The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “By the time we arrived it was.” Alasdair led the way onto the staircase that angled up the interior walls. Its wrought-iron banister was a neo-Gothic fantasy, but the stark stone treads seemed suitably medieval, if not at all hollowed by centuries of climbing feet. On the second floor landing he indicated an arched doorway. “This door now, this one was unlocked. It opens into the upper corridor.”

  “So the killer ran out this way?”

  “Either that or he flew.”

  She was tempted to say that the murderer could have climbed down the wall of the tower like Dracula, but restrained herself. She followed Alasdair up the next flight, carefully, favoring her sore knee. “Are you saying ‘he’ for any particular reason?”

  “No. Could have been ‘she,’ right enough.”

  Four stories up—Jean was grateful she wasn’t acrophobic—the staircase ended at a trap door in an expanse of rafters and planks, the floor of the tower room. Alasdair threw open the trap, climbed through, and disappeared. He wasn’t going to offer her his hand, then. Once bitten, twice shy.

  Not that she needed a hand up. Grasping the edge of the opening to steady herself, Jean climbed up into Ambrose and Iris’s eyrie and stood catching her breath.

  Kirsty had said nothing was here but dust, and there was plenty of that, especially around and about the ceiling rafters. A table and a straight-backed chair sat in front of one of the windows, beside a bookshelf that held only a pair of binoculars. Perhaps the notebook Alasdair was leafing through had also come from there. The wooden planks of the floor were scuffed and dirty in the center of the room, sprinkled with forlorn yellow broom blossoms, and were clouded by sheets of dust in the corners, even the corner propped up by several rusty gardening tools.

  Jean had expected the place to look like a monastic cell, perhaps even the sort of cell in which an anchorite would have him or herself walled up, the better to contemplate the mysteries of the soul. But she hadn’t taken into account the view. Two windows on each side of the room opened it to the glory of the physical world—the moss-edged slates of the roof, the cascading leaves of trees, the green fields stitched with pink foxgloves, the mauve humps of the mountains, the royal blue sky above indigo water that flowed to the wind and to its own subtle rhythms, its depths concealing a mystery . . . Wasn’t that one of Aleister Crowley’s magical precepts, as above, so below?

  Jean frowned. A crease in the surface of the loch showed several low undulations, darker than the already dark water . . . Oh. It was the wake of a barge that was just disappearing behind the tower of Urquhart Castle. Shaking her head—as inside, so outside—she turned toward another window.

  It was closed now, but last night it had been open, and Tracy had fallen through. Jean walked over to it, noting that the sill and the floor beneath were clear of dust. The crime scene specialists had been thorough. She peered through one of the windowpanes.

  There was the roof of the Lodge, and the terrace, each stone looking smooth, hard, and unforgiving. Now it was the Ducketts, their bodies oddly foreshortened from this angle, who were standing where Tracy’s body had lain. They were leaning together the same way the Bouchards had been leaning together last night, for mutual support, Jean supposed. And to what end? Her suspicions about them were one more thing to dump on, er, share with Alasdair.

  The glassed-in murder holes ran around the edge of the floor, two or three to each wall. She leaned over to peer through the closest one and saw a dizzying vista straight down. Something was caught on a branch of ivy—no, the glass was cracked, that was all.

  She straightened. “I take it there’s nothing in that notebook.”

  “The stubs where some pages have been torn out is all.” Alasdair replaced the book on the shelf, inspected his fingertips, then brushed them off.

  “What evidence did your people collect here last night?”

  Leaning against the edge of the table, he crossed his arms and looked at Jean. It was the first time he’d looked at her since he’d stood on her doorstep. His face was so uncommunicative it might just as well have been covered with a visor. The visor of a plain, simple helmet, without plumes or the trailing tokens of a favored lady. “Fingerprints,” he said. “Footprints. Dirt and pollen. A skein of wool and a broken knitting needle. Bread crumbs. A cigarette butt. Some bits of plastic, cloth, and threads. Nothing that shouts, ‘clue here.’”

  “A cigarette? Martin Hall smokes, and he was one of the first people on the scene. I think there was something going on between him and Tracy. But then, we saw Roger almost bash her one at the Festival.”

