The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Glad to hear she’s all right,” added Dave. “Accidents can be fatal, you know.”

  “She’s resting,” the constable stated, which was more polite than No kidding.

  Even though they apparently felt honor-bound to support a compatriot in her hour of need, the couple ceased and desisted. On their way into the house they passed the lanky figure of Martin Hall, identified by the fiery dot of a cigarette at his lips. Above them all, lights gleamed from the top of the tower. Was someone there, or were the lights on an automatic timer?

  The constable was wearing a yellow slicker, which shone spectrally in the last cloud-filtered gleam of midsummer, but none of the others were using umbrellas. The rain must have stopped. Jean turned away from the window, wondering if she’d ever see her own umbrella again. It had probably been trampled or run over or both. Well, better it than her.

  She poured herself another cup of tea, sponged off her muddy bag, and turned off the electric fire. On the coffee table she arranged all her journalistic implements—her laptop, the photo of the Pitclachie Stone, copies of passages from books and newspapers, Internet print-outs, the books on Nessie and on Crowley, Roger’s press release and the Omnium brochures. And, last but not least, the envelope with the transcripts. Most of the notes in her notebook had been saved on her laptop—all she’d lost was another layer of insulation from her nerves. But Alasdair or no Alasdair, she wasn’t going to assume the vanishment and the not-an-accident were cause and effect. Not yet, anyway.

  Jean settled down on the couch, tucked the duvet snugly around her, and picked up the new addition to her bag of tricks, the old copy of Loch Ness: the Realm of the Beast. She fanned the yellow-rimmed pages and her nostrils puckered.

  At Fraser’s table in the open air, all she’d detected was a whiff of mildew and something sweet. Now, after the book had spent several hours in a plastic shopping bag in her wardrobe, that whiff had intensified to a charnel house stench. The book had been steeped too long in this damp climate, in a storage shed or barn, perhaps. The librarian with the beautiful Thai name would be appalled.

  Holding the book gingerly, at arm’s length, Jean inspected the flyleaf with its faded autograph: To my dear E., remembering the good times, Ambrose Mackintosh. Then she turned to the copyright page. This book hadn’t been published by Mandrake, defunct in 1930, but by another obscure if perhaps less controversial press in 1932, the year before Eileen’s exit and Nessie’s entrance.

  Jean leafed through the book carefully enough to ascertain that it was identical to her paperback edition. Then, with an unladylike snort to clear her nasal passages, she set it on the coffee table and fished out her cheat-sheet on Ambrose. Born 1886, the Crowley years and WWI, married 1922. He was a gentleman scientist, an enthusiastic amateur like Schliemann at Troy, except his archaeological work met Indiana Jones’ definition of the word—“smash and grab.”

  Roger, too, had evoked Schliemann, and by inference, Jones. If not as far out on the pseudo-science limb as Ambrose had been, still Roger was a similar character. Jean thought suddenly that the prime mover of events was not Roger and his expedition, but Ambrose and his adventures along that uncertain shore where myth and fact overlapped, a coastline she herself knew only too well.

  The Water-Horse of Loch Ness was published in 1934, following Ambrose’s spate of articles about Nessie-sightings. Pictish Antiquities, his last effort at validation by an increasingly professional archaeological establishment, was published in 1939, just as another war drove the final nail into his way of life. He’d lingered until 1970, servants long gone, the house falling into disrepair, but there was no record of him doing more than brooding here in his ivory tower, his fortress of solitude . . .

  The cat leaped onto Jean’s feet. She jerked, then laughed and patted the animal’s sleek head. He kneaded the duvet, a cat attractor if ever there was one, and lay down beside her. At least he hadn’t landed on her sore knee. Nothing like being so preoccupied she’d missed him jumping down from the chair.

  She looked around the room—no, she hadn’t missed anything else. The less-than-brilliant overhead light reflected off the glossy photo of the Stone, so that it looked as though it were radiating energy. Some inanimate objects did have auras, Jean had heard, and the Stone seemed as likely a candidate for one as any. She wondered yet again just why Ambrose had never set the Stone up. But that was about number fifteen on her list of questions, number one being: Why had Jonathan Paisley been killed?

