Alasdair placed her inside the Lodge. The tiled entry seemed warm to her feet, and the lights, modest as they were, seemed garish. When he removed his arm from her shoulders and turned back toward the courtyard, she felt fragile and transparent, not like fine crystal but like cheap plastic. “Alasdair?” she asked.
He stopped, silhouetted against the glow of lights. “Jean?”
“I was standing there when she fell. Someone was in the upper room. I don’t know who it was. They ran away, but I didn’t see anyone come out the tower door.”
“There’s a second door, into the house. You’re saying she was pushed?”
“She had to . . . someone had to . . . yes.” Jean waved her hands, groping after the right words. “Listen, I know this isn’t a good time, I just . . . I’m sorry about what I said earlier, and there’s some stuff in the transcripts you need to know, and about the submersible and Roger, and that toy Nessie in the press kit, there was a bug in it . . .”
A cacophony of voices rose from the courtyard. Multiple yellow jackets swirled like autumn leaves.
Alasdair’s eyes flashed, but all he said was, “Lock your doors. We’ll have us a blether the morn.” And he was gone, off to the wars, leaving her with only that swift compression and breath to hint at the riptides swirling beneath his professional armor.
Jean locked the door. Alasdair, she thought, would make tea. He’d search the Lodge. He wouldn’t loom over her, not this time, even though a good masculine loom would actually have been comforting, now.
Her stomach gagged at the thought of tea. Her brain gagged at searching the Lodge—it had been searched already, by an expert . . . She’d stood there in the courtyard, her back turned to the open door, plenty long enough for someone to sneak inside. Although, if the evildoer was in the tower pushing Tracy, he or she would have had to move fast to get down the stairs and through the second door, wherever it was, and around the back of the house into the Lodge.
But why? She didn’t want an answer to that, but one came to her anyway. Dressed down, in the dark, Tracy would look like Jean. If the driver of the attack car thought it was Tracy walking with Roger earlier, then the opposite could be just as true. Whoever pushed Tracy out of the window might have thought they were pushing Jean. And yet it was Roger and Tracy who had the motive, wasn’t it?
To snoop on her, yes. To kill her? Well, the explosion had been drastic. Pushing Tracy out of the tower had been drastic.
Jean checked the doors and windows. Upstairs, the door to the storage room stood wide open. She slammed it shut. She had no time for paranormal hocus pocus right now, thank you very much.
She laid her wet footwear out in the bathroom, warmed her feet with the hair dryer until she could feel her toes again, and put on dry socks. Then, making two careful trips, she retrieved the duvet and her books and papers from downstairs. Each time, the damnable door stood open. Finally she just left it that way, scurrying past its dark, gaping maw and into the bedroom.
Jean locked the door and jammed a chair beneath the knob for good measure. Pulling the dressing table bench close to the window, she sat down and watched as the crime scene investigators went to work. Their raw white lights cast a shimmer on the mist, making the night outside their range even darker. Each figure appeared as abruptly as though from the wings of a theater, made its ritualistic gestures, and exited the scene. Softer lights rose and fell in the windows of the house and tower, flash bulbs winked, and headlights flared and died in the distance. Like fireworks, she thought.
She identified Alasdair from his stance, alert and contained, taking up more space than his compact stature required, and from his gestures, like those of a conductor before his orchestra, made with efficient economy rather than with flourishes.
Gunn was taller but thinner, looser of limb. He came and went, his notebook at point. And here came the ape-like form of Sawyer, ushering a shambling, limping man who had to be Roger. Alasdair conducted him to the chrysalis-like shape around which the activity accreted, lifted one end of the blanket, grasped his arm as he reeled. His voice rose. Alasdair’s met it and brought it down again. Roger staggered away again, assisted by a shapelier male figure that had to be Brendan.
At last the lights went out in the courtyard and the house, and the actors departed with Tracy’s now plastic-bagged body. Alasdair’s pale face turned up to toward Jean’s window. He raised his hand in a motion that was neither a regal wave and nor a traffic cop’s Stop right there. She wasn’t surprised he knew she was watching. If anyone had eyes in the back of his head, it was Alasdair.
