The Murder Hole (29 page)

Oh my God
. Jean’s mind leaped and
skidded. Her ears buzzed. She realized her hands were pressed to
her face—she could smell the odor of bread and of the rotting book
on her own fingertips.
Oh my God
.

The front door of the house opened with a
crash and a clatter of the knocker. “What is it?” shouted a male
voice. And just behind him came a woman’s, “What’s happened?”

Jean couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. It
was all she could do simply to stand, there beside Tracy Dempsey’s
dead body.

If the scene by the roadside earlier that
night had seemed like an impressionist picture, now Jean felt as
though she’d fallen into a non-representational painting, something
by Pollock, perhaps, all splatters and smears . . . There was an
unfortunate image.

The constable was talking into his small
radio unit. No matter that he’d been inside. He could have been
standing right here, and he could have done nothing to stop Tracy
from falling.

Falling? Jean’s gaze darted upward. She had
seen movement in the tower room. Whoever it was should have been
rushing down to the terrace—assuming Tracy had fallen, assuming she
hadn’t been pushed, because if she’d been pushed . . .

If Tracy had been pushed, then there was no
debating whether her death was an accident. Maybe Jonathan’s death
was an accident. Maybe the sideswipe by the car was an accident.
This, though, this was murder.

The shiver rising from Jean’s cold feet met
the shiver flowing outward from the splash of that word in her
mind. Wrapping her arms tightly around her chest, trying to quell
her trembling, she shrank away from Tracy’s broken body—one step,
two steps, three.

Kirsty appeared through the mirk and mist,
wearing slippers and a robe over loose pajamas. The color drained
from her face, leaving her complexion fish-belly white. Even her
lips, the lower one caught between her teeth, were gray.

“Have you got a blanket, Miss?” the constable
asked her.

She didn’t react.

“A blanket, Miss?” repeated the
constable.

Kirsty’s stare moved from Tracy’s empty face
to his intent one. She whispered, “Oh. Aye.” She plodded into the
house and several long moments later returned with a red and blue
knitted afghan that might have been one of Iris’s cottage industry
samples. The constable shook it out and laid it over Tracy’s body,
over her sweatshirt and jeans and athletic shoes, like a flag
draped over a coffin.

The blanket helped give her mortality a
little dignity, a little privacy. But the image of Tracy’s blank
staring eyes was printed on Jean’s retina. The scream, outraged,
terrified, scraped her senses like fingernails against a
chalkboard. Murder. It had come to murder at last.

There was Martin Hall, wearing only a pair of
jeans, his shoulders bony and his chest concave. His face was a
mask, eyes wide, mouth flapping open and shut again. Faintly he
said, “Tracy? Tracy, what, how . . .” With a sharp glance at the
constable and then at Jean, he tightened his lips into a slit.

The lights went on in an upper room, and the
curtains flew back, and Dave and Patti’s ample shapes jostled each
other in the window. Jean wondered where the rest of audience
was—no sign of the Bouchards, and the cat was probably halfway to
Edinburgh by now.

If she’d listened to Alasdair, she’d be
halfway to Edinburgh . . . No. Doubly no, now.

A police car turned into the driveway, its
pulsing blue lights sending waves of sickly sheen over the watching
faces. Doors slammed. Footsteps raced. “Miss Fairbairn. Miss
Wotherspoon.”

She looked around. She recognized that
youthful, puzzled face. Gunn.

“What happened? What did you see?”

“I was standing here,” Jean said. “She fell.
There was someone in the upper room.”

“She was lying here,” said Kirsty.

Martin said nothing.

Gunn waited, but Jean had nothing else to
offer and the others looked as though they couldn’t have spelled
their own names. At last he said, “You’d better be getting yourself
inside. The lot of you.”

Oh yes. Please. Thank you
. Jean turned
toward the Lodge. Only then did she realize her feet were so cold
and numb they felt like ice-filled galoshes. Her knee twinged and
she lurched. Gunn seized her forearm. His hand seemed small, his
grip tentative next to Alasdair’s. Feeling older than a centenarian
now, like a set of bones echo-located by one of Roger’s sensors,
Jean allowed Gunn to walk her toward the Lodge.

