Whoa, Jean thought, she was on a roll. To what, she didn’t know, but she was rolling. “Haven’t you got anything from the threatening letters?”
“I’ll not be saying that.” His hint of a smile partly apologized for not confiding in her, partly reminded her that he was the interrogator here. “Whoever sent the letters was after stopping the expedition, aye, but that’s not necessarily the same person who blew up the boat.”
“Good point. Iris said that considering Roger’s reputation, just about anyone could have wanted to stop the expedition, although blowing up the boat did seem a bit drastic.”
“Iris said that, did she? What else was she saying about Dempsey?”
Nothing that would make Jean feel as though telling Alasdair was betraying a confidence. “That Roger puts people at risk in order to serve his ambitions and that amateurs like him can do more harm than good. I got the impression Iris feels some sort of personal betrayal. Roger hinted he’d already gone several rounds with her. But that’s only a marginally stronger impression than my feeling Roger’s up to something behind the scenes.”
“The expedition might could have been the set-up for an insurance scam.”
There was a thought, but not one she was comfortable with. “Roger loves his gadgets. I can’t see him destroying them on purpose.”
“Who was with you when the boat exploded?”
“Some of the guests at Pitclachie House, the Ducketts and Martin Hall and his little boy.”
“No one else? Not Iris herself?”
Back to Iris. The only reason Jean could keep up with Alasdair’s acrobatic thought processes was because hers tended to leap and twirl, too. “No, Iris wasn’t there—I didn’t meet her until this morning. Kirsty, her niece, wasn’t there, either. She went out with Brendan last night. Iris isn’t too happy about that. She thinks he’s been contaminated by Roger, I guess.”
“Who else is stopping at the B&B?”
“The Hall family, the Ducketts, and a French couple, the Bouchards. Iris and Kirsty put me in the Lodge, a separate cottage, because the Bouchards didn’t want to stay . . .” Oh hell, if she could tell anyone, she could tell Alasdair. That moment they’d each realized the other had the same ghostly allergy was not one she’d soon, if ever, forget.
She leaned in a bit closer. Her nerve endings stirred in that energy field she remembered all too well. Like a tickle, it was neither entirely pleasant nor entirely irritating. “There’s a ghost in the Lodge. Ambrose, I bet—it used to be his study. I heard the door of a locked room open and shut, footsteps, the smell of coffee and tobacco. I also heard a man and a woman arguing, and what might have been Eileen Mackintosh scream and fall down the stairs. I didn’t get up and look. There’s a ghost in the garden, too, not as strong a one, though.”
“Eh?” Alasdair tilted his head toward hers. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, so he didn’t have far to tilt. “Ambrose was tried for murder, wasn’t he?”
She tried not to shrink away like some sweet young thing on her first date—she wasn’t sweet, she wasn’t young, she wasn’t a thing, and this sure as heck wasn’t a date. “He was, yes. But that’s over and done with. What isn’t over and done is that before I heard the ghost, I heard another door shut, maybe the outside one. Which was also locked.”
“You’re thinking that was a living person. Had anything gone missing this morning?”
“Nothing of mine. I can’t speak for everything in the house. A bookshelf was disarranged is all. Oh, and a curtain was drawn, but I’m sure that, at least, was Ambrose.”
“And you’re on your own in this cottage at night, are you?”
“Somebody could have been searching for something there, but they’d have no motive to come after me!”
“You don’t know that for certain, do you now?”
She smiled tightly. “Thanks, Alasdair.”
“You’re welcome, Jean,” he returned, almost sober, but a similar smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. He turned his gaze to the blue-tinted mountains that dwindled away to the south.
No, he couldn’t explain the small mystery of the doors either, but he wasn’t about to reject anything as irrelevant to his investigation. Damn, Jean thought, she was still able to read him. That was not a skill she’d meant to cultivate. And damn him, while she was at it, not only for pointing out that she just might could maybe be in danger, but for that knowing if subtle smile that got under her skin every time.
Voices and the scramble of footsteps echoed up the stairs. Down below, the piper struck up Auld Lang Syne. Alasdair stepped away from her the instant she stepped away from him, his expression locking itself down. “We’re needing a statement.”
