Michael was used to picking up on her non sequiturs. “There was guid precedent for disposin’ of the unwanted—mostly women—wi’ a charge of witchcraft.”
“Like the English disposing of Joan of Arc.”
“And was Anne a saint, too?”
“If I had any evidence, maybe I could tell you.” Rebecca frowned. “If Mackenzie doesn’t bring those records back by this weekend, I’ll go to Galashiels or Edinburgh or wherever he’s lurking and shake them out of him.”
Michael laughed. A police car pulled up in front of the hotel and Mackenzie and Devlin got out. The Sergeant peered dubiously up at the sky. The Chief Inspector hoisted a slim briefcase and looked straight at Rebecca, exactly as if he’d heard her threat. She tried a manic smile in his direction, turned toward the cottage, and skidded on the gravel. Michael grabbed her arm to steady her. “Who decreed high heels as proper dress wear for a woman anyway?” she demanded.
“The same sod who invented the tie,” he answered, jerking his from his throat with his free hand. “Or else a man invented the shoes, and a woman the tie, each meanin’ to disable the other.”
Rebecca snorted. She couldn’t imagine why he’d visualize the sexes in an adversarial relationship.
In the kitchen, the students were ranged around Colin while he confirmed his notes of their testimonies. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he told Michael and Rebecca, “if someone saw something or heard something he or she doesn’t realize was seen or heard.” He thrust the pad back into his sporran and looked around expectantly. Adele seemed amused, Mark and Hilary puzzled, Dennis oddly sullen. No sudden revelations, no abrupt confessions.
On the one hand, Rebecca wanted to scurry into the bedroom and slip her exacerbated nerves into jeans and a sweatshirt. On the other hand it seemed a shame to take off her tweed suit and pantyhose—she hadn’t dressed up in months. Adele was resplendent in an ultra-suede pantsuit and a blue and green Hermes scarf. Hilary’s wool jacket and Black Watch tartan skirt she’d bought in Edinburgh were similarly spiffy. Dennis’s tailored suit lent him an unaccustomed air of gravity, and Mark’s navy sports jacket dusted his gray eyes with blue. His silver buckle and tooled leather belt clashed with his conservative tie; Rebecca didn’t know whether he’d forgotten to bring a plain belt or whether the gaudy one was native costume. Like Michael’s and Colin’s kilts, which had drawn more than one admiring glance from the ladies, and subsequently jaundiced glances from Mark and Dennis, Tony and Jerry.
“Everyone looked awful posh today,” Rebecca said. “Did us proud. But we’ll have to get back to work after lunch.”
Silently, avoiding eye contact, everyone plodded away to change. By the time Mark and Rebecca fixed a plate of sandwiches and a vat of tea, Michael and Colin had shed their plumage and were back in international uniform—jeans and Tshirts reading, respectively, “Mitsubishi Glendhu Distillery Pipe Band” and “Keep Scotland Tidy, Throw Your Rubbish in England.”
Half an hour later, she was sweeping the kitchen floor while Mark, his shirtsleeves rolled up, washed the dishes. She opened the back door and threw a handful of crumbs onto the porch for the birds. But no birds were there, only cats. “How about some leftover ham?” Rebecca asked Guinevere’s upturned face. Lancelot was looking down, pawing at a reddish lump, disappointed it didn’t fight back.
Good grief, he’d dragged the remains of a mouse onto the porch. Rebecca stepped forward, wielding the dust pan. No, that wasn’t anything organic; what she had taken for a tail was a strip of fabric.
Lancelot delicately picked up the fabric with his teeth and trotted inside, lump dangling, Guinevere and Rebecca on his heels. Quickly Rebecca bribed the cats with pieces of ham and took possession of the object.
Mark looked around. “What’s that?”
“Good question.” Rebecca took a dirty spoon from the sink and poked. “Curiosity killed the cat,” Mark teased, even as he laid down the dishrag and knelt beside her.
Cautiously she picked up the object. The cloth strip was stained and damp, but wasn’t too disgusting. Its end disappered into the cold, strangely slick lump. The dark red material looked as intricately carved as a Chinese sculpture. Rounded edges, Rebecca deduced, now folded over and perforated by tooth-marks. Probably it had once been flat and deeply incised. She scraped with her fingernail. A thin paring came off. Below the surface the material was lighter red, almost pink.
