“Did you sleep well? I thought I heard the footsteps a time or two.” Jean nodded toward the velvet curtain, now pulled across the vestibule.
“You did that. They were up and down all the night long. But policemen are like doctors, they learn to sleep when they can.”
“No one living tried to get in, anyway, although I suppose that doesn’t prove anything.”
“Not a thing.” Alasdair crunched his toast, to the accompaniment of Mozart . . .
Oh. After a brief scramble, Jean found her bag beneath the coffee table and fished out her phone. The tiny screen was illuminated with the legend “Michael Campbell-Reid.”
“Michael! How are you? How’s Rebecca?”
It was Rebecca’s voice that replied. “I’m just fine, thank you. Sitting up in an uncomfortable hospital bed and wishing they’d hurry up and let me take Linda home.”
“That’s where it gets really fun, I hear.” Jean spared one second’s thought for her own very brief pregnancy, back in the distant deeps of time. It hadn’t lasted long enough for her to start seriously researching issues of childbirth, let alone baby homecomings.
“You should see her, Jean. Eight pounds, a little Amazon.”
“I can’t wait. I guess she’s got all her fingers and toes and everything?” From the corner of her eye Jean saw Alasdair look up sharply. Policemen! she thought. “How’s Michael?”
“Standing here teeming with information. He’s been to work and back already this morning, just to amaze and gratify you with his research. Here he is.”
Michael’s voice said, “Good morning, Jean. I saw the headlines about Mrs. Dempsey. Dreadful, that. I hope you’re watching your back.”
“It’s being watched,” Jean said.
“I handed the bug from the Nessie in to the police here yesterday, and they’ve sent it up to your D.C.I. Cameron in Drumnadrochit. Bit of luck, him being on the case again, eh?”
“I prefer to think of it as fate.”
“You wanted the name of the mason who uncovered the Pitclachie Stone whilst working for Ambrose,” Michael went on. “Turns out to be a chap named Gordon Fraser.”
“Gordon Fraser found the Stone?” That took the wind out of Jean’s sails. She ran aground on the couch. Alasdair, brows on full alert, stopped pretending not to listen and sat down beside her. She tilted the phone so he could hear.
“What’s right interesting,” Michael went on, “is that according to the report, the Stone wasna broken when he found it. There’s a drawing of it on file—above that double disc was a gripping beast crossed by a Z-shaped line, a Z-rod. The hole was there already, why, no one knows.”
So Roger was right about the missing pictograph being a gripping beast. Pretty damn good guess, that. “But you have nothing about it being dropped when they moved it or anything?”
“Not a word. As for the silver chain the Museum was offered last year, a dealer in Paris was trying to get up an auction for it, but we couldn’t compete. He claimed the chain was from the Great Glen, then admitted he’d bought a job lot of goods at an estate sale in London and there it was, Pictish and genuine, but no provenance at all.”
Feeling as though fate was playing the old shell game with her, Jean repeated, “A dealer in Paris? His name is Charles Bouchard, isn’t it?”
“Oh aye, that it is. Friend of yours?”
“He and his wife are here, probably hoping to grab up whatever Pictish artifacts Roger Dempsey uncovers.”
“Dempsey’s gone from searching for the monster to searching for artifacts, has he?”
“Yes and no. What he’s done is uncover a passage grave, just up the hill behind the house. So far, all he’s found there are bones, some of them human. We think . . .” Alasdair’s elbow landed sharply in her ribs. “We think the police will identify who it is fairly soon now.”
“Surely it’s Eileen,” said Michael.
“Well,” Jean replied, her own elbow nudging Alasdair back again, “did your granny ever say anything about Eileen missing part of her left forefinger?”
“Not that I can recall, no. You’re not meaning . . .” He was interrupted by the delicate piping cry of a newborn baby. Rebecca’s voice crooned a response. Michael said to Jean, “You’ll be telling us all about it soon. We’re holding Dougie hostage ’til you do, right enough. Must run.”
“Hug the baby for me,” Jean said, and clicked off the phone.
Beside her Alasdair was sitting to attention. “Gordon Fraser found the Stone?”