  The transcripts. She owed it to Alasdair to do her assignment conscientiously. She opened a new file on her computer and dumped a short stack of paper out of the envelope, copies of typewritten pages. A post-it note obscured the cover sheet. “Jean. Here you are. Thanks for helping out. A.” The handwriting was solid, the strokes as precise, as controlled, as letters carved onto a stone monument. But his capitals hinted at frustration, the “J” of her own name slashing downward . . . Good grief! Here she was analyzing the man’s handwriting! Next she’d be drawing little hearts with his initials in them in the margins of the papers. She began to read.

  According to the police reports and interviews, the only physical evidence in the case of Mrs. Mackintosh’s disappearance was a freshly-scrubbed floor at the foot of the stairs in Ambrose’s study and a bloodstained scarf identified as Eileen’s that was found caught in a shrub. The police had established that the blood on the scarf was human, but that was the forensic limit in 1933.

  The trial transcripts repeated the interviews in the voices of the participants. Jean began typing notes, occasionally smiling at the archaic language of both the era and the court.

  The servants—Eileen’s maid, a cook, a butler/valet and several gardeners—and members of the local community all agreed that Eileen and Ambrose were not on good terms, but that Iris’s birth had gratified them both and given them hope for the future. Eileen had last been seen by her maid on the morning of March 29. Then the servants had departed and left Eileen, baby Iris, Ambrose, and a companion alone.

  Jean sat up, earning an eyelid shiver from Mandrake. A companion? Oh. The woman hadn’t been a servant, a petty but relevant point in the days when social status had been meticulously graded. She had been a companion, and not even a paid one, apparently, just a woman who had lived at Pitclachie since the previous fall, fetching and carrying for Eileen during her pregnancy and then for baby Iris.

  She, too, disappeared on March 29. And her name, Jean saw with a micro-thrill, was Edith Fraser. From Foyers, which was near Crowley’s Boleskine estate. But that didn’t mean Edith was connected to Crowley, let alone Gordon Fraser the bookseller, who disapproved so strongly of The Beast from Boleskine. Inverness-shire was Fraser territory. Still, Alasdair would be interested in this bit of synchronicity. Jean typed Edith’s name, added an exclamation point, and hurried ahead to Ambrose’s own testimony.

  The prosecution said, probably with a sniff, “It is suggested here by the Crown that on March twenty-ninth, nineteen-thirty-three, you killed your wife, Eileen Fleming Mackintosh.”

  Ambrose replied, probably with an indignant bridle, “That is absolute bunkum with a capital B, if I may say it. Why should I kill my wife?”

  “Mr. Mackintosh seems to have great difficulty recognizing bunkum, whether capitalized or not,” retorted the prosecutor, no doubt referring to Ambrose’s admiration for Crowley and implying that murdering one’s wife was the logical outcome of such admiration.

  The defense had contented itself with a stiff, “The Mackintosh family has always borne the stamp of respectability and truthfulness.”

  Ambrose had conducted himself accordingly, displaying his credentials as landed gentleman and benign scholar. No, he and his wife had sadly not been getting on well. As for the day she disappeared, its quiet had been broken only by a cup of coffee spilled at the foot of the staircase in his study. He had emerged from his sanctum late in the afternoon to find both Mrs. Mackintosh and her companion Miss Fraser gone and the infant Iris wailing in h
er cradle, her condition of hunger and dampness indicating that she had been unattended for quite some time. He could not explain the bloodied scarf.

  What had happened to his wife? The tribulations of childbirth and motherhood had proved too much for her delicate constitution and she had thrown herself into the loch. Dreadful business, a great tragedy.

  What had happened to Miss Fraser? Perhaps the terrible event had unhinged her mind. Or, fearful of attracting blame, however unjustified, she had not stayed to give notice but had run away. She was above the age of consent. He was not her keeper. She was a destitute young woman from the area, who, out of the goodness of his heart and his desire to see his wife catered to during her very difficult—blush—confinement, he had taken in.

