The Murder Hole (13 page)

“So I hear. Loch Ness never gives up its
dead.” She firmly rejected the imagery that went along with his
statement.

“Did you have your interview with Roger,
then?”

“Yes. He’s doing both water and land surveys
looking for Nessie. I assume he’s sucking up to the other reporters
as blatantly as he is to me, except with me he’s acting like we’re
old friends because we once met. To no good purpose, but we
met.”

“He’s presuming on the acquaintance, is
he?”

“Yes, and that makes me . . . Okay, okay,
I’ve only been a journalist for a few months and already I’m firmly
convinced that everyone has a secret agenda. He wants publicity,
that’s all.”

Alasdair said nothing, expressing no
skepticism about Dempsey’s agendas, Jean’s convictions, or even
Nessie’s existence. Unlike her, he was very good at that old
journalist’s trick, to keep so quiet the subject runs on and on.
She might be a subject and not a suspect, but she didn’t have much
to run on about. “There was a lot of electronic equipment on board
the boat, like you’d expect, although I couldn’t tell you anything
about it. It’s just as well I didn’t stay very long, that boat
aroma, you know, bilge and gasoline, got to me . . .”

“Gasoline?” asked Alasdair. “You’re saying
that you smelled petrol?”

“I’ve got kind of a sensitive nose, I notice
smells . . .”

“The Water Horse boat was powered by
diesel.”

Her brain screeched around a sharp curve,
only two wheels in contact with coherence. Gasoline. Diesel. That’s
right, she’d smelled the diesel fumes when the boat pulled away
from the pier. “They could have had gasoline for a generator or—or
. . . You don’t mean the smell could have come from a Molotov
cocktail!”

“A petrol bomb. Oh aye.”

Good God
. She’d been sitting on a
bomb. She filed that thought in her denial basket and plunged on,
“Someone threw a petrol bomb at an expedition camping along the
shore about twenty years ago. No one was hurt, and no one was ever
charged. The nut they suspected left the area and that was that. Or
it was that, until now.”

“Oh aye?” Alasdair said again. His left
eyebrow arched upward, infinitesimally.

“That bomb was thrown from a passing boat.
This one must have already been on board. Someone had to have been
there to light the fuse or start the timer or something.”

“Perhaps Jonathan himself, but he didn’t
escape before it went up.”

“Why would he want to blow up the boat he was
working on?” She frowned out over the water. Below the tower, a
tourist boat wallowed in the waves while its passengers took
photos. Since her picture was going to be in several vacation
albums, maybe she should wave or even curtsey.

She swiveled back around without doing
either. “When I first got there and Jonathan demanded my bona
fides, Brendan shouted, ‘You’re as jumpy as a guy tap-dancing in a
minefield.’ Then, later on, Jonathan said to Brendan, ‘And it’s not
five minutes you were asking me to take your place this evening.’
Take his place working on the boat that evening, or somewhere else?
Why was he so nervous? And Brendan said that Jonathan should be
careful about going into the water, he’d sink like a rock from the
weight of the chip on his shoulder. They weren’t getting along
well, in other words, although that bit about going into the water
could just be a badly-timed turn of phrase.”

“Or it might could have been a threat.
Anything else?” Alasdair’s other eyebrow arched upward to join the
first.

Whoa, Jean thought, she was on a roll. To
what, she didn’t know, but she was rolling. “Haven’t you got
anything from the threatening letters?”

“I’ll not be saying that.” His hint of a
smile partly apologized for not confiding in her, partly reminded
her that he was the interrogator here. “Whoever sent the letters
was after stopping the expedition, aye, but that’s not necessarily
the same person who blew up the boat.”

“Good point. Iris said that considering
Roger’s reputation, just about anyone could have wanted to stop the
expedition, although blowing up the boat did seem a bit
drastic.”

“Iris said that, did she? What else was she
saying about Dempsey?”

Nothing that would make Jean feel as though
telling Alasdair was betraying a confidence. “That Roger puts
people at risk in order to serve his ambitions and that amateurs
like him can do more harm than good. I got the impression Iris
feels some sort of personal betrayal. Roger hinted he’d already
gone several rounds with her. But that’s only a marginally stronger
impression than my feeling Roger’s up to something behind the
scenes.”

