The Murder Hole (28 page)

He didn’t mean that as a jab, Jean told
herself, just fact.

“We got along great. He was working on a
submersible, even called me up a few months after the conference to
ask about the mechanics of ballast tanks and watertight seals and
stuff. I didn’t mention it to you, you never understood that sort
of thing.”

She felt her jaw tightening. “What about
tanks and seals?”

“The problem with using water for ballast in
your submersible is that you need pumps and valves to blow it out
when you want to get back to the surface. That means more parts
that can malfunction. And watertight seals, well, that’s
obvious.”

Yes, it was. Jean noted those interesting
factoids, then drew loop-the-loops not unlike the interlaced tail
of Ambrose’s signature. From the phone emanated faint voices,
rising and falling, similar to the intimation of ghostly voices
she’d heard earlier. She imagined Brad sitting in his favorite old
recliner, TV remote in one hand, phone in the other. “The police
want to know whether Roger had a submersible on board his boat when
it blew up,” she prodded. “He’s implying that all he had were
remote-operating vehicles, but someone else saw a sub. Was he
building one, then?”

“Oh yeah. He got it to the beta-testing phase
before it went down off the Gulf Coast somewhere, Tallahassee,
maybe.”

Jean didn’t think Tallahassee was on the
coast, but that hardly mattered. “Roger’s sub went down? You mean,
when it wasn’t supposed to go down? When did this happen?”

“I heard about it last year, maybe year
before last now.”

“And it sank because the pumps and valves
didn’t work?”

“Oh no, no, it was the hatch that didn’t
work. Or the latches and seals on the hatch, probably. It leaked,
the sub filled up with water, and it sank like a rock. The pilot
drowned, but fortunately he was the only one on board.”

A metal coffin sinking into the water . . .
Jean shuddered. So Jonathan was the second man who’d been killed on
Roger’s watch?
Oh boy
. Her pen raced across the paper. “Not
so fortunate for the pilot’s family. Did they manage to retrieve
the sub and the man’s body?”

“Eventually, yeah. Roger gave up on the
submersible and went into ROV research. I think he’s working on an
AOV, too, a vehicle that doesn’t need to be tied to the boat but
can pilot itself. That would work better in the loch there, when
the boat’s going back and forth and tangling up its cables. An ROV
should work just fine for that treasure galleon.”

Treasure galleon . . . “You mean the Armada
galleon that sank in Tobermory Bay off Mull? Funny, I saw something
about that today. Yesterday. I thought it was right up Roger’s
alley.”

“Yeah, he was really excited, said there was
Spanish gold on board that ship.”

“There’s a long shot for you, although I
suppose there’s a better chance of him finding gold in Tobermory
than Nessie here. He’s looking for her on land now.”

“If I was him I’d climb out on land, too,
cover my butt. Sounds like he might be in line for a second
lawsuit, depending on how your explosion thing plays out, I
guess.”

“Lawsuit?” Jean enunciated, pen poised. “What
lawsuit?”

“The guy’s family, like you said. His wife
was threatening to file a suit against Omnium. Wrongful death or
negligence or something. Saying that the sub was faulty so Omnium
should pay to support the kids. I bet Omnium is saying the guy just
didn’t close the hatch properly.”

“But no lawsuit’s actually been filed?”

“I don’t think so, but I got to working on
that project for NASA and lost track. Omnium probably settled out
of court. Way out of court, to keep the story from leaking.”

Leaking like the sub . . . Jean caught a
movement from the corner of her eye. Oh. Mandrake was pussyfooting
along the kitchen counter, sniffing at the plastic bag of bread.
“Can you find out the name of the man who was killed?” she asked
Brad.

“Why do you want to know?”

“What don’t I want to know?”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“What?”

“I read about that murder case you were
involved in on the Internet, in the
Scotsman
headlines. Way
to go, Jean. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

Mandrake was alive and well, Jean thought
huffily. And so was she. Barely . . . Beyond the faint hum of the
airwaves she heard an announcer’s voice say, “A swing and a miss!”
Ah yes. A summer Saturday. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie. “Brad,
can you just find me the name of the man, please?”

“Okay, okay, I’ll ask around on Monday. I
don’t know why you think it has anything to do with anything,
though.”

