The Murder Hole (33 page)

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.”

“And thinking their ends justify their
means.”

That brought them back around to Sawyer’s
omelet, but Jean wasn’t going to go there.

Alasdair stepped off the cairn and offered
her his hand. His chin was set, she saw. So was his will.
Take
it or leave it
. Taking his large, warm, dry, steady hand, she
let him balance her onto clear ground, then quickly subtracted her
hand from his before she was tempted to cling to it. “Thanks.”

The answering spark in his eye was so subtle
Jean wasn’t sure she’d actually seen it.

Voices outside the grove broke the silence
within. Sophie Bouchard said something about digging holes in the
ground. Roger replied with a twenty-words-or-less explanation of
archaeological technique. A shovel clanged, against rock, perhaps.
Alasdair started off toward the gate.

At his elbow this time, Jean said, “The
Bouchards were at the ceilidh last night, too. I don’t know where
Brendan was.”

“He and the Bouchards need to be giving their
statements at the house, not hanging about with Roger and his
windmills.”

Tilting at windmills. Yep, that was
Roger.

“As for Roger,” Alasdair continued, “I’m
thinking that asking him outright about the submersible and all
would be counter-productive just now. Same for the Ducketts.
Fishing’s only worth the while when you know what sort of fish
you’re after and are ready with the proper bait.”

“If you’d like to send photos of the debris
to Brad, I can give you his e-mail.”

“No need, thank you just the same.” Alasdair
didn’t turn a hair at the name. “We’ve looked out an expert. He’s
got the photos now.”

That was a relief. Alasdair opened the gate
and held it for Jean. She stepped through and then aside into the
bracken while he turned back to make sure the latch caught
properly.

In the pasture, Brendan was up to his thighs
in the brown soil, his not insignificant chest rising and falling
attractively beneath his Water Horse T-shirt. All Jean could see of
Roger was his baseball cap and his shoulders, bobbing up and down
as he fussed about in the hole which had not yet become a trench.
Sophie stood alone and spouseless to one side, her hands in her
pockets, her head tilted like a bird’s, her blonde hair
fluttering.

Alasdair turned around just in time to see
Roger vanish into the earth as abruptly as though he’d been beamed
away into inner space.

Jean was, for once, rendered speechless. All
she could do was run with Alasdair down the path and into the
field, where they joined Sophie in craning over the lip of the
excavation.

Brendan was down on his knees beside a
table-sized and -shaped boulder that filled the hole horizontally,
disappearing into its dirt wall on one side and resting on a flat
upright stone on the other. A fresh gray scrape on the muddy
upright had no doubt been produced by his shovel or by Roger with a
trowel. An irregular layer of small water-worn rocks, like the
rocks in the cairn beneath the Stone, were half-obscured in the
dirt above the boulder and down the sides of the trench.

A pair of work boots extended from beneath
the flat stone like the wicked witch’s shoes from beneath Dorothy’s
house, and for a second Jean thought it had fallen on top of Roger.
But no. It was immobilized. He had uncovered an opening beneath it
and with typical go-for-broke bravado had dived right in. Better
him than her, Jean thought with a shudder.

“What’s he on about?” Alasdair demanded.

“It’s a passage grave,” explained Brendan.
“The big stones and the empty chamber showed up on the survey.”

“Pictish?” asked Sophie.

“These sorts of tombs are ages older than the
Picts,” Jean said. “But the Picts supposedly re-used them.”
And
Ambrose wrote about them
, she added to herself.

The boots disappeared. A muted wink of light
came from the dark cavity. So Roger had provided himself with a
flashlight. Nothing like being prepared. “Bones,” he shouted, his
voice muffled. “Big bones. The bones of the Loch Ness monster. The
Picts probably worshiped them.”

“Oxen?” Alasdair asked under his breath.
“Deer?”

“The Museum needs to know about this,” said
Jean, and as Alasdair glanced at her, “I’m not telling you your
job, I’m doing mine.”