“That’s the name of the mason who uncovered it when Ambrose had the Lodge moved up here from the road. It can’t be the book dealer, he’s elderly, but he sure wasn’t an adult in the nineteen-twenties.”
“Even so, the name Fraser keeps turning up, doesn’t it now? The mason. The dealer. Edith. Did your Fraser say anything that might could connect him to Edith?”
“No, but he was saying that Ambrose was too much like Crowley when it came to women, and I’m thinking now he didn’t mean as a babe magnet. Maybe he meant when it came to women meeting premature and nasty ends. But he wouldn’t know about Edith. Or Eileen.”
Or would he? Alasdair’s eyebrows asked.
“He was telling me some lurid stories about Crowley, his butcher severed an artery and—oh my.”
“There’s someone with a meat cleaver for you.”
“We’re onto something.” She was getting mighty free and easy with that “we,” Jean told herself, but if Alasdair had a problem with that, he’d let her know. She dug through her bag. “Here you go, Fraser’s card. He’s in Fort Augustus. Kirsty was telling me that Fraser had no use for Iris, but . . .”
“Damn and blast! Why weren’t you telling me this yesterday, Jean?”
“What?”
“Iris was away to Fort Augustus last night. If I could have had a word with them separately! By now they’ve compared their stories, synchronized their watches, and sung the same chorus of ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again!’” He stood up, lunged toward his jacket draped over the chair, and yanked his own phone from an inside pocket.
“You don’t know Iris went to see Fraser,” Jean retorted, and added indignantly, “What did you expect me to do, foretell the future?”
“Hello? Is that D.C. Gunn? Get on to Fort Augustus. I want Gordon Fraser, the book dealer, collected and brought here.” Alasdair extended his hand. Like a nurse assisting at an operation, Jean placed the card in it. “Highland Books and Maps. Aye, that’s it. Good man.”
She assumed Gunn was the good man, not Fraser, whose reputation was open to discussion at the moment.
Alasdair thrust his phone into his pocket and his arms into his jacket. He started toward the door, then whirled back around, suddenly recalled to a different duty. “Jean, sorry about that . . .”
This is a test, she told herself. It’s only a test. Besides, he was probably right about Iris and Fraser, circumstances making strange bedfellows and everything. “It’s all right. Go on, I’ll hang around here. Maybe I’ll find that little hank of yarn that connects all of this into one story.”
“We’re getting to it,” he told her, and with a swift kiss that missed her lips to land on her cheek, he pushed past the curtain and slammed through the door.
She stood listening to his receding steps, then shook her head. Yep, this was going to be interesting, and she didn’t mean only the resolution of the case. She pitched the dishes into the sink, then gathered up her computer and papers. Taking them upstairs, she stowed them in her wardrobe. A quick pit-stop for toothpaste and lipstick, and to check that the site of the tick incursion was healing properly, and she was ready to go—do what? Make waves, she supposed.
The door to the lumber room was now shut. Inside, something was making a scratching sound. A mouse? Warily, Jean opened the door and peeked into the shadowed room. A sudden movement at the window made her leap as though she’d been shocked, then laugh. She could see the shape of the bird perched on the outside sill through the gap betwee
n the shutters. Poe’s raven, no doubt, coming home to roost.
Her nostrils dilated. What was the smell in that room, anyway, over and beyond the scent of mildew? It was the same cloying sweet smell that clung to the book, and to the objects in the desk in the library. The smell of perfume that had accompanied the ghostly re-enactment of Edith’s fall?
She should ask Miranda what posh perfume had been dabbled behind wealthy ears in 1933. Roses, she thought with another sniff. Distilled roses, spilled and then spoiled. But there was something spicy, too, like the first whiff of a National Trust shop with its potpourri, or even a New Age shop with its . . . “Incense,” she said aloud. That’s what she’d been smelling all along, not pipe tobacco. Incense.
Jean’s gaze moved from Eileen’s painted, impassive face to the plaster ceiling with its smudges of what had to be smoke. Candle smoke. Incense smoke. What had Ambrose been doing, staging occult ceremonies? Or simply burning incense as inspiration for his wilder theories, like an earlier generation would have drunk absinthe or smoked opium?
