The Murder Hole (43 page)

Oh for a glass of iced tea, she thought. But
she had as much chance of getting that as she had of going
water-skiing with Nessie.

Two police cars came up the driveway and Jean
sat up, trying to look like an alert and competent participant in
the case. A moment later Gunn appeared, guiding Dave Duckett with a
hand under his elbow. Dave was rolling from side to side, not drunk
but traumatized. Self-traumatized, the worst kind. His color was
terrible, a pasty white, and his plump cheeks sagged. He made the
Pillsbury doughboy look like the model of health.

“Please sit down, Mr. Duckett,” Alasdair
said, back in knight-justiciar pose.

Dave didn’t so much sit down on a lawn chair
as collapse. “We didn’t know all this was going to happen. I feel
like it’s our fault, even though we never, we didn’t . . .”

Gunn sat down on the terrace wall, notebook
at the ready. Alasdair loomed. “Go on.”

“Our son-in-law, Chris Peretti, was testing a
submersible off Florida. The hatch was defective, it wouldn’t shut
properly. The sub sank. He drowned. It was a terrible, terrible . .
.” Dave’s voice broke.

“Take your time,” Alasdair told him.

Shaking his head, Dave plunged on. “Melissa,
our daughter, the three little ones, if it wasn’t for us they’d
have been living on the streets. Chris couldn’t get insurance for a
reasonable price, his work was so dangerous. We knew his work was
dangerous, but heck, you’re in danger just crossing the street,
aren’t you?”

Denial,
Jean thought,
was a very
useful skill
.

“He was contracted to Omnium because Roger
Dempsey had developed the sub, but Omnium wouldn’t pay anything,
said they weren’t liable, Dempsey wasn’t working for them any more.
We tried contacting Dempsey, but he sent a message through some
slick-willy lawyer saying he didn’t sweat the details of these
things, that Chris must not have shut the hatch properly and,
basically, tough luck.” Dave’s jaw firmed with indignation. “We
found a lawyer of our own. He said we could sue, but that we’d only
have a strong case if we could prove the hatch was defective. But
the sub disappeared into a warehouse somewhere. Kind of like the
Lost Ark, I guess.”

Jean turned her smile into a crinkle of
sympathy.

“You hired Jonathan Paisley to get the proof
for you,” Alasdair said quietly.

“Yeah. We found out about the Water Horse
Expedition and who was on it and that Dempsey was shipping a bunch
of water-exploration stuff over here. We thought maybe he’d try to
use the sub again. Jon had the right technical expertise, so we
made a deal with him. Brendan came along later. Maybe we chose the
wrong guy, I don’t know—Jon seemed to think that putting one over
the boss was a good joke. He found our evidence, though. He said
the sub was on board, but it had been partially disassembled, and
Dempsey never said anything about using it. Jon himself thought the
hatch looked dodgy. We gave him a camera, asked him to get photos.
So he sneaked back onto the boat Friday night.”

“And it exploded.”

Dave subsided into a puddle of horror and
remorse, his head sunk in his hands. With a sigh, Jean looked past
him toward the water. The cold, uncompromising water. A shimmer was
gathering above it, a mirage caused by the warm air against the
chill surface of the loch. Good monster-spotting weather. Starr had
chosen the right evening for their cruise.

“We just wanted to get the evidence,
Inspector. Chief Inspector, isn’t it? We wanted to get what was
coming to our kids. Is that so wrong? But the Dempseys blew up the
sub rather than face us in court fair and square.”

“Do you know that for a fact, that they
themselves blew up the boat and the sub?”

“Well, no.” Dave looked up, eyes pleading.
“But the newspaper said you’d found evidence that the explosion was
deliberate. What other explanation is there? They wanted to damage
the hatch so badly we couldn’t use it as evidence. I don’t think
they intended for Jon to die. As for the rest of it . . .”

“Tracy Dempsey’s death?”

Dave stared, mouth opening and shutting as
though he was gathering bugs. At last he croaked, “Saturday night,
Patti and I had some drinks at the Cameron Arms. Brendan was there,
but he didn’t say anything that could help us and we didn’t dare
ask him outright. We came back here and we were asleep, really deep
asleep, you know? It took us a few minutes to come around and
realize we were hearing people shouting. Even when she screamed and
we heard someone running down the hall, from that door into the
tower, I guess it was, we weren’t too quick on the uptake. That’s
what we told your people when we made our statements yesterday.
We’ve never lied to your people or to anyone here. We just never
told the whole truth.”

