The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “May I?” Elvis asked his parents, bouncing to his feet.

  Noreen managed a stiff wave, Martin a stiffer nod. Kirsty took Elvis’s hand and led him away. No one moved until his voice, going on about ice cream and snakes and Nessie, disappeared behind the swing of the kitchen door.

  Then, with slow deliberation, Alasdair took off his jacket, draped it over the desk chair—his gaze strayed to the photo of Ambrose and Eileen—and loosened his tie. To help him keep cool, Jean knew, but he was also playing off his threatening aspect, signaling it was time to get down to brass tacks. “Miss Fairbairn,” he said calmly, “would you be so kind as to take notes?”

  She almost replied, Of course, Chief Inspector Cameron, but decided that would be laying it on too thick. From her bag she pulled her decrepit notebook and a pen.

  “Shit,” Noreen said, shrinking down even further. “They’ve found it.”

  Martin snapped at her. “Shut up.”

  “I told you, Marty, I told you you’d get yourself banged up if you wasn’t careful, and what about us, then?” Tears welled in Noreen’s eyes.

  Jean stood holding her notebook. Oh. Alasdair had wanted to see if they’d recognize it. The man had a streak of low cunning, no doubt about it. And economy—he really did need someone to take notes. Sitting down in the closest chair, a high-backed overstuffed antique, she poised her pen over a blank page. Sweat prickled along her back and beneath her thighs.

  “Mrs. Hall,” Alasdair said, “you are not obliged to testify against your husband, but if you choose to do so, whatever you say will be used against him.”

  Noreen’s face seemed to implode. She buried it in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Instead of walking across the room to render aid and comfort, Martin glared at her and repeated stupid cow under his breath. He glanced around as though considering whether to leap through the unscreened window, but a constable—by no chance at all—was strolling past. His legs folded and deposited him on the windowsill, where he bent double in the universal posture of woe.

  The front door opened and closed. Swift, light footsteps came down the hall, and like Jeeves bringing a tray of drinks, Gunn glided into the room. Nodding to Alasdair and then to Jean, he sat down and produced his own notebook, ready to go. With relief, she turned hers into a fan.

  Alasdair said quietly, to the balding top of Martin’s head, “I might could charge you with the murder of Tracy Dempsey, Mr. Hall, unless you’re giving me good reasons not to. Where did you first meet the woman?”

  “At the Bristol University,” said Martin, voice flat. Noreen looked up with a sniffle, her eyes red and swollen. “Roger was lecturing. I thought he could help me move up in my field, but when I went to talk to him I got to talking to her, and after a bit she said he needed a second research assistant for work at Loch Ness. I applied straightaway—what a leg-up that would be, part of the expedition that actually finds the creature. But Roger chose himself another Yank, didn’t he, that Brendan chap. Still, Tracy said she liked my work experience and my attitude, said she could get me a fellowship if I helped her and Roger with a small problem. Said she’d pay my expenses and bonuses as well, for work well done. Just as long as I did what she said and didn’t ask too many questions.”

  His attitude being eager to please and desperate for money and position, Jean footnoted. Susceptible to Tracy’s wiles.

  “What work were you doing here in April?” asked Alasdair.

  “April? You know about . . .” Martin looked up, assessed the glacier thickening along Alasdair’s jaw, and slumped even further. “I collected some notepaper for her. And she said she wanted something that could be identified with the house, so I lifted an old corkscrew from the desk there. Pretty clever, eh? Nothing so big they’d call out the plods, but seen to be from Pitclachie.”

  Unimpressed, Alasdair asked, “What else?”

  “She wanted an old book as well. One written by Ambrose Mackintosh.”

  Alasdair’s gaze flicked like the snap of a whip toward Jean. “A book? Not loose notes?”

  “No, a bound book. My Life, by Ambrose Mackintosh of Pitclachie. Autobiography, sounds like.”

  Jean let her head fall back against the scratchy velvet of her chair. So that was it. Ambrose’s autobiography. He had written it and had it printed and bound—once a publisher, always a publisher, perhaps. A truthful autobiography, not a puff piece, would be sensational, the location of the passage grave the least of the revelations that Iris would be dead set on keeping private. But if Tracy and Roger already had a copy, wherever it came from, why did they want another one?