Two constables stayed behind. If there was another murder, Jean wondered, would Alasdair then leave four? She hauled herself to her feet just as a couple more human figures appeared in time for the curtain call. Ah, the Bouchards, leaning together as close as honeymooners. Or conspirators. They exchanged nods with the constables but didn’t stop to ask questions. The news had spread.
Imagining Peter Kettering banging his head against a wall, Jean trudged to the bed and did not look at the clock. The day and then the night had stretched out like Macbeth’s tomorrows, until the last syllable of recorded time.
Alasdair had asked if Tracy was playing Lady Macbeth. He’d said that the other reporters hadn’t mentioned getting toy Nessies. He was too perceptive by half. By three-quarters, even.
Jean crawled beneath the duvet, assumed the fetal position, and played with the concept of a strong, compact body snugged to her back and a whiskey-scented breath on her cheek . . .
In the hallway a door shut. Footsteps made each floorboard creak in turn. Ah, Ambrose’s nightly show. The wet-blanket sixth sensation flowed over her and weighted her down. A sweet scent of what was either flowers past their prime or a heavy perfume teased her nostrils. Pipe tobacco. Coffee. Ambrose had testified that he’d spilled a cup of coffee at the foot of the staircase. And there was the mutter of voices, a man’s and a woman’s.
She was expecting the scream, and yet when it came it was so penetrating a repetition of Tracy’s real-time shriek, short and sharp, that she gasped. Her body spasmed to the slightly different timbre of each thud as Eileen’s body ricocheted off the treads and the balusters and came to rest on the floor below. This time Jean heard the shaking male voice, saying quite clearly, “Oh God, no, no, God, no,” although if he referred to the usual capital-G God or some lower-case entity, she had no way of knowing.
Holding her breath, she waited, but heard nothing more than the pacing steps of the constables outside her window. The heaviness in the air dissipated, and she realized she was curled into so tight a ball her shoulders were cramping. Inhale, exhale, inhale, and she relaxed, as much as a taut rubber band could relax. She could still see Tracy’s broken body. She could imagine Eileen’s.
If she kept thinking about it, trying to work it all out, she’d lie awake the rest of the night and be utterly useless in the morning. Instead, she deliberately slackened each muscle fiber and cleared her mind—she was a calm pool, unruffled, smooth. She was driving a submersible the same way she’d drive her car, and it was dropping through the water too fast, and she kept pumping on the brake pedal but nothing happened. Until the hatch popped open and peat-dark water flooded in.
She saw her own face, wet, eyes staring, pulled from the water by Alasdair’s capable hands.
Chapter Twenty-three
A sudden noise jerked Jean out of her dream. She blinked upward at daylight tinting the ceiling amber, the same color as the curtains. Oh. She’d slept after all. What had that noise been? It sounded like the clanking clatter of garbage men heaving around metal trash cans. But they’d hardly be doing that on a Sunday morning. Maybe the chill of the bed indicated that the ghost—ghosts—had added something else to their repertory. Once they reached their last act, she wondered, then what?
Jean crawled out of the bed and discovered that her knee, while stiff, functioned properly. The clock read nine a.m., hours after sunrise. She opened the curtains to see the sun
shining through a mist thin as chiffon, casting tenuous shadows over courtyard, terrace, and garden, but illuminating no signs of life. No signs of death, for that matter, only blue-and-white police tape across the door set into the angle where the tower abutted the main house. People used to mark plague houses with charcoaled crosses, Jean thought as she headed toward the bathroom. The tape worked just as well.
Across from her bedroom, the door to the storeroom was now shut. Fine. Be that way. Quickly Jean washed and threw on jeans and a sweater, gathered up her things, and headed downstairs. She felt headachy and nauseated, but if that indicated a hangover, it wasn’t from the one glass of whiskey. She was hungry, that was all. Hunger had to be a good sign.
The velvet curtain was pulled across the vestibule. Behind it the tiles were littered with squashed yellow broom petals, tracked in the night before. She went outside, locked the door, and reached for the old book she’d left on a stone gewgaw last night. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere, neither on the pavement nor in the shrubbery, knocked aside by some distracted police person. She could ask the constable now standing by the base of the tower, but decided she didn’t care.