“Wax?” asked Mark.
“Sure is. I don’t suppose it could be the remains of a wax seal?”
Mark took the lump from her hand. His elfin eyes glinted. “Paraffin? Or beeswax?”
“In other words, Mr. Archeologist Larva, how old is it?”
“That would depend,” he replied, “on whether it’s been lying in a trash heap for six months or in someone’s strong box for a century. But if it’s been in a strong box, how did the cats get it?” He shoved away an inquisitive feline nose and scratched its owner’s ears.
Michael walked into the room. “Havin’ a prayer meetin’, are we?”
“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Rebecca. “Lancelot, to be exact.”
Mark stood and offered Michael the lump. The belt buckle gleamed in Rebecca’s eyes, a strand of labyrinthine engraving turning itself into words. She blinked. The legend “Mark and Karen Forever” was etched in the metal. The words had once been inlaid with a contrasting copper or gold wire, which someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to pick out. Probably Mark himself, reluctant to part with a fine piece of work but only too eager to forget the woman who’d given it to him. And how short a time forever had apparently turned out to be.
Mark offered Rebecca his hand and helped her to her feet. Once again she thought, you don’t pry into your friends’ psyches.
Michael was peering at the object with his own feline inquisitiveness. He announced, “It’s a wax seal.”
“Told you,” said Rebecca to Mark.
“I wasn’t arguing,” he replied. And, to Michael, “How old? Where did the cats dig it up? What does it go to?”
A fiendish grin like a carnival mask spread slowly over Michael’s face. “The warrant for Anne Douglas’s arrest! It was nicked wi’ that gold noble last month. It had several seals on it. What if the thief hid them together, somewhere around here?”
“All right!” Mark exclaimed. “A treasure hunt!” He seized his coat and rushed upstairs, calling to the others, “Come one, come all!”
“If that’s no a hell of a leap of faith.” Michael’s grin skewed.
“Hey. It’s worth a try.” Rebecca rushed to the sink to finish washing the dishes while Michael opened the back door and scanned the Priory grounds, evidently hoping that X marked the spot. The cats, licking their whiskers smugly, padded off into the wet grass.
Soon the entire company was standing by the bridge, kitted out in wellies and jackets. Above them, billowing gray and white clouds played tag with pools of blue sky. “Good,” said Hilary.” It’s clearing up.”
“Now,” Rebecca said, assuming her best lecture hall voice. “We’ll assume the seal is mashed up because the cats dragged it off the parchment and were playing with it. We’ll not assume the parchment was dumped into the burn and has disintegrated or anything like that. We’ll also waive the question of just why the thief hid the warrant and coins here instead of carrying them away. Has anyone seen the cats poking around?”
Every head moved solemnly back and forth, signifying negative recall. A crunching on the driveway heralded the arrival of Tony, carrying his camera bags, Elaine, carrying the bag of trowels and the drawing board, and Jerry, carrying his moustache and a smile mimicking that of a used-car salesman. “Back in the right gender, I see,” he said to Michael and Colin.
The two Scots exchanged a look of pity for those afflicted with cultural dyslexia. Once again Rebecca gave her spiel.
Elaine refused to touch the lump of wax. Tony regarded it cautiously, as if it would bite. Jerry took it, considered it, handed it b
ack. “Okay, sure, no problem. Mark, we’ll get back to work on the bones. Elaine, I’ll need you to gopher, as usual.” Elaine didn’t blink at his slang—she’d learned the hard way what gophering was. “The rest of you guys go ahead and look for needles in haystacks. If you know what you’re talking about, Campbell.”
“I always know what I’m talkin’ aboot,” Michael responded. His smile was saintly and sharp at once, like that of his namesake, the warrior archangel who went around killing dragons.
Rebecca quelled both her lecture hall voice and an impulse to push Jerry into the burn. He was right about needles in haystacks. He was also dig director. She couldn’t help but wish he wasn’t so casual about what could just as well turn out to be yet another time-waster.