There was a lot of that going around, Jean
thought.

Alasdair met Dave’s stare evenly, his
impassivity a question.

“We didn’t push her out of the window. What
good would that do us? Revenge? How’s revenge going to bring Chris
back and send our grandkids to college? We wanted justice, and we
didn’t get that. We’re not going to get it, now. Roger Dempsey
screwed up, and Omnium screwed up, and now we’re screwed.” He
groaned. “Running away today, that was stupid.”

Alasdair did not disagree. He met Gunn’s eye
and nodded. Gunn stood up, tucking his notebook into his pocket.
“Come along please, Mr. Duckett.”

Dave had to try twice to heave himself to his
feet. He trudged off, Gunn at his elbow, Alasdair just behind with
Jean at his elbow. She looked at him, rolled her eyes toward Dave,
looked back. Alasdair shook his head, an infinitesimal movement,
but a negative one, nonetheless.

Slumped in the back seat of the police car, a
policewoman beside her although presumably not handcuffed to her,
Patti was in full meltdown. She wasn’t even trying to wipe away the
tears that flowed down her face. Jean’s heart wrenched with
compassion.

Patti reached through the open window. “Dave,
hon, we’re going to jail.”

Taking her hand, Dave turned back to Alasdair
and drew himself up with one last grasp at dignity. “Are you
sending us to jail, Chief Inspector? We should have come to you
right after the explosion, and we shouldn’t have left when you told
us to stay put. We’re sorry we caused you and your people problems.
But I don’t see where we’ve actually broken any laws.”

“We’re hoping you’ll continue helping us with
our inquiries for a wee while yet,” Alasdair replied, and taking
Gunn aside, “Take them to the station, brew up a pot of tea, get
her calmed down a bit. Have a blether about the grandchildren. I’ll
stop in directly.”

Gunn, the model of efficiency—he was probably
enjoying his impromptu promotion—organized the Ducketts and
assorted police people into the cars and away.

Even after they had negotiated the
telecommunications siege engines at the foot of the drive and
disappeared toward town, Alasdair stood cogitating, almost but not
quite expressionlessly. Jean could trace the thoughts moving across
his face the way physicists traced neutrons passing through the
earth, with great difficulty . . . Suddenly he made a frustrated
gesture, turned around, and saw Jean biding her time just behind
him. “Ah, there you are.”

“I’m not anywhere else,” she replied, and as
he started around the side of the house she fell into step beside
him. His helpmeet. His cheering section. His gadfly. So much for
her vaunted independence.

Iris was still knitting in the upper window,
like Madame Defarge knitting beside the guillotine. She had to be
hoping the blade would fall before any awkward truths came out
about her parentage.

“You’re going to talk to Patti, see if her
story matches Dave’s?” Jean asked.

Alasdair’s smile was thin as a blade. “I
reckon it will.”

“That’s my gut feeling, but then, I’m not an
experienced detective. And we’re still faced with one
question.”

“If the Ducketts didn’t kill Tracy, then who
did do?” Looking like Napoleon scanning a map of Europe, Alasdair
stopped at the end of the garden path to scan the hillside,
Brendan, and Roger. “Let’s have ourselves that word with Dr.
Dempsey.”

Roger, Jean thought. Ambrose might be the
prime mover, but Roger was sure his prophet.

Every flower petal, every leaf and twig, hung
limp in the still moist warmth of the afternoon. In his black and
white uniform, the constable standing by the hedge seemed as out of
place amid the flowers as a penguin in a drift of confetti.
Alasdair, Jean thought, must have conscripted police personnel from
the farthest reaches of Northern Constabulary territory. This would
be a good time to rob a bank in Orkney.

He held the gate open for her. Just as she
stepped through, Brendan shouted, “Hey! Look at this!”

Roger glanced up from his array of boxes and
bags, each now holding a bone or some other bit of excavated loot,
like a time-traveling crime scene. “What?”

“It’s a carved stone, just down from the
entrance. Put there really recently.”

“How can you tell?”

“By the bottle cap behind it.”

