The Murder Hole (31 page)

“Good morning,” said Jean.

Martin took a deep drag of his cigarette, as
though in defiance of the fresh air, then inspected either his feet
or the carved flagstone they stood on.

“Noreen says y’all are staying on for a few
days, during the police investigation.” Not that Noreen had said
that to her, but Jean wasn’t going to let an inconvenient
explanation get in her way.

“You know that we’ve been told to stay on.
You’re working with the police, aren’t you now?” The teacher’s pet
was implicit in his half-growling, half jeering tone.

“You have a problem with that?” Jean asked,
but the sharp angle of his shoulder turned toward her and he didn’t
reply.

Could he act any more like he had a guilty
conscience? Which probably meant he’d never so much as gotten a
traffic ticket. Jean glanced at the constable standing watch beside
the tower, but his face remained impassive beneath the bill of his
cap, perhaps contemplating the righteousness of toast and tea. Life
is brief. Comfort food is eternal.

She walked into the Lodge and up the stairs.
The door of the lumber room was standing open—nothing like an
architectural feature with contrarian tendencies . . . Her phone
rang. She fished it out of her bag and flipped it open too quickly
to look at the I.D.
Alasdair?
“Hello?”

“Jean,” said Hugh’s voice. “I’m just now
hearing about your night, the stramash with the car, Tracy Dempsey
and all. Are you all right?”

“Sure. Scared, frustrated, curious—in both
senses of the word. The usual. How are you?”

“Flattered and fed and right well lubricated.
Starr PLC is making sure the lads and I are in good form for the
festivities.”

“How was the ceilidh last night?”

“Ah, the room was hot and heaving. Thought my
lord Kettering would have to go unbuttoning his jacket. But he kept
popping out to massage his mobile phone.”

Hmm, Jean thought. If Kettering was at the
ceilidh, he wasn’t pushing Tracy out of the tower. Him killing one
of his guests of honor was hardly likely, although Jean wasn’t sure
what was.

“Then there was a French couple,” said Hugh,
“who stripped off so far I was thinking we’d be hosing them down.
They’re stopping at your B&B, are they? They’re well and truly
fans of the water of life, it seems. Not quite under the table but
crawling fast in that direction.”

“They were drunk? Well, they’d already had a
fancy dinner. Most of those multi-course dinners come with so much
wine you need to be rolled out on the serving cart. Or I do, at
least.” Jean eyed the boxes in the darkened room. Here, too, the
odor of mildew was moderated by the sweetish smell of the curtains,
as though a wet dog had bathed in perfume.

“I’m away to the Festival,” Hugh said. “We’re
playing a set at half past eleven. There’s another ceilidh tonight,
after the Festival closes down, if you’ve got a moment amidst your
sleuthing.”

“Isn’t there something tomorrow night,
too?”

“Oh aye, Starr’s hired a boat for a farewell
cruise, just for the punters, I’m thinking. We’re the
entertainment—Hugh and the lads, unplugged, unbowed, and un-sober,
likely enough. You’ll be there, won’t you now?”

The thought of a boating trip had lost just a
bit of its appeal. Nevertheless . . . “Oh yeah, that’s on my
marching orders.”

“I’ll expect to see you dancing, then,” said
Hugh. “Cheers.”

“Bye,” she returned, without commenting on
her lack of resemblance to Ginger Rogers. Jean brushed her teeth,
applied lip-gloss, and checked to make sure her laptop was locked
in the wardrobe. She couldn’t remember putting it there, but there
it was. She’d been on automatic pilot last night.

Next to her canvas carryall sat the plastic
bag with the stuffed toys for her younger relatives and for baby
Linda . . . Oh my goodness. The wee Scottish-American bairnie had
probably made her appearance by now. Jean hoped everyone was all
right. Things could go wrong, as the Ducketts kept pointing out
like corn-fed versions of a Greek chorus.

The Ducketts, buying bags of gifts for their
grandchildren. What had Patti said, something about them losing
their father? That phrasing implied death, not divorce. In Florida,
where Roger’s submersible had gone down.

Come on now
. She was just as likely to
have misunderstood Patti as Kirsty. Lots of people lived in
Florida. Lots of them had accidents. Jean knew she had a tendency
to build supposition upon conjecture into a structure so flimsy it
made a house of cards look sturdy as Edinburgh Castle—just because
everyone else seemed to have ulterior motives didn’t mean the
Ducketts did, too . . .