Another car roared up the drive, and another.
Alasdair’s strong arm around her shoulders pulled her away from
Gunn and pressed her so tightly against his side that his deep
intake of breath reverberated through her own body. He was wearing
blue jeans. And a sweatshirt. Beneath a yellow police jacket. She’d
only ever seen him in a suit and tie. And in a kilt, getting in
touch with his inner peacock. Now he’d look as though he was
getting in touch with his inner punk if his face hadn’t been set in
such stern lines she could have chiseled stone with it: On
Duty.

Alasdair placed her inside the Lodge. The
tiled entry seemed warm to her feet, and the lights, modest as they
were, seemed garish. When he removed his arm from her shoulders and
turned back toward the courtyard, she felt fragile and transparent,
not like fine crystal but like cheap plastic. “Alasdair?” she
asked.

He stopped, silhouetted against the glow of
lights. “Jean?”

“I was standing there when she fell. Someone
was in the upper room. I don’t know who it was. They ran away, but
I didn’t see anyone come out the tower door.”

“There’s a second door, into the house.
You’re saying she was pushed?”

“She had to . . . someone had to . . . yes.”
Jean waved her hands, groping after the right words. “Listen, I
know this isn’t a good time, I just . . . I’m sorry about what I
said earlier, and there’s some stuff in the transcripts you need to
know, and about the submersible and Roger, and that toy Nessie in
the press kit, there was a bug in it . . .”

A cacophony of voices rose from the
courtyard. Multiple yellow jackets swirled like autumn leaves.

Alasdair’s eyes flashed, but all he said was,
“Lock your doors. We’ll have us a blether the morn.” And he was
gone, off to the wars, leaving her with only that swift compression
and breath to hint at the riptides swirling beneath his
professional armor.

Jean locked the door. Alasdair, she thought,
would make tea. He’d search the Lodge. He wouldn’t loom over her,
not this time, even though a good masculine loom would actually
have been comforting, now.

Her stomach gagged at the thought of tea. Her
brain gagged at searching the Lodge—it had been searched already,
by an expert . . . She’d stood there in the courtyard, her back
turned to the open door, plenty long enough for someone to sneak
inside. Although, if the evildoer was in the tower pushing Tracy,
he or she would have had to move fast to get down the stairs and
through the second door, wherever it was, and around the back of
the house into the Lodge.

But why? She didn’t want an answer to that,
but one came to her anyway. Dressed down, in the dark, Tracy would
look like Jean. If the driver of the attack car thought it was
Tracy walking with Roger earlier, then the opposite could be just
as true. Whoever pushed Tracy out of the window might have thought
they were pushing Jean. And yet it was Roger and Tracy who had the
motive, wasn’t it?

To snoop on her, yes. To kill her? Well, the
explosion had been drastic. Pushing Tracy out of the tower had been
drastic.

Jean checked the doors and windows. Upstairs,
the door to the storage room stood wide open. She slammed it shut.
She had no time for paranormal hocus pocus right now, thank you
very much.

She laid her wet footwear out in the
bathroom, warmed her feet with the hair dryer until she could feel
her toes again, and put on dry socks. Then, making two careful
trips, she retrieved the duvet and her books and papers from
downstairs. Each time, the damnable door stood open. Finally she
just left it that way, scurrying past its dark, gaping maw and into
the bedroom.

Jean locked the door and jammed a chair
beneath the knob for good measure. Pulling the dressing table bench
close to the window, she sat down and watched as the crime scene
investigators went to work. Their raw white lights cast a shimmer
on the mist, making the night outside their range even darker. Each
figure appeared as abruptly as though from the wings of a theater,
made its ritualistic gestures, and exited the scene. Softer lights
rose and fell in the windows of the house and tower, flash bulbs
winked, and headlights flared and died in the distance. Like
fireworks, she thought.

She identified Alasdair from his stance,
alert and contained, taking up more space than his compact stature
required, and from his gestures, like those of a conductor before
his orchestra, made with efficient economy rather than with
flourishes.

Gunn was taller but thinner, looser of limb.
He came and went, his notebook at point. And here came the ape-like
form of Sawyer, ushering a shambling, limping man who had to be
Roger. Alasdair conducted him to the chrysalis-like shape around
which the activity accreted, lifted one end of the blanket, grasped
his arm as he reeled. His voice rose. Alasdair’s met it and brought
it down again. Roger staggered away again, assisted by a shapelier
male figure that had to be Brendan.