  The defense inferred that Edith killed Eileen and fled, but could not come up with a motive other than a vague suggestion of missing jewelry. Out of respect for the Fleming family’s sensibilities, though, no one had inventoried Eileen’s belongings. When the maid said she was under the impression nothing was gone, that was that.

  Edith’s destitution might explain why her family was absent from the transcripts and presumably the trial. It did explain why no one seemed more than perfunctorily concerned about where she’d gone. She had been something between a parasite and a slave, neither part of the servant’s hall nor known to the friends Eileen had liked to entertain before her “confinement” had confined her within the walls of Pitclachie, alone except for Ambrose and a skeleton crew—hah, Jean told herself—of servants.

  Edith. Was it just coincidence that “Edith” also started with an “E”? To my dear E, remembering the good times. What? Had there been some sort of love triangle? That could explain a lot, up to and including Edith’s abrupt departure. As for the Lodge’s ghost-video . . .

  Jean swiveled, but the staircase was silent and empty, and beyond the fringes of the rug the stone flags of the floor revealed no lingering stains, of coffee, blood, or anything else. Had her ghost-sensing been confirmed by outside evidence? If so, that was both encouraging and creepy.

  Jean hitched the duvet further up over her chest, rested her head against the back of the couch, and massaged her eyes. The original uneven and slightly smeared typewritten lines would have been hard enough to read, let alone the copies.

  The room was growing colder and colder, as much from the iceberg whose tip was barely revealed in the transcripts as from the chill night outside. The ticking of the kitchen clock sounded like the plunking of raindrops onto stone—well, okay, she was hearing the occasional plop of a raindrop falling from the roof onto the courtyard. The malodorous air of the old book seemed to be coagulating in her throat like slime. She was going to have to put it, as well as the cat, out for the night.

  Yawning, Jean told herself that if she went upstairs and lay down, she could get to sleep before any paranormal activities started up. Maybe. But she had only a few more pages to go.

  The prosecution offered only the merest hints of occult activities, either sparing the sensibilities of the court and the Crown or else assuming that those activities were so well known in Inverness-shire they went without saying. If the defense had ever considered a change of venue, to, say, Timbuktu, it was not recorded.

  Aleister Crowley had last visited Pitclachie when he sold Boleskine in 1919. The proprietor of the local hotel, the building that was now the Official Exhibition with the floating Nessie, reported white-robed figures carrying flaming torches on the hillside behind Pitclachie House. Ambrose pooh-poohed the idea of secret rituals and the like, wisely cutting himself off before launching into a defense of Crowley’s not-so-secret and less-than-savory activities. That, Jean supposed, had come indirectly, in his theories about ceremonial magic in Pictish Antiquities.

  While many locals had not been gladdened by this business of digging up graves, let alone associating with wizards, digging at the castle was seen as a legitimate endeavor. As for Ambrose’s collection of bronze and silver artifacts, Jean deduced that it served as a character reference. And Nessie? Well, every landed gentleman was allowed his eccentricities, especially one who had suffered such a terrible tragedy. Jean reminded herself that at the time of the trial, in late 1933, the Nessie tsunami was no more than a wavelet on the loch.

  Manners and morals had changed so drastically in seventy years that trying to understand those of an even earlier period—why the Picts carved and erected their stones, for example—was the philosophical equivalent of landing on Mars. Impatient, she skimmed ahead to the verdict and the formal discharge of the prisoner. The court had probably greeted “Not Proven” with an air of bemused futility, no joy but no sorrow for either defense or prosecution. So Ambrose’s life had gone on, and Iris’s life had begun, under a cloud.

  Jean stacked the pages and tucked them away in the envelope, thinking that if not for Ambrose’s slightly sinister reputation, the jury would have found him Not Guilty and had done with it. Trust the Scots, with their streak of grim practicality, to invent a verdict that split the difference between Guilty and Not Guilty. Not Proven was draped in shades of gray that hung over you like your own personal overcast the rest of your life—and after. People who had actually done the deed deserved that. People who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time did not. But it wasn’t Jean’s responsibility to pass judgment, tempted as she often was.

