The Murder Hole (39 page)

“Very helpful,” he told her, and put his
phone back to his ear. “North on the A82, aye. No, don’t go chasing
them down, stop them at an intersection.”

It would have been entertaining to get a jump
on Alasdair, but she had to admit that getting a jump on the
Ducketts was more important. At least she’d called his attention to
them to begin with. Jean seated herself on a plastic chair out of
the line of fire, next to D.C. Gunn and his notebook. He was
already in his shirtsleeves, ready for action and almost
suppressing his grin—Sawyer was exhilaratingly conspicuous by his
absence. Alasdair would be shocked if she and Gunn high-fived each
other, though, so Jean offered him a friendly smile.

From the incident room next door came a low
hum of activity, almost drowned out by the hum of activity from
Alasdair’s brain. Somehow he’d found time since he left the Lodge
to shave and put on a clean shirt, plus a different tie, this one
with little figures on it that looked suspiciously like dragons. He
seemed less drawn and pale than he had yesterday morning, due
perhaps to his progress on fronts both public and personal.

He switched off his phone and lifted a
plastic bag containing a small metallic object, like half a
ballpoint pen, from the desk. “Here’s your listening device. Your
bug. No Omnium trademark, more’s the pity. I’ll be having a word
with Roger directly.”

Jean’s smile evaporated. “Yeah, you and me
both. The nerve of the man. I wasn’t any threat to him.”

“Right,” Alasdair said, with no more than a
hint of skepticism. He set the bag down and closed the cover of a
file folder lying in front of him. “Crime scene reports. We’ve got
a couple of items from the tower room that look to be interesting,
a scrap of plastic and a knitting needle. The trace evidence
reports haven’t come along yet.”

The outer door opened and a constable ushered
in Gordon Fraser. His glance around the room missed nothing. His
gray eyebrows were so thick and heavy they were set in a perpetual
frown, which deepened when he registered Jean’s presence. His
granite-domed head, square granite jaw, and sharp granite shoulders
reminded her of an ambulatory Easter Island statue.

Alasdair stood up and extended his hand.
“Chief Inspector Cameron, Mr. Fraser. I’m in charge of
investigating the recent deaths here in Drumnadrochit. Please, sit
down.”

Fraser shook hands, his huge hand engulfing
Alasdair’s merely large one, and sat down in the straight-backed
wooden chair. It squeaked a protest. “My shop needs seeing to,
Chief Inspector. I gave my assistant a day out, with him working
all the weekend whilst I was at the Festival.”

“We’ll be taking you back to your shop soon
as you help us with our inquiries.”

“I wish I could help, but I’ve got nothing
for you.”

“That’s for me to decide, Mr. Fraser,”
Alasdair said in his menacing yet mild manner. “You were born and
raised in this area, were you?”

Gunn began to write. Jean leaned forward, the
better to listen, to observe, to counsel and comment when the time
came.

“That I was,” Fraser answered. “In
Foyers.”

“Near Aleister Crowley’s house at Boleskine,
then.”

“He was long gone from the area by the time I
was born, and good riddance to him.”

“You were telling Miss Fairbairn here that
Crowley raised demons. That people went mad and suffered accidents
when he was about. But you say you weren’t seeing any of this for
yourself?”

“My mother and her mother, they raised me up
to fear God and walk righteously. They warned me off folk like
Crowley and those telling tales of the loch as well.”

Jean half rose from the chair and sat herself
back down. Roger’s old guy from Foyers. She was looking at him.

Alasdair caught her reaction, even though he
had no way short of ESP—which she wouldn’t put past him—of knowing
what had produced it. “By ‘those telling tales of the loch’ do you
mean Ambrose Mackintosh?”

“He was right daft. Not wicked, not like
Crowley, but daft.”

“You knew him, then?”

Fraser shifted his weight, the chair creaking
piteously. Gunn turned a page. Jean held her breath. At last the
man said, “He was a bit of a kenspeckle figure in the district,
known by all.”

“But not liked by all?”

“You’re known by the company you keep, Chief
Inspector. You’re known by the fruit of your work. Ambrose was a
fine scholar, a decent man in some ways, but well off his head in
others.”

Alasdair lifted and then let fall the cover
of the file folder. “Your father was a stone mason who worked for
Ambrose.”

