Chapter Eighteen

BY the time they had left the M8, heading north to cross the Erskine Bridge, McLeod had filled Peregrine in on the background regarding the Kriegsmarine flag found on Mick Scanlan's body and the submarine it ostensibly had come from. As they linked up with the A82 and began working their way westward toward Dumbarton, Peregrine was shaking his head.

"And I told Julia this was probably going to be uneventful," he murmured. "I'd better tell you about that, too," he went on. "I had to tell her a little bit about us, Adam."

As they drove, Peregrine related the substance of his parting conversation with Julia. Only in the retelling did he fully realize how effectively he had been outguessed and outma-neuvered by his young wife.

"I tried to be discreet, Adam, but I guess those photos had me more rattled than I realized," he concluded. "And she'd deduced so much already, there didn't seem to be any point to trying to sweep everything under the mat. She knows me too well. If there was some better way to handle the situation that escaped me, I'm heartily sorry."

"No, you did exactly right," Adam assured him. "Lies are no proper foundation for a marriage. Quite frankly, I'm surprised the two of you haven't had this conversation long before now - though I've been grateful for the temporary respite. Still, Julia's a very observant and perceptive young woman - as is fitting, if she's to be your life partner. She couldn't help but notice what she did."

"Yes - well, she reacted well enough this time, but what about the next?" Peregrine wanted to know. "Clearly, she can't be privy to the details of our work, but there will be times when I'm in danger. I accept that danger - and I suppose I accepted it for her, unbeknownst to either of us, when I asked her to marry me - but it's hardly fair to keep her totally in the dark."

"No, but it isn't fair to frighten her needlessly, either," Adam replied. "There are dangers to our work, but I might even go so far as to say it's more 'difficult' than 'dangerous,' in the vast majority of cases - rather like more conventional police work, wouldn't you agree, Noel?"

McLeod gave a nod, catching Peregrine's glance in the rearview mirror. "He's right, son. Certainly, a conventional police officer faces danger - there are occasional fatalities - but a lot more of the work is about solving problems, finding out answers, helping people. How did I hear someone put it? 'Stretches of routine punctuated by instants of sheer terror.' The work of the Hunting Lodge is little different in that respect, except that the work is rarely routine."

"I'd have to agree with that" Peregrine said. "Still - Noel, do you and Jane ever talk about your work as a member of the Hunting Lodge?''

"Not in so many words," McLeod said with a tiny smile. "We worked that one out while you were still in short trousers."

"But she does know all about your special abilities, and how you use them?"

"I wouldn't say she knows all about them," McLeod said. "She knows the breadth of my - shall we say, 'hospitality'? And she knows that my writ as an officer of the law extends beyond the limits of the conventional legal system. If we decline to discuss the details, it's by common consent."

Peregrine contemplated this disclosure in silence. After staring out the window for several minutes, he asked, "How did it come about? - that she became aware of your gifts, I mean. Did you just decide one day to tell her?"

"Hardly as simple as that," McLeod said with a snort. "No, as it happened, it came as a revelation to us both."

Peregrine had never before ventured to ask how McLeod had originally become involved in the Hunting Lodge, so he listened avidly as the older man continued speaking of his own accord.

"It was a good twenty years ago. I'd just recently been promoted to detective sergeant, and was called out early one morning to investigate a burglary at a small country house museum, just this side of Dunbar. In fact, it was a lot like that place that had the Hepburn Sword stolen from it, just before you met Adam." Peregrine shifted to lean slightly forward between the two front seats as McLeod went on.

"Among the items reported stolen was a silver cross set with cairngorms, which had been handed over as part of the museum grant when old Sir Andrew Cockburn died, back in the early sixties. When I arrived at the crime scene, one of the curators told me the cross had been gifted to one of Sir Andrew's ancestors by Mary Queen of Scots herself - which made it a family heirloom beyond price.

"The job itself had been carried out by a team of professionals," McLeod continued. "No fingerprints, no wanton vandalism - just a clean sweep of everything worth taking. Burglaries like that don't leave the police with much to go on. When I drove back to Edinburgh that afternoon, I wasn't very sanguine about recovering any of the artifacts that had been stolen. Then, when I went to bed that night, I had a curious dream.