Averting her eyes from the water horse logo carved into the dew-dampened stone flags, Jean went into the main house and followed her nose—coffee, toast, bacon!—past the library and down the hall into the dining room. Its arched windows and French doors echoed the neo-gothic extravagance of the rest of the house, but its furnishings were less fussy. Four small tables in assorted styles, less antique than simply pre-owned, were scattered across the polished planks of the floor. A sideboard displayed not the family silver but assorted cereal boxes, fruit bowls, and pitchers. The drinks cart sat to one side, its array of bottles looking sad and neglected. And still lacking a corkscrew, Jean assumed. Had Martin palmed it, so he could loudly announce its absence?
The other two Halls, Noreen and Elvis, were sitting by the window. She was staring into her teacup—foretelling a meeting with a handsome stranger, perhaps—while the child ate a soft-boiled egg with strips of toast, utterly focused. Multi-tasking came along with adulthood and the worries thereof. Jean seated herself at one of the two tables still set.
Kirsty pushed her way through the swinging door from the kitchen, a pot of coffee in one hand, a pot of tea in the other. Her face was almost as ashen as it had been the night before, and yet, on her, pallor was attractive, romantic as a drooping rose. Jean’s own face in the mirror had resembled an albino cactus. She held out her cup. “Coffee, please.”
Kirsty filled the cup expertly, without spilling a drop. “Help yourself to juice and the like. I’ve got bacon, eggs, and tomato on the cooker.”
“Thank you.” Jean poured milk in her coffee and took a healthy swig. Oh my. Oh yes. She swallowed again, then headed for the sideboard.
“We only booked the room ‘til today,” Noreen said to Kirsty, as though resuming a conversation interrupted by a kitchen timer. “If the police want us to stay on, then they can pay the tariff.”
“I’m sure we can work something out,” Kirsty replied. “Is Mr. Hall coming down for breakfast?”
“Don’t know. Couldn’t be bothered to say.” Even Noreen’s scowl seemed anemic. “This isn’t a safe place for the child, is it now? He’s never a suspect. But no, that prat Cameron, he’s saying we’re obliged to stay on.”
Alasdair was no prat, Jean harrumphed silently. Keeping your suspects corralled was standard procedure, child or no child. And she wasn’t surprised he was already out and about, delivering directives and no doubt asking questions.
“Me, I’m obliged to ring the folk with rooms booked the night and cancel,” Kirsty muttered darkly as she hurried back to the kitchen. “Iris won’t be half . . .”
Upset, Jean finished, and starting spooning bran flakes and fruit salad into her mouth.
“Mummy,” said Elvis. His ensuing soliloquy was muffled by Noreen’s wiping his face with a napkin. She grasped his hand and pulled him out of the dining room, acknowledging Jean’s presence by turning up one side of her upper lip. Elvis’s voice disappeared down the hall and up the stairs. “Nessies climb out of the water, don’t they? Daddy says they climb out of the water. And he says the arky—arkylogies—will find their bones buried like treasure.”
Jean chewed. So that’s what Daddy—er, Martin—was saying about Roger’s archaeological plans, was it? Bones like treasure. Or maybe bones and treasure. Is that what Martin and Tracy had talked about during the boat tour, leaving Noreen to chase after Elvis? It had probably been Martin in Tracy’s hotel room, after all, plotting . . . Well, plotting something. He’d looked horrified last night, but then, they’d all looked horrified last night.
Kirsty reappeared, holding a plate of runny eggs, charred bacon, and a tomato half, a dishtowel serving as hot pad. She set the plate and a rack of toast on the table. “Sorry, we’ve got no sausage or beans. Most times Aunt Iris is off to the shops of a Saturday, but she’s . . . Well, you know where she was. Your pal Cameron, he’s saying she’ll be back home the day.”
“Good,” said Jean, and swallowed the “your pal Cameron” with a bit too audible a gulp.
Kirsty clattered the Halls’ dirty dishes into a stack and started for the kitchen.