The warble of the phone interrupted whatever
clever deduction she’d been formulating.
Alasdair?
she
thought again, and told herself to stop acting like a teenager with
a crush. This time she checked the I.D. “What ho, Miranda.”

“Up to your neck again,” her partner’s voice
said. “Good job you’ve survived. So far.”

“It’s not my fault,” Jean insisted, then
launched into the tale of the listening device in the Nessie and
story of the sinking submersible, which proved that some of the
epic, if not her fault, could at least be considered a flaming
paper bag left on her doorstep.

Miranda responded with murmurs augmented by
the discreet peal of fine china. She must be having her breakfast.
“Well, well, well,” she said at last, “no surprise, then, that I’m
hearing Dempsey’s been asked to resign from the Omnium board of
directors. They’re putting it about that he’s after pursuing his
own researches and will still have an advisory role and whatnot.
But . . .”

“They haven’t exactly scheduled a farewell
banquet and the presentation of an engraved gold watch. Roger
hasn’t breathed a word of this. He’s implying Omnium is his own
personal fiefdom.”

“Of course he is. He’s under something of a
cloud. No one’s saying just how thick that cloud is, but if it’s to
do with that lawsuit, that’s enough for a wee rain shower, wouldn’t
you say?”

“I would,” said Jean. The door of the lumber
room was closed again. She opened it halfway, as an experiment, and
went on down the stairs.

“Could be the lawsuit’s been settled on the
sly.”

“Or that they’re piling on as much red tape
as possible, to hide it. Neither Omnium nor Roger want any
publicity over it, that’s for sure. Are they still paying him
anything, a pension or whatever?”

“Haven’t a clue. As for Tracy, for what it’s
worth now, mind, my friends at the
Chicago Sun-Times
are
telling me she built herself one of those faux-European mansions
and filled it with antiques and collectibles.”

Collectibles, Jean thought. A synonym for
junque
. “What sort of antiques?”

“Objets d’art and French furniture.”

“Ah, that spindly gilded stuff.”

“Not all French furniture is Marie Antoinette
tushery. Though Tracy’s taste might have run to such. All show and
no comfort.”

“Like high-heeled shoes?” asked Jean.

“Shoes are another topic entirely,” Miranda
replied demurely.

Not really. Tracy had worn high-heeled shoes
to make herself taller. To rise in the estimation of the people she
dealt with. She’d died wearing athletic shoes. It didn’t seem quite
fair. “Speaking of French antiques, do you know a shop called La
Bagatelle d’Or in Paris?”

“I’ve heard tell of it, aye. Rare books and
antiquities, genuine and faux. No furniture, but small things,
easily carried through customs, shall we say.”

“So they have a reputation for not being
entirely conscientious about the niceties of the antiquities trade
such as import-export licenses, signed expertises, attested
provenances?”

“If the rumors have any truth to them. It’s
possible to have smoke but no fire, as you know yourself. Why are
you asking?”

“The owners of La Bagatelle, the Bouchards,
are staying here at the B&B.” Jean looked around the living
room of the Lodge and decided nothing had been either moved or
removed. Even the gallery of old Nessie photos hung blandly in
their frames. “I’m thinking antiquities like the artifacts Ambrose
uncovered. Iris has sold off a few, and I bet she’s sold off some
rare books, too . . .”

“Oh aye, she’s done that, I’ve got a chum
who’s a dealer.”

“And Roger’s looking for Nessie on land.”

Miranda laughed. “Is he now?”

“I’m wondering if he’s after artifacts
himself, with the Bouchards standing by as receivers, and the whole
monster thing is just a smokescreen. If he has money problems, it
could be.”

“He and Tracy looked to be heading toward a
divorce, although how recently the cracks appeared is hard to say.
So is whether Tracy had a pre-nup.”

“Pre-nuptial agreements weren’t in style
twenty-five years ago. She probably thought that investing in Roger
was enough . . .” Jean opened the door of the Lodge. Alasdair was
standing on the threshold, his hand raised to knock.

Jean jerked back into the house with an
annoyingly loud gasp. Alasdair recoiled.

“Jean?” Miranda asked.

“I’m okay, no problem,” Jean lied. “I need to
go. Talk to you later.”

