Owen grinned. "It's a bad old world these days, even in sleepy Scotland."
"I guess it always was, what with Sawney the Cannibal
wandering around a few centuries ago. You just don't think of things like that when you see the travel posters. All the castles and kilts and all that."
"Your boyfriend is from Edinburgh, isn't he? I wonder if he knows anything about these cases? Especially the Malcolm guy."
"Don't bet on it." Elizabeth smiled. "Unless one of the killers is a seal, he will have escaped Cameron's notice."
"I wish we could have stayed in Edinburgh longer. I'd like to check newspaper morgues about these cases. See if there were any articles on release dates for these four.''
"You can always do it when we go back," said Elizabeth. "That is, if the police haven't solved Keenan's murder by then."
Owen brightened considerably. "That's right. I might as well give them a sporting chance."
"That's very kind of you, Owen," Elizabeth said with a straight face. "Now, why don't you go and annoy the others with a bagpipe concert?"
CHAPTER
10
TRAVELER'S DIARY
Friday
Cameron is coming tomorrow. For the past three days die sea and sky have been an unbroken line of gray, barely visible through a curtain of rain. The air is wet and smells of salt and kelp, and I am chilled from the inside out. I do not think I am being very successful in my efforts to capture the spirit of the ancient island Celts, unless cabin fever was a problem in the Highlands. Unless one of them once wanted to stand out on the cliff in the rain screaming, "Get me off this island!"
Three days in a Nissen hut with these people ... At least Owen has not played his bagpipes anymore. Denny has been teasing him about playing an American Indian rain dance by mistake, and saying that the rain is all Owen's fault. Owen sulked for most of the day, but since then most of his conversation has been about famous murderers, and he has been pumping the other diggers for their recollections about the cases. Of course, Denny instantly claimed to be one of them, which annoyed Owen still further, and the others made no secret of their disinterest. Actually, of course, no one remembers anything except in a vague jumble, the way we remember the Corn Laws, and I'm afraid Owen is becoming less popular by the minute. He is not the endearing sort of eccentric. He is a bit of a show-off.
Alasdair and Callum (true Scots?) profess not to be bothered by what they call "a little rain," and they spend much of the daylight hours out of the hut, supposedly tramping about the island. I suspect that Callum is exploring the sea cave. Alasdair seems to be indulging his preference for solitude as much as anything, although he does occasionally allow Gitte to go with him, for which I am grateful.
And I have spent most of the leisure time (apart from mapping and so on) as close to the camp stove as I can get, in a nonstop bridge game against Leath and Marchand. Denny overbids. He cannot seem to grasp the idea that the object of the game is to win.
Gitte talks incessantly, which she calls "practicing her English." I don't see why Alasdair doesn't just buy a cocker spaniel and be done with it! Why do some intelligent men like unintellectual women? Is it restful for their egos, or just an answer to the servant problem?
Thank God, I'll be seeing Cameron tomorrow. That thought has enabled me to be civil to everyone throughout this interminable downpour. Cameron seems so pleasant and normal, now that everyone else I know is grating on my nerves.
I am beginning to imagine this island in winter. No wonder the old Scots thought of hell as a cold, wet place. It must have been a grim life. It makes you understand why Celtic and Norse mythology is so pessimistic compared to Greek myths. The Northern people simply couldn't imagine a carefree existence, even for the gods. I just wish the rain would stop.
By the wee hours on Friday morning the drumming of rain on the hut's tin roof had begun to subside, and when Elizabeth peeped out the door just past six, the sky was an encouraging shade of blue. She ran her hand through her jumble of curls, and hoped that one day would be enough time for the frizz to go away.
Denny Allan rounded the corner of the Nissen hut carrying two tin cups of spring water and Tang. "Pill time!" he announced.
Elizabeth took the cup and the capsule, trying to smile. She always felt like a gorgon in the morning, and she wished people wouldn't expect her to be civil before she had lipstick on. Some women could manage the disheveled look, she thought, but she was not among them.
"How's the hand today?" Denny asked.
Elizabeth gulped down her medicine. "Fine," she croaked. "I mean, it isn't infected, but the cut is rather deep. I suppose I could have used stitches, but I'm not very brave about things like that. Anyhow, I put a fresh bandage on it. Is anyone at the burn now? I want to wash up."
"I saw Callum, but he was about finished when I was there. Leath and Marchand have been up for ages, getting ready for today's project. Where's Alasdair?"
Elizabeth made a face. "He has also been up a while. He's
in there helping Gitte make breakfast, and she is simpering like mad."
"Oh, well." Denny smiled. "You know how women are with a foreign boyfriend."
With that he strolled away, leaving Elizabeth to wonder whether or not she had been insulted.
Derek Marchand, delighted with the return of good weather, supervised the assembling of the surveying equipment for measuring the standing stones. As a civil engineer he was in his element with tachymeters and tripods. He had risen at dawn, and the traces of red on the horizon had lifted his spirits immeasurably. His first impulse had been to shake Tom Leath awake and to begin the day at once, but an instant later he decided that he did not want to share these early moments with anyone.
He pulled on a white fisherman's sweater over his turtle-neck and set off inland toward the stones. The peat was still slippery from the previous rains, but to Marchand's nose the air smelled dry and fresh—a further promise that today the work would begin in earnest. The stones were still black shapes in the graying light of morning, and their twisted forms silhouetted against the sky looked oddly graceful, like dancers frozen in place. They seemed to bow to each other and to him, beckoning him closer.
Derek Marchand wondered what dawn it was, or perhaps what moonset, that would make the stones reveal their secret to a waiting communicant. Midsummer, perhaps, or Beltane. He was sure that there was some significance to the standing stones and that the paths of sun and moon were somehow bound to this rine of rock mired in neat on a forgotten island. If you stood just here—or perhaps there, by the tall tapered stone—and looked . . . where? At the mountain? At the smaller island just past the channel? . . . From some such point of reference, on a given day ordained centuries ago, the sun would rise just over one certain stone; or perhaps by standing at one special place within the circle, one could see the moon caught in a fold between two mountains.
The ancient engineers had set it all up to some heavenly purpose, and modern man had yet to determine what it was. Marchand was sure, though, that the extraordinary efforts put forth to construct that monument over a span of decades had not been expended frivolously or for the sake of art. There had been some careful plan at work, perhaps a religious one. He was certain that the circle had been precisely engineered to tell its builders something that they needed to know. The time of the solstice, perhaps, for planting or for worship. What in heaven—literally—had they watched for?
Such determinations were months—perhaps years—away from the work at hand. Before the astronomical significance of the Banrigh stones could be considered, hours of more prosaic measuring had to be done, in order to determine heights, widths, and angles. Marchand thought he might even leave the star-charting to a younger scholar. He doubted that he had the time or the strength to stay for all the answers. He would settle for his short-term goaclass="underline" determining the unit of measurement they had depended on to construct their circle. That was knowledge enough for him. They had not been children, these old ones. For all their quaintness of dress and lifestyle (to modern sensibilities), Marchand did not underestimate them for a moment. Modern scientists achieved a good deal by standing on the shoulders of a host of others whose discoveries had made later ones possible, but these old ones had stood alone, and they had accomplished much. He watched the sun come up over the water and shower the stones with golden light. Far off were wave sounds and the cry of seabirds, but across the stubble of heather, among the standing stones, all was quiet.