The Murder Hole (11 page)

“Surely the flatworms were introduced by
accident.”

Muttering something about common sense
preventing accidents, Iris opened the garden gate, ushered Jean
through, then shut it with a resounding clang.

“Maybe the explosion last night wasn’t an
accident,” suggested Jean. “I hear Roger Dempsey received some
threatening letters. Do you have any idea who could have sent
them?”

“Someone who wanted to stop his expedition, I
expect. Considering Roger’s reputation, it could have been almost
anyone. Although blowing up his boat does seem a bit—drastic.” Iris
walked on toward the house, trailing her hand through the leaves
and flowers crowding the path, leaving Jean to play catch-up yet
again.

“I hear one of his assistants is missing,”
she said to Iris’s back.

“A shame, that. But then, Roger has never
hesitated to put others at risk in order to serve his own
ambitions. I have nothing against educated amateurs, mind—I’m one
myself—but the ones who don’t realize their limitations can do far
more harm than good.”

“He told me he’s going to search here at
Pitclachie. I guess he means some sort of geophysical survey, not
actually digging, not unless he finds something.”

Iris made a sound that Jean interpreted as a
thin, taut laugh, the sort of laugh that teetered uneasily between
humor and a harsher emotion, although she couldn’t tell what that
emotion was. Annoyance? Embarrassment? Perhaps even grief? Jean was
beginning to suspect that something more than academic disagreement
had soured Iris’s feelings toward Roger.

Iris stepped up onto the terrace and spun
around. Her pale gray eyes didn’t look at Jean so much as through
her. “Please go back out to the Stone any time you wish. Just make
sure the gate shuts properly, so that the sheep don’t get into the
garden.”

“Thank you.” It was time to slip gracefully
out of the interview before she was forcibly ejected. “Can we talk
again soon, perhaps this evening? I’d like to hear about your work
with Scotland the Green. And your father’s archaeological work as
well—I’m hoping to do something about the spirit of scientific
inquiry running in the family.”

Iris nodded at that. “Well then, yes, there
are important matters that should be brought to the attention of
the public, such as ATV damage in mountain passes. And some of my
earlier work might be of interest—deforestation in Brazil, water
conservation in India and the like. ”

“Great!” Jean heard another set of car doors
slam. That must have been the Ducketts taking off for the day,
unless Kirsty was running some errands.

No, here came Kirsty around the corner of the
house, her arms waving. “Aunt Iris!”

Without another word to Jean, Iris strode
away across the flagstones, bent her head close to Kirsty’s urgent
murmur, and then vanished around the corner. Kirsty skipped briskly
after her.

Wondering what that was all about, Jean
pulled out her notebook and jotted down first what Iris had said,
and second what she had implied.

No one would admit faster than Jean that
there was a fine line, a very tense line, like quivering piano
wire, between privacy and secrecy. She reminded herself that she
was not an investigative reporter but a mild-mannered journalist
after mild-mannered stories for a history and travel magazine.
Still, she could try to make friends with Iris, hoping she’d talk
about Ambrose and the Stone and, if she was lucky, Eileen’s
disappearance.

Which was what Roger was doing with Jean. If
there was a line between secrecy and privacy, there was also one
between being friendly and exploiting that friendship. Iris’s chill
cordiality seemed like a refreshing breeze after Roger’s—well, he
hadn’t quite sunk to the level of smarm. Jean would rather go
without a story than smarm Iris or anyone else.

So far, though, she hadn’t learned much about
Ambrose she didn’t already know. He’d been a teenager when he fell
under Crowley’s spell, metaphorically speaking, just before Crowley
left Scotland around 1900. Soon afterwards, Ambrose went up to
Oxford and read history and archaeology, then shared his time
between family in Britain and Crowley on the Continent. In 1914,
unlike the blatantly anti-war Crowley, he went off to do his duty
on the western front.

