The Murder Hole (45 page)

Kettering stood up, his insectoid sunglasses
still turned toward the bones. “The boat sails at half past seven.
If you could come a bit early to assist with the display?”

“My reputation for getting lost in my work
and running late precedes me, I see. No worries, Peter, I wouldn’t
miss this for anything. My life’s work, vindicated! Soon as
Inspector Cameron here gives the word, Brendan and I will get
everything boxed up here and clean up for the cruise.” Suddenly
Roger’s face pleated into his beard. “Geez, Tracy would have gotten
such a charge out of this. She worked by my side all these years,
contributed so much . . .”

Jean wondered what Jonathan would have
thought, and decided it was better not to know. As far as Kettering
was concerned, the upside of a Big Discovery trumped the downside
of two Unfortunate Deaths, publicity-wise. She glanced at
Alasdair.

All he said was, “Mr. Kettering, could you
see your way clear to including a wee boy and his mum in the
evening’s events? The lad’s a fan of Nessie. A future
consumer.”

“Of course, Chief Inspector. Plenty of room.
We’ve only invited sixty people—including Iris Mackintosh, of
course, if we can lure her down from her ivory tower.” He brayed at
his own joke, the glare off his teeth almost casting a shadow.
“Miss Fairbairn, we’ll see you there with the other members of the
fourth estate. And Chief Inspector, I know a fair number of your
people will be there in their official capacities, but if you would
care to be Starr’s honored guest—we’re having Hugh Munro and his
band on the lounge deck, playing their own unique blend of
traditional and modern tunes.”

“Thank you,” said Alasdair.

“You won’t mind my mentioning that the event
is formal dress,” Kettering went on. “I’ll be dressed in the style
of the country, myself. My first experience as a kilted Highlander,
but I won’t be indulging in the same sort of undergarments that a
proper Scotsman would be wearing. Or not wearing.” He bleated
again.

Alasdair’s eyes were starting to cross. Jean
kept her face hidden by continuing to make notes.

Roger shifted his vertebra from hand to hand
like a gambler shaking luck into his dice. Unlike Alasdair, whose
gambling consisted of counting the fall of the cards and playing
the odds, Roger was the type who would risk everything on one
throw. “Tracy would have loved Hugh. Great band. Heard them at the
ceilidh Saturday night and enjoyed them so much I went back on
Sunday for more. Takes your mind off, well, takes your mind
off.”

“Yes, yes, of course, very brave of you to
persevere. Most admirable,” said Kettering. “I’m afraid I made a
bit of a fool of myself Saturday night, dancing and all—you just
can’t keep your feet on the floor, now can you, when Hugh is
playing?”

Yeah, Jean remembered, Hugh had said
something about Kettering prancing around when he wasn’t ducking
out to take a call.

“No way,” said Roger. “You remember that
sequence of songs he did—oh, it must have been around midnight. The
pop tunes, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,’ and the jigs
and stuff in between. If you weren’t drunk when he started, you
were drunk . . .”

An electronic trill made all three men go for
their pockets. Kettering won the jackpot. “Starr Beverages
promotion! Ah yes, I’ll be there straightaway.” And, slipping the
phone back into his dangling jacket, “Must see to the catering.
Good job for me, eh, catering, Kettering?” Exuding ghastly jollity,
he cantered back down the path.

“See you tonight, Peter! You too, Jean.
Inspector. Champagne’s on me!” Roger gathered up a camera, and what
was probably a GPS unit, and what could just as well have been
Captain Kirk’s tricorder, and descended into the trench, there to
lavish his affections on the top half of the Pitclachie Stone.

Alasdair jerked his head toward Pitclachie
House. Jean walked beside him in silence until they were past the
first gate and into the moist shade of the garden, where they were
bushwhacked by a cloud of midges. They hurried the rest of the way
into the courtyard of the house. Only then did Alasdair stop, and
after a searching look up, down, and sideways had ascertained no
one was watching—even Iris’s window was now vacant—he closed his
eyes and let his shoulders sag.

Jean felt as though she’d been dragged
through two barbed-wire fences, and she hadn’t been doing half the
work he had. She applied her right hand to his left shoulder and
allowed herself to both massage and appreciate the firm musculature
concealed beneath his shirt. “Bonus points for remembering Elvis.
How about one of those nice cups of tea for yourself?”