"I woke up - or thought I'd woken up - to the sound of somebody knocking at the front door. When I went downstairs to see who it was, I found an elderly white-haired gentleman standing outside on the step. He introduced himself as Sir Andrew Cockburn, and informed me that he could lead me to the crooks. He asked me very politely if he could come in, and without stopping to think, I said yes. The next thing I remember is waking up in the office of a priest who shall remain nameless, with my wife holding my hand."

At Peregrine's gasp, McLeod glanced back over his shoulder with a grin.

"Turns out, I'd been taken over by the spirit of old Cockburn himself," he continued reminiscently. "As keeper of the family cross, he'd developed an affinity with it over the years. With that affinity to guide him, he knew where the cross was to be found after the robbery, even if he didn't know who'd taken it. All he needed was the right person to use as a medium."

"You," said Peregrine.

"Me," McLeod agreed. He gave a short laugh. "Jane would be the first to tell you that it scared the hell out of her when she realized that the person sitting across from her at breakfast wasn't actually me. Oh, he promptly introduced himself, and assured her that I was in no danger, but he kept repeating that he had to give a message to someone in authority."

He grinned. "Fortunately, Jane was quick to realize that he didn't mean my police superiors - it would have been the end of my career. She also rightly surmised that this probably wasn't something that would make the minister of our kirk too happy."

"I should say not," Peregrine murmured, spellbound.

"Anyway, she rang a lady friend who'd dabbled in seances and the like, and the lady friend referred her to a local Anglo-Catholic priest who was sympathetic to such occurrences and understood exactly what happened and why. He verified that the possession wasn't satanic or anything like that, then brought me safely out of my trance, after taking down the information that my 'tenant,' Sir Andrew, had to impart.

"And that information led to the successful retrieval of the cross and a number of other items from the robbery. I wasn't to learn until much later that the good father - who's dead now, God rest him, though he later became a bishop - was a member of the same Hunting Lodge as Philippa Sinclair.'' Adam's mother. As far as Peregrine was concerned, this single revelation supplied the answers to many hitherto tantalizing questions.

"I can see why you and Jane wouldn't have many secrets from one another," he said after a moment. "But doesn't she worry about you?''

He shrugged. "A cop's life can be dangerous; she knew that when she married me. I don't suppose that adding an extra dimension to my jurisdiction increases the danger all that much; after all, we do have astral tools for astral enforcement."

"Am I really supposed to reassure Julia by telling her thatT' Peregrine said.

"Of course not," Adam said, finally joining the discussion. "But don't sell Julia short. Beneath that fetchingly girlish exterior beats a heart of true steel - a quality for which you may have cause to be thankful one day."

"So I shouldn't tell her any more?" Peregrine asked.

"I'd keep it on a need-to-know basis," Adam replied. "You'll know when more or less information is appropriate. In the meantime, I see the signs coming up for Dumbarton. Where's this hospital, Noel?"

"Actually, it's in Alexandria, a few miles past Dumbarton," the inspector replied, scanning the signs ahead. "The police mortuary is at Vale of Leven Hospital. Shout out when you see a sign. I know the central Glasgow area pretty well, but a lot of this is new out here."

They whisked past the outskirts of Dumbarton, with its stone-built houses and crowstepped roofs, arriving at Vale of Leven Hospital with minutes to spare. The police mortuary was housed in a separate building from the main hospital, clearly signposted, and they parked adjacent to its entrance. They were met in the lobby by a young man in plain clothes who introduced himself as Detective Angus Murray, from L-Division of the Strathclyde Police. After giving McLeod's credentials a cursory inspection, Murray led them along a dimly lit corridor and through a glass-panelled door into a small room functionally furnished as a staff lounge.

Jack Somerville was there ahead of them, a husky, balding man half a head shorter than McLeod and muscled like a wrestler, heatedly discussing rugby standings with an athletic-looking younger man with an Irish accent. Listening indulgently was a diminutive grey-haired woman in hornrimmed spectacles and green surgical scrubs who turned out to be Vale of Leven's resident pathologist, Dr. Margaret Gow. The Irishman was introduced as Detective Sergeant Ernan Ryan, sent over from the Garda Siochana in Dublin.