Stone?
Jean sprinted up the hill,
Alasdair at her heels for once, and came to a stop beside the
trench, lathered in sweat and expectation. “Stone?”

“Here.” Brendan handed her a dirt-encrusted
bottle cap. “It was wedged in right there, between the edge of the
stone and the rocks behind it. I bet that’ll give you a good
date.”

Jean already had a good date. 1933, when the
entrance to the tomb was filled in—a task not done by Gordon
Fraser, she bet. She handed the cap to Alasdair, who inspected it,
popped it into a plastic bag he liberated from Roger’s stash, and
stowed it in a pocket.

Brendan was right. The stone that was
emerging from the dirt wall of trench did seem to have been propped
up against the smaller stones that formed the main body of the
passage grave. But it wasn’t the same shape and size as the other
curbstones. It was larger, perhaps four feet tall, and tapered
upward from a stubby base like a giant stone canine tooth. Brendan
scraped delicately at the very bottom of the stone, revealing a
dirt-filled pictograph—a gripping beast crossed by an
ornately-decorated Z-rod.

Roger clambered to his feet. “Is it the other
half of the Pitclachie Stone?”

“Looks like it,” Jean said. “It fits the
description.”

“There’s a description?” asked Brendan. “You
knew it was here?”

Alasdair said, “Quite startling what you’ll
turn up in a criminal investigation.”

“Oh? I’d like to hear about that.” Roger
didn’t specify whether he meant the disposition of the Stone or the
investigation. He chose a camera from his collection of electronic
paraphernalia and started taking photos. “And I was about to tell
you to give that up and help me pack, Brendan. Good going! Nessie’s
bones and her image carved on the sacred Stone, too. Absolute
proof!”

Alasdair plucked the paparazzo back, just as
the rim of the trench was crumbling beneath his oversized athletic
shoes. “All in good time. Just now, Dr. Dempsey, I’ve got some
questions that need answering.”

“Sure. Yeah. No problem.” Lowering the
camera, Roger blinked around him as though wondering why no one
stepped forward with a press release. “Brendan . . .”

“Mr. Gilstrap,” Alasdair directed, “go down
by the house, please, and help Miss Wotherspoon look after the Hall
lad.”

“Kirsty? Sure.” Brendan leaped from the
trench and bounded down the hillside like a buck scenting a doe.
Some men, Jean reflected, would have just looked dirty. Brendan
seemed all the manlier for his coating of grime. Put him together
with Kirsty and her skimpy outfit and they’d be ready for a photo
spread in
Maxim
or some other men’s magazine. So had they
gotten back together last night, when—something sensual—had been in
the air?

Roger just looked grubby. “I’m sure he’d be
glad to help and everything, but I really need him to be up here
working. We’ve got to get the bones packed up and into a safe
place. Locked up.” As though illustrating his point he lowered
himself down onto his tarp and went back to packing bones, not
without the occasional possessive glance toward the trench and the
Stone inside.

Alasdair loosened his tie and removed his
jacket and sat down across from Roger, his pose as casual as though
they were having a picnic, the flicker of light and shadow and
thought in his eyes not casual at all. Jean arranged herself on a
flat rock to one side and pulled out her notebook. She couldn’t
make notes like Gunn, but she could get something down.

Her gaze drifted to the landscape behind
Alasdair, the mountains that seemed made of paper, not stone, the
banks and braes plunging into the loch, the water glistening
gunmetal blue-gray in the diffused sunlight. When he asked, “And
then what?” she jumped.

Roger didn’t. “What?”

“After you get the bones to a safe place and
locked up. What then?”

“Why, I’ll study them. I’ll invite scientists
from all over the world, and news teams, and I’ll apply for funding
for a Museum. Jean,” Roger called to the side, “you can have a
lifetime ticket.”

“Thanks,” she said, and wrote baloney on her
blank page.

“Documentaries, books—this is a big story,
Cameron. I’ll have to retire after this one. No more worlds to
conquer.”

“So that’s why you felt justified in planting
a bug on Miss Fairbairn here?”

Roger’s hands stopped dead. He looked from
Jean to Alasdair and back, warily as an animal from the cover of
his cap and his beard. “Ah. Well. That was Tracy’s idea. Sorry
about that, Jean. She got a little carried away. Very supportive,
you know. I’ll name the Museum after her.”