire festival. Stopping it in its tracks, I assure you, will guarantee you publicity you do not want.”
McGregor was irritating and driven, but she wasn’t a fool. Sybilla was playing diva to the hilt, but she was right. Setting her jaw, McGregor sent Ben on his way.
Watching from the doorway, Eircheard hobbled over to me, shaking his head. “Born diva, that one. Would you like me to try something similar for you?”
“Are you in need of a bodyguard?” I asked acidly. “Ah well, I seem to have mislaid my vulnerable side. But I’m sure I could find it, would it come in handy.”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile. “But I’m running on about three hours’ sleep as it is. I think I’ll stay here and collapse.” Kate Stanley, whispered the paper in my pocket. All I wanted was to be alone so I could figure out what this page meant. It would never happen in a crowd of ten thousand.
Eircheard laughed. “Sweet dreams, lass.”
McGregor motioned me over, and we went through a set of questions remarkably similar to those I’d already answered. Finally, I was free.
I fairly ran up the stairs toward my room. Would anyone have put it back together again? So long as t
here was a single working lamp, I didn’t much care.
As I came up to the top landing, I heard a wail through the corridor and stopped. “Bollocks!” burst out Lily. “Jason, Sybilla, and Eircheard are going. Why can’t I?”
So she was back. Relief eased through me as I heard Lady Nairn’s voice reply. “for starters, Jason, Sybilla, and Eircheard have the lead roles. The festival won’t go on without them. Like it or not, the same can’t be said for a torchbearer. Furthermore, none of them grew up with Auld Callie in and out of their homes. She was murdered this morning, Lily. You will pay your respects.”
“Eircheard knew her. Better than me.”
“Eircheard is not my granddaughter.”
“Auld Callie, of anyone, would want me to go.”
“I’m sorry, Lily,” Lady Nairn said firmly.
“No, you’re not. You’re a…you’re a…”
“Secret, black, and midnight hag?” prompted Lady Nairn with a sigh.
I heard a quick intake of breath. “That’s a quote.”
“The taboo is in effect for the hall, darling. Extending it to the entire house does seem a bit excessive.”
I stifled a chuckle, but Lily clearly didn’t see the humor in the situation. “You are trying to live up to your part in that bloody play, aren’t you?” she cried. Footsteps ran down the hall, and a door slammed.
Lady Nairn appeared around the corner.
“Is it safe?” I asked.
“So long as you avoid the dragon’s lair,” she said with a rueful smile. “Third door on the left, that would be.” for the first time since I’d met her, she looked her age.
I hesitated. On the one hand, I really just wanted to read the page in my pocket. On the other, I needed to know who had directed it to me, and for that, I needed Lady Nairn’s help. She was gliding past me, heading down the stairs, when I heard myself call her back.
“Today on the hill, you said Blood will have blood.”
Haunt Me Still Page 12
