The Murder Hole (38 page)

Was that the door opening downstairs? The
ghosts must be at it again, in broad daylight this time. Talk about
her and Alasdair making a critical mass!

Jean walked downstairs. She was glancing
guiltily at the dishes piled in the sink as she reached out to
shove the curtain back on its rod. Still holding a handful of thick
velvet, she turned toward the door and saw that she wasn’t
alone.

By sheer force of will, Jean stopped herself
from leaping backwards yet again. She stood with her hand on her
chest, cramming her heart back behind her ribs, looking down at the
small boy and the cat. “Elvis,” she managed to say. “How did you
get in?”

Oblivious to the sensation he’d caused, Elvis
kept on stroking Mandrake’s sleek back. “The moggie pushed the door
open. Listen, he’s making a funny sound.”

“Yeah, he’s purring up a storm.” The cat was
smirking so smugly he’d probably orchestrated the entire episode.
Not only had Alasdair not locked the door, he hadn’t even left it
properly shut. She could flatter herself that he’d decided she
could take care of herself, but she suspected the paragon of
protocol had simply made a mistake. She wouldn’t be mentioning it
to him.

“Let’s go on outside,” she said, shooing both
child and cat onto the terrace and making sure this time the door
was locked.

The mist was starting to burn off.
Wraith-like tendrils wafted upward from loch and land, toward a sky
veiled with silver that would soon, Jean estimated, turn blue. And
hot. Not one breath of wind stirred the flowers and the trees. The
humid air pressed close around her, seeming to muffle the voices of
Elvis’s parents.

Noreen and Martin were standing at the edge
of the terrace, he hulking over her, she crouched defensively. They
weren’t so much talking as hissing to each other. Jean recognized
those tones, the spat that couldn’t wait for a private venue.

“. . . and me no more than a bit on the
side?” Noreen was saying.

“That’s not how it was. It was for all of
us,” Martin replied. “She could have gotten me a fellowship. Do you
want to work in a motorway café the rest of your life?”

“A fellowship, is it? Last year it was a
teaching post. The year before that . . .”

Elvis tried to pick up the cat. Mandrake
slithered through his hands like a ferret and ran for the
shrubbery, Elvis on his tail.

Martin’s long arm swept Noreen aside and
seized the back of the boy’s
I’m a Wee Monster from Loch
Ness
T-shirt. “Let’s walk up to the dig, lad, have us a look at
the Nessie bones. Mummy’s not feeling well. Mummy’s going to have a
lie-down.” And, as he turned and saw Jean standing outside the door
of the Lodge, “Mummy should have been looking after you.”

“I was watching him,” Noreen said. “He only
stepped inside for a bleeding minute. She’s right friendly with
that detective, isn’t she? He came out the door not half an hour
ago. It didn’t hurt nothing letting the boy go inside there. It’s a
safer place than the house for him.”

Martin gave Noreen a look of pity and
contempt mingled. Jean expected him to use Ambrose’s “impertinent!”
but he merely took Elvis’s hand and started off toward the garden,
his manner changing to patient indulgence as quickly as a traffic
light changed from red to green.

Noreen looked toward Jean, shamefaced but
stubborn. “Tell your policeman that me and the boy, we need to get
away from this place. We need to go home. I’ll lose my job, Martin
will . . .” She blundered toward the house.

No point in saying that Alasdair wasn’t
her
policeman. They weren’t exactly making a public
spectacle of themselves, but the clues were there for anyone to
see. As for Noreen . . . “He knows you want to go home,” Jean
called after her. “He can’t let you go until he finds out who blew
up the boat and who pushed Tracy Dempsey out of the tower.”

Noreen’s steps faltered. She looked back.
Some impulse seemed to swell in her face and then die, and
wordlessly she went on into the house.

She could have gotten me a fellowship
.
Tracy had promised Martin some sort of pie in the sky job in return
for helping her—do what? Cover up the submersible disaster? Send
the threatening letters? The Halls had stayed at Pitclachie in
April. Martin could have picked up the notepaper. And the old
corkscrew, for that matter, assuming the Dempseys themselves blew
up the boat.