“The expedition might could have been the
set-up for an insurance scam.”

There was a thought, but not one she was
comfortable with. “Roger loves his gadgets. I can’t see him
destroying them on purpose.”

“Who was with you when the boat
exploded?”

“Some of the guests at Pitclachie House, the
Ducketts and Martin Hall and his little boy.”

“No one else? Not Iris herself?”

Back to Iris. The only reason Jean could keep
up with Alasdair’s acrobatic thought processes was because hers
tended to leap and twirl, too. “No, Iris wasn’t there—I didn’t meet
her until this morning. Kirsty, her niece, wasn’t there, either.
She went out with Brendan last night. Iris isn’t too happy about
that. She thinks he’s been contaminated by Roger, I guess.”

“Who else is stopping at the B&B?”

“The Hall family, the Ducketts, and a French
couple, the Bouchards. Iris and Kirsty put me in the Lodge, a
separate cottage, because the Bouchards didn’t want to stay . . .”
Oh hell, if she could tell anyone, she could tell Alasdair. That
moment they’d each realized the other had the same ghostly allergy
was not one she’d soon, if ever, forget.

She leaned in a bit closer. Her nerve endings
stirred in that energy field she remembered all too well. Like a
tickle, it was neither entirely pleasant nor entirely irritating.
“There’s a ghost in the Lodge. Ambrose, I bet—it used to be his
study. I heard the door of a locked room open and shut, footsteps,
the smell of coffee and tobacco. I also heard a man and a woman
arguing, and what might have been Eileen Mackintosh scream and fall
down the stairs. I didn’t get up and look. There’s a ghost in the
garden, too, not as strong a one, though.”

“Eh?” Alasdair tilted his head toward hers.
He wasn’t that much taller than she was, so he didn’t have far to
tilt. “Ambrose was tried for murder, wasn’t he?”

She tried not to shrink away like some sweet
young thing on her first date—she wasn’t sweet, she wasn’t young,
she wasn’t a thing, and this sure as heck wasn’t a date. “He was,
yes. But that’s over and done with. What isn’t over and done is
that before I heard the ghost, I heard another door shut, maybe the
outside one. Which was also locked.”

“You’re thinking that was a living person.
Had anything gone missing this morning?”

“Nothing of mine. I can’t speak for
everything in the house. A bookshelf was disarranged is all. Oh,
and a curtain was drawn, but I’m sure that, at least, was
Ambrose.”

“And you’re on your own in this cottage at
night, are you?”

“Somebody could have been searching for
something there, but they’d have no motive to come after me!”

“You don’t know that for certain, do you
now?”

She smiled tightly. “Thanks, Alasdair.”

“You’re welcome, Jean,” he returned, almost
sober, but a similar smile lurked in the depths of his eyes. He
turned his gaze to the blue-tinted mountains that dwindled away to
the south.

No, he couldn’t explain the small mystery of
the doors either, but he wasn’t about to reject anything as
irrelevant to his investigation. Damn, Jean thought, she was still
able to read him. That was not a skill she’d meant to cultivate.
And damn him, while she was at it, not only for pointing out that
she just might could maybe be in danger, but for that knowing if
subtle smile that got under her skin every time.

Voices and the scramble of footsteps echoed
up the stairs. Down below, the piper struck up Auld Lang Syne.
Alasdair stepped away from her the instant she stepped away from
him, his expression locking itself down. “We’re needing a
statement.”

“I know the drill,” she returned, and glanced
at her watch. “I’m supposed to catch up with Hugh Munro—my
neighbor, you remember, the musician—at the Festival, but then I
can stop by the station.”

“I bought one of Munro’s albums, since you
spoke so well of him. Fine music.”

Surprised, not to mention pleased, Jean was
inhaling to respond when five or six people clambered out of the
stairwell and crowded the top of the tower.

Alasdair motioned toward the stairs with a
curt, “Right.”

“Right.” Jean expelled her breath and took a
step.

“Look!” The shout sparked a general rush to
the side of the tower. Cameras leaped to attention and started
clicking. “It’s Nessie!” someone else said, and the word passed
from voice to voice like a hot potato from hand to hand. “Nessie!
Nessie!”

