The Murder Hole (9 page)

She imagined Roger standing on the dock and
tearing at his hair, and Tracy saying “I told you so,” and Jonathan
and Brendan . . . No one had been on the boat when it exploded,
right? Those lights in the windows had been only reflections,
hadn’t they?

Please
, Jean prayed to her thoroughly
tarnished guardian angel,
please let no one have been on that
boat
.

The coffee pot hissed and steamed, emitting
its delectable aroma. Instead of standing over it with her tongue
hanging out, Jean shoved her toast into the toaster oven and turned
toward the television set. And saw that the velvet curtain was
drawn across the vestibule, where she had most emphatically not
left it after her middle-of-the-night lock inspection.

In three swift steps she crossed the room and
threw the curtain open, revealing no more than sunlight shining
through the transom over the door and the scattering of broom
blossoms on the floor. Not that she’d expected to see anything.
Ambrose’s ghost was repeating his actions in life, drawing the
curtain not only to keep out drafts, but also to secure his inner
sanctum, where he wrote his arcane books . . . The books. Something
nagged at the corner of her eye. She turned slowly around.

The DVDs were piled on the floor. Some of the
tourist guides and popular histories were jammed tightly together,
while gaps opened between others. Some were shoved all the way back
into the shelf, others stuck out as far as its edge. A well-worn
copy of Ambrose’s
Pictish Antiquities
was laid crosswise
atop the other books, along with an equally worn copy of
The
Water-Horse of Loch Ness
, the book that collected all his
newspaper and magazine articles about the monster, but never
mentioned his theory about Aleister Crowley’s role in its, er,
creation.

Last night Jean had gone straight upstairs.
She hadn’t noticed, either then or when she came down to check the
door, whether the shelves had been disarranged.

Now she ran her fingertip along the uneven
row of books, releasing not one mote of dust, then picked up
Ambrose’s
Antiquities
and opened it to the photo inside the
back flap. The man’s long lantern jaw and partly befuddled, partly
lugubrious expression reminded her of classic horror writer H.P.
Lovecraft—an appropriate resemblance, considering. Ambrose’s round
spectacles, like two tiny magnifying glasses, and his severely
parted and slicked-down hair also evoked in Jean’s mind
implications of plutocrats as well as scholars. Well, he had both
inherited and married wealth, although how long he’d kept it was up
for discussion.

As Michael Campbell-Reid had pointed out so
graphically,
Pictish Antiquities
was Ambrose’s only
archaeological publication, despite years of amateur digging. Or
plundering, as the case may be. Its sober historical account was
colored by off-the-wall theorizing. That the Picts re-used ancient
Neolithic sites had been borne out by recent excavations. That they
were performing magical ceremonies in them could never be
proved—even though archaeologists’ routine explanation for any
puzzling object or setting was “ritual use.” At least Ambrose was
weirdly consistent, segueing from magical Picts to water monsters
to
Loch Ness: the Realm of the Beast
, a title conspicuous by
its absence. No surprise there.

The surprise, quickly ratcheting up into
alarm, was that yesterday Jean had noted how tidy the bookshelf
was, and yet today it was a mess. What? Had the ghost of the old
man been making sure guests in his premises noticed his work?
Repeating his routines from life was one thing, deliberately trying
to get her attention was another, one that strained
credibility.

What unfortunately didn’t strain credibility
was that someone living had searched the cottage. Jean inspected
the rest of the room, but nothing else was disarranged. The flowers
still stood on the table next to her canvas carryall . . .

The smell of burning toast turned her lunge
toward the table into a lunge toward the kitchen. Easing the toast
onto a plate, she poured herself a cup of coffee and carried both
to the table. While they cooled she inventoried everything in her
bag. The large envelope with the photo of the Pitclachie Stone. A
couple of file folders with copies and clippings. The biography of
Crowley and several Nessieology books. Roger’s press release, the
Omnium brochures tucked inside. She’d left her paper notebook
sitting on the table last night, and it was still there, if not
exactly where she’d left it at least not obviously elsewhere.
Beside it sat her laptop, cold and silent.