Jean didn’t believe for a minute Tracy had
any personal interest in Martin. Still, there was another triangle,
like Ambrose, Edith, and Eileen’s. Would it be better to have a man
not do his duty by you if by doing it he felt entitled to treat you
like a mentally defective rat? And what duty did Ambrose owe to
Edith, anyway? Was she his mistress, or simply a feisty employee
who helped herself to the lady of the manor’s earrings?

As though evoked by Jean thinking those
names, Iris paced around the corner like a sentry at the changing
of the guard. She was carrying a basket containing a pair of
knitting needles and some balls of off-white wool yarn, the color
and texture of the cardigan she was wearing. “Good morning,” she
said. If her words had been any more formal, they would have been
wearing little black ties.

“Good morning.” Jean fell oh-so-casually into
step beside her. “Do you have a moment, Miss Mackintosh? I’d like
to ask a few more questions for my article about you and your
father’s interests.”

“I’m sure you would, Miss Fairbairn.
Especially in the light of recent events. However, you’ll please
excuse me if I say . . .” she stopped in front of the tower door,
pulled a key from her pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside
“No comment.” The door shut in Jean’s face and the tumblers of the
lock turned.

Well, she couldn’t blame the woman for that.
She could be irritated and impatient, but she couldn’t blame. Jean
craned her neck, the same way Martin had done. Iris’s tall,
neo-classical shape appeared in the window from which Tracy had
fallen. A quick double flash was the metal tips of her knitting
needles catching the light. She hadn’t stationed herself looking
out over the loch but up the hill. Jean wondered not whether but
when Alasdair would turn up present-dimensional evidence proving
that that the body in the tomb wasn’t Iris’s mother after all.

Not that that would mitigate the situation.
Technically speaking, Ambrose hadn’t gotten away with murder, but
with manslaughter. Jonathan’s death would probably come under the
heading of manslaughter, too. As for Tracy’s death, well . . . Jean
walked through the garden and up the hillside, thinking that it was
too much to either hope or fear the perpetrator had already fled
the area. No, among her acquaintances here at Pitclachie was
someone—or several someones—capable of killing.

Martin and Elvis were kibitzing as Brendan
toiled inside the orange-netted boundary zone. A couple of royal
blue tarps had been added to the color scheme. The austere Scots
pines in the glade just beyond the excavation seemed to be pulling
their skirt-branches away in disdain.

As Jean drew closer, she saw twenty or so
angular brown lumps, the animal vertebrae from the tomb chamber,
spread out on one of the tarps in a line longer than she was tall.
At its end rested a small skull like that of a greyhound. Several
other brownish chunks, along with a camera and other bits of
electronic equipment, lay on the second tarp. Charles and Sophie
sat nearby, wiping, assessing, and placing the occasional item into
a plastic bag or cardboard box. They were the seagulls following
the archaeological plow and picking over the remains.

Brendan sat on the side of the trench,
mopping his pink-suffused face with a bandanna. He, no doubt, had
removed the sill of dirt half-blocking the entrance passageway.
Roger came crawling out of its dark maw, dragging a plastic bag
behind him, blithely ignoring the finer points of archaeological
procedure. Ambrose had had an excuse for his vandalism, Jean
thought. Roger didn’t.

Roger flailed a bit, then with a groan
managed to climb out of the hole. His Water Horse T-shirt was grimy
and sweat-stained, and the bandages on his arms were gray rather
than hospital white, clashing with the red scratches and pink
splashes of lotion on his nettle stings. He had definitely gotten
the worst of the hit-and-run.

But as he turned toward Jean, she could see a
glint in his eyes indicating flint in his soul.
This makes it
all worthwhile
, he’d said yesterday, with a touch of his old
devil-may-care spirit. Now he looked devil-possessed. “Hi, Jean,”
he said, baring his fangs in a smile.

“Hi. How’s it going? Any breaking news?”

Roger made an expansive gesture over his
array of bones, a priest blessing his congregation. “Kettering’s
sending a photographer. I told him I’ll make the announcement
during tonight’s cruise. I can’t promise you an exclusive, Jean, I
mean, Starr’s been very helpful with funding and all, but look at
those vertebrae, they’re the classic Nessie profile with the long
prehensile neck and the small skull—horsy, isn’t it? And we’re
picking up the bone fragments that have to be fins. This will be
the story of the century. The bones of the Loch Ness monster,
proving that the stories are true. You’ll be in on it from the
get-go.”

