He didn’t mean that as a jab, Jean told herself, just fact.
“We got along great. He was working on a submersible, even called me up a few months after the conference to ask about the mechanics of ballast tanks and watertight seals and stuff. I didn’t mention it to you, you never understood that sort of thing.”
She felt her jaw tightening. “What about tanks and seals?”
“The problem with using water for ballast in your submersible is that you need pumps and valves to blow it out when you want to get back to the surface. That means more parts that can malfunction. And watertight seals, well, that’s obvious.”
Yes, it was. Jean noted those interesting factoids, then drew loop-the-loops not unlike the interlaced tail of Ambrose’s signature. From the phone emanated faint voices, rising and falling, similar to the intimation of ghostly voices she’d heard earlier. She imagined Brad sitting in his favorite old recliner, TV remote in one hand, phone in the other. “The police want to know whether Roger had a submersible on board his boat when it blew up,” she prodded. “He’s implying that all he had were remote-operating vehicles, but someone else saw a sub. Was he building one, then?”
“Oh yeah. He got it to the beta-testing phase before it went down off the Gulf Coast somewhere, Tallahassee, maybe.”
Jean didn’t think Tallahassee was on the coast, but that hardly mattered. “Roger’s sub went down? You mean, when it wasn’t supposed to go down? When did this happen?”
“I heard about it last year, maybe year before last now.”
“And it sank because the pumps and valves didn’t work?”
“Oh no, no, it was the hatch that didn’t work. Or the latches and seals on the hatch, probably. It leaked, the sub filled up with water, and it sank like a rock. The pilot drowned, but fortunately he was the only one on board.”
A metal coffin sinking into the water . . . Jean shuddered. So Jonathan was the second man who’d been killed on Roger’s watch? Oh boy. Her pen raced across the paper. “Not so fortunate for the pilot’s family. Did they manage to retrieve the sub and the man’s body?”
“Eventually, yeah. Roger gave up on the submersible and went into ROV research. I think he’s working on an AOV, too, a vehicle that doesn’t need to be tied to the boat but can pilot itself. That would work better in the loch there, when the boat’s going back and forth and tangling up its cables. An ROV should work just fine for that treasure galleon.”
Treasure galleon . . . “You mean the Armada galleon that sank in Tobermory Bay off Mull? Funny, I saw something about that today. Yesterday. I thought it was right up Roger’s alley.”
“Yeah, he was really excited, said there was Spanish gold on board that ship.”
“There’s a long shot for you, although I suppose there’s a better chance of him finding gold in Tobermory than Nessie here. He’s looking for her on land now.”
“If I was him I’d climb out on land, too, cover my butt. Sounds like he might be in line for a second lawsuit, depending on how your explosion thing plays out, I guess.”
“Lawsuit?” Jean enunciated, pen poised. “What lawsuit?”
“The guy’s family, like you said. His wife was threatening to file a suit against Omnium. Wrongful death or negligence or something. Saying that the sub was faulty so Omnium should pay to support the kids. I bet Omnium is saying the guy just didn’t close the hatch properly.”
“But no lawsuit’s actually been filed?”
“I don’t think so, but I got to working on that project for NASA and lost track. Omnium probably settled out of court. Way out of court, to keep the story from leaking.”
Leaking like the sub . . . Jean caught a movement from the corner of her eye. Oh. Mandrake was pussyfooting along the kitchen counter, sniffing at the plastic bag of bread. “Can you find out the name of the man who was killed?” she asked Brad.
“Why do you want to know?”
“What don’t I want to know?”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“What?”
“I read about that murder case you were involved in on the Internet, in the Scotsman headlines. Way to go, Jean. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”
Mandrake was alive and well, Jean thought huffily. And so was she. Barely . . . Beyond the faint hum of the airwaves she heard an announcer’s voice say, “A swing and a miss!” Ah yes. A summer Saturday. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie. “Brad, can you just find me the name of the man, please?”
“Okay, okay, I’ll ask around on Monday. I don’t know why you think it has anything to do with anything, though.”
Alasdair wouldn’t have wasted his breath with that comment. As far as he was concerned, everything had something to do with . . . A suspicion swelled in the back of Jean’s mind like a thunderhead on the horizon. “You told Roger your name. He knew you were my husband.”
