Most of the other members of the tour—a women's group from a local church—had been released almost immediately. The archaeologists had been detained, waiting in uncomfortable wooden chairs while the police questioned Adam Lyal himself. Owen wondered why he felt so guilty. Suppose he had to take a lie detector test. What if he failed it simply because he was having an anxiety attack? He wondered if the British police allowed one the customary phone call, and whether the American consul to Scotland would have his home phone number listed in the directory.
Adam Lyal, deceased, had wiped off most of his white stage makeup from the evening's performance, but he still managed to look decidedly pale. The unscheduled demise of a tourist was one surprise that he had not incorporated into the evening's entertainment. As he explained the premise of the tour for the fourth time that evening, he leaned back in the dented metal chair and looked at the linoleum floor instead of at the spotty youth in blue who was meticulously printing Adam Lyal at the top of his notebook. Gently the guide corrected him, providing the spelling of his real name. The constable looked at him suspiciously: an alias. Adam Lyal was sure that he had just been promoted to the top of a short list of suspects, but he was too tired and worried to be amused.
"Have they found my partner yet?" he asked the young police constable who was taking the statement.
P. C. Hendry took a long look at the smeared vampire makeup and the rumpled black cloak. "There were two of you?"
The tour guide nodded impatiently. "I must have explained this half a dozen times by now! Don't you people talk to each other? When we give the murder tour, I lead the people round and do the commentary; my partner waits for us along the route and makes various surprise entrances in disguise to liven up the tour. Have you found him yet?"
"You are saying then, sir, that it was he who murdered—"
"No, of course, I'm not saying that! Somebody coshed him, and took his place in Fishers Close. You have to find him!"
"I'm sure it's being seen to," the constable said soothingly, scribbling a word on his notepad. "Now, how well did you know the gentleman who was murdered?"
"I hadn't any idea who he was," Lyal replied. "People phone up to reserve a place on the tour, but I don't meet them beforehand. In fact, it is so dark when we begin that I scarcely see them at all."
"Well, we can help you there," P. C. Hendry told him. "There'll be plenty of light in the morgue, and you can go along and look at him for as long as you like. But we have made a tentative identification of the deceased. He was an Englishman called Kevin Keenan. Does that help?"
Lyal shook his head. "Quite a lot of the people who take the tour are from out of town. I take them round in the dark for an hour and never see them again.''
"Did the deceased say anything to you during the tour?"
Adam Lyal almost laughed at the constable’s formal phrasing. I wonder how many American cop shows he watches per week, he thought. Next he'll be making references to the perpetrator. Suppressing a smile, he turned his attention back to the matter at hand. "Wait . . . somebody asked me a stupid question. What was it? Oh, yes! Whether John Donald Merrett's house was on the tour. But I don't think he asked it. I seem to remember an American accent."
P. C. Hendry hesitated, as if trying to determine what to say next. Sometimes, he decided, you had to give a little information in order to get some. "It sounds like the sort of question Mr. Keenan might have asked," he said. "Considering who he was."
At that moment the door opened, and another officer signaled for their attention. "We've just found the other gentleman who runs the tour," he told Hendry. "He's on his way to hospital with a head injury."
"Thank God for that!" said Adam Lyal. "I've been afraid he was dead."
P. C. Hendry's lips twitched. "No, sir," he said. "Excepting the victim tonight, you are still the only one deceased."
In the end Owen had decided against routing the American consul general out of bed, but as he was led away to be questioned, he implored Elizabeth not to leave him alone at the police station. She promised they would wait for him.
"Of course he didn't do it!" Elizabeth said to no one in particular. "He was standing right beside me when the man was stabbed!"
Cameron and Denny ignored her. "Gangs, do you suppose ?" asked Cameron. "One hears of such things in Glasgow."
Denny shrugged. "It's possible, of course, but there was no robbery, and surely that fellow was a bit too old to be mixed up in such things."
"Will I need my passport?" Elizabeth asked. "They always say not to carry it with you, don't they? Or is it not to leave it anywhere?" She began to rummage through her purse.
"I hope they're not planning to make us stay in town," said Denny. "Imagine telling the old man that the dig has been held up because of a murder.''
Cameron smiled. "They can hardly detain an entire tour. I believe the parish auxiliary has already been sent home. I think they just want to get the paperwork done. Find out if anyone saw anything, and of course we didn't."
Elizabeth looked up. "I did."
"No," said Cameron. "I mean, if we noticed anything about the killer. All of us saw it happen, more or less, but it was so dark and sudden that we hadn't time to take it in."
"I did."
Denny grinned. "Two days in Edinburgh, and the killer turned out to be somebody you knew, Elizabeth?"
She blushed. 'Of course not! But I did notice his feet. Or rather I noticed the feet of the other one. Adam Lyal's accomplice, I mean. After the first two times, when I was just as startled as everyone else, I noticed that he was wearing white socks and sneakers. His costume always changed, but his footwear didn't. After a while I started looking around for him, because, of course, he was going on ahead and waiting for us to catch up. Once I spotted him waiting for us
across the street from one of the closes. But the person who came in during the plague speech—the killer—wasn't wearing white socks and sneakers."
Cameron sighed. "So you've just cleared the other tour guide, who has no doubt been found coshed behind an ash-can by now. Very helpful indeed, dear."
If Owen had not reappeared just then, Elizabeth was sure that there would have been a major Anglo-American disagreement, because her reply would have contained a particularly Anglo-Saxon four-letter word of which Cameron disapproved thoroughly. It was an unladylike utterance, he had informed her more than once. Elizabeth found this attitude very confusing, not only because Cameron himself used the word quite often in reacting to heavy traffic and minor injuries, but also because she had just that afternoon read the Dawson family newspaper and discovered that most of page three consisted of a bosomy young woman, nude from the waist up. When she had asked his brother Ian about this unusual feature for a family newspaper, he seemed surprised that she'd noticed; page three, he explained, was always like that. Elizabeth thought that it was quite hypocritical of Cameron to quibble about a figure of speech and then to drag girlie pictures into the house every day without giving it a second thought. British morals, she decided, were not what she would call consistent.
If he continued to make gentle jokes at her expense for Denny's amusement, they might have words about the British attitude toward women as well, she thought.
Owen, looking more like his Saint Bernard puppy self, interrupted these mutinous thoughts with news of his own.