“Did you hear anything last night?” Jean asked. “Before Tracy—you know.”
“I heard people walking about. I’m always hearing people walking about. Then she screamed.”
“Do you ever hear ghosts walking about?”
Kirsty stopped in the doorway, bracing the door open with her elbow. Her face was hidden but her voice was sharp as a paring knife. “Ghosts? Why are you wanting to know that?”
“I like ghost stories. A lot of these old places have gray ladies and blood spots, that sort of thing. It’s not all that unusual for people to sense, well, presences.” When Kirsty didn’t reply, Jean said, “Did you hear a metallic crash about twenty minutes ago?”
“I was cooking toast for the Americans then. They wanted coffee and toast is all. Hard to credit, them not wanting the full breakfast, but that’s all they ate yesterday morning as well.”
“Maybe they were upset about Tracy. And yesterday about the boat explosion.”
“They were that, aye, pulling long faces and talking about what a tragedy it was and all, and how things happen that you don’t intend.”
Amen to that. “So you didn’t hear a crash?”
“Brendan’s saying they’ll be digging the day. You heard him and Roger. Dr. Dempsey. Digging for monster bones when his wife’s been murdered.” Kirsty vanished through the swinging door, leaving it to creak to and fro a couple of times and then quiet. Her Glasgow accent gave each sentence a sarcastic tail, but Jean bet the sarcasm ran deeper than her voice.
In lonely splendor—a state that was less compelling now than it had been several months ago—Jean finished her cereal, ate her eggs, and considered the different skeins of evidence. Ambrose and Eileen. Roger and Tracy. Aleister Crowley, the Picts, Nessie. Iris.
Then she stacked up her dishes and started toward the kitchen, planning to offer her assistance . . . Who was she kidding? She’d help clean up, yes, but she was hoping that in the process Kirsty would render up a clue, one that would not only satisfy some of Jean’s curiosity but earn her points with Alasdair.
Her shoulder was against the door when she heard voices. Brendan was saying, “You’ve got to give it to the police.”
“Don’t you go telling me what needs doing,” Kirsty replied. Dishes jangled and water ran.
“Listen, if that book’s important enough for Iris to call and tell you to hide it, then it’s got to be important enough to give to the police.”
“It’s one of Uncle Ambrose’s books. It’s got nothing to do with the police, with your boat, with Tracy, with Roger, with anything.”
“Then why hide it? Roger already has copies of all of Ambrose’s books. Big deal.”
“So that’s it, is it? Roger. And here’s me, t
hinking you wanted me for myself. No, it’s you who’s the spy, I reckon, not Jonathan. You and your boss, coming here, digging things up, it’s all your fault.”
“Our fault? We’ve had two people killed!”
“There’s work to be getting on with. Yours and mine both. You’d best be away now.”
“Kirsty, I . . .”
A businesslike clatter of pots and pans drowned out the rest of the sentence and also, probably, the sound of Brendan’s crest falling. A door slammed, and a moment later he strode past the dining room windows. He bore a shovel and that universal masculine pout meaning, Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em!
Repelling male boarders seemed to be the thing just now, Jean thought with a grimace. Kirsty might have more justification for that than Jean had, though . . . From the kitchen came the sound of china smashing, followed by a choice four-letter word.
Charles and Sophie walked into the dining room. When they saw Jean standing beside the door and holding her dishes, they exchanged a cautious glance, probably wondering whether this was some custom of the country they should know about. With a bland smile in return, Jean put the dishes back on her table and strolled leisurely out of the room and down the hall. Behind her she heard the scrape of chairs, the kitchen door opening, and Kirsty’s taut voice. “Tea is it? Coffee?”
So, if she were Kirsty hiding a book, where would she put it? In her room? Jean didn’t know where Kirsty’s room was. In the office off the foyer?
Kirsty’s voice still emanated from the dining room. Picking up her pace, Jean went straight for the door marked Private. It was locked.
A rustling noise behind her made her spin toward the brochures on the table—looking at them was an innocent enough activity. But no one was sneaking up behind her. The rustling noise, followed by a thud, came from the library.
The Murder Hole Page 22