“I know the drill,” she returned, and glanced at her watch. “I’m supposed to catch up with Hugh Munro—my neighbor, you remember, the musician—at the Festival, but then I can stop by the station.”
“I bought one of Munro’s albums, since you spoke so well of him. Fine music.”
Surprised, not to mention pleased, Jean was inhaling to respond when five or six people clambered out of the stairwell and crowded the top of the tower.
Alasdair motioned toward the stairs with a curt, “Right.”
“Right.” Jean expelled her breath and took a step.
“Look!” The shout sparked a general rush to the side of the tower. Cameras leaped to attention and started clicking. “It’s Nessie!” someone else said, and the word passed from voice to voice like a hot potato from hand to hand. “Nessie! Nessie!”
Jean almost tripped over her own feet, she spun around so fast, and was pulled along in Alasdair’s wake as he cut through the group. She bumped up against the railing between him and a plump woman, and followed the trajectory set by the multiple pointing fingers.
A mottled dark hump bobbed up and down in the waves just below the castle. Around it floated what looked like appendages, mere suggestions just below the surface of the opaque water. This time Jean’s brain ran smack up against a wall and stopped. Nessie? No way!
The piper stopped playing. In the sudden quivering silence Jean could hear more excited voices drifting up from below. A brush against her arm was Alasdair reaching into his jacket and pulling out a cell phone. Stepping away from the parapet, he punched buttons then put the phone to his ear.
Oh. It was all in the perspective, wasn’t it? An explosion, a fire, might singe the red of a life preserver into mottled black. But it would still be buoyant. Jonathan hadn’t sunk at all.
Jean mouthed the words as Alasdair said them, his voice flat, dull, professional: “We’ve found Jonathan Paisley.”
Chapter Eleven
In the rush of police cars and media vans along the road toward the castle, Jean felt like a salmon swimming upstream. She presumed boats were on the way, too, but she couldn’t see the bay from the town. So that’s why intelligent and imaginative Alasdair had been loitering with intent at the top of the tower. Because he hoped that Jonathan’s body would eventually drift by.
Poor Jonathan, she thought again, those two words wearing a rut in her mind. There he’d been, cautiously wearing that life preserver, and all it had preserved was his body, an exhibit in a crime scene. Some life preservers were made with blocky extensions around the neck to keep an unconscious person’s head above the water. Not the kind Jonathan had been wearing. He’d chosen a light sports model that wouldn’t limit his flexibility while he worked with Roger and Brendan. But he’d gone into the water alone, in the fiery darkness. Into cold water that would have sapped first consciousness, then life.
Shuddering, Jean drove up to Pitclachie House and parked next to a second police car. Was Iris so formidable that Sawyer had called for back-up? Jean wouldn’t have minded witnessing the confrontation, but not if it meant getting caught in the line of fire.
Was Jonathan an innocent bystander who had been caught in the line of fire? Or had the mad bomber intended to kill him? Had he intended to kill Brendan or Roger—especially Rog
er? Unless Roger himself was the mad bomber as Alasdair had theorized, Alasdair being a man who always considered his options.
When she told Miranda she was tired of playing it safe, Jean hadn’t necessarily meant she wanted to put herself at risk, either physically or emotionally. And yet she had. Now she wasn’t sure which part of D.C.I. Cameron’s concern she found more disturbing, that he thought she might be in danger or that he cared about her safety. He was only doing his job, she rationalized.
Rationality had its limits. Nessie was only one of the creatures that frolicked in the blank spaces at the edge of the map. She’d been rooting for Nessie yesterday afternoon. Before the explosion.
Just as Jean turned away from the house and her own thoughts, the Water Horse van careened off the road and up the drive, Roger at the wheel with Brendan riding shotgun. He skidded to a stop beside her and leaned out of his window. “Hey, Jean.”
“Hello,” she replied, suppressing the impulse to add, You look terrible.
