"The prospect looms increasingly likely," Adam said grimly. "I couldn't begin to be specific at this point, but U-636 and its crew appear to have been bound up in some nefarious plan - which explains why it should have been brought to our attention."
"You mean, I was somehow directed to find Scanlan's body?" Peregrine asked.
Adam waggled one hand in a yes-and-no gesture. "I don't know that I'd go that far - and I couldn't begin to tell you where your ghost-monk fits in. But there's no getting around the fact that Scanlan was murdered - probably by a man wielding what appears to be an Oriental dagger - and that he did procure a Nazi submarine's flag from somewhere. This all suggests that whoever originally sent out the sub - or their descendants - may well still be functioning - and still deadly."
Peregrine swallowed loudly. "But - Nazi Germany collapsed half a century ago," he said plaintively.
"True enough," Adam agreed. "But the dark forces that fuelled much of its power still flare up occasionally. You surely haven't forgotten what we encountered in the Cairngorms."
"Christ!" McLeod muttered under his breath. "You don't think it's that lot again, do you?"
"I hope not. But I was warned to expect the reappearance of an old enemy." Adam sighed. "I think we'd better see about finding that sub."
"More easily said than done," McLeod retorted. "There's no way we can try that here, especially in light of the whammy Peregrine just got. And I certainly hope you aren't suggesting that we abscond with official evidence."
"Not abscond, no; we'll ask," Adam replied. "But the flag is the only direct link we've got to the sub. And if you can find out where Scanlan was patrolling, when he and his partner went missing, that should narrow down the location before we even start resorting to more drastic measures."
"It's the drastic measures that are worrying me," McLeod grumbled, as Adam carefully gathered up the flag and began folding it. "Even if I could borrow it, how do you propose to get past what zapped Peregrine?"
"I haven't figured that out yet," Adam conceded. "Actually, I doubt it's the flag that's protected; more likely, we're talking about spillover from the sub itself, which is protected. But that can be got around, if I can trace the link back. What I cannot do is make the link without the flag."
Before McLeod could respond, Somerville himself returned, waving a dismissive hand at someone in the outer office as he came in and closed the door behind him. He looked restive and harried, as if whatever business had called him away had not gone as well as he might have hoped.
"Bloody red tape," he muttered under his breath, jerking a chair out from the table and flouncing into it with a sigh. "I hope you gentlemen had better luck than I did."
McLeod glanced obliquely at Adam, who was tucking the flag back into its plastic bag.
"We've come up with a few ideas. But I'll warn you right now, they're nothing you could print in the newspapers without being branded a raving lunatic."
"Not another one of those cases?" Somerville muttered. "Never mind, I don't want to know. Just help me solve this case, and I won't ask any questions that might embarrass us all."
"I hope you mean that," McLeod said, "because in order to test our ideas, Dr. Sinclair and I need to borrow the flag for a day or two."
Somerville's grizzled eyebrows climbed. "That's asking rather a lot, considering it's my name on the sign-out. I can't alter the production book for you, Noel."
"I wouldn't ask it," McLeod said. "Forty-eight hours - and we'd be careful."
"I don't know…"
Adam was familiar with production-log procedure, and fully understood Somerville's concern.
"We'll be more than careful, Inspector," he assured him. "If it would make you feel any happier, Noel and I would be prepared to offer you a solemn pledge to that effect - for the sake of the widow's son."
His use of the Masonic phrase earned him a sharp look from Somerville, who glanced then at McLeod.
"Is he on the level?" he asked.
McLeod inclined his head. "And on the square. It's important, Jack."
"So I gather." The Strathclyde inspector pursed his lips. "If I were to let you have temporary custody of the flag, what exactly would you be planning to do with it?"
"Do you really want to know?" McLeod asked with a wry smile.
"On second thought," Somerville said, "maybe not." He drew a deep breath. "Seeing as how it's you who's asking," he ventured, "I suppose I can let you have the flag on trust. You said forty-eight hours?"
"Hopefully, no longer," McLeod said, with another oblique glance at Adam.
"Quite hopefully," Adam agreed. "At the most, seventy-two."
"This keeps getting more complicated," Somerville grumbled, "but all right. Come on out to the front office while I take care of the necessary paperwork."
"Thanks," McLeod said, handing the flag to Peregrine to deposit in his sketchbox. "I'll make sure you don't regret this."
As the two police officers began heading for the door, Adam summoned Peregrine with a glance and then said, "I think we'll wait for you in the car. I'm going to use your cell phone to make a call."
Lady Julian Brodie's jewellery studio was situated on the upper floor of her handsome Edinburgh town house. Even on grey days, the big windows and louvered skylight kept the room flooded with natural light, sufficient for all but the most exacting work. The walls were lined with low counters supporting a wide array of tools and apparatus, including an enamelling kiln, rolling mills, and a centrifugal casting unit. The air was permanently redolent of hot metal, borax solution, and pickling acids, but years of exposure had rendered Julian cheerfully oblivious to the atmosphere associated with her chosen avocation.
Today, to the background accompaniment of an old D'Oyly Carte recording of The Mikado, she was finishing a commission for an old friend, a graduation present for his granddaughter, soon to receive her law degree. The piece was a golden miniature of a disk-shaped bronze mirror of the T'ang dynasty, the detailing inlaid in silver, the whole thing hardly larger than a 50p. piece. Creating the wax matrix for the design had been a fiercely demanding task, involving much close work under a magnifying glass; but though Julian Brodie was nearly seventy, the infirmity that now confined her to a wheelchair had done nothing to diminish the sharpness of her eye or the steadiness of her hands. She had just begun maneuvering a flawless blue-tinged moonstone into a bezel replacing the center boss of the original design when the telephone chirruped from across the room.
Humming a line from "Three Little Girls from School," Julian spun her wheelchair around and headed over to where she had left the portable telephone she habitually kept near her when left alone in the house, for Grace Fyvie, her live-in companion and housekeeper, had gone out to do the shopping. She turned down the stereo before picking up the phone.
"Bonnybank House."
"Julian, it's Adam," said a familiar male voice. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything critical, but have you got a moment or two to spare?"
"For you, my dear Adam, always," she said warmly. "What can I do for you?"
"I'm ringing on Noel's cell phone," came his tense reply. "I need to pick your brain."
"Of course."
His reminder of the need for circumspection, coupled with a friendship that went back to Adam's earliest childhood, warned her that what was to come was not a casual inquiry.
"I've stumbled onto a rather curious artifact that looks as if it must have come from someplace in the Far East," he told her. "Have you ever seen, or do you know anything about, a sort of Oriental dagger with a triple-edged blade and a hilt carved with some kind of grotesque heads?''