And here came Mackenzie and Devlin, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza tilting at windmills of human deceit. Although at the moment they actually looked calm, almost mellow—the effect of a couple of pints of McEwan’s Export and Nora’s superlative ploughman’s lunch. Time for them to start work, too. Rebecca took the lump of wax from Michael, trudged across the spongy turf and confronted the officers with the latest find.
Mackenzie listened, his head tilted to the side, his eyes narrowed. Devlin’s brows registered skepticism, but with a glance at his superior he said nothing. “Sergeant,” Mackenzie directed, “ask the Bairds and the Johnstons where the moggies usually play, then put some of our lads onto the search.”
“Thank you.” Rebecca was surprised Mackenzie would take her seriously.
“You’re welcome,” he returned.
Mark helped Jerry fold up the plastic sheet from the trench. His face was a sketch by Picasso, half-yearning toward the searchers, half-intent upon the bones at his feet. Tony laid out an array of cameras and tried various sight lines both into the trench and toward the church, ready for anything.
Rebecca found a box for the mangled seal and left it with Elaine. Elaine was interested only in Jerry’s and Mark’s backs showing above the rim of the trench like humps of dolphins above the surface of the sea. It wasn’t justice that was blind, Rebecca thought, but love.
The same cool, damp wind that was shoving the rain clouds toward the east fluttered her jacket and set her hair dancing across her forehead. The grass was so wet it squeaked beneath her boots. Michael was standing by the grate-covered well. The police had dredged up assorted coins, styrofoam wrappers, and a truly awesome pile of green muck, but not the sgian dubh. “Let’s try the Law,” he suggested to Rebecca. “We saw the cats stravaigin’ aboot the first day we were here.”
“We saw a man that day, too, remember? Not skulking, just walking through the ruins. We wondered if he’d vandalized the tomb; how about him hiding the warrant and the coin?”
“He’d be a cool one, hidin’ the goods in sight of the hotel.”
“Like whoever was cool enough to drag Sheila’s body into the church in full sight of the village? Those coins are a connecting thread, if you’ll pardon the mangled metaphor.”
“Oh aye, they are. And you’re pardoned.”
Colin gathered the students, and under the combined eyes of Tony and the video camera began delivering geologic incantations. “The Eildons are the remains of a stratified laccolith intruded into the Old Red Sandstones characteristic of the area. Wester Hill, closest to us here, is two layers of fine-grained reibeckite-felsite.”
“Sounds like a Hebrew tribe from the Bible,” said Michael.
Colin turned, gesturing expansively. “Yon hill is a phonolitic intrusion, younger than the Eildons, a much-eroded lava neck like Traprain and Berwick Laws. The wheel-cross here is made of whinstone from Battle Law… .” His voice disappeared down the wind.
Michael and Rebecca fell into step, side by side, toward the steep, stony sides of the hill.
1Chapter Fourteen
Battle Law looked like a child’s sand castle half-washed away by an invading tide. Only lumps of stone now protruded from the thick undergrowth. Rebecca could hardly tell which stones were the original igneous blocks of the Law and which had been shaped by hands that were long since dust. The ground seemed to ring hollow, as if concealing fairy caverns.
For a time she and Michael turned over small rocks and probed at larger ones. They found an intact arch, a rubble-filled cistern, and on the eastern extremity of the hill the stump of another wheel-cross, arms and halo lying shattered amid heather and hogweed. “This is the one Mary Pringle said was set up by Robert the Bruce?” Rebecca asked. “Somewhat older than his time.”
“He appropriated it,” Michael replied. “Standard procedure. Also standard procedure for Cromwell’s troops to break it during the 1650’s invasion. I imagine they were billeted up here, in the remains of the castle, and got bored.”
“So they found something to smash. Things haven’t changed much.”
They walked on through the dark green gorse that spread over and between the stones and sprinkled yellow blossoms like confetti over the ruins. Vast ferns sprouted through a pavement similar to that in the newly excavated cellar. “My mother slaved to grow ferns half that size,” Rebecca said, “and here they grow wild.”
“My mother was always tryin’ to grow cactus.”
“Yeah, the grass is always greener, isn’t it?”