“What?” Brad asked, dumped off the back of the truck as her thought accelerated. “Oh. Of course I told him my name. Geez. And after you told him off, I bet he remembered yours. Yours as it was then. Inglis isn’t all that common. Neither is Fairbairn, but you were born with that.”
She confined herself to, “Yes,” and went quickly on, “So can you tell the difference between a submersible and an ROV from the wreckage?”
“Sure. If you’ve got people inside, you’ve got to have a tough environment. In fact, I doubt if you could blow one up without actually putting explosives inside it. You could damage the heck out of it, sure. Look for a pressure hull lined with glass foam or the equivalent. Tell the cops to e-mail me some photos.” The announcer in the background exclaimed over the swelling cries of a crowd, “. . . and it’s a home run!”
“I’ll tell them,” Jean said loudly. “If you hear anything else about Roger or the lawsuit or the submersible accident, let me know, okay?”
“Sure,” he repeated. “Wow, can you believe those Red Sox?”
A woman’s voice answered Brad’s question before Jean could. Oh. He had someone there with him. Only Brad would call his ex-wife with his—girlfriend?—in the room. Not that him having a new female friend was surprising. He was subsiding into middle age, less gracefully than helplessly, but still, to some women he’d be a good catch, a safe port. A home run.
“Thanks,” Jean said, ended the call, and carried the notepaper over to her collection of reference material. She could hardly walk, her knee was so stiff and her feet were so cold. Her hands and arms were cold. Her nose was cold. She stood where Alasdair had stood, telling herself that it was time to go to bed . . . The tiny screen on the cell phone indicated that she had a message.
Quickly she pressed the keys. Ah, Michael had called while she was in the shower. His voice, its accent seeming all the livelier after Brad’s, filled her ear. “Jean, Rebecca and I are just off to the Royal Infirmary. Linda’s thinking she’ll not wait for the Fourth of July but come a bit early. Not to worry, the doctor says she’s well within tolerances. What’s worrisome is Dougie’s Nessie toy. He and Riccio tore it open, and there’s a bittie electronic gadget inside. Rebecca and me, we’re guessing it’s a listening device. A bug.”
Jean’s chin and eyebrows took off in separate directions. A bug? In the Nessie toy that Roger included with his press kit? Alasdair had said that none of the other reporters mentioned a toy.
Michael’s voice concluded, “I’ll hand it in to the police soon as I get the chance. Take care.”
“Yeah, y’all too,” Jean said into the ether. She remembered vigils by the phone, waiting for word from her brothers about their wives, comforted by knowing they were in a hospital, with the best of care. Eileen, on the other hand, had probably labored alone here at Pitclachie.
But that was old news. This was a fresh headline, big type, black block letters. Roger had planted a bug on her! The bloody nerve of the man! That was just the sort of thing a two-fisted gadgeteer like him would think was clever.
Jean slammed her phone shut and pressed her hand to her head, trying to sq
ueeze out the sequence of events. The press kit had arrived at her office late Tuesday. She’d taken it home. Hopefully, Roger had been amused listening to the TV news and her music and her inane one-sided conversations with Dougie. Until Michael and Rebecca came to visit on Thursday, when she sang the same old song about Brad, Dempsey, and the conference, that she’d sung to Miranda, too. They’d taken the toy away. Soon after that Roger had called to set up the interview. To keep his enemy close.
Her thunderhead of suspicion crackled with lightning. Both Dempseys kept asking about Brad because they thought he’d told her about the submersible. They thought she’d go public with it, the way she’d gone public with the scandal at the university, the way she’d waded into police work last month. But the sub accident hadn’t touched her personally—until now.
Oh God. She and Alasdair had been speculating whether Roger had a motive to kill Jonathan. He’d been motivated to plant a bug on Jean, and maybe to search the Lodge and take her notebook—what if he’d been motivated to try and kill her? For a long moment Jean cowered against the back of the couch, seeing bearded, baseball-capped assailants coming out of the woodwork.