  “You found the book, then, Mr. Hall?” Alasdair was asking.

  “I looked at every book in this bleeding house, even the ones in the trout’s office. I turned up one buried in a filthy old box in the lumber room of the Lodge, The Realm of the Beast, and thought maybe Tracy’d make do with that. And she took it, right enough, said thank you kindly, very useful, but not the one she wanted. If Iris has a copy of My Life, she’s walled it up in her tower.”

  But if it was that well-hidden, Jean told herself, why would Iris call Kirsty and ask her to hide it? Martin just hadn’t looked carefully enough.

  Alasdair said, “You were stopping at the Lodge in April.”

  “Ever so much more room,” said Noreen through her teeth. “I could cook the meals, save a few pence—you never told me, Marty, you never told me she was paying the tariff for us!”

  “Was the lumber room unlocked then?” Alasdair’s cool voice cut Noreen’s sweaty mumble.

  “I pinched the key from the office,” answered Martin. “Had it copied, put it back. The trout, she never knew, did she?”

  Jean saw that her exploratory efforts had been hampered by honesty.

  “I knew.” Noreen sniffed, a sound like a drain clearing, and sat up straighter. “I knew. I told you that woman would leave you banged up, and I was right!”

  Alasdair’s stern expression neither contradicted nor agreed with her. “You returned to Pitclachie in June, for the Water Horse Expedition.”

  “The frogs, they got the Lodge, then moved out, then you . . .” Martin’s glance at Jean would have been hostile if it wasn’t so lifeless, like his pale face, drained of blood as though by some deep internal injury. “I used my key and searched again, Friday night, just so the trout hadn’t changed things round from April. No joy.”

  Jean wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or insulted that she hadn’t been the object of the night crawler.

  “The key, the copy, it’s in my sponge bag upstairs,” said Noreen. “He thought no one would go looking for it, there, with my things.”

  Alasdair tilted his head toward Gunn. Gunn tilted his head toward Alasdair. Check. “Please go on, Mr. Hall,” Alasdair said.

  “She told me to hide the corkscrew from the drinks table on the Friday, and I did—it’s in the shrubbery. She told me to lift your notebook . . .” His chin jutted toward Jean. “Your bag was hanging open there at the Festival, didn’t even have to go back into the Lodge to get it.”

  If he survived this, Martin had a future in pickpocketing, Jean thought. She’d never felt a thing.

  “What did Mrs. Dempsey do with Miss Fairbairn’s notebook?” asked Alasdair.

  “Glanced through it, then told me to throw it down somewheres, so she’d think she lost it.”

  “Why did Mrs. Dempsey want Miss Fairbairn’s notebook?” A subtle difference, but a vital one.

  “Cause she, Fairburn . . .” Martin wasn’t the first person to skew Jean’s name. Still she frowned. “She’s a reporter, isn’t she? She had something on Roger, Tracy never said what. She had something on him and was going to make trouble, and if she did, then Roger wouldn’t be able to fund a fellowship for me. She was asking too many questions, Tracy said.”

  Asking questions was her job, damn it! Jean tried to meet Martin’s eye with a hostile glare of her own, but he ducked, wrapping his long arms around his narrow chest and folding back on the
windowsill. So Tracy had read through her notebook for the same reason Roger had bugged the toy. To see what she knew about the submersible disaster. To see if she was going to publicize it. There was privacy, and there was secrecy . . .

  Alasdair walked to the empty fireplace and looked down at the cat, who was dozing peacefully, his calico sides rising and falling. Not that Alasdair was interested in the cat. He was deploying one of his significant silences, letting the Halls sweat. Letting Jean sweat, too, but not because she was on the hot seat. “Were you working just for Tracy,” he asked in that prickly velvet voice of his, “or for Roger as well?”

  “I never talked with him at all. Why should I? She was a strong woman, she was, dressed right smart, had a good head on her shoulders. She knew what she was about.”