In exchange for being in on it, Roger would
expect her to follow his script. Jean cast her gaze right and left,
from Sophie and Charles’s disdainful sniffs to Brendan’s dubious
shrug. Martin’s mouth hung open. Elvis clung to his father’s hand,
eyes huge. There had to be some logical explanation for those
bones, but no one was raining on Roger’s parade with it. Yet.

“They worshiped them,” Roger went on. “The
Picts, that is, they worshiped the Nessie population. That’s what
the whole story of St. Columba is about, driving away the old pagan
Nessie religion. That old guy from Foyers, whose grandmother warned
him about the loch, that just goes to show you how long memories
last here. The Nessie cult must have been active for centuries.
See, there are some little plaque things. Offerings.” He pointed
toward Sophie, who was holding a small and scabrous metal plaque
between thumb and forefinger, like a worm.

“Thanks.” Jean was about to start asking some
rather pointed questions about Roger’s sources of information and
inspiration when her cell phone rang. She fished it out of her bag.
Whoa! Alasdair!
She retreated down the path, out of earshot.
“Hello again.”

“Come down by the station, Jean, Gordon
Fraser’s just arriving.”

“That was fast.”

“The lads stopped by his shop as he was
opening up.”

“I’m on my way.” Stuffing the phone back into
her bag, Jean shot one last dubious glance at Roger and another at
the camera-laden figure just emerging from the garden path. Up the
garden path was where Roger was leading them all. It had to be.

The mist evaporated into a clean-washed blue
sky. The loch shone blue in the sunlight, each slow swell viscous
as Jell-O. A large boat—or small ship, nautical nomenclature not
being Jean’s area of expertise—was gliding into Urquhart Bay.
Strings of colored flags rippled lazily fore and aft. Ah, yes, the
evening cruise. Alasdair would have everything up to and including
a SWAT team inspecting that boat for combustibles. Pity the steward
who tried to flambé a dessert.

The sunlight intensified the humidity and, in
just the few hundred yards between the excavation and the house,
Jean started to ooze sweat. Even in the tree-shaded parking area
the air was so heavy with the scent of mud and vegetation she
expected to see serpents dripping from the trees. Instead, a cloud
of midges descended upon her like micro-miniature vampire bats and
she launched into the midgie jig, a version of St. Vitus’s
dance.

Roger’s van was squeezed up against her car.
She couldn’t begin to open the driver’s side door wide enough to
climb in, so she went around to the other side, next to the
Bouchard’s Renault. Its pale gold coat had been dulled by rain and
run-off to nickel.

Just as she opened her passenger door, Dave
and Patti Duckett burst around the side of the house and jogged
toward their own car. Dave was unlocking its doors by the time Jean
called, “Hello!”

“Oh!” Patti almost stumbled. “Oh, hello.”

Jean winced. Yeah, we’re all nervy. And the
midges didn’t make for a leisurely chat. “Sorry to startle you. Off
for a drive?”

“Mailing some things home,” said Dave.
“Overweight baggage fees, you know.” He took a bulging shopping bag
from Patti’s hand and threw it in the back seat, where it spilled
clothing and small objects, including a toothbrush.

“See you later.” Patti barely got her door
shut before Dave started the car and peeled off down the drive,
scattering gravel like buckshot. He would have run down a reporter
lurking by the road if one of the constables stationed there hadn’t
dragged him away. The car turned north, toward Inverness. Surely
the closest post office would be in Drumnadrochit . . .

A toothbrush. Funny how indicative
toothbrushes could be. And mailing a shopping bag? Yeah, right. The
Ducketts were doing a midnight—er, midday—flit. Running away. Like
Martin, they couldn’t look any guiltier if they tried.

Apparently the constable agreed. He was
already talking into his radio by the time Jean drove by, taking a
dozen or so midges on a brisk ride to the police station.

Jean burst through the doorway of the little
police office. Alasdair half rose from his barricade behind the
desk and tucked his phone into his shoulder. “The Ducketts are
away,” he told her.

“Yeah, I saw. Their car is something dark
green and bigger than my Focus, and there’s a five in the license
number.”