They leaned against a bit of wall. To the east green billows of land faded into gray billows of cloud, and the wind was brisk and chill. A ray of sun illuminated the priory, village, and lawn as precisely as an architect’s model. Colin’s class strolled through the church. The others clustered around the trench. Two uniforms prowled around the remains of the infirmary, Mackenzie’s attenuated figure following as aloof as a wolf. Cars flowed down Jedburgh Street as the reporters returned to Rudesburn like swallows to Capistrano.
“Is that why you want me?” Michael asked. “Because I’m greener?”
“That’s part of it. Although I guess I’m just as exotic.”
“But I’m no so intent on runnin’ away from home as you.”
His keen perception could be downright annoying—probably because it was usually correct. Dryly she said, “Thanks.”
He shrugged.
“Colin thinks one of us knows something we don’t know we know,” she sighed. “Something the killer doesn’t know anyone knows.”
“The only window in the attic is the one on the landin’, ootside the door. A guid view ower the priory, true, but I only looked oot the once. Maybe twice. I didna see a thing.”
“You weren’t trying to see anything that night. Neither was I. Now I keep going over and over the holes in that timetable. Makes my teeth itch.”
“Serial suspects,” Michael said. “Includin’ me and you.”
“We were suspects last winter. We ended up being the detectives, too.”
“And we almost didna survive.”
“Our mistake was in not being frightened enough soon enough. In not trusting each other soon enough. Now I’m frightened, and I do trust you.”
Michael shook his head and said softly, “Oh aye.”
Colin strode toward the cottage, glancing at his watch. Hilary scuffed along the dormitory wall as if expecting the warrant to explode into the air like a grouse. Adele and Dennis poked around in the chapter house. Tony and Elaine sat on the edge of the trench where Mark and Jerry were apparently making mud pies. The police scouted the perimeter wall.
“Noo we have real detectives,” Michael said, “who’d be narked if we got in their way.”
“Would they? Mackenzie seems to expect me at least to poke and pry into everyone’s lives just as he is. What else is there for anyone to do?”
“Wait and see what bluidy well happens next?” Michael demanded between his teeth.
They looked at each other. Maybe, Rebecca thought, two minds at work could reach some kind of critical inspirational mass. Interesting physics, two substances reaching critical mass without really touching, without really—what had Mark said about Adele?—being quite in the same space-time continuum
? “One thing we can do,” she said, “is look for the warrant.”
“A hint of where to look widna come amiss,” said Michael.
Colin came out of the cottage carrying his suitcase. Elaine held up a measuring stick. Tony knelt on the wall, focusing one of his cameras… .
Rebecca grabbed a handful of Michael’s shirt. “There was a photo on Laurence’s desk—one of the ones Tony took from up here. The cats were poking around in the far corner of the cemetery, where the graves are marked with flat slabs instead of headstones.”
Michael leaped up. “Let’s go!”
They went, first scrambling cautiously down the Law, then skimming past the wheel-cross and around the corner of the church. The dark fronds of the yew tree drooped beneath their burden of moisture. Depending on the type of rock and the degree of weathering, the various headstones either sparkled or stood smudged and stolid. Some of the slabs covered vaults; around those the ground had ebbed, leaving dark, muddy gaps between the rims of stone and earth.
Michael and Rebecca walked past Francis Kerr’s grave and approached the flat slab marking the soldiers’ resting place. The skull and crossbones etched upon it was camouflaged by dirt and moss.
“We ought to try a charcoal rubbing of this one sometime.” Rebecca indicated a sandstone slab covered with script almost as indecipherable as the feathered angel’s wings surrounding it. “I’d like to know who it belonged to. Eighteenth century, I guess.” She bent, resting one hand on the cold, wet, gritty stone. That wasn’t just a gap between the earth and the slab, that was a cavity, the grass flattened at its edge. “Look!”
Michael knelt and rolled up his sleeve. “If something tries to pull me in, will you save me?”
“Yes, dear,” Rebecca replied. From the corner of her eye she caught a movement. She glanced around. Adele stood in the transept door, her mouth turned down. We’re not robbing any graves, Rebecca told her silently.
Dust to Dust Page 19