He must know he looked terrible, with bags hanging slackly from his bloodshot eyes. Although, judging by the trace of egg clinging to his beard, he hadn’t looked in a mirror for quite some time. Even the bill of his cap drooped dispiritedly, and his voice was dull. “We’re going on with the survey. Jonathan would have wanted us to. He was a real supportive guy, Jonathan—was.”
“In other words, the police told us not to leave,” said Brendan. He was leaning away from Roger, against the opposite door, giving Jean the impression the two men had been arguing.
Roger focused on Jean. “We had the ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers stored at the hotel, along with some of the computers we weren’t using on the boat. We didn’t lose as much as we might have.”
One if by land, two if by sea, Jean thought irreverently and irrelevantly, and asked. “Do you have any idea what caused the boat to explode?”
“It was an accident. No other option.”
“But the threaten . . .”
“The stove in the galley,” Roger stated. “Tracy says it’s been playing up. Acting up. She even mentioned it to the guy who owns the boat. He ignored her, and now look what happened.”
“Wasn’t it a propane stove?”
Roger stared at her as though she’d just spoken in Elvish. “Yeah, that’s just the point. Leaking propane, a spark from the equipment, boom.”
Either he hadn’t noticed the gasoline smell or . . . Or what? She knew better than to trespass on Cameron’s theories or his witnesses. If Roger wanted to indulge in denial, prevarication, or both, all she could do was take note. She tried an innocuous, “Maybe you can show me your remote-sensing equipment some time.”
“Yeah, great. We’ll do that.” He tried to grin and produced a ghastly grimace instead.
Brendan’s face was soberly downcast, his cubical jaw tucked into his jacket collar like a box wrapped in gift paper. Still, his eyes glinted warily as they looked from Jean to the police car waiting at the top of the drive and back again. She wondered if he was feeling guilty over—well, maybe no more than his hasty words to Jonathan, or trading places . . . Oh. He and Roger didn’t know Jonathan’s body had just turned up. She could try telling them, and seeing what their reaction was. But Alasdair would prefer doing that himself. He kept as tight a control of his variables as his emotions.
“See you later,” Roger said, and accelerated toward the house.
Jean inhaled the damp wind scented with the slightly musty smell of the loch. What she had thought was some emanation from the neighboring fields she now realized had been Roger’s breath. Knocking back a few drinks was the time-honored response to disaster, she told herself. He was entitled.
She walked briskly down the length of the drive and onto the sidewalk that ran beside the main road. Since it was also the shoulder of the road, she stayed as close to the fence-lined side as she could—taking into account that some of the leafy wonders filling the gully between asphalt and fence were stinging nettles. This country was filled with an amazing variety of prickly things. And people. Go figure.
The festival occupied a bumpy open field that lay between the old hotel housing the Official Loch Ness Exhibition—distinct from the Original Loch Ness Exhibition down the road—and the new Cameron Arms Hotel. Jean paused a moment to admire the contemporary building’s slate roof, stuccoed walls, and crow-stepped gables, a design that recognized Scottish traditional architecture without becoming the sort of “authenticity” that was actually mockery.
A sudden pricking of her thumbs made her first frown, then look quickly around and up. What the . . ? Ah, Tracy Dempsey was framed in a large bay window on the second floor of the hotel. She was staring down at Jean, her face set in something between a scowl and a sob, like Medusa catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror.
Tracy had every reason to be grief-stricken, frustrated, angry—or all of the above. Just as Jean lifted her hand in a sympathetic wave, a thin, tall silhouette wavered in the window behind Tracy and she vanished as abruptly as though she’d been jerked back by a rubber band.
Jean stood with her hand upraised. Had she seen a second person in the room or had she been deceived by Tracy’s reflection on the glass? If someone were there, it sure wasn’t Roger, not unless during his explorations along the edge of science he’d learned how to be in two places at once. As for who was there—the body shape was Martin Hall’s—it was none of her business.
Like that was going to stop her, Jean thought.