“Aye, he was that,” Fraser replied without
surprise—he didn’t know Alasdair hadn’t had time to actually check
him out. “I worked with him for some years, then on my own,
conservation and restoration work, mostly.”

“Your father turned up the Pitclachie
Stone.”

“Oh aye. A pagan stone, he said. Just the
thing for a pagan like Ambrose.”

Most people, Jean reflected, would have asked
what the heck the Pitclachie Stone had to do with the recent
deaths. But no. Fraser had been warned.

“Was your father the only member of your
family to have dealings with Ambrose?”

Fraser hadn’t exactly been slumping, but at
that he sat up a little straighter. Jean couldn’t see his face, but
from the clenching of his shoulders she deduced an internal
struggle. Alasdair waited, his hands folded on the desk in front of
him, not looking away, not even blinking.

Fraser said, “No. My aunt, my father’s
sister, worked at Pitclachie.”

“Edith.”

“How do you . . . Ah. You’ve read up on
Ambrose’s trial, have you?”

“Your aunt disappeared just as surely as Mrs.
Mackintosh did do, but no one inquired after her,” Alasdair went
on. “Why not?”

Fraser didn’t reply. His shoulders rose
toward his ears and his massive hands clenched into clubs on his
lap. The room was so quiet that Jean could hear Gunn breathing, and
the voices and footsteps of people on the sidewalk outside, and the
low rumble and cough of a passing bus. She was starting to sweat
against the plastic chair—two small windows did nothing to keep the
room from being still and close and hot. Alasdair, though, was
wrapped in his cool professional shell.

Fraser was beginning to sweat, too. At last
his shoulders relaxed, and his hands opened and his gnarled fingers
spread out on his thighs. Decision made, Jean thought, and sat back
with a glance at Gunn. His pencil was poised.

“You’re known by the company you keep,”
Fraser said, his voice as deep a rumble as that of the bus, dragged
out of his depths. “Mind, I never knew Edith, save as a cautionary
tale whispered about the fire on a Sunday evening. She was first at
Pitclachie in nineteen-nineteen, as scullery maid. Respectable work
that, no shame in it. Then Crowley came to visit. He had an eye for
the ladies, he did, and promised her clothes and jewels and
adventure. Away she went with him, to the Continent and to God in
his heaven knows what sorts of evil doings. And that after maiming
her for life.”

“Maiming her?” Alasdair asked, with a glance
at Jean.

“Another so-called accident. She was cutting
a joint of venison and struck off her forefinger. My father said
‘twas God’s judgment for her impure thoughts, but I’m thinking
‘twas Crowley.”

“And your family disowned her when she went
away with him?”

“She fell into sin, forsaking her proper
upbringing to follow the Beast.”

“But your father went to work for Ambrose
even so.”

“He was feeding six bairns—I’m the
seventh—and the two grannies as well, then. When Ambrose made his
apologies fair enough, asked that bygones be bygones, and offered a
steady wage, well . . . Edith was dead to the family. As a lad I
was thinking she was genuinely dead and in the ground, be it
sanctified ground or no.”

“But she came back to the area in nineteen
thirty-two and Ambrose took her in.”

“Felt guilty, like as not, more credit to
him.”

Alasdair’s gaze darted to Jean and back again
to Fraser. She knew he was hearing Ambrose’s ghostly voice saying,
I’m caring for you, as is my duty
.

“He was daft, right enough, but not so wicked
as Crowley,” Fraser insisted. “Crowley, he raised demons, and I
reckon one took Edith. My father did his best with the pagan stone
and all, but there was no help for her.”

Alasdair was inhaling for the next question.
Jean made a cramped time-out signal in her lap. Gunn looked over
curiously, which reminded her that unless Alasdair was a closet fan
of American football, he wouldn’t know what she meant. But her
gesture attracted his cool blue gaze. She mouthed the word stone,
and made a breaking motion with her hands.

With a nod considerably more subtle than her
gesture, and with a telltale curl at the corner of his
mouth—
historians!
—he asked, “What did you father do with the
pagan stone, Mr. Fraser?”

“He cut it in half, so Crowley widna be
getting his hands on it and using it to raise more demons. I mind
we’re thinking now there’s no harm in such stones, and maybe not,
but when the Beast himself is squatting on your doorstep, you do
what you can to defend yourself.”

Jean buried her face in her hand. Her first
impulse when she’d seen the photo of the Stone had been almost
right. Unfortunately. She tried telepathy:
Ask him where the
other half is.

