He appeared to have enjoyed his session with the police hugely.
"I got the constable's autograph!'' he announced, in tones suggesting possession of the Hope Diamond, or at least a winning lottery ticket.
"That I would like to have seen," murmured Denny, picturing the spotty young policeman's reaction to celebrity status.
"He was a nice guy," Owen assured them. "Asked me all kinds of stuff about Disney World. Which I haven't been to, but I was able to advise him not to make hotel reservations near his cousin's place in Pittsburgh, and then plan to drive down to Orlando for the day." He shook his head. "Boy, you people are really hazy on distances here."
Denny raised his eyebrows. "Did the subject of the recent murder happen to crop up?" he inquired.
Owen nodded, his enthusiasm undampened by the sarcasm. "Sure did! Do you know who that guy was?"
"Elizabeth seems to." Cameron grinned.
Owen ignored the bait. "His name was Kevin Keenan." No signs of recognition lit the feces of his listeners. "Well, I'd never heard of him, either," he admitted. "I just thought you guys might have. He was a reporter for the World Star. A lady cop came in while I was talking to Donald, and she said they'd called his newspaper back in Britain."
"England!" said Cameron in menacing tones. Why couldn't the bloody Americans get their terms straight? Britain for the whole country; England, Scotland, or Wales for wherever you happened to be.
"Whatever!" Owen shrugged. "Anyhow, she was telling Donald that they said it sounded like Kevin Keenan, from
the description on the phone. And you'll never guess what he was doing in Scotland!" Without waiting for the clever remarks that would surely follow, Owen supplied the answer himself. "He was working on a story for his newspaper."
Cameron shrugged. "The World Star is a scandal sheet. I wouldn't use it to wrap fish in."
"So different from the high journalistic standards of your own dear newspaper," Elizabeth purred.
Denny frowned. "Stop bickering, both of you. Owen, I can't think how you got the police to take you into their confidence, but—"
Owen looked uneasy. "Well, when the policewoman came in, I said I had to go to the toilet. But I left the door a bit ajar so that I could hear what they said."
Cameron smirked. "How very—" A glance at Elizabeth told him that it would be as much as his life was worth to complete that sentence with the word American, as he'd planned, "—resourceful," he finished lamely.
"You'll never guess what he was working on!"
"Tell us," Denny suggested.
"He was doing a piece on famous murderers. A where-are-they-now article!"
Cameron blinked. "What do you mean, where are they now? Peterhead, I should think. And Barlinnie, and Wormwood Scrubbs, and Strangeways—"
"No, not that," said Owen. "Now that you people have abolished capital punishment, most killers get out sooner or later. I guess they go somewhere and start new lives, maybe change their names, if they were well known."
"And then this reporter comes barging into their lives,
telling everyone about their past. No wonder someone murdered him!" Elizabeth said.
"I wonder who he was looking for in Edinburgh," said Owen. "Merrett has been dead for years. Madeline Smith, the poisoner, died in the twenties. One of the Moors Murderers was from Glasgow; but they're not out, are they?"
"Oh, give it up, Owen!" Denny said. "Keenan's murder was probably not related to his story at all. And even if it were, the murderer would turn out to be some druggie that nobody ever heard of.''
"I suppose so," said Owen, dampened by this dose of common sense.
"And besides," Cameron said, "after tomorrow, you'll be stuck on a barren island in the Hebrides. So there'll be no chance for you to play detective anyhow."
Owen wasn't listening. "A not-so-reformed killer loose in Edinburgh," he mused. "I wonder how Keenan found him?"
CHAPTER
7
CAMERON
We left Edinburgh early on Sunday morning, when the streets were empty and all the shops were shut, thus relieving Elizabeth of having to decide whether or not she could live without the teddy bear in Waterston's window, the one decked out in the MacPherson tartan.
Perhaps she would have decided against him, anyway; he might have been out of place where she was going, which seemed to be the eighteenth century.
In the car's tape deck she put a cassette of Gaelic folk songs, of which neither of us understands a word, although she claims to know "instinctively" what the songs are generally about. She has learned a few phrases of the language out of one of her interminable books, but her pronunciation is arbitrary, and her fluency nil. Still, whatever ghosts she expects to find in the Highlands would think her very pretty: her hair falls about her shoulders in soft waves, and her dark eyes have a new sparkle of anticipation. She was wearing a white tapestry skirt and a teal-blue shawl of lambswool, acquired during one of her raids on Princes Street. I said that I hoped she had more suitable clothing for grubbing about in the dirt on Banrigh, and she made a face at me and said I had the soul of a chartered accountant, and that the stone circle on the island was a Celtic cathedral. I replied that she could rinse off the sacred soil in holy water if she wanted to, but she'd better add two cups of Clorox besides. (We were not amused.)
She paid hardly any attention at all to Glasgow. It is too rough and modern. Its monoliths are bustling office buildings of glass and steel, rooted in concrete, rather than the abandoned stone circles of the Hebrides, drifting in mist and heather. She did not want to stop; nothing there caught her interest. The Highlands were waiting.
So we left the twentieth century, a rapidly diminishing vista in the rear-view mirror, and side by side in my brother's green Moggie Thou, we went our separate ways.
"Oh, ye'll tak' the high road an' I'll tak' the low road." Elizabeth is too fond of explaining to people that the song refers to the differing means of travel used by mortals and fairy folk. The high road would be the motorway of today, and the low road is the magic passageway used by the Daoine Sidhe to reach their destinations in the twinkling of an eye. "An' I'll be in Scotland before ye." But will you come to the same place?
Because we started out with different memories, we were going to different destinations. The Highlands to me was scout camporees on the banks of Loch Ness and long stretches of country roads perfect for trying out my motorbike on weekends away from college. But Elizabeth was taking the low road north. She had visited the Highlands in a stack of books on history and folklore: on her A82 the Campbells massacred the MacDonalds in the glen of weeping, shadowed by Buchaille Etive Mor, the rock bastion that supposedly shepherds the pass. Her A830 is a scattering of loch-shore caves where the Bonnie Prince hid after the disaster of Culloden.
There are no billboards or convenience stores to pull her back into the twentieth century, and she wrapped herself in the unintelligible Gaelic songs, overlooking the modernity of car and well-paved road.
When she talked to me, it was to tell me tales I'd never heard about the fairy folk, who hid the Sleeping Warriors in the Hollow Hills, in case Britain should ever need them again. And stories of Ossian and Cuchulain, who fought the Norsemen with cold iron and magic. She's had it all out of her books; these tales were not handed down at the fireside by her MacPherson kin, who must all have forgotten about their point of origin several generations before Elizabeth herself existed. Perhaps they had good reason to forget. Such as the New World was two centuries ago, with disease and Indians and only pockets of civilization in a great howling wilderness, the people who went there must have had desperate reasons for going. The Scotland she has returned to is not the one they left; nor is she—the middle-class, college-educated, well-spoken young lady—the same MacPherson who departed these shores so long ago. She could find no more distant strangers, I think, than the ghosts of her own ancestors.