Was that the door opening downstairs? The ghosts must be at it again, in broad daylight this time. Talk about her and Alasdair making a critical mass!
Jean walked downstairs. She was glancing guiltily at the dishes piled in the sink as she reached out to shove the curtain back on its rod. Still holding a handful of thick velvet, she turned toward the door and saw that she wasn’t alone.
By sheer force of will, Jean stopped herself from leaping backwards yet again. She stood with her hand on her chest, cramming her heart back behind her ribs, looking down at the small boy and the cat. “Elvis,” she managed to say. “How did you get in?”
Oblivious to the sensation he’d caused, Elvis kept on stroking Mandrake’s sleek back. “The moggie pushed the door open. Listen, he’s making a funny sound.”
“Yeah, he’s purring up a storm.” The cat was smirking so smugly he’d probably orchestrated the entire episode. Not only had Alasdair not locked the door, he hadn’t even left it properly shut. She could flatter herself that he’d decided she could take care of herself, but she suspected the paragon of protocol had simply made a mistake. She wouldn’t be mentioning it to him.
“Let’s go on outside,” she said, shooing both child and cat onto the terrace and making sure this time the door was locked.
The mist was starting to burn off. Wraith-like tendrils wafted upward from loch and land, toward a sky veiled with silver that would soon, Jean estimated, turn blue. And hot. Not one breath of wind stirred the flowers and the trees. The humid air pressed close around her, seeming to muffle the voices of Elvis’s parents.
Noreen and Martin were standing at the edge of the terrace, he hulking over her, she crouched defensively. They weren’t so much talking as hissing to each other. Jean recognized those tones, the spat that couldn’t wait for a private venue.
“. . . and me no more than a bit on the side?” Noreen was saying.
“That’s not how it was. It was for all of us,” Martin replied. “She could have gotten me a fellowship. Do you want to work in a motorway café the rest of your life?”
“A fellowship, is it? Last year it was a teaching post. The year before that . . .”
Elvis tried to pick up the cat. Mandrake slithered through his hands like a ferret and ran for the shrubbery, Elvis on his tail.
Martin’s long arm swept Noreen aside and seized the back of the boy’s I’m a Wee Monster from Loch Ness T-shirt. “Let’s walk up to the dig, lad, have us a look at the Nessie bones. Mummy’s not feeling well. Mummy’s going to have a lie-down.” And, as he turned and saw Jean standing outside the door of the Lodge, “Mummy should have been looking after you.”
“I was watching him,” Noreen said. “He only stepped inside for a bleeding minute. She’s right friendly with that detective, isn’t she? He came out the door not half an hour ago. It didn’t hurt nothing letting the boy go inside there. It’s a safer place than the house for him.”
Martin gave Noreen a look of pity and contempt mingled. Jean expected him to use Ambrose’s “impertinent!” but he merely took Elvis’s hand and started off toward the garden, his manner changing to patient indulgence as quickly as a traffic light changed from red to green.
Noreen looked toward Jean, shamefaced but stubborn. “Tell your policeman that me and the boy, we need to get away from this place. We need to go home. I’ll lose my job, Martin will . . .” She blundered toward the house.
No point in saying that Alasdair wasn’t her policeman. They weren’t exactly making a public spectacle of themselves, but the clues were there for anyone to see. As for Noreen . . . “He knows you want to go home,” Jean called after her. “He can’t let you go until he finds out who blew up the boat and who pushed Tracy Dempsey out of the tower.”
Noreen’s steps faltered. She looked back. Some impulse seemed to swell in her face and then die, and wordlessly she went on into the house.
She could have gotten me a fellowship. Tracy had promised Martin some sort of pie in the sky job in return for helping her—do what? Cover up the submersible disaster? Send the threatening letters? The Halls had stayed at Pitclachie in April. Martin could have picked up the notepaper. And the old corkscrew, for that matter, assuming the Dempseys themselves blew up the boat.