  Noreen wiped her nose on the back of her hand and sat up even straighter. Her face was pink, and not only from the heat, Jean estimated. She was getting mad.

  “And the boat explosion?”

  Martin took off his glasses, mopped them across his shirt, put them back on. Through them he peered molishly up at Alasdair. “I don’t know anything about the boat explosion. I was as surprised as everyone else. I’m sorry that chap Jonathan was killed. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “And Mrs. Dempsey’s death?”

  “I didn’t do it. I swear. I was with Noreen and the boy. We were asleep.”

  “We weren’t asleep,” snapped Noreen. “I was after talking to you, and you was snoring like an outboard engine. Pretending to be asleep, so you wouldn’t have to talk to the likes of me.”

  “Noreen,” Martin protested, “not now . . .”

  “Then when, Marty? You didn’t kill Tracy, I was with you, I’ll tell any policeman who asks that I was with you. Because that’s the truth. You can ponce about, putting on airs, sniffing around that woman—she’s dead, I’m sorry, but that bitch had no right using you and you had no right letting her use you. If you can’t act like an honest man for the child, then when can you?”

  “I did it for the boy, I wanted a better life for him. I did it for us.”

  Noreen came straight up out of the chair, her quivering forefinger leveled at an impassive Alasdair. But she wasn’t looking at him. Her red face was turned to Martin, who by now was cowering on the windowsill like a crab next to a boiling pot of water. “He’ll do you for murder, he will, and where’s us, then, where’s us?”

  Better off, Jean answered, playing judge and jury. Martin might be only a sneak-thief and toady, not a murderer, but by showing Elvis the wrong way to treat a spouse he was as guilty of child-abuse as of wife-abuse.

  In the sudden silence, Gunn’s pencil hitting the page in an emphatic dot—the period at the end of Noreen’s tirade—sounded like a gunshot. Alasdair pointed toward the door. In one move, Gunn was up and down the hall.

  Noreen spun around to Alasdair. “What are you doing with us?”

  “We’ll be taking Mr. Hall to Inverness for the night, so he can make his statement. He’ll stay overnight in the cells, but I’ve not yet decided whether to charge him with anything. You’ll need to be making as statement as well. I’ll have a W.P.C. drive you to the station here in Drumnadrochit and bring you back again. Pop down the hall and have a word with Miss Wotherspoon, if you like.”

  “I don’t know what I like, not now,” Noreen replied, but with an effort that made her entire body quiver, she pulled herself together and popped down the hall.

  Alasdair watched Martin, arms folded. Martin watched his hands opening and shutting in his lap. Jean pushed her notebook through the air like an oar through water, but produced only a tentative zephyr on her warm face.

  Just as Noreen reappeared, so did Gunn, two constables, one male, one female, trooping at his heels. Efficiently they gathered up their respective wards and walked them away. Martin sidled along as though his ankles were manacled. Noreen stepped out, chin jutting, ignoring her husband. The front door slammed, leaving Jean, Alasdair, and the comatose Mandrake in control of the field.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Alasdair wiped his forehead on his sleeve and rotated his shoulders as though he’d been doing hard labor. Which he had, Jean told herself. He might feel as though he was shoveling out the Augean stables, but the case was well on its way to a solution. Wasn’t it?

  The heavy chair seemed to be sucking her down. She peeled herself out of it and turned her back to the window. Her damp blouse feel clammy against her skin. “Now what?”

  “They’ll stop in at the infirmary and have a look for scratch or puncture wounds from the broken needle. But I reckon Martin’s innocent. And Noreen as well, before you go asking me about her.”

  Jean smiled. Who, me?

  “It’s not worth the time and energy trying him for stealing notepaper and the like. He’ll find himself with a probationary sentence, and her with the phone number of social services. There’s just one problem.”

  “Our list of suspects is getting short. We’re down to the Ducketts or some mysterious master criminal or passing tramp, unsuspected by all, who just happened to be hanging out in the top room of the tower. Or else someone’s got a false alibi.”