  Mandrake lifted his head and looked past her, toward the stairs. The fur along his back rose into a serrated edge. His eyes were chips of amber, unblinking. If she leaned over and looked into those eyes, she’d see what he was seeing. But she didn’t need to. The back of her neck puckered. The frigid air pressed her down into the couch, a cement overcoat.

  Jean, too, looked toward the stairs, but saw nothing. Mandrake’s head, though, lowered and turned, tracing the path of the ghost as it walked down the steps and across the floor to the vestibule. The velvet curtain twitched. One edge curved outward, grasped by an unseen hand. It moved slowly across its rod and with a flutter fell back into place.

  Was she hearing faint voices, male and female intermingled? Or were the microscopic hairs in her ears waving like sea anemones to otherwise undetectable currents in the air? Ah, there was that coffee smell again, and tobacco, and something else—the reek of the old book, probably, cutting through the extrasensory odors.

  Mandrake’s pink nose expanded and contracted. And then, with an audible sigh, his eyes closed, his fur smoothed, and his chin dropped onto the duvet. Jean wished it were that easy. She sat there, skin prickling, waiting for the oppression to lift, for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a minute. Exhale, inhale, exhale, and her own fur settled. The tick of the clock filled the silence. That, and . . . Well of course there would be footsteps outside, the constable was walking his beat.

  Maybe that ghostly display had been the exhibition for tonight. Maybe it was only the prelude to something more vivid. She wasn’t going to wait around. It was almost midnight, time to finally call Saturday a done deal. Midsummer’s Day, the longest day of the year. No joke.

  Yawning again, and resisting the urge to scrub at the grit in her eyes, she saved her file and shut down the computer. If nothing else—and there was plenty else—the transcript gave her an excuse to call Alasdair tomorrow. To talk to him, face to face. He’d be polite, professional, distant. He’d look like an ice sculpture. If she wanted to start him thawing again she’d have to . . .

  The trilling notes of Mozart sounded abruptly from the kitchen.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Jean broke her own record at the sitting high jump. The duvet went one way and, in a scramble of paws, the cat went another. Pressing her heart back into her chest, Jean stumbled to her bag, still sitting beside the sink, and pulled out her cell phone. Alasdair?

  It was Brad, his voice bland as mashed potatoes. “Hi. I got your message. What’s going on?”

  She leaned against the counter, catching her breath and waggling her knee. She’d told him what was going on. S
he’d told him . . . “Brad, it’s midnight here.”

  “Yeah. Six hours later—I knew that, you didn’t have to tell me. But you said it was a police matter, so I thought I’d better call. You can get pretty impatient.”

  She shouldn’t fault him for those remarks. Trying not to do so, Jean walked over to the table, pulled some notepaper and a pen out of the drawer, and established the order of business: “Someone blew up Roger Dempsey’s boat.”

  “What for?” Brad asked.

  “That’s what the police want to know, especially since a man was killed.”

  “Whoa. That’s not good.”

  She didn’t need to explain the entire case to him. He’d probably object if she tried. “Roger’s here showing off all his equipment and searching for the Loch Ness monster.”

  “Sounds like the sort of thing he’d go for. He was telling me all about some treasure galleon sunk off a Scottish island—you’d know all about that.”

  “What do you mean, he was telling you? You’ve never met him.”

  “Sure I have. I was sitting at the bar at that convention in Williamsburg —you remember, the one about layers of wallpaper and blocked-up doorways and stuff.”

  “The archaeology of standing buildings. Yeah, that’s where I met Roger, but I didn’t . . .”

  “I told you I talked to him.”

  She winced. He probably had. But they’d started tuning each other out a long time ago, more shame to them both.

  “Anyway, I was sitting in the bar and he was sitting in the bar and we started visiting, you know, the way you do when you’re just having a drink. He asked me if I was at the conference and I said I was only there to carry my wife’s luggage.”