But Alasdair was after more immediate
answers. “What happened to Edith, then, Mr. Fraser?”

He gestured, stiffly, looking right and left
with a sort of desperation. “No one knew, so far as I can tell. I
most certainly didna know. ‘Til just last year.”

“What happened last year?”

“After Mrs. Mackintosh, Eileen,
disappeared—driven to suicide, I’m thinking, may God have mercy on
her soul—Edith went off to America. She was in the family way with
Ambrose’s child. Truly, once you step off the straight and narrow
path, ‘tis a long way down.”

Jean felt her eyes fly open so far dust
settled on them. Edith being pregnant she could buy, even though
Ambrose’s charms escaped her personally. But Edith fleeing to
America? Crowley’s so-called magic or not, she couldn’t have been
in two places at once, both dead and alive.

“And how were you finding this out?” Alasdair
asked, his eyes showing no reaction at all.

Fraser’s hands worked on his thighs, flexing
and loosing, digging out an entrance passage to the past. “No harm
in saying, now that the woman’s dead. ‘Twas Mrs. Dempsey told me
the tale.”

Aha!
Jean thought, so clearly that she
almost clapped her hand over her mouth. But no, she hadn’t spoken
aloud. Finally the story got back around to Roger and Tracy.

“Mrs. Dempsey,” Alasdair enunciated clearly.
Again he shot a quick glance at Jean, a glance that if it didn’t
say
aha
at least said
hmm
.

Fraser sighed so heavily Jean could see
Alasdair’s hair wave in the breeze. “She and her husband came to me
a year or so past, whilst organizing their expedition. Looking out
a creature in the loch, the man’s got more silver than sense. I was
telling him how my granny talked of water horses and the like, her
putting superstition behind her like the braw, virtuous lady she
was, meaning to put him off, but he took it all the other way
round.”

If believing is hearing
, Jean thought,
then hearing is believing
.

“Mrs. Dempsey visited again in April this
year—a handsome fair-spoken woman, for a Sassenach wed to a Yank .
. .” Fraser’s eyes turned toward Jean. “Meaning no insult,
Madam.”

“None taken,” Jean told him.

Alasdair cut to the chase. “Why did the
Dempseys come to you?”

“They were asking me whether my father had
uncovered a pagan tomb at Pitclachie.”

“How did they know about that?”

Fraser’s face twisted, so that its seams
deepened into fissures. “Mrs. Dempsey was telling me her husband
was Edith’s grandson. Ambrose’s grandson. She was telling me we’re
cousins.”

Jean’s mouth dropped open.
What?
Gunn’s hand jerked so that he had to cross out what he’d already
written and try again. Even Alasdair reacted to that, his eyes
narrowing.

“She gave me a book that Ambrose had given to
Edith, by way of proving their claim,” Fraser said, calmly,
carefully. “The same one you bought, Madam. Twould be better for a
burning, it has got an unhealthy air about it, and no mistake.”

Jean’s disapproval of book-burning matched
Fraser’s disapproval of Crowley, although she agreed that that
particular book did tempt the business end of a match. But the book
itself didn’t prove a thing. If it weren’t for the testimony of the
ghosts—she knew she shouldn’t be counting that, but she did—and the
testimony of the skeleton, which she knew Alasdair was very much
counting, Fraser’s story would make sense. But it didn’t.

“Let me guess,” said Alasdair. “Iris is
denying Roger Dempsey his birthright, some part of Pitclachie.”

“She’s embarrassed to acknowledge the man.
Here he is, looking to be the spit of Ambrose, a right loony, and
here’s Iris, gey respectable, a fine sensible woman and all.”

Which wasn’t exactly what Fraser had been
saying Saturday, Jean noted.

“So sensible she stopped in last night, by
way of talking all this over with you?” asked Alasdair.

By this time Fraser had accepted Alasdair’s
prescience, and responded with nothing more than a nod. “She was
after owning the truth, aye. And me, I apologized for having been
sharpish with her, soon after I first heard the story.”

“Right,” said Alasdair, almost
whispering.

Jean mopped surreptitiously at the moisture
dewing her forehead.
Wait for it
. Gunn flexed his fingers
and re-installed his pen. Fraser looked down at his monumental and
empty hands. The back of his neck and the top of his head, between
thin strands of hair, glowed pink and damp.