For five seconds he leaned into her touch,
then opened his eyes and withdrew. With a nod of thanks, he said,
“A wee dram wouldn’t come amiss, but I’ll not be getting that ‘til
after the cruise. If then. We’ve gone through our list of suspects,
and we’ve come to a dead end.”

“But you have your eye on Roger.”

“When a wife is killed, your first suspicion
falls on the husband. And the other way round. He wasn’t half angry
with her Saturday night. I reckon she cut him off at the knees
right and proper when she told him she’d destroyed the boat.”

“He was mad, all right. Angry. However . .
.”

“He was at the ceilidh while Tracy was being
pushed out the window. A fact he took a right bit of care pointing
out just now.”

“No kidding. He sure did give you the charm
offensive. The well-meaning but slightly goofy inventor going
happy-go-luckily about his business, while his wife machiavellies
behind his back.”

“Owned up to quite a bit, he did, though
you’ll never convince me he didn’t know that submersible was on
board, partially disassembled or not.”

“I bet he was going to dump it in the deepest
part of the loch. Which would have been a lot better than Tracy’s
blowing it up, but like he said, Tracy was over the top.”

“And wanted to show him up, I reckon. Feeling
unappreciated and all.” Alasdair wiped his forehead. “In any event,
he shopped Tracy and Martin good and proper, and suggested the
Ducketts murdered Tracy. Everyone’s guilty but him.”

“And the Bouchards. They were working with
him while Martin worked with Tracy. I’m surprised they didn’t all
collide in the hallway outside my door—well,” Jean amended, “the
Bouchards had the Lodge all to themselves for several days. I
thought somebody had picked the lock of the lumber room. And here I
was thinking they’d moved into the house because they’d sensed the
ghosts.”

“No, they’ve not got the personality to sense
ghosts.”

Ghost-sensors tending to be nervous and
intense. “I wouldn’t think they have the personality to run people
down with their car, either, but . . . Funny how Roger went off to
the ceilidh that night when he was hurt worse than I was, and I was
aching all over. No way could I have gone dancing. Maybe he
couldn’t stand being in the same hotel room with—no, Tracy wasn’t
there.”

“She was sneaking about Pitclachie, looking
out a complete copy of that book, using the keys Martin copied for
her.”

“Yeah, she was wearing sneakers when she died
because she was sneaking. And since she was a sneaky person, she
thought I was, too. If it weren’t such a tragedy it would be a
farce.”

“These things usually are,” said Alasdair, so
blandly Jean suspected he was covering bleakness.

She looked discreetly away. There was the
garden constable pacing along the path. He must be using bug
repellent for after-shave. And Mandrake the cat was ambling across
the terrace, his coat of many colors flicking in and out of shadow
like a jaguar on the prowl. “Roger would probably turn the
Bouchards in, if he could. As for vice versa, I know Hugh saw them
at the ceilidh, but did the Bouchards ever say in so many words
they saw Roger?”

Alasdair scowled so fiercely his eyebrows met
at the bridge of his nose. “No matter—Andy Sawyer saw him
there.”

“Oh. Yeah. He did.” The egregious Sawyer,
whose work Alasdair now had to do along with his own.

“I’ll get onto him, get the details,” he
said, discarding his scowl as useless distraction. “We might be
obliged to interview all the people who were there, work out a
timetable or the like.”

“Hugh said the place was heaving. I bet the
bar was packed, too. It would take a long time to find everyone,
let along talk to them. And meanwhile Roger’s congratulating
himself for pulling everything, including Nessie, out of the fire.
Or the water, as the case may be.”

“Oh aye. Best I can do now is go back to the
station and have a look at everyone’s statements and the trace
evidence reports, perhaps I’ve missed something.”

If he had had a warhorse, he’d be getting
Jean to winch him back onto it. “Do you need me to drive you back?”
she asked.

“I’ll cadge a ride from the constable at the
end of the drive, thank you kindly.”

“Okay then. I’ll go put on my glad rags for
tonight. Of course, with all the men in kilts, no one’s going to
notice me.”

“I’d not be so sure of that.” One corner of
his mouth thawed enough to crimp into a wry half-smile.

“You don’t have time to get your own kilt
from Inverness, though.”