"We're only waiting on Dr. Macaulay," Somerville explained in his gravelly bass. "He's on staff at Southern General, coming across to be our independent consultant. He should be here any minute."

This announcement coincided with a stir back down the hall, followed by the sound of a door opening and closing.

"Och, just stay where you are, Detective," a tenor voice said good-naturedly. "I know my way well enough from here."

Muffled footsteps approached; then the door swung open to reveal a lanky, lantern-jawed man with bright, dark eyes peering out from under an untidy fringe of black hair. Though Dr. Macaulay would have towered head and shoulders above his female colleague if he stood straight, his posture was somewhat bowed from many hours spent bending over operating tables and peering through microscopes.

"Sorry I'm a bit late," he announced to the room at large. "Meg, if you'd be kind enough to introduce me to these gentlemen, we can suit up and get on with the afternoon's business."

A quarter hour later, with introductions tendered all around, both Macaulay and the police observers had exchanged their street attire for green surgical scrubs and seemingly incongruous rubber boots and shifted their venue to the theatre where the post-mortem would be performed. Peregrine had a sketch pad and pencil clutched to his breast. Scrubbed white tiles lined the walls and floors under a bank of high-intensity lights, and several stainless-steel buckets flanked a drain in the middle of the floor, directly underneath the stainless-steel table that occupied center stage. As a mortuary attendant wheeled in a green-sheeted form on a gurney, Peregrine found himself wondering whether the buckets were for the benefit of weak-stomached observers or were meant to contain more grisly offerings.

A faint whiff of decay tickled at his nostrils as Macaulay helped the attendant shift the body onto the stainless-steel table, and Peregrine retreated to the foot of the table with McLeod. The array of shiny surfaces reminded him queasily of a cross between a veterinary surgery and a prep-school biology lab, and the refrigerated air was cold enough to make the breath turn to frost between his teeth. Despite the sterile chill and the operative hum of the ventilating system, the air smelt strongly of clinical disinfectants - but not strongly enough. Detective Murray came to stand on McLeod's other side, already beginning to look unwell.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gow was slipping a series of X rays under the clips of a bank of light-boxes to one side, pulling on surgical gloves as she beckoned for Macaulay to have a look. Adam moved to the head of the table with Somerville and Ryan, also casting a professional eye over the X rays. As the two police surgeons came back to the table, taking positions on either side, McLeod casually interposed himself between Peregrine and Murray - which Peregrine realized would afford him a greater degree of privacy once he began sketching.

Pausing to switch on the overhead lights and video recorder at the head of the table, Dr. Gow stripped back the body's covering to the waist, announced the date and time, then began her description and external examination of the body.

"Subject is a well-nourished male Caucasian, approximately thirty years of age, previously identified by next of kin as Michael Alan Scanlan, an Irish national. Police surgeons attending: Dr. Margaret Gow, Vale of Leven Hospital, and Dr. Richard Macaulay, Southern General."

When she had also rattled off the names and functions of all the witnesses present - no mean feat, by Peregrine's reckoning - she and Macaulay examined the body's head injury, then got down to work.

Somewhat removed from too direct a view, Peregrine managed to remain reasonably detached through the initial phase of the procedure by working quick anatomical sketches; he had done similar exercises in art school. As the autopsy progressed, however, he found cause to be glad that he had not eaten much lunch. The cold room felt suddenly hot and stifling; he became aware of a roaring in his ears. The reek of decay and blood and other bodily fluids made the bile rise in the back of his throat, and he found himself swallowing convulsively to keep from gagging.

He glanced surreptitiously at his fellow observers to see how they were bearing up. Not unexpectedly, Adam's composure surpassed even the professional detachment evidenced by his medical colleagues, a compassion akin to reverence stirring his patrician features. Peregrine had the feeling that nothing, not even this clinical butchery, could make his superior lose sight of Scanlan as a once-living being, possessed of an immortal soul that would survive such violation of the earthly temple it had once occupied.