Okay
. Jean munched her toast, washed
it down with coffee, and pondered the possibilities. Maybe someone
had come into the Lodge while she was gone yesterday and ransacked
the shelves. Kirsty and Iris had to have a key, but why would one
of them leave the shelves disarranged?

Someone else with a key might have looked
through the shelves, even taken something from them, but Jean
couldn’t tell if anything were missing. Besides, the logical place
to look for—whatever—would be in the locked room, which would argue
either a second key or the sort of frustrated violence that would
leave telltale marks on the door or the knob.

Or, she thought with a chill that cooled the
coffee on its way down her throat, had someone come into the house
last night? The first sound to wake her had been that of a door
shutting. Maybe she’d been more deeply asleep than she’d thought,
and while she’d heard an intruder leave the cottage, she hadn’t
heard him or her come in. Her sixth sense had responded only to the
second round of noise, when the click of a door had been
accompanied by footsteps and the creak of the floor. And yet there
was no reason to assume the first sound hadn’t been the ghost, too.
Maybe he’d just been warming up for the full manifestation.

Besides, why would someone sneak into the
cottage while it was occupied and run the risk of being caught?
That was pretty bold, even if he or she knew that Jean had no
better weapon than her toothbrush.

She informed herself sternly that she had no
evidence the mysterious searcher was after her things, let alone
her person. In fact, she had no evidence there was a mysterious
searcher at all. She might just as well throttle the galloping
paranoia back to walking caution. That took a lot less energy.

A second cup of life-affirming caffeine in
one hand, Jean used the other to turn on the television. Only BBC
Scotland was showing news, and that was the morning Gaelic
broadcast. A shot of two yellow-jacketed policemen standing beside
Temple Pier, the loch behind them smeared into watercolor by early
morning haze, switched to a shot of a clean-cut young man wearing a
suit and tie. His eyes, as large as those of a Japanese anime
character, gazed into the camera as though expecting it to bite
him. Whatever he was saying was drowned out by a voice translating
it into soft but incomprehensible Gaelic syllables. Jean got the
message, though, loud and clear.

That was Detective Constable Gunn. He had to
have a first name, but she’d never learned it during her brief
contact with him and his superiors back in May. Those same
superiors had sent him out today to hand the news people the
standard line: The Northern Constabulary is making inquiries into
the matter. Move along, move along, there’s nothing to see
here.

Had D.C.I. Cameron been dispatched from
headquarters to deal with the matter of an exploding boat? Prying
her gritted teeth far enough apart to fit in the rim of her coffee
cup, Jean remembered the moment Alasdair Cameron had dragged her
out of danger, his arm strong and solid around her waist. And the
last time she’d seen him, over an Indian meal in Fort William, when
she’d mentioned the Casket Letters and the Red Books of Westmarch.
He’d not only recognized both references, he’d smiled his dry,
reserved smile, and said, “The wardens of Westmarch were named
Fairbairn. Ancestors of yours, I reckon.”

Like Michael and Rebecca, she and Alasdair
Cameron would have been a lot alike to begin with, wounded by duty
and commitment, had there been a beginning. But that same evening
he’d warned her off.
Don’t go breaking my shell, woman. You
might not like what’s inside
. And they’d walked away from each
other. Once burned, Jean thought, you tended to leap back
hyper-ventilating from a sudden spurt of flame.

More than once she’d told students
complaining about a difficult assignment,
Let it be a challenge
to you
. More than once in the last few weeks she’d wondered if
Alasdair’s words had been just that, not a warning but a challenge.
Maybe she would soon find out.

Jean switched off the TV and rinsed off her
dishes. Then she typed the notes from her interview with Roger into
her laptop, even though the story he’d told her yesterday had been
overrun by events. As for today, Kirsty had said Iris would show
Jean around the garden “after breakfast.” Glancing at the kitchen
clock, she decided that nine-thirty had to be after breakfast—and
that Dempsey’s ten a.m. press junket had been cancelled.