But no. She’d been walking with Roger. They’d both been side-swiped by that car. Unless . . . Jean remembered Tracy’s anger both at the hotel and at the Festival, and Roger almost taking a swing at her, right there in front of God and Alasdair and the Ducketts. Had Tracy decided that Roger, like Jean, was more of a liability than an asset?
Tracy had been having a drink with Kettering. She hadn’t been driving a car without its headlights down the fog and dusk-darkened highway. Or had she? What if Kettering was in on the whole thing, thinking there was no such thing as bad publicity. What if . . . Well, there was an appalling number of what-ifs.
Jean gazed longingly at her phone. She needed to info-dump on Alasdair. She needed to hear his calm voice, to touch the still surface above his unplumbed depths and watch the ripples of his thought spreading outward. But no. What he needed was his sleep. Assuming he was sleeping, when his mind was as much a perpetual motion machine as hers.
Jean hadn’t realized her face was wrinkled up like last year’s Halloween pumpkin until the thought of Alasdair—and his nearby constable—relaxed it into a rueful smile. She pried her icy fingers off the phone and switched it off. Its little trill of farewell made Mandrake, still on the counter, look around sharply. First thing tomorrow morning she’d talk to Alasdair. Tonight she’d recharge the phone and herself as well. It was time to go to bed. Really, really, time to go to bed.
She piled everything back into her carryall except for the old book. She couldn’t just put it outside . . . Aha, the plastic bread bag. She dumped the rest of the bread into the breadbox, tucked the book into the bag, and closed it with a twist-tie. Mandrake observed the proceedings, nose twitching, then leaped onto the floor. After a valedictory twine around Jean’s legs he trotted toward the velvet curtain and slipped past its edge.
The curtain was hanging perfectly still, the folds of its fabric like sculpture. Jean tiptoed toward it, then pounced, throwing it aside. Mandrake sat in front of the door, tail swishing, waiting for his servant to let down the drawbridge. Okay, then. Jean unlocked the door and opened it. The damp chill of the night gathered around her like a shroud.
Shivering, she laid the book on a bit of decorative stonework just outside the door, where it would be protected from all water short of an earthquake dropping the entire hillside into the loch. The air was thick with mizzle, drizzle not heavy enough to fall to the ground. The main house and the tower loomed against the fragile glow of the clouds, a huge angular ink blot, the occasional lighted window seeming no more substantial than a streak of paint. Someone moved in the window to the right of the front door—ah, the private office. That lissome silhouette had to be Kirsty’s. She was up late.
Jean inhaled the fresh air scented lightly with smoke, clearing the smell of the book from her lungs. The constable had disappeared. If she’d been him, she’d have nipped into the kitchen for a cuppa, too.
The distant sound of music and singing hung eerily on the air. If Alasdair was staying at the hotel, he was sleeping with a pillow over his head. Hugh in full spate wouldn’t have awakened Brad, but Alasdair wasn’t Brad. And she wasn’t the Jean she’d been for Brad, either. Encouraged by that thought, she turned back into the Lodge.
A scream sliced suddenly, urgently, through the night, and was cut off by a thudding splat. The ghosts? No. The noise came from behind her.
All five of her normal senses flaring with adrenalin, Jean spun around, looking up, looking down. Was that a shadow flicking along the row of murder holes as someone ran through the tower room? That was most certainly a human form crumpled on the terrace, one that hadn’t been there a moment before. A shape as pale and indistinct as though seen through water. Drowned Ophelia . . .
She forced herself to walk toward it, her hands curled into fists at her sides, her socks and slippers swishing through the icy water gathered on the stone.
There, in a nimbus of reflected light, lay a body, limbs splayed loosely as a rag doll’s. An ashen face was turned upward, eyes staring past the tower, past the clouds, seeing nothing. A dark crimson stream oozed across the rain-slick terrace and pooled in the carved symbol of the gripping beast, Roger’s water horse.
Oh my God. Jean’s mind leaped and skidded. Her ears buzzed. She realized her hands were pressed to her face—she could smell the odor of bread and of the rotting book on her own fingertips. Oh my God.
The front door of the house opened with a crash and a clatter of the knocker. “What is it?” shouted a male voice. And just behind him came a woman’s, “What’s happened?”
