The Murder Hole

“...there’s time to savor the complexities of
the story and take in the scent and sense of Scotland. The author
has a wonderful sense of humor and a gives us a story that moves
right along and a heroine who doesn’t take herself too
seriously.”—Diana Vickery,
Cozy Library

Carl creates vivid images of the Scottish
scenery and her characters ring true. There is an element of
woo-woo involved in figuring out the mystery, but it seems
appropriate to the setting. This is a thoroughly enjoyable addition
to the series.—Shirley H. Wetzel,
Over My Dead Body.com

Book Two of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair
Cameron Series

Lillian Stewart Carl

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2010 by Lillian Stewart Carl

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When Jean Fairbairn picked up the newspaper
from her desk and turned to the friends melting into her couch, she
felt as though she were picking up a gauntlet and choosing her
seconds. “Did you see today’s
Scotsman?
” she asked, and read
aloud:

Inverness—American scientist Roger Dempsey
arrives at Loch Ness today to launch his Water Horse Expedition. He
intends to prove once and for all whether Nessie is an actual
animal or merely the sort of beastie one sees on the way home from
the pub. “The carvings on the Pitclachie Stone,” he says, “are
incontrovertible evidence that the ancient Picts were familiar with
the race of creatures we now call Loch Ness monsters. They clearly
show the creature’s head emerging from the water.”

Experts at the Museum of Scotland who’ve
studied the Pitclachie Stone say that it’s an incomplete class I
Pictish carved stone, dating from almost 2000 years ago, and that
the symbols are typical of its time period.

The Stone is situated on Pitclachie Farm
above Loch Ness, the home of environmental activist Iris
Mackintosh. Miss Mackintosh declined an interview, saying only that
Dr. Dempsey is not the first amateur scientist to see what he wants
to see.

Dempsey dismisses the anonymous letter
warning him off the expedition as the work of a crackpot, and will
open the Midsummer Monster Madness Festival as scheduled. The
Northern Constabulary is making inquiries.

Jean shoved her glasses up the damp bridge of
her nose and sent a significant look toward her guests. While she
theorized that most married couples grew to resemble each other,
this thirty-something couple had probably looked alike from the
beginning, their faces sculpted by intelligence, humor, and the
refusal to suffer fools gladly. Although who was the fool
now—Dempsey, Mackintosh, or Jean herself—remained to be seen.

“And you’re away to interview the pair of
them?” Michael Campbell-Reid asked. “Nothing like a bit of
controversy and a threat or two for increasing the circulation.
Yours and the magazine’s as well, I reckon.”

“Yes, Iris agreed to an interview with no
problem, but then, she’s never met me. Roger has, and he won’t be
so eager to please. Neither might the person who sent the anonymous
letter to him.”

Michael’s wife, Rebecca, said, “Good luck,”
but either her tone added a silent
you’re going to need it
or Jean’s strolling paranoia added it in.

That Jean was taking the high road to Loch
Ness tomorrow was one reason she was sweating. Not with heat-sweat,
with flop-sweat. Luck? Never underestimate the power of luck, for
good and for bad. Or was it luck alone that had turned her last
trip out of town for an interview into a case of murder, which in
turn had introduced her to a certain Northern Constabulary
detective? Maybe it had been the variety of luck called fate.

Through the nearby window the Princes Street
gardens and the rooftops of Edinburgh shimmered in a haze of heat,
light, and water vapor. Jean felt as though she were looking into
deep water through a glass-bottomed boat. But water in this part of
the world more often hid than revealed. Especially the haunted
waters of Loch Ness, its abyssal depths dark with peat and cold
with snow-melt. Loch Ness never gave up its dead—or so the story
went.

Her business was checking out stories. Some
held water, some didn’t, and some were about much more than
H2O.

She set the newspaper on the desk, next to
the Kelly-green stuffed Nessie toy that had arrived with Dempsey’s
press kit, and opened the window to its miserly limit. A warm
breath of diesel, damp, and the sea filtered into the room. Ladies
might glow, not sweat, but right now a runnel of glow trickled down
her back beneath her T-shirt like the ectoplasmic tingle of a ghost
along her senses. Stifling the sensation, she sat down next to her
guests. “This is the first time since I moved here I’ve been hot.
Of course, back in Texas we’d be wearing sweaters because of the
air-conditioning.”

“Hot? Speak for yourself. I’m toting around a
little furnace, a.k.a baby Linda.” Rebecca patted the globe of her
abdomen, which strained against her Scottish: The Next Generation
hatching T-shirt.

With a glance at his wife’s stomach like that
of a farmer inspecting his crops, Michael uttered a string of
diphthongs and glottal stops that Jean interpreted as, “That’s as
may be, hen. Just now it’s time to be off. Some of us are working
for a living.”

“No need to be stroppy just because I’m on
leave.” Rebecca might be the American part of the Campbell-Reid
equation, but her accent was catching up fast with her husband’s.
She heaved herself toward the edge of the couch. Michael took her
hands and hauled her to her feet, where she swayed a moment,
orienting her center of gravity.