“I’ll borrow Hamish’s, we’re much the same
size. The runts of the Cameron litter, I’m thinking, though I doubt
our ancestors were the giants among men that legend paints
them.”

“Who is?” she replied with a smile, not so
much at the joke as at Alasdair being able to make one at this
fraught moment, and tore the relevant pages from her notebook.
“Here you go.”

He folded her notes into his pocket. The
other corner of his mouth melted, drawing his lips up into a full
smile. “Half past seven, then.”

“See you later,” she called to his retreating
back.

With a smooth pirouette, he turned around,
blew her a kiss, and went on his way—toward Noreen Hall, who was
climbing out of a police car in the parking area like someone
climbing out of a sickbed. With a hold-that-bus gesture to the car,
Alasdair spoke to Noreen. Her desolate expression cracked and
flowed away, revealing an actual smile. “Thank you, thank you.
Elvis, I’ll tell Elvis, shall I . . .” She ran across the courtyard
and into the house.

Smiling and digging in her bag for the key—it
was at the bottom, of course—Jean started toward the door of the
Lodge. Just as she put the key in the lock, her cell phone rang,
sending her back into the bag. “Hello?”

“Hiya,” said a male voice. “Here I am.”

Her brain spun without traction. She knew who
it was, who was . . . Oh. Brad. “Hi. Where are you supposed to
be?”

“You asked me to call you back,” he said with
exaggerated patience. “Nancy Drew and the case of the sinking
submersible, right?”

“Oh yeah. Sorry. Things have been happening
here.”

“No shit. Tracy Dempsey bit the dust. Has
Dudley Do-Right caught the killer yet?”

Jean gritted her teeth and resisted
drop-kicking the phone. “About the submersible . . .”

“The guy who was killed was named Christopher
Peretti. His wife was Melissa Duckett—must be her maiden name,
huh?––and they had three kids. Does that help?”

“Yes it does.”

“I wrote it down, so I’d remember. Bet you
thought I’d forget. Anything else I can do to—what do they say
there, assist the police in their inquiries?”

It could have been worse. He could have
called while she and Alasdair . . . She had to be mature about
this. “I’ll let you know. Thanks for checking it out for me. Gotta
run now. Bye.”

“Bye,” said his voice from the speaker as she
squashed
End
. Independent, disinterested confirmation of the
Ducketts’ story
was
a help. It was her own prejudice that
made Brad seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Or a pound
short.

Speaking of pounds, eight infant pounds to be
exact, she walked into the stuffy Lodge and called the
Campbell-Reid’s flat. She got the voice mail, and duly left her
message. “Hi, it’s Jean. I wanted to let you know that Roger’s
assistant uncovered the rest of the Pitclachie Stone. Thanks to
your I.D. of the mason, we’ve got the full story and are making
progress on the case . . .” From her lips to the ears of Justice,
she added silently, never mind that intrepid we. “I’m cruising the
loch tonight, so I’ll call y’all back tomorrow. Give my love to the
baby.”

She closed the phone and noticed the time on
its face. Five-thirty. Time flies when you’re shoulder-to-shoulder
with Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a mountain. But Miranda should
still be in the office.

She was, and answered the phone herself. “Ah,
Jean. You’ve not been abducted the day, then.”

“Not by aliens, anyway.” By a certain
detective chief inspector, but she’d save that until Miranda wormed
it out of her with a third degree beyond even Alasdair’s
capabilities.

“Getting forwarder on the case, are you?”

“More or less. Roger’s assistant turned up
the missing half of the Pitclachie Stone, so at least the Museum’s
going to come out ahead. How are things at the office?”

“Hardly had time to look over this month’s
print run, the phone’s been going all day long with folk asking for
advice.”

“You should hang out a second shingle—Dear
Aunt Miranda.”

“Not that sort of advice. Names for boards of
directors and the like. Protect and Survive is looking out a
security chief for overseeing historical properties, the National
Portrait Gallery is looking out a curator for sharing an exhibition
with the Met in New York . . . There goes my other line. Sorry,
Jean. We’ll have us a good blether when you get back, all
right?”

“All right. Take care.” Jean switched off
again and thought,
Get back? Could she ever get back?
And
she didn’t mean to her flat in Edinburgh and her office above the
Royal Mile.