Alasdair wouldn’t have wasted his breath with
that comment. As far as he was concerned, everything had something
to do with . . . A suspicion swelled in the back of Jean’s mind
like a thunderhead on the horizon. “You told Roger your name. He
knew you were my husband.”

“What?” Brad asked, dumped off the back of
the truck as her thought accelerated. “Oh. Of course I told him my
name. Geez. And after you told him off, I bet he remembered yours.
Yours as it was then. Inglis isn’t all that common. Neither is
Fairbairn, but you were born with that.”

She confined herself to, “Yes,” and went
quickly on, “So can you tell the difference between a submersible
and an ROV from the wreckage?”

“Sure. If you’ve got people inside, you’ve
got to have a tough environment. In fact, I doubt if you could blow
one up without actually putting explosives inside it. You could
damage the heck out of it, sure. Look for a pressure hull lined
with glass foam or the equivalent. Tell the cops to e-mail me some
photos.” The announcer in the background exclaimed over the
swelling cries of a crowd, “. . . and it’s a home run!”

“I’ll tell them,” Jean said loudly. “If you
hear anything else about Roger or the lawsuit or the submersible
accident, let me know, okay?”

“Sure,” he repeated. “Wow, can you believe
those Red Sox?”

A woman’s voice answered Brad’s question
before Jean could. Oh. He had someone there with him. Only Brad
would call his ex-wife with his—girlfriend?—in the room. Not that
him having a new female friend was surprising. He was subsiding
into middle age, less gracefully than helplessly, but still, to
some women he’d be a good catch, a safe port. A home run.

“Thanks,” Jean said, ended the call, and
carried the notepaper over to her collection of reference material.
She could hardly walk, her knee was so stiff and her feet were so
cold. Her hands and arms were cold. Her nose was cold. She stood
where Alasdair had stood, telling herself that it was time to go to
bed . . . The tiny screen on the cell phone indicated that she had
a message.

Quickly she pressed the keys. Ah, Michael had
called while she was in the shower. His voice, its accent seeming
all the livelier after Brad’s, filled her ear. “Jean, Rebecca and I
are just off to the Royal Infirmary. Linda’s thinking she’ll not
wait for the Fourth of July but come a bit early. Not to worry, the
doctor says she’s well within tolerances. What’s worrisome is
Dougie’s Nessie toy. He and Riccio tore it open, and there’s a
bittie electronic gadget inside. Rebecca and me, we’re guessing
it’s a listening device. A bug.”

Jean’s chin and eyebrows took off in separate
directions. A bug? In the Nessie toy that Roger included with his
press kit? Alasdair had said that none of the other reporters
mentioned a toy.

Michael’s voice concluded, “I’ll hand it in
to the police soon as I get the chance. Take care.”

“Yeah, y’all too,” Jean said into the ether.
She remembered vigils by the phone, waiting for word from her
brothers about their wives, comforted by knowing they were in a
hospital, with the best of care. Eileen, on the other hand, had
probably labored alone here at Pitclachie.

But that was old news. This was a fresh
headline, big type, black block letters. Roger had planted a bug on
her! The bloody nerve of the man! That was just the sort of thing a
two-fisted gadgeteer like him would think was clever.

Jean slammed her phone shut and pressed her
hand to her head, trying to squeeze out the sequence of events. The
press kit had arrived at her office late Tuesday. She’d taken it
home. Hopefully, Roger had been amused listening to the TV news and
her music and her inane one-sided conversations with Dougie. Until
Michael and Rebecca came to visit on Thursday, when she sang the
same old song about Brad, Dempsey, and the conference, that she’d
sung to Miranda, too. They’d taken the toy away. Soon after that
Roger had called to set up the interview. To keep his enemy
close.

Her thunderhead of suspicion crackled with
lightning. Both Dempseys kept asking about Brad because they
thought he’d told her about the submersible. They thought she’d go
public with it, the way she’d gone public with the scandal at the
university, the way she’d waded into police work last month. But
the sub accident hadn’t touched her personally—until now.

Oh God
. She and Alasdair had been
speculating whether Roger had a motive to kill Jonathan. He’d been
motivated to plant a bug on Jean, and maybe to search the Lodge and
take her notebook—what if he’d been motivated to try and kill
her?
For a long moment Jean cowered against the back of the
couch, seeing bearded, baseball-capped assailants coming out of the
woodwork.