Jean stood up with considerably less physical
effort—it was her psychic center of gravity that had been wobbling
lately—and picked up the brown envelope lying on the coffee table.
“May I take this with me?”

“Oh aye,” said Michael. “The Museum has
copies aplenty.”

Jean pulled the large black and white
photograph from the envelope. She’d already inspected it over tea
and fortune cookies, but it was worth several more looks.

Judging by the meter stick propped against
the fine-grained rock, the Pitclachie Stone stood about four feet
tall and tapered smoothly upward to a jagged rim. The
photographer’s raking light, light that would have made a human
face resemble a bleached skull, here cast the carved symbols into
razor-sharp relief. A decorated crescent crossed by a right-angled
line was paired with a horse’s head that looked like the knight
from a chess seat. A line beneath the horse’s head could represent
anything from the sculptor trying out his stroke to, as Dempsey
claimed, the surface of Loch Ness.

Just above the crescent, a small hole pierced
the rock. A figure eight-shaped symbol called a double disc barely
fit between that and the broken edge, implying that a fourth
symbol, the other half of a second pair, had been carved on the
lost piece.

The stone conjured times past. It evoked
human hands long gone to dust and thoughts lost beyond memory. If
it had a voice, it would be calling Jean to its side. Even if none
of her interviews produced anything to write about in her
history-and-travel magazine, her journey would be worthwhile just
to see this stone. “What a shame it’s broken. I guess some old
farmer thought a symbol stone was no more than pagan rubbish. At
least he re-used part of it as a doorstep—face downward,
thankfully.”

“Oh aye,” said Michael. “Save the Stone was
broken a bit too recently for comfort. That edge isna weathered at
all, not like the hole, so smooth it’s dished out. Neither’s the
surface of the stone itself.”

“Oh. I see.” Jean turned the photo this way
and that, and had to agree that the serrations along the broken rim
were sharp as teeth, so long as the teeth were molars, not
incisors. That was an even bigger shame, that someone would use a
steel chisel on the stone . . . A chisel? Wouldn’t ordinary vandals
use a sledgehammer? “Do you think Ambrose Mackintosh did it?”

“He said he found the Stone there at
Pitclachie Farm when he renovated an old cottage,” Rebecca said.
“But he didn’t write about it in his
Pictish Antiquities
. He
barely wrote about his amateur excavating at all, more shame to
him. Or where he found that hoard of bronze and silver artifacts.
To his generation archaeology meant collecting antiquities, not
mapping out postholes.”

“Maybe he thought he could get twice the
money if he sold two stones instead of one,” said Jean.

“Even in the nineteen-twenties, he’d know a
Class I Pictish stone was more valuable in one piece. Besides, he
didn’t try to sell it. He didn’t even tell anyone he had it. It was
Iris who reported it to the Museum, just last year.”

“We were hoping you’d be asking her for the
details,” added Michael, “considering the Museum’s not got the
resources for a proper excavation at Pitclachie. And the site’s on
private land, not endangered by construction or the like.
Whatever’s beneath the sod is better off there, considering an
archaeologist murders his witnesses.”

While Jean appreciated that excavating a site
destroyed it, and agreed that not publishing your results was the
equivalent of burning and pillaging, she would have shied away from
that particular metaphor. More sweat trickled down her back. She
should consider trying out for an antiperspirant commercial.

Rebecca’s roll of her eyes toward Michael—no,
diplomacy was not his forte—footnoted her cheery, “Good luck.”

Well, Jean told herself in as chipper an
internal voice she could muster, since the Campbell-Reids had not
one but two murder cases in their past, the fact that Michael
didn’t shy away might mean that the raw scabs of memory could
eventually turn into scars. She slipped the photo back into its
envelope and said, “Yeah, right, that’s a great way to start the
interview. Hey, Iris, did your dad indulge in a bit of
archaeological vandalism along with Nessie-spotting and
wizard-watching?”

“Wizard-watching, eh?” Michael repeated,
undaunted by Rebecca’s wifely disapproval. “You’re covering—or
uncovering, rather—Ambrose’s old scandal, are you?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s Miranda’s idea. She
runs
Great Scot
, you know, I’m just the silent partner. I
can’t blame her for trying to get more bang for the bucks—the
pounds—she’s spending to set me up in Iris’s B&B.” Jean put the
photo on her desk, picked up a plastic Waterstone’s bag, and pulled
a paperback book from inside. Its cover was decorated with black
and white drawings of symbols as enigmatic as those on any Pictish
stone. In lurid red letters across the top was written,
Loch
Ness: the Realm of the Beast. By Ambrose Mackintosh
. “No, this
isn’t about Nessie. It’s a reprint of Ambrose’s biography of his
guru, Aleister Crowley.”

“That nut case back in the early twentieth
century who claimed to be a magician?” Rebecca took the book and
flipped through it.

“He was an egotistical maniac,” said Michael.
“So mad for attention he named himself the Beast from Revelations,
created his own religion, and made a meal of the scandals. Went
through women like loo paper, drove more than one to suicide.”