Jean didn’t believe for a minute Tracy had any personal interest in Martin. Still, there was another triangle, like Ambrose, Edith, and Eileen’s. Would it be better to have a man not do his duty by you if by doing it he felt entitled to treat you like a mentally defective rat? And what duty did Ambrose owe to Edith, anyway? Was she his mistress, or simply a feisty employee who helped herself to the lady of the manor’s earrings?
As though evoked by Jean thinking those names, Iris paced around the corner like a sentry at the changing of the guard. She was carrying a basket containing a pair of knitting needles and some balls of off-white wool yarn, the color and texture of the cardigan she was wearing. “Good morning,” she said. If her words had been any more formal, they would have been wearing little black ties.
“Good morning.” Jean fell oh-so-casually into step beside her. “Do you have a moment, Miss Mackintosh? I’d like to ask a few more questions for my article about you and your father’s interests.”
“I’m sure you would, Miss Fairbairn. Especially in the light of recent events. However, you’ll please excuse me if I say . . .” she stopped in front of the tower door, pulled a key from her pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside “No comment.” The door shut in Jean’s face and the tumblers of the lock turned.
Well, she couldn’t blame the woman for that. She could be irritated and impatient, but she couldn’t blame. Jean craned her neck, the same way Martin had done. Iris’s tall, neo-classical shape appeared in the window from which Tracy had fallen. A quick double flash was the metal tips of her knitting needles catching the light. She hadn’t stationed herself looking out over the loch but up the hill. Jean wondered not whether but when Alasdair would turn up present-dimensional evidence proving that that the body in the tomb wasn’t Iris’s mother after all.
Not that that would mitigate the situation. Technically speaking, Ambrose hadn’t gotten away with murder, but with manslaughter. Jonathan’s death would probably come under the heading of manslaughter, too. As for Tracy’s death, well . . . Jean walked through the garden and up the hillside, thinking that it was too much to either hope or fear the perpetrator had already fled the area. No, among her acquaintances here at Pitclachie was someone—or several someones—capable of killing.
Martin and Elvis were kibitzing as Brendan toiled inside the orange-netted boundary zone. A couple of royal blue tarps had been added to the color scheme. The austere Scots pines in the glade just beyond the excavation seemed to be pulling their skirt-branches away in disdain.
As Jean drew closer, she saw twenty or so angular brown lumps, the animal vertebrae from the tomb chamber, spread out on one of the tarps in a line longer than she was tall. At
its end rested a small skull like that of a greyhound. Several other brownish chunks, along with a camera and other bits of electronic equipment, lay on the second tarp. Charles and Sophie sat nearby, wiping, assessing, and placing the occasional item into a plastic bag or cardboard box. They were the seagulls following the archaeological plow and picking over the remains.
Brendan sat on the side of the trench, mopping his pink-suffused face with a bandanna. He, no doubt, had removed the sill of dirt half-blocking the entrance passageway. Roger came crawling out of its dark maw, dragging a plastic bag behind him, blithely ignoring the finer points of archaeological procedure. Ambrose had had an excuse for his vandalism, Jean thought. Roger didn’t.
Roger flailed a bit, then with a groan managed to climb out of the hole. His Water Horse T-shirt was grimy and sweat-stained, and the bandages on his arms were gray rather than hospital white, clashing with the red scratches and pink splashes of lotion on his nettle stings. He had definitely gotten the worst of the hit-and-run.
But as he turned toward Jean, she could see a glint in his eyes indicating flint in his soul. This makes it all worthwhile, he’d said yesterday, with a touch of his old devil-may-care spirit. Now he looked devil-possessed. “Hi, Jean,” he said, baring his fangs in a smile.
“Hi. How’s it going? Any breaking news?”
Roger made an expansive gesture over his array of bones, a priest blessing his congregation. “Kettering’s sending a photographer. I told him I’ll make the announcement during tonight’s cruise. I can’t promise you an exclusive, Jean, I mean, Starr’s been very helpful with funding and all, but look at those vertebrae, they’re the classic Nessie profile with the long prehensile neck and the small skull—horsy, isn’t it? And we’re picking up the bone fragments that have to be fins. This will be the story of the century. The bones of the Loch Ness monster, proving that the stories are true. You’ll be in on it from the get-go.”
The Murder Hole Page 28