  The crinkle of deep thought tightening his eyebrows, Alasdair strolled over to the window. Jean noticed the slight creak and catch in his posture as he loosened his armor and leaned on his sword. She could offer to massage his shoulders . . . No. He wouldn’t want that, not here, not now.

  She stepped up beside him, to see that he was looking at Roger and Brendan, back at work on the hillside, sorting their bones. And sorting the Bouchard’s objets de dirt, too, because Charles and Sophie themselves were being conducted toward the parking area by three constables.

  Their voices drifted down the heavy air, a duet of protests in both French and English. Jean caught something about consulates and embassies and the European Union. Like that was going to do them any good. If nothing else, they’d find themselves on the fast track back to France and their shop . . . Their shop. Their job lot of goods from a London estate sale, that just happened to include a Pictish silver chain. Their inventory of antiquities and old books.

  “I bet Tracy bought a copy of Ambrose’s autobiography from the Bouchards. That’s how they got involved in all of this—they wanted first dibs on any more Pictish treasure, especially since they have a certain lack of concern when it comes to provenance. Or so Miranda says.”

  Alasdair glanced around, the crinkle giving way to a glint of silver in his eyes. “We were thinking the Dempseys were our organizing principle, but . . .”

  “It all goes back to Ambrose, with his antiquities and his books and his mania for the occult and Nessie.” Jean whirled around so fast she almost lost her balance. Alasdair grabbed her arm but she hardly felt his grasp, shaking it off and rushing toward the dark corner of the shelving. She knelt down and with her fingertip traced along the rank of books until she came to the ones she remembered. “Look—there were three books from Crowley and Ambrose’s Mandrake Press here on Saturday. Now there are only two, Crowley’s book and the Lawrence. But the Boccaccio is gone.”

  Alasdair leaned over her shoulder, so close she could feel the warmth of his body, venting now that he’d set his cool persona aside. “Eh?”

  She eased the two books from the shelf and then apart—the heat made their bindings almost sticky—and leafed through them. They were as advertised. “What if the Boccaccio, the Decameron . . .”

  “The what?”

  Oh. She laughed. “It’s a book of one hundred medieval Italian stories, lots of fighting, sex, and magic, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have gone over well in the thirties. Like these.” She shoved the Lawrence and the Crowley back onto the shelf, making sure they were aligned properly. “The name’s from the Latin root for ten, you know, like decimal or Decalogue. Nothing to do with your family. Just an alphabetical coincidence, if a pretty good one.”

  “The Camerons have done as much fighting and all over the years as any medie
val Italians,” said Alasdair, not apologetically. “You’re thinking that’s the book Iris told Kirsty to hide?”

  “She couldn’t speak plainly in front of your people, so she just said the book Ambrose wrote. And Kirsty saw the book from the lumber room sitting outside the Lodge and thought that was it. I mean, it was mine, it was under threat, right?”

  “Right. But Ambrose didn’t write . . . Ah, that’s what you’re on about. You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

  “No way. Just because it says Boccaccio on the spine doesn’t mean the Decameron’s inside the binding.” Jean stood up, trying to brush the dust from her hands but making little pills of it instead. “When Iris came back from Inverness, she squirreled the real book away somewhere. No more of this purloined letter, hide-in-plain-sight business.”

  “Like as not Martin was just reading the titles. If he’d pulled every single book from the shelf, he’d be working yet.”

  “Exactly.”

  Alasdair walked across the room to the desk and rolled up the cover. There was Realm of the Beast in its tacky plastic bag. “And this bittie red herring is still here.”

  Mandrake’s nose wrinkled. He stirred, stood up, stretched, and trotted toward the enticing odor.

  “Smells like corpse of herring with a funeral wreath.” Jean trotted to the desk, too, and rescued Kirsty’s knitting project from the chair just as Mandrake leaped up onto it. “This book was never hidden. It was discarded along with a bunch of other useless items.”

  Alasdair picked up his jacket and eased it on, smoothed his lapels and snugged his tie against his throat. “Useless items? Yon photo of Ambrose and Eileen is here on the desk, but their wedding photo and Eileen’s portrait are both in the lumber room.”