But no. She’d been walking with Roger. They’d
both been side-swiped by that car. Unless . . . Jean remembered
Tracy’s anger both at the hotel and at the Festival, and Roger
almost taking a swing at her, right there in front of God and
Alasdair and the Ducketts. Had Tracy decided that Roger, like Jean,
was more of a liability than an asset?

Tracy had been having a drink with Kettering.
She hadn’t been driving a car without its headlights down the fog
and dusk-darkened highway. Or had she? What if Kettering was in on
the whole thing, thinking there was no such thing as bad publicity.
What if . . . Well, there was an appalling number of what-ifs.

Jean gazed longingly at her phone. She needed
to info-dump on Alasdair. She needed to hear his calm voice, to
touch the still surface above his unplumbed depths and watch the
ripples of his thought spreading outward. But no. What he needed
was his sleep. Assuming he was sleeping, when his mind was as much
a perpetual motion machine as hers.

Jean hadn’t realized her face was wrinkled up
like last year’s Halloween pumpkin until the thought of
Alasdair—and his nearby constable—relaxed it into a rueful smile.
She pried her icy fingers off the phone and switched it off. Its
little trill of farewell made Mandrake, still on the counter, look
around sharply. First thing tomorrow morning she’d talk to
Alasdair. Tonight she’d recharge the phone and herself as well. It
was time to go to bed. Really, really, time to go to bed.

She piled everything back into her carryall
except for the old book. She couldn’t just put it outside . . .
Aha, the plastic bread bag. She dumped the rest of the bread into
the breadbox, tucked the book into the bag, and closed it with a
twist-tie. Mandrake observed the proceedings, nose twitching, then
leaped onto the floor. After a valedictory twine around Jean’s legs
he trotted toward the velvet curtain and slipped past its edge.

The curtain was hanging perfectly still, the
folds of its fabric like sculpture. Jean tiptoed toward it, then
pounced, throwing it aside. Mandrake sat in front of the door, tail
swishing, waiting for his servant to let down the drawbridge.
Okay, then
. Jean unlocked the door and opened it. The damp
chill of the night gathered around her like a shroud.

Shivering, she laid the book on a bit of
decorative stonework just outside the door, where it would be
protected from all water short of an earthquake dropping the entire
hillside into the loch. The air was thick with mizzle, drizzle not
heavy enough to fall to the ground. The main house and the tower
loomed against the fragile glow of the clouds, a huge angular ink
blot, the occasional lighted window seeming no more substantial
than a streak of paint. Someone moved in the window to the right of
the front door—ah, the private office. That lissome silhouette had
to be Kirsty’s. She was up late.

Jean inhaled the fresh air scented lightly
with smoke, clearing the smell of the book from her lungs. The
constable had disappeared. If she’d been him, she’d have nipped
into the kitchen for a cuppa, too.

The distant sound of music and singing hung
eerily on the air. If Alasdair was staying at the hotel, he was
sleeping with a pillow over his head. Hugh in full spate wouldn’t
have awakened Brad, but Alasdair wasn’t Brad. And she wasn’t the
Jean she’d been for Brad, either. Encouraged by that thought, she
turned back into the Lodge.

A scream sliced suddenly, urgently, through
the night, and was cut off by a thudding splat. The ghosts? No. The
noise came from behind her.

All five of her normal senses flaring with
adrenalin, Jean spun around, looking up, looking down. Was that a
shadow flicking along the row of murder holes as someone ran
through the tower room? That was most certainly a human form
crumpled on the terrace, one that hadn’t been there a moment
before. A shape as pale and indistinct as though seen through
water.
Drowned Ophelia
. . .

She forced herself to walk toward it, her
hands curled into fists at her sides, her socks and slippers
swishing through the icy water gathered on the stone.

There, in a nimbus of reflected light, lay a
body, limbs splayed loosely as a rag doll’s. An ashen face was
turned upward, eyes staring past the tower, past the clouds, seeing
nothing. A dark crimson stream oozed across the rain-slick terrace
and pooled in the carved symbol of the gripping beast, Roger’s
water horse.