After the war, Ambrose helped excavate
Urquhart Castle, wrote florid prose about area antiquities and
legends for various newspapers and magazines, married, and
remodeled the family estate. While rarely or never seeing Crowley,
Ambrose remained an admirer. By the 1930s, the old wizard had
devolved from evildoer to laughing-stock. Ambrose probably wrote
the justificative biography for just that reason—if your guru’s a
joke, then so are you. Jean understood. One of the reasons she’d
followed through with the lawsuit against the university was to
protect her students’ reputations as well as her own.

She tucked away her notebook, thinking that
she could sure empathize—boy, could she empathize—with a policeman
growing frustrated at not getting the whole story. Except that a
policeman was usually justified in demanding the whole story and
nothing but, and Jean wasn’t.

An all-too-familiar male voice echoed harshly
in the courtyard, a loud sarcastic voice that demanded rather than
asked. Jean’s hackles bristled.
Shit!
The minute she saw
D.C. Gunn on television, she should have known that the Northern
Constabulary’s token troll, Detective Sergeant Andy Sawyer, was
skulking around the area, too.

It might have been amusing to hang around and
see how long it took Iris to turn him into stone, except Jean had
never found anything amusing in D.S. Sawyer. In a thoroughly
undignified scuttle, she whisked around the far side of the cottage
and gained her car without being accosted. But not without telling
herself that if Sawyer and Gunn were on the scene, D.C.I. Cameron
couldn’t be far behind.

Failing at her attempt to ignore the knot in
her stomach—when it came to Alasdair Cameron, denial was growing
increasingly futile—Jean stopped her car at the end of the drive.
She’d have to make a right turn across both lanes, but traffic was
moving slowly. Each car in turn came almost to a stop as
rubberneckers looked at the blue-and-white police tape closing off
the road down to the pier.

There. She made it safely into the left-hand
lane. Not that she had anywhere to go, other than away from Sawyer.
She’d have to run Roger Dempsey down eventually, to get his view of
what had happened and to ask him again about Iris, but. . . She’d
check out the new Urquhart Castle visitor center. Hysterical
Scotland aside, it deserved a few lines in any article about the
area.

She drove through the village at walking
speed, easing her car past the bumpers of the media vans parked
haphazardly along the road. Several people stood outside the police
station, a small office annexed to the local constable’s home. More
people thronged the souvenir shops, restaurants, and Tourist
Information Center, where cars circled the jam-packed parking lot
like sharks scenting gasoline in the water.

Once past the road-clot, it took Jean only
minutes to drive to the point of land crowned by the ruined castle.
Its new parking lot was several times larger than the one she
remembered, but was almost full. Iris had been right about the
increased traffic, although surely some of these people had been
lured in by the Festival . . . A camper with a German license plate
was just pulling out. She nipped into the space.

The moment she emerged from the car, her bag
erupted in Mozart’s
Rondo
. Quelling her start, she dug out
her cell phone and flipped it open. The screen read,
Miranda
Capaldi
. Jean smiled. “You’re slow off the mark. The boat blew
up last night.”

“I didn’t hear ‘til now, did I?” returned
Miranda. Her smooth voice was muffled by the wind blowing past
Jean’s ear.

She assumed the cell phone crouch, head
tucked, her free hand covering her free ear. “Before you ask, I
haven’t the foggiest notion what happened. I’m just an innocent
bystander.”

“Oh aye, that you are,” said Miranda
consolingly. “How are the articles getting on? Any joy from either
Roger or Iris?”

“Only their party lines. Iris says Roger uses
people to further his ambitions.”

“That’s not shocking news. Either her saying
it or it being true.”

“Yeah, but still, she’s letting him do a
ground survey of Pitclachie Farm. I hear he’s going on with it,
boat or no boat. And did you hear that one of his assistants is
missing?”

“Aye, that was on the telly as well. Your old
chum D.C. Gunn . . . No, don’t say it, he’s naught but a business
acquaintance.”

On the one hand, Jean thought, it was helpful
that Miranda knew her so well. She didn’t have to dissimulate. On
the other hand, it was annoying that Miranda knew her so well,
because then she couldn’t even rationalize, let alone deny. “Iris
is impossible to read. She’s like one of those books in her
library, hide-bound.”

“Ah, but you’re a grand researcher.”