Jean couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. It was all she could do simply to stand, there beside Tracy Dempsey’s dead body.
Chapter Twenty-two
If the scene by the roadside earlier that night had seemed like an impressionist picture, now Jean felt as though she’d fallen into a non-representational painting, something by Pollock, perhaps, all splatters and smears . . . There was an unfortunate image.
The constable was talking into his small radio unit. No matter that he’d been inside. He could have been standing right here, and he could have done nothing to stop Tracy from falling.
Falling? Jean’s gaze darted upward. She had seen movement in the tower room. Whoever it was should have been rushing down to the terrace—assuming Tracy had fallen, assuming she hadn’t been pushed, because if she’d been pushed . . .
If Tracy had been pushed, then there was no debating whether her death was an accident. Maybe Jonathan’s death was an accident. Maybe the sideswipe by the car was an accident. This, though, this was murder.
The shiver rising from Jean’s cold feet met the shiver flowing outward from the splash of that word in her mind. Wrapping her arms tightly around her chest, trying to quell her trembling, she shrank away from Tracy’s broken body—one step, two steps, three.
Kirsty appeared through the mirk and mist, wearing slippers and a robe over loose pajamas. The color drained from her face, leaving her complexion fish-belly white. Even her lips, the lower one caught between her teeth, were gray.
“Have you got a blanket, Miss?” the constable asked her.
She didn’t react.
“A blanket, Miss?” repeated the constable.
Kirsty’s stare moved from Tracy’s empty face to his intent one. She whispered, “Oh. Aye.” She plodded into the house and several long moments later returned with a red and blue knitted afghan that might have been one of Iris’s cottage industry samples. The constable shook it out and laid it over Tracy’s body, over her sweatshirt and jeans and athletic shoes, like a flag draped over a coffin.
The blanket helped give her mortality a little dignity, a little privacy. But the image of Tracy’s blank staring eyes was printed on Jean’s retina. The scream, outraged, terrified, scraped her senses like fingernails against a chalkboard. Murder. It had come to
murder at last.
There was Martin Hall, wearing only a pair of jeans, his shoulders bony and his chest concave. His face was a mask, eyes wide, mouth flapping open and shut again. Faintly he said, “Tracy? Tracy, what, how . . .” With a sharp glance at the constable and then at Jean, he tightened his lips into a slit.
The lights went on in an upper room, and the curtains flew back, and Dave and Patti’s ample shapes jostled each other in the window. Jean wondered where the rest of audience was—no sign of the Bouchards, and the cat was probably halfway to Edinburgh by now.
If she’d listened to Alasdair, she’d be halfway to Edinburgh . . . No. Doubly no, now.
A police car turned into the driveway, its pulsing blue lights sending waves of sickly sheen over the watching faces. Doors slammed. Footsteps raced. “Miss Fairbairn. Miss Wotherspoon.”
She looked around. She recognized that youthful, puzzled face. Gunn.
“What happened? What did you see?”
“I was standing here,” Jean said. “She fell. There was someone in the upper room.”
“She was lying here,” said Kirsty.
Martin said nothing.
Gunn waited, but Jean had nothing else to offer and the others looked as though they couldn’t have spelled their own names. At last he said, “You’d better be getting yourself inside. The lot of you.”
Oh yes. Please. Thank you. Jean turned toward the Lodge. Only then did she realize her feet were so cold and numb they felt like ice-filled galoshes. Her knee twinged and she lurched. Gunn seized her forearm. His hand seemed small, his grip tentative next to Alasdair’s. Feeling older than a centenarian now, like a set of bones echo-located by one of Roger’s sensors, Jean allowed Gunn to walk her toward the Lodge.
Another car roared up the drive, and another. Alasdair’s strong arm around her shoulders pulled her away from Gunn and pressed her so tightly against his side that his deep intake of breath reverberated through her own body. He was wearing blue jeans. And a sweatshirt. Beneath a yellow police jacket. She’d only ever seen him in a suit and tie. And in a kilt, getting in touch with his inner peacock. Now he’d look as though he was getting in touch with his inner punk if his face hadn’t been set in such stern lines she could have chiseled stone with it: On Duty.
The Murder Hole Page 21