  “Roger’s right out. He has an alibi. Sawyer flushed him out of the ceilidh.”

  “And was probably less than diplomatic informing him he’s now a widower.”

  “Like as not,” Alasdair agreed, desert-dry. “Even so, we’re taking fingerprints, clothing samples, and the like from everyone concerned, and a few who are not.”

  “Did you find any evidence on Tracy’s body?”

  “Nothing yet.” His gaze fell, as though he pictured the medical examiners going about their work. When he looked up again, she could see the cold steel of the morgue reflected in his eyes. “What was it you were telling me last night?”

  Jean’s breath snagged in her throat. But no. He just wanted the facts, ma’am. She told him the facts, trying not to stray into opinion any further than she had to. Ambrose’s trial. Iris’s instructions to Kirsty about one of his books. Roger and the submersible. The bug in the toy Nessie. She didn’t spare herself Brad’s role, and she didn’t spare Alasdair her wilder speculations about the Ducketts and the Bouchards.

  He listened, his brows lifting and tightening in turn, his eyes casting sharp glances at the stairway or the windows, as though he could look down on the suspects, the bystanders, even the dead. Like hers, his mind worked just fine as a remote sensor. “Well then,” he said when Jean reached her last full stop and with a gesture ceded the floor to him. “That’s a tale and no mistake. A bug in your soft toy, is it? The man’s not half daft.”

  “Roger, you mean? Or Ambrose?”

  “I’m thinking Roger, but Ambrose, now, he must have been quite a piece of work. One of his books, eh? You’re right, Iris can’t have known you bought one at the Festival just as we were taking her away.”

  “Kirsty says Iris is on her way back here, that you’ve let her go.”

  “We couldn’t keep her without bringing charges, and once she told us she’d confessed to sending the letters to protect Kirsty, we had no charges to bring.”

  “And you don’t think Kirsty sent the letters.”

  “I had a word with her this morning. She owned up to the incident in Glasgow and says she had nothing to do with Roger’s letters, and, well, I’m believing her.”

  “What did you do, try trapping her with the exact wording or something?” Alasdair glanced down at his feet, an affirmative answer if Jean had ever seen one. “So she and Iris are both in the clear, for the letters and the explosion?”

  “The former, aye. And the latter, I reckon. Still, Iris knows more than she’s telling—and who doesn’t—but . . .”

  “She has a cast-iron alibi for Tracy’s murder,” Jean finished.

  “Oh aye. Opportunity’s not everything, though. Motive, there’s your bottom line.”

  “That’s what lacking in Ambrose’s case. Motive.”

  Alasdair strolled over to one of the windows, braced his hands on both sides of it, and tilted forward, looking at something outside. “What about this Edith, then? Is she the ‘E’ in your book? Was there a love triangle? Or a lust triangle, come to that? Jealousy, there’s a motive for you.”

  Trust Alasdair to call a spade a spade. Jean looked at the rusty old tools in the corner next to where he was standing and thought of the spick and span house and garden below. She hefted a small dirt-crusted shovel. “Iris wouldn’t let her gardening tools get this dilapidated, would she? And why would she haul them all the way up here? I bet these are
Ambrose’s excavation tools.”

  Alasdair looked around.

  The metal blade fell off the rickety handle. Jean skipped back, but it missed her feet and clanked to the floor, sending up a cloud of dust and dirt particles. “That’s the sort of sound that woke me up this morning. I wondered if it was another ghost noise. Kirsty said it was Roger and Brendan going to work. I guess Roger’s on automatic pilot, not that you’d let him leave anyway. Them.”

  “They’re up the field behind the house, digging themselves a trench, right enough.”

  “Having excavating equipment on hand would have made it easy for Ambrose to bury a body. A lot easier than hauling one across the main road and pitching it into the loch.” Jean set down the handle and inspected her fingertips for splinters. All clear. “Odd, isn’t it, how we’ve gone from thinking Eileen committed suicide to thinking Ambrose did kill her. She fell down the stairs while she and Ambrose were arguing and smashed her head. He wrapped the wound in her scarf and buried her, then cleaned up the floor and blamed the wet patch on a coffee spill. He knew he had such a bad reputation in the neighborhood, no one would believe the truth. The only reason they brought him to trial to begin with was that same reputation.”