“Hah,” Jean returned. “She did tell me that
Ambrose wrote about the Pitclachie Stone in his personal papers,
but when I told her that
Great Scot
might consider a
publishing deal, she turned me down. In fact, when I asked if I
could just see them, she said that the papers are, well, personal.
No dice.”

“Ooh,” said Miranda. “You’d almost think she
was hiding something.”

“Just because she doesn’t want to fling open
her family cupboard for public inspection doesn’t mean there’s a
skeleton in it—literal or not. But you do get the impression she’s
trying to protect Ambrose’s reputation, don’t you? Were they close?
She said something about returning to Pitclachie at his death that
made me wonder.”

“She spent a good many years traveling and
working in other parts of the world, aye, but I suppose they got on
well enough. Mind the turning.”

“What?”

“I’m speaking to Duncan, sorry. We’re just
arriving at the clubhouse, have a round scheduled for eleven.”

“Have a good game, then. When I know anything
else, I’ll let you know.”

“I’m sure you will. Cheerio.” Miranda’s words
were punctuated by background voices, probably all the caddies
flocking forward. Duncan and Miranda had long ago noticed that good
tips meant good service.

Jean shut her phone, stowed it away, and
blinked. For a moment she’d seen the manicured fairways of—where
were they? Muirfield? Gleneagles? She, however, was at Loch Ness,
if not up to her neck at least up to her waist in another set of
mysterious circumstances, and not exactly struggling to break
free.

Below a low wall edged with shrubs, the
ground fell away, rose again slightly to support the shattered
walls of the castle, and then plunged to the murky gray-blue water
of the loch. Which was starting to get choppy, making even a
passing barge rock and roll. The wind was freshening, its cool
gusts tugging at Jean’s hair and jacket, and those big white fluffy
clouds were now being jostled from the sky by darker, more serious
ones.

She made her way through the traffic to the
mock turret that was the entrance to the Visitor Center. Paying a
not-inconsiderable fee admitted her to its interior, where
staircases led down to an educational display and movie, a gift
shop, and a restaurant teeming with humankind—Scandinavians,
Africans, Moslem women in their head scarves. While Jean wasn’t
going to suggest joining hands and singing “Kumbaya,” she had to
smile at how the myth mongers had succeeded in giving the ruined
building universal appeal. An appeal that might have gone unnoticed
if the castle hadn’t been situated on a major road, next to a loch
with a vivid myth of its own.

The Visitor Center was as much following the
crowds as enticing them. The last time Jean had visited, she’d
waited in line to use a spartan Portakabin toilet with a group of
Japanese women, each of them ready with her antiseptic wipe. Still,
Iris had a point about people destroying what they came to see.
Historic Scotland had dug out the side of the hill to build this
structure, demolishing God only knew what in the process. Some of
the authenticity, for one thing. At least they hadn’t Disneyed the
place up with audio-animatronic clansmen and a Nessie running back
and forth on an underwater track.

Mulling over issues of Theme Park Scotland,
Jean exited past a terrace equipped with tables and chairs. The
construction scars were covered with lush greenery, cut only by a
path that slanted steeply downward. She took small steps, hoping
she wouldn’t be swept away by a sudden avalanche of humanity, and
punched a number on her phone.

“Hello,” said Rebecca’s voice.

“Hi. It’s Jean, calling from the bonny banks
of Loch Ness. Literally. I’m walking down to the castle right
now.”

“I told you she’d be calling,” Rebecca said
faintly, and then, into the phone, “We saw the news this morning.
What happened? Was the explosion an accident or sabotage?”

“I don’t know any more than you do right
now.”

A couple of clunks signaled Michael switching
on the extension. “Well then, Jean. You’ve put the boot in again.
That is, a reporter’s after being where the action is and all.”

“Nice try, Michael.” Jean went on, “Iris
showed me the Pitclachie Stone this morning, and said something
about Ambrose writing about it in his personal papers. I don’t
suppose the Museum has any of those?”

“No, but telling me he had private writings
is like telling me it’s Saturday. No surprise.”

“How do we know, then, that Ambrose really
did find the Stone in the door of the cottage? There are some
pictographs carved in the terrace of the house . . .”