At last the lights went out in the courtyard
and the house, and the actors departed with Tracy’s now
plastic-bagged body. Alasdair’s pale face turned up to toward
Jean’s window. He raised his hand in a motion that was neither a
regal wave and nor a traffic cop’s
Stop right there
. She
wasn’t surprised he knew she was watching. If anyone had eyes in
the back of his head, it was Alasdair.

Two constables stayed behind. If there was
another murder, Jean wondered, would Alasdair then leave four? She
hauled herself to her feet just as a couple more human figures
appeared in time for the curtain call. Ah, the Bouchards, leaning
together as close as honeymooners. Or conspirators. They exchanged
nods with the constables but didn’t stop to ask questions. The news
had spread.

Imagining Peter Kettering banging his head
against a wall, Jean trudged to the bed and did not look at the
clock. The day and then the night had stretched out like Macbeth’s
tomorrows, until the last syllable of recorded time.

Alasdair had asked if Tracy was playing Lady
Macbeth. He’d said that the other reporters hadn’t mentioned
getting toy Nessies. He was too perceptive by half. By
three-quarters, even.

Jean crawled beneath the duvet, assumed the
fetal position, and played with the concept of a strong, compact
body snugged to her back and a whiskey-scented breath on her cheek
. . .

In the hallway a door shut. Footsteps made
each floorboard creak in turn. Ah, Ambrose’s nightly show. The
wet-blanket sixth sensation flowed over her and weighted her down.
A sweet scent of what was either flowers past their prime or a
heavy perfume teased her nostrils. Pipe tobacco. Coffee. Ambrose
had testified that he’d spilled a cup of coffee at the foot of the
staircase. And there was the mutter of voices, a man’s and a
woman’s.

She was expecting the scream, and yet when it
came it was so penetrating a repetition of Tracy’s real-time
shriek, short and sharp, that she gasped. Her body spasmed to the
slightly different timbre of each thud as Eileen’s body ricocheted
off the treads and the balusters and came to rest on the floor
below. This time Jean heard the shaking male voice, saying quite
clearly, “Oh God, no, no, God, no,” although if he referred to the
usual capital-G God or some lower-case entity, she had no way of
knowing.

Holding her breath, she waited, but heard
nothing more than the pacing steps of the constables outside her
window. The heaviness in the air dissipated, and she realized she
was curled into so tight a ball her shoulders were cramping.
Inhale, exhale, inhale, and she relaxed, as much as a taut rubber
band could relax. She could still see Tracy’s broken body. She
could imagine Eileen’s.

If she kept thinking about it, trying to work
it all out, she’d lie awake the rest of the night and be utterly
useless in the morning. Instead, she deliberately slackened each
muscle fiber and cleared her mind—she was a calm pool, unruffled,
smooth. She was driving a submersible the same way she’d drive her
car, and it was dropping through the water too fast, and she kept
pumping on the brake pedal but nothing happened. Until the hatch
popped open and peat-dark water flooded in.

She saw her own face, wet, eyes staring,
pulled from the water by Alasdair’s capable hands.

A sudden noise jerked Jean out of her dream.
She blinked upward at daylight tinting the ceiling amber, the same
color as the curtains. Oh. She’d slept after all. What had that
noise been? It sounded like the clanking clatter of garbage men
heaving around metal trash cans. But they’d hardly be doing that on
a Sunday morning. Maybe the chill of the bed indicated that the
ghost—
ghosts
—had added something else to their repertory.
Once they reached their last act, she wondered, then what?

Jean crawled out of the bed and discovered
that her knee, while stiff, functioned properly. The clock read
nine a.m., hours after sunrise. She opened the curtains to see the
sun shining through a mist thin as chiffon, casting tenuous shadows
over courtyard, terrace, and garden, but illuminating no signs of
life. No signs of death, for that matter, only blue-and-white
police tape across the door set into the angle where the tower
abutted the main house. People used to mark plague houses with
charcoaled crosses, Jean thought as she headed toward the bathroom.
The tape worked just as well.