  “Ghosts aren’t evidence,” Alasdair pointed out, not without a hint of a smile.

  She shrugged agreement.

  “We’ll never know the truth of the matter. And it might not make any difference, not when it comes to Jonathan and Tracy.”

  “You think it does, though, don’t you? It’s not just an intellectual exercise.”

  “We’ve got no time for intellectual exercises just now. The lads are setting up in the dining room to interview everyone here at Pitclachie, about Tracy, mostly, but we’ll have another go at Jonathan’s death as well, with your information and all.”

  “Glad I could help.” Jean hoped he’d take that statement the way she meant it, straight up.

  He did. There was that implication of a smile again, but still his face didn’t crack. “Let’s have us a look at the Pitclachie Stone and see what Roger’s on about.” Without waiting for her reaction, he headed for the trap door and the staircase.

  All right—not only a couple of we’s but also a let’s. Be careful what you ask for, Jean reminded herself. Her knee reminded her to take the stairs slowly. Alasdair had never asked about it, had he? Well, she couldn’t have it both ways.

  He held the outside door for her, then locked it and made sure the police tape cut just the right diagonal across the opening.

  D.C. Gunn was kneeling beside the open front door, balancing a laptop on his thigh and stroking Mandrake’s helpfully arched back. Just as Alasdair and Jean approached, Andy Sawyer burst through the doorway with all the subtlety of a train exiting a tunnel. “Oh for love of . . . Get a move on, Nancy. We’ve got a nice bit of crumpet inside, not that you’re up for it, are you now?”

  His face going flat white, Gunn leaped to his feet, computer in hand, and disappeared into the house. The cat showed great discernment, if not excellent taste, by sprinting across the courtyard into the shrubbery.

  Sawyer’s bull neck swiveled just enough to see Alasdair gazing at him as gimlet-eyed as a gunner taking aim. Sawyer gave off a sound between a snort and a cough and followed Gunn into the house. Alasdair took off into the garden so fast, Jean could hardly keep up with him.

  Each one of his steps hit the path so hard, the gravel crunched like a shot. It was probably just as well she could see only the back of his head. His ears were cherry-red. In another moment smoke would be trailing from them. And she’d thought earlier he was under pressure. Sawyer’s toxic smog was coming close to melting Alasdair’s ice cap.

  He pushed through the gate and on up into the pasture, toward where Brendan was digging while Roger stood by. A long trench, extending perpendicularly from the fence encircling the pine glade, was marked out by pegs connected with string. So the remote-sensing equipment had detected something, then. Or Roger believed it had. He stood very still, the bill of his cap low over his face, holding a rock in his hands in the same pose as Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick.

  Two days ago he’d been brash but charming. Yesterday he’d seemed flabby, somehow, like a balloon that had lost most of its helium. And now? Jean couldn’t see his face and wasn’t sure how to read his stance—tense, certainly. And not only because parts of his body had been chopped and pureed by the hit-and-run. Two major emotional blows in as many days must have taken their toll, and yet he was keeping on keeping on. Jean had to admire the man for that.

  Alasdair stalked past Roger and Brendan as though they were so many sheep and burst through the gate in the deer fence. Jean followed, on tiptoe, into the shadow of the glade, where she found Alasdair standing before the Stone like a pilgrim before a shrine, head lowered.

  The Stone was standing as it had the day before, aloof but not lonely, a riddle of lost time. Several of the tumbled rocks at its base seemed darker and grayer than Jean remembered, showing not the bright whorls of lichen but damp root tendrils . . . Oh no. Someone had turned more than a few rocks over. The Bouchards, perhaps, treasure-hunting? She’d seen them coming out of the enclosure yesterday afternoon. Or Martin? He seemed to be on Roger’s wavelength. Or Tracy’s.

  Well, no real harm had been done—the rocks been disturbed several times, most recently by Ambrose’s excavations and by Iris when she had the Stone set up. Still, Jean was as indignant on the rocks’ behalf as she was on Alasdair’s.