Just in case her paranoia was justified, she
tucked her laptop into its case and the case into the carryall, and
locked them both in the wardrobe in her bedroom after she dressed.
Here we go again
. . . Except, she reminded herself very
firmly, this time she really was just an innocent bystander.

On her way out, Jean tried the front door key
in the lock of the locked room. But it was too big, and left a
gleaming scratch on the age-darkened metal plate. Great, she
thought, she’d been driven to vandalism. Even though there were
other scratches around the keyhole, too, some quite recent. Had
someone picked the lock? Leaning over, she peered through the
keyhole to see nothing but darkness. Short of finding a ladder and
dragging it around to the window, she wasn’t going to find out what
was in that room.

Forward momentum, then, as one of her
favorite fictional characters was fond of saying. To which she
could only add,
and don’t look back, something might be gaining
on you
.

With a sound between a snort and a sigh, Jean
shut the door of the Lodge and locked it. Maybe she should title
her next article “Locking Doors for Fun and Profit.”

The birds were singing, the sun was shining,
a boat trailed a foaming white wake like the train of a bridal gown
across the surface of the loch. You’d think there were no cares to
be had in the world. You’d think there were no secret agendas, ones
that impelled the bloody-minded not only to make threats but to
also carry them out. Making long, purposeful strides across the
courtyard, Jean imagined herself taller, stronger, a more
formidable opponent . . . Dempsey had enemies, she told herself.
All she had were irritants.

The front door of the main house opened and
decanted the Bouchards, dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch’s latest
hiking-up-Fifth-Avenue gear. “Good morning,” Charles said with a
gracious inclination of his head. Sophie adjusted the zipper on her
jacket and said, “Pretty sunshine day. Good to walk.”

“Yes, it’s a lovely morning.” Jean replied,
not without a suspicious glance at the so-far innocent white clouds
swanning overhead.

The Bouchards went on down the terrace. Jean
lingered to pet the calico cat, who was sunning itself on the low
wall where Elvis had stood last night to watch the show—both acts
of it. This beastie wasn’t in the mood to be elusive, but emitted a
comfortable and comforting purr.

All right!
The slate flagstones
rimming the terrace were carved with Pictish symbols, among them
the gripping beast, Dempsey’s logo. The stylized shapes of bull,
boar, eagle, and serpent reminded Jean of the drawings in the Book
of Kells and other old Celtic Bibles. Which led her back around to
beasts from Revelations or from the loch or both. Brushing away a
scattering of broom petals like a drift of gold flakes, she
crouched down for a better look.

A tattoo of footsteps announced Kirsty,
walking around the base of the tower with her maiden—well, if Iris
was not a maiden, at least permanently unmarried—aunt at her side.
Iris was not only the taller of the two, her posture made a
regimental sergeant major look slouched. Kirsty was sidling along
with her head tilted up, speaking in a voice that made up in
vehemence what it lacked in volume. Today her hair was pulled
tightly back from her face, sharpening its curves into angles.
Iris’s face was already angular. Her expression was the same as it
had been on the television screen two nights ago, dealing sternly
with the facts, thank you, not with anything as disreputable as
fancy.

The two women stopped in the corner where the
tower met the house, beside a small arched doorway. Kirsty’s voice
rose. “Roger’s is just another expedition!”

“It wasn’t that even before he got his boat
blown up last night. Good riddance, I’m thinking.”

“How can you go saying that? Jonathan Paisley
has been missing since the explosion!”

Jean winced. So it was too late for angelic
intervention. Poor Jonathan. Talk about being in the wrong place at
the wrong time.

“Not to speak ill of—of him.” Iris made a
gesture that came close to patting Kirsty’s head. “But it just goes
to show how Roger Dempsey will do anything, will sacrifice anyone,
to further his ambitions. The other lad, the American, his back
wants watching, I should think. If Roger had the least bit of
respect, he would take his circus and go away home.”

“He’s not after going home, he’s making plans
to get on with the ground survey.”

“How did . . . Ah. I see. That phone call.
That was the American lad, was it?”