She picked her way across the muddy patch inside the gate of the Festival Field and up the hill. Flags strained against their moorings, her hair whipped around her face, and the fabric of the large central tent ran a swell like the water of the loch. Technicians used lengths of cable to knit together microphones, amplifiers, and mixer boards on the stage, while vendors of food and souvenirs around the periphery were already making sales to the gathering multitude. A wide selection of Starr beverages was available, Jean noted, from water with caffeine or vitamins, to beer and whiskey served up with warm scones, meat pies, and other high-carb, high-grease selections. Festival food, in other words.
A sensual fiddle melody rose and fell on the wind, luring Jean to a smaller tent. She peeked through the flap. Aha, this was the green room, furnished with chairs and provender for the performers. Hugh Munro was sitting there dreamily sawing away at a ballad, not that “sawing” was the right word for the motion of his bow across the strings of his fiddle. It danced, tracing arabesques in the air. Or, Jean thought in spite of herself, it made love to the fiddle—connecting, receding, connecting again. If words could barely describe the action of making music, they failed utterly when it came to describing music itself, emotion in sound. And like emotion, some music was uplifting and some was painful.
Jean suspected Hugh wasn’t so much rehearsing as—no, not amusing himself. He was breathing. For a musician, business was pleasure and pleasure was business. Even historians couldn’t quite say that.
Most of the time Hugh looked like Santa Claus, polished bald head fringed by neatly-trimmed white hair, apple cheeks fringed by a neatly-trimmed white beard, stomach shaking with humor. Other times he morphed into Karl Marx, his stomach shaking with indignation and his eyes flashing fiercely. His protest songs were so stirring they would drive the most rabid reactionary onto the barricades.
Now Hugh’s clear blue eyes beamed with goodwill to man—and woman. He brought the song to a close and said, “Here you are, then,” echoing Cameron’s statement.
“Here I am,” Jean returned, “in the thick of it.”
Carefully Hugh tucked his fiddle into its well-worn case and the case beneath his arm. “Your story’s blown up on you again, has it? And aye, I’m intending the pun.”
“I don’t do these things on purpose,” she told him with a sickly smile.
He bowed her out of the tent, patting her shoulder reassuringly as she passed. “No, I’m not thinking you do. I hear there’s a lad gone missing.”
�
��Not any longer. We–er–they found him just a few minutes ago, floating in the loch.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hugh.
“Me, too,” Jean stated. “So where were you when the boat went up?”
“The lads and I were unloading the bus. Bloody thing broke down twice on the road from Dundee, we were hours late arriving here. That flack from Starr looked to be having a coronary.”
“Flack from Starr? A public relations guy?”
“Oh aye, name of Peter Kettering. A right ponce, scunnered I’d missed some sort of posh dinner with the Tourist Authority folk. Carted me away for a drink with the VIPs, including the American scientific chap and his wife. Mutton dressed as lamb, she was, low-cut frock, ankle-breaking high heels. If that’s not too unkind a cut.”
Jean thought, there but for the grace of common sense . . . “I used to wear high heels all the time—when you’re only five-three people don’t always take you seriously. Tracy would be about that tall without her shoes, I bet. And she wants to be taken seriously.”
“Don’t we all?” said Hugh. “Dempsey now, he seems couthy enough, if a bit cracked. They were serving good whiskey, thank the gods for small favors, but the conversation was hopeless. Kettering and My Lady Dempsey were making talk so small it was microscopic, all the while sniffing each other like dogs. And Dempsey himself drank and looked about like an alien suddenly set down on the earth.”
Jean grinned. She could see the entire scene.
“A handsome young couple was there too,” he went on. “Didn’t say much, though—never caught their names.”
“Did you catch their nationality?” Jean asked, wondering if the Bouchards had attended the dinner.
“He was a Yank, whilst she had a Glasgow accent, I’m thinking. Bonny lass, she was, and clever enough not to go ruining her looks by painting her face.”
“Ah, that was Kirsty, Iris Mackintosh’s niece. And Brendan, one of Dempsey’s assistants. The surviving assistant, although Jonathan was still alive if this was before the boat blew up.” Unless someone killed him and staged the boat explosion to cover up the murder, whispered the insistent voice in the back of Jean’s mind. Some people had muses, she had Miss Marple.
The Murder Hole Page 10