  Edging around him, she stepped onto the cairn and again traced the carvings on the Stone, delicately, with her fingertips. The line incised beneath the horse’s head seemed not only shallower than the others, but also not patinated—not showing the brownish film of age but instead gleaming gray, like the top of the Stone where it had been cut. The hole, though, was old. It wasn’t as though some recent iconoclast had recreated an ancient ritual by ritually “killing” the Stone. But then, the gradations of color were hard to see beneath the rills of shadow cast by the pines.

  Alasdair asked, in his usual quiet but intense voice, “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Another good question. Ambrose found it, but never said it was complete. It was broken fairly recently, although ‘recently’ is open to definition.”

  “Has someone been digging about in these stones, do you think? That rather supports your treasure-hunting hypothesis.”

  “I do think, yes.” She turned around, relieved to see his expression back to its usual still coolness.

  “Roger’s pressing on, I see, in spite of it all.”

  “He was saying yesterday that Jonathan would have wanted him to keep on. I don’t know why he lost it for awhile there, but I guess now he’s thinking that Tracy would want him to go on, too.”

  “Oh aye, that she would.”

  “She may have tried to play the dutiful stand-by-your-man role, but I bet she was half the brains and guts of the operation, wanting to protect her investment . . .” Jean’s thought somersaulted. “You know, I was wondering several days ago if Roger had sent himself the letters. What if the Dempseys themselves blew up the boat? You were hinting at that with your insurance scam, weren’t you?”

  “Oh aye,” Alasdair returned with a knowing nod. “You finally twigged it.”

  She’d finally put it into words was all, but she let it go. “Tracy made a big deal out of the propane stove, but not the gasoline smell. And Roger has never said he had a submersible here.”

  “He was after destroying his prototype.”

  “So no one could prove that the hatch was defective and use it against him in the lawsuit. He would have lost, and lost big . . .”

  “American juries being notorious for handing down huge settlements. Money’s aye a grand motive.” Alasdair stepped forward and caressed the stone, his right hand cupping its edge and sliding down lightly, curiously.

  He was grounding himself, Jean thought. Literally. His stance was alert as always, but no longer armed
and dangerous. “So if Roger and Tracy blew up the boat, did they intend to frame Iris for it? I wonder what it is that came between them.”

  “Iris might could have heard of the submersible accident.”

  “Yeah. It keeps coming back to Roger. So how about revenge as a motive? What if Roger and Tracy have been the target all along, and Jonathan was just collateral damage?”

  “And the driver of the car thought you were Tracy, oh aye. Two birds with one—stone.” His thumb brushed the gritty surface. “The Ducketts, by the by, were at the Festival at the time of the hit-and-run. Having a blether with D.C. Gunn, as luck would have it.”

  “Or as good planning would have it?” She couldn’t see Dave and Patti committing mayhem on anything larger than a scone, but then, she was just as likely to see what she wanted to see as everyone else. “And then there’s Roger planting a bug on me to see whether I was going to blow the news up—if you’ll pardon the expression. What a jerk.”

  “Oh aye, a right pillock, but that doesn’t mean he was after killing you.”

  “No,” Jean admitted. “But maybe whoever pushed Tracy out of the tower last night thought they were pushing me.” She hoped that didn’t come across quite as pitiful as it sounded to her. Or as critical. What if Tracy had demanded police protection? What if Alasdair had thought to offer her any? He’d no doubt thought about it since last night . . .

  “You, Jean,” he said even more quietly, “are having police protection.” His hand flattened itself against the face of the Stone. In the dappled sunlight his blue eyes glowed and gold touched his hair, as though he were a sentry at the gate of Faerie.

  By “protection” he didn’t mean the constable downstairs. He meant himself. She opened her mouth to respond, but couldn’t think of anything to say that he might not misinterpret.

  He didn’t wait for a response. “I was saying I’d prefer the killer to be determined rather than careless, then he’d be predictable. I don’t think I’m getting what I wanted.”

  “What you’ve got is either someone who’s careless, or two people working at cross purposes. Or with the same purpose, just with different means of getting there.”