By contrast, the two surgeons seemed more casual, sometimes even flippant, though Peregrine soon realized that their apparent breeziness masked righteous dismay for the fate of this young man cut down so untimely. McLeod was stoically impassive, as was his heavyset counterpart from Strathclyde; Ryan looked a little queasy but determined to stick it out. When Macaulay fired up a miniature electric saw, and the stench of fragmented bone joined the other smells of the post-mortem theatre, Murray chose that moment to hurriedly excuse himself, decidedly green around the gills.

Looking away, Peregrine caught sight of his own face mirrored off various metallic surfaces round the room - pasty white, the eyes slightly hollowed behind their wire-rimmed spectacles, lips grimly set. To distract himself and regain some perspective, he turned to a fresh page in his sketch pad, shifting position as the two surgeons turned their subject onto his stomach to inspect the back wound. Taking a firmer grip on his pencil, Peregrine forced himself to resume sketching, not looking at the long probe that Dr. Gow inserted into the wound, testing the limits of the laceration, searching for anything left behind.

"Point of entry is between the eighth and ninth ribs, approximately eight centimeters to the left of midline; depth of the wound is approximately - eighteen centimeters…."

Peregrine's sketches from this angle began as anatomical studies like the first ones, though he was uncomfortably aware of the closer connection of death with the wound Dr. Gow was examining. By concentrating on details of contour and musculature he was able to regain some much-needed objectivity, but very shortly his perceptions began spontaneously to shift, mediating between levels of awareness. Almost before he was aware of what he was doing, he found himself drawing on the astral.

His physical eyesight grew blurred; the sounds all around receded. This blunting of his external faculties signalled the imminent release of his inner vision, insulating him from his earlier horror. Like a hawk upheld by the wind, he ascended out of himself to hover serenely within the stillness of the Inner Planes.

Increasingly detached, he watched as a few bold strokes defined the emergent image of the dead man suspended head-downward in midair, as if he were falling. Protruding from his back was the ornate hilt of a strange, clumsy-looking dagger.

Squinting at the body, Peregrine let his deep sight focus on the weapon, turning to another page. At once a more detailed sketch began to take shape beneath his pencil - first, a triangular cross section of the blade, with the slight indentations of fullers, or blood grooves; then a detail of the hilt attached to the blade embedded in the dead man's back - an intricately modelled collage of demonic faces, hideously contorted in a variety of snarls and leers.

He saw it clearly in his mind's eye; his hand obeyed him, sketching its details. But as he bent to the fine detailing, he became simultaneously aware of a growing strain on the silver cord holding body and soul together. With a final stroke to the sketch, he allowed the re-fusion, briefly closing his eyes against the now-familiar pang of disorientation and vertigo. Swaying slightly, he pulled himself up and realized that Somerville and Dr. Macaulay were directing curious glances his way.

Hastily he flipped over to another blank page to hide the dagger drawing and began another quick sketch. As he did so, he caught a look of unspoken inquiry from Adam, but his only response was a fleeting grin and a small shrug. He had Seen something, all right; but determining the significance of what he had Seen would have to wait until he and Adam and McLeod had a chance to review his drawings together in private.

Half an hour later it was all over. The official verdict handed down by the two pathologists was that Michael Scan-Ian had died from massive internal hemorrhage as a result of a stab wound to the back. Beyond this primary fact, however, many of the other aspects of the case remained open to speculation. As they gathered in the coffee room afterwards, shed of their surgical scrubs, Somerville and his medical colleagues were engaged in a debate on the possible identity of the murder weapon.

"We're definitely talking about something with a triangular cross-section," Dr. Gow observed, setting down her coffee mug. "In addition, the damage to the ribs at the point of entry suggests a degree of force more consistent with the penetrating power of a projectile weapon. The head injury was serious, but the wound was the proximate cause of death. There was virtually no fluid at all in the lungs. The man must have been dying even as he hit the water."

"Could the weapon have been some kind of spear - something like a harpoon, maybe? " Garda Sergeant Ryan asked. "We're working on the possibility that he and his partner ran afoul of illegal fishermen. It's the sort of weapon that might be used in a hot confrontation."