“Take care then. Ta ta.”

Jean spent longer than was necessary
switching off the phone and tucking it away. When she finally
stepped outside, locked her door, and turned to face Alasdair, he
was, of course, waiting as patiently as a cat outside a mouse
hole.

Even though he was wearing his uniform of
dark suit and white shirt, enhanced by a tie patterned in a flowing
gray and red design, he looked as though he’d been dragged through
a barbed wire fence backwards—to use the vernacular of her state of
origin. His skin was pallid, his cheekbones sharp, his eyes hard,
the curve of his lips flattened into a rigid line. How much longer
was he going to endure the pressures of his job, she wondered,
before he collapsed in on himself like a black hole?

Without demonstrating any Einsteinian physics
just yet, Alasdair said, “Sorry to startle you,” and held out
something small and flat.

It was her notebook, the pages curled with
damp and a muddy footprint embossed on the cover. She took it and
flipped through it. The moisture had made the ruled lines bleed
blue, and the pencil tracks of her notes were almost illegible. She
popped it into her bag. “Where did you find it?”

“One of the lads turned it up in the nettles
beside the road. I’d be thinking it fell from your bag when the car
hit you, but you’d already found it missing.”

Found it missing
. She liked that. “So
did someone take advantage of the, er . . .” No point in wasting
her breath with the word “accident,” not any more. “Of the car, or
were they working with the driver of the car?”

“Good question. We’ve got loads of good
questions, haven’t we?”

“Is that an editorial we, Alasdair?”

He looked at her, unblinking, unmoving,
impenetrable.

“You could have sent Gunn or someone with the
notebook. You didn’t have to bring it yourself.”

“I told you we’d have us a blether the morn.”
He took several deliberate paces to where Martin had been standing
earlier but was now, thankfully, not. Beyond the edge of the
terrace the roses and the broom rustled to the breeze. Against the
breeze.

Jean’s skin prickled to the touch of
invisible cobwebs and her shoulders puckered beneath the chill
weight of another reality as she walked slowly to Alasdair’s side.
He was watching the invisible shape move through the leaves. Except
now it wasn’t invisible. The branches and the flowers bowed and
parted as the transparent shape of a woman ran past them. Ran
through them, the red and yellow petals becoming part of the
flowered skirt she wore beneath an oversized cardigan, blending
with the silk scarf that trailed from her hand. Her face was little
more than eyes and mouth agape with alarm, turned toward the Lodge.
A small hand, a diamond flashing from the fourth finger, swept up
and covered the mouth, and a cry of dismay mingled with the wind.
Then she was gone. The plants waved innocently, no longer reacting
to an uncanny memory-movement but to an ordinary breeze scented
with the raw, chill odor of the loch.

Jean closed her eyes and opened them again.
Beside her Alasdair said matter-of-factly, “The ghost was walking
in the shrubbery all the while we were working last night, but I
never saw her, not the once. ”

“I have the awful feeling that the two of us
together make some sort of critical mass,” Jean replied. “It did
last month, when we saw the ghost walking down the hall.”

Alasdair didn’t follow up on that one. “This
ghost’s Eileen, is it?”

“Oh yeah. There’s both a painting and a
picture of her in the Lodge. I wonder what she . . . why she . . .
I mean, her ghost is in two places at once. Although I guess if
Anne Boleyn’s ghost turns up all over England, why not Eileen twice
here?”

“Loads of questions,” he repeated, this time
without the evocative
we
, “and bloody few answers. Do you
fancy a tour of the tower room?”

“Yes, please,” she said, and walked across
the terrace an arm’s length from his side.

Was that offer an olive branch? Or was he
rewinding the tape, pretending those too-revealing moments the
night before had never happened? Yesterday his manner had come
perilously close to flirtatious, but now—thanks to her own sharp
tongue—he was locked in his emotional tower, buttressed by duty.
She was overdue for a meal of crow, yes, but now wasn’t the time to
serve it up. Not if she didn’t want him to retire beneath a layer
of frost like an old-fashioned freezer.

The constable on guard might have wondered
why Alasdair and Jean had been staring into the underbrush. Now he
acknowledged his superior’s nod by dutifully stepping aside and
lifting the tape. Alasdair drew a key from his pocket and opened
the wooden slab of a door.