Brendan reeled back. With a wriggle and a
slither, Roger popped out of the hole. He hardly set foot in the
trench but leaped straight out of it. He was bedaubed with mud,
like a color-blind Pict painting himself brown instead of blue, but
his grin was all white teeth framed by the gray-streaked beard.
“I’ve found it. I’ve found the bones,” he said, speaking so fast
Jean thought he was going to hyper-ventilate. “Nessie bones. Well,
there are a lot of other ones down there, too, and small stones and
dirt , and some artifacts, I think—we need to get things cleared
out, it’s in great shape—Brendan, let’s widen the trench, get the
entrance passage dug out, and set up a protocol.”

“Very amusing” said Sophie, her tone just a
bit edged.

Roger stared at her a moment and then held
out his hand. On his palm lay a bottle-cap-sized dirt clod.
Sophie’s nostrils flared in distaste, as though he’d offered her a
dry turd.

Jean caught the quick glint of reflected
light from one side of the lump—the same thing that had no doubt
attracted Roger’s attention. She took the clod from his hand, dug a
tissue from her bag, and began wiping the damp dirt away from what
appeared to be interlaced black twigs.

Roger said, “This makes it all worth while,
you know, it really . . . Oh, hello there, Chief Inspector.”

“Hello, Dr Dempsey,” Alasdair said, clearly
intrigued if far from amused. “Makes all what worth while? The boat
explosion? Jonathan Paisley’s death? The hit-and-run? Your wife’s
murder?”

Roger’s grin wobbled, and for a moment Jean
could see his old self as in a fun-house mirror. Then the grin
contracted to a grimace. “She worked hard for this. She wouldn’t
want me to stop, not now, not right when I’ve found the bones.”

And the artifacts
, Jean finished for
him. Ah, the black twigs were tarnished silver, encrusted with tiny
whitish knobs. The larger lumps were faceted glass or even
semi-precious gems. This was not the sort of object she’d expect to
find in a Neolithic tomb, whether re-used by the Picts or not. “I’m
impressed, Roger. You went right to the entrance of a passage
grave. How long were you digging, Brendan, an hour and a half?”

“Seemed like three.” Brendan brushed dirt
from his hands and inspected several red patches that held every
promise of turning into blisters. “I’m a diver, not a digger.”

“Of course we went right to it,” said Roger.
“I was using Omnium remote-sensing devices.”

Alasdair smiled, thinly and humorlessly, and
picked up on his cue. “You were right lucky then, that you began
using your devices at just the part of Pitclachie Farm covering the
grave, eh?”

“I think I deserve a bit of luck, Chief
Inspector, with everything else that’s happened.”

Luck had very little to do with it, Jean
thought. Ambrose now, Ambrose and his occult Pictish ceremonies and
his unrecorded digging and . . . The last flakes of dirt fell away
and light flared from the object in her hand. It was a modern
earring with a clip back. And it reminded her of something,
something very immediate. “Look at this.”

“Diamonds? That’s why it’s so
well-preserved?” hazarded Brendan.

“No,” Sophie said, in a quick intake of
breath. “The Pictish have no diamonds.”

“I think it’s badly-tarnished silver,” Jean
said, “set with marcasite, which is some sort of stone—I’d have to
look it up. And these square gems are probably Czech glass. It’s
Art Deco design. It’s only been here since
nineteen-thirty-three.”

Alasdair kept his outward composure—she would
have expected no less—but she bet his inner child was turning
cartwheels. “I hope you noted where you found this,” he said to
Roger, and extended his hand. Jean dropped the earring into it.

The ruddy glow in Roger’s face drained away
and his grimace contracted even further, so that he looked like a
moss-bearded gargoyle. He stepped back, and would have fallen into
the pit if Brendan hadn’t grabbed his arm. “It was lying on some
bones. You don’t mean . . .”

“You might could have found some animal
bones,” Alasdair told him, “but I reckon this was lying on human
bones. I’ll have the torch now, please.”

Brendan was looking from face to face, his
noble brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Human bones? Nineteen
thirty-three? What the . . ?”

“I know that earring,” said a clipped
voice.

Like an ungainly chorus line, everyone spun
around to see Iris, tall and stark as a standing stone. If her
tanned face held any expression at all, it was of stunned
recognition. The portrait in the Lodge lumber room, Jean realized
with a frisson that started at her nape and ran all the way to her
toes. Eileen was wearing those earrings in that portrait.