The two forensic surgeons exchanged glances. "That's not a bad guess, as guesses go," Macaulay said, "except that the wound itself is far too neat."

"A harpoon is barbed so that it won't come free without tearing the surrounding flesh," Dr. Gow pointed out. "Whatever implement made this wound came out as cleanly as it went in."

While the physicians and investigators continued to speculate, Peregrine quietly drew Adam and McLeod aside and showed them the drawings he had made of the dagger.

"This is what made the wound," he whispered, "though I obviously can't show it to them. I'm not sure what it is, though. Any ideas?"

McLeod gave a dissatisfied grunt and shook his head. "Beats me. I'd guess it's Oriental, though - or maybe South American."

"I'd vote for Oriental," Adam said, "but I don't pretend to be a expert on Oriental weaponry. Fortunately, there's someone in our immediate circle who is extremely well versed in Oriental artifacts - and I seem to recall something vaguely similar to this in one of her display cabinets. I think a call to Julian is in order."

"Aye, she'll know," McLeod concurred with a grim smile. "Or she can find out. Say, you don't suppose this is what Peregrine's ghost-monk was holding in his hand? Where are those photos, son?"

Opening his sketchbox, ostensibly to put away his sketch pad, Peregrine unearthed the best of the ghost-monk photos, with the blade-like extension between the monk's clasped hands.

"I think maybe that is what I was trying to see, when I took this shot," he said.

"I'd say you're probably right," Adam agreed. "And I'd say there's also an excellent chance that this is, indeed, the murder weapon. I'll certainly ring Julian before we leave here. And in the meantime, I wouldn't mind a look at that flag Somerville mentioned."

McLeod heaved himself to his feet with a nod. "I'll ask him about it," he said as Peregrine closed up his box. "Under the circumstances, I'm sure something can be arranged."

Somerville, when McLeod drew him to one side, proved as cooperative as predicted.

"Of course you can have a look," he murmured. "All Scanlan's personal effects are being stored in the local lockup until the procurator fiscal agrees to release them to the family. I've got to go along there anyway, to make my report. Why don't you follow me there?"

At the station in nearby Alexandria, Somerville showed McLeod and his associates into a side office and then disappeared, returning a few minutes later with a large storage carton with Scanlan's name affixed to it.

"I hope you won't mind if I abandon you for a few minutes," he told them. "I've got some phone calls to make. You'd think no one at headquarters can do anything, judging by the number of messages I've got waiting. Take all the time you want to go through this stuff. If you finish before I can get back to you, and you need to leave, just give a shout for the desk sergeant and he'll return the box to the safe. I've signed it out, so I'm responsible."

Most of the box was filled with Scanlan's clothing - his bright orange life-vest, the black-and-orange survival suit he had been wearing, the knitted black boiler suit that went underneath like long Johns, a few personal items from his inside pockets. Both suits had triangular tears in the back, though the sea had washed away all traces of his blood. Adam fingered the hole in the survival suit thoughtfully before laying it aside.

The flag was at the bottom of the carton, wrapped in a plastic bag. Pulling it out, McLeod shook out the folds of fine wool, stained by the salt water but otherwise as bright as the day it had been made. His expression was one of mingled fascination and distaste as he passed it to Adam for his inspection.

"I wonder if Scanlan did get this thing off a German U-boat," he murmured.

"I wonder, indeed," Adam agreed. "Peregrine, I don't suppose you can See anything that might be helpful?"

As Adam held out the flag, Peregrine found himself suppressing a shiver.

"Nothing immediate comes to mind," he whispered. "If you want, I suppose I could try handling it…."

"Don't, if it makes you uncomfortable," Adam said.

"No, it's all right."

Drawing a deep breath to ground himself, Peregrine picked up the flag in his two hands. It was slightly stiff from its saltwater immersion; he could smell its mustiness, the salt tang of the sea, as he raised it closer to his face. Everything else around him softened and blurred as he centered his attention on the folds of scarlet and black and white.

The image of the flag itself grew harshly articulate, its color and design impinging on his inner sight with fierce intensity. But when he tried to penetrate beyond that image, the picture itself suddenly exploded.