Jean almost tripped over her own feet, she
spun around so fast, and was pulled along in Alasdair’s wake as he
cut through the group. She bumped up against the railing between
him and a plump woman, and followed the trajectory set by the
multiple pointing fingers.

A mottled dark hump bobbed up and down in the
waves just below the castle. Around it floated what looked like
appendages, mere suggestions just below the surface of the opaque
water. This time Jean’s brain ran smack up against a wall and
stopped.
Nessie? No way!

The piper stopped playing. In the sudden
quivering silence Jean could hear more excited voices drifting up
from below. A brush against her arm was Alasdair reaching into his
jacket and pulling out a cell phone. Stepping away from the
parapet, he punched buttons then put the phone to his ear.

Oh
. It was all in the perspective,
wasn’t it? An explosion, a fire, might singe the red of a life
preserver into mottled black. But it would still be buoyant.
Jonathan hadn’t sunk at all.

Jean mouthed the words as Alasdair said them,
his voice flat, dull, professional: “We’ve found Jonathan
Paisley.”

In the rush of police cars and media vans
along the road toward the castle, Jean felt like a salmon swimming
upstream. She presumed boats were on the way, too, but she couldn’t
see the bay from the town. So that’s why intelligent and
imaginative Alasdair had been loitering with intent at the top of
the tower. Because he hoped that Jonathan’s body would eventually
drift by.

Poor Jonathan, she thought again, those two
words wearing a rut in her mind. There he’d been, cautiously
wearing that life preserver, and all it had preserved was his body,
an exhibit in a crime scene. Some life preservers were made with
blocky extensions around the neck to keep an unconscious person’s
head above the water. Not the kind Jonathan had been wearing. He’d
chosen a light sports model that wouldn’t limit his flexibility
while he worked with Roger and Brendan. But he’d gone into the
water alone, in the fiery darkness. Into cold water that would have
sapped first consciousness, then life.

Shuddering, Jean drove up to Pitclachie House
and parked next to a second police car. Was Iris so formidable that
Sawyer had called for back-up? Jean wouldn’t have minded witnessing
the confrontation, but not if it meant getting caught in the line
of fire.

Was Jonathan an innocent bystander who had
been caught in the line of fire? Or had the mad bomber intended to
kill him? Had he intended to kill Brendan or Roger—especially
Roger? Unless Roger himself was the mad bomber as Alasdair had
theorized, Alasdair being a man who always considered his
options.

When she told Miranda she was tired of
playing it safe, Jean hadn’t necessarily meant she wanted to put
herself at risk, either physically or emotionally. And yet she had.
Now she wasn’t sure which part of D.C.I. Cameron’s concern she
found more disturbing, that he thought she might be in danger or
that he cared about her safety. He was only doing his job, she
rationalized.

Rationality had its limits. Nessie was only
one of the creatures that frolicked in the blank spaces at the edge
of the map. She’d been rooting for Nessie yesterday afternoon.
Before the explosion.

Just as Jean turned away from the house and
her own thoughts, the Water Horse van careened off the road and up
the drive, Roger at the wheel with Brendan riding shotgun. He
skidded to a stop beside her and leaned out of his window. “Hey,
Jean.”

“Hello,” she replied, suppressing the impulse
to add,
You look terrible
.

He must know he looked terrible, with bags
hanging slackly from his bloodshot eyes. Although, judging by the
trace of egg clinging to his beard, he hadn’t looked in a mirror
for quite some time. Even the bill of his cap drooped dispiritedly,
and his voice was dull. “We’re going on with the survey. Jonathan
would have wanted us to. He was a real supportive guy,
Jonathan—was.”

“In other words, the police told us not to
leave,” said Brendan. He was leaning away from Roger, against the
opposite door, giving Jean the impression the two men had been
arguing.

Roger focused on Jean. “We had the
ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers stored at the hotel,
along with some of the computers we weren’t using on the boat. We
didn’t lose as much as we might have.”

One if by land, two if by sea
, Jean
thought irreverently and irrelevantly, and asked. “Do you have any
idea what caused the boat to explode?”

“It was an accident. No other option.”

“But the threaten . . .”