The Murder Hole (12 page)

“Oh,” said Rebecca. “You think he carved the
Stone himself.”

“Not necessarily. I’m just exploring
possibilities.”

Michael answered, “We’ve got possibilities
aplenty when it comes to Ambrose, but that one’s right out. It was
a mason working on the cottage who turned up the Stone, and who
went on record about it. Ambrose could have paid the man to say he
found it, but why?”

“Good question. Ambrose didn’t try to profit
from the Stone—he dumped it into a grove of trees behind the house.
You’d expect an antiquarian to set it up. But it was Iris who did
that.”

“It was Iris who reported it to us. Mopping
up after her father, I’m thinking.”

“Sounds like it.” Jean stopped at the bottom
of the slope, next to the medieval siege engine that had recently
been constructed for a television show. With its swinging beam
removed, it looked like a wooden rocket on a timber launch pad. An
American was saying to his wife, “This was used to defend the
castle. Pretty well preserved for being so old, isn’t it?”

And so was myth generated, Jean thought. “Was
the Stone broken when the mason found it?”

“Good question,” Michael replied. “I’ll look
out the man’s statement on the Monday, shall I?”

“Please. Not that Ambrose has anything to do
with Roger’s boat blowing up.”

“Does Iris?” Rebecca asked.

“I can’t imagine what Iris might have to do
with it. Well, I can imagine any number of things, but whether any
of them are even logical, let alone the truth . . .” Jean shook her
head, trying to shake away the frustration but only tangling
herself further up in it. “I don’t suppose Iris ever tried to sell
you the Stone. I mean, renovating an old house and fitting it out
as a B&B takes a lot of money.”

“Don’t believe so, no, though we were offered
a fine Pictish silver chain from that area just last year, if I’m
remembering aright. A bit unusual to find Pictish silver there, but
Ambrose’s hoard might could be evidence of an alliance.”

“How about an arranged marriage?” Rebecca
suggested. “And the Stone is like the wedding license.”

“Linecrescent Horsehead marries
Doubledisc-something, carrying a bouquet of foxgloves and
meadowsweet, wearing a becoming gown of blue paint? Maybe the stone
was broken to signify a divorce . . . No, that’s right, it was
broken recently.” Jean shrugged. “The chain was one of those
heavy-duty numbers with the big links and a cuff holding the ends
together?”

“Oh aye, just that. I’ll suss out the
provenance. Could be from Ambrose’s mysterious hoard, right enough.
However . . .”

“Iris would get more money for Ambrose’s
artifacts if she took them straight to the antiquities market,”
Rebecca chimed in. “Anything from an old family collection like
that wouldn’t fall under the laws of treasure trove. She wouldn’t
be obliged to offer it to the Museum first.”

Jean stopped on the drawbridge spanning the
now-dry moat. “Miranda said something about an old family
collection, too. And they are an old family, right?”

“Oh aye,” said Michael. “Mackintosh of
Pitclachie is an old landed family, right enough. Bar the one who
became a Red Indian chief in your part of the world, they were a
right colorless family as well, ‘til Ambrose appeared.”

“On top of his other eccentricities,” said
Rebecca, “when he finally got married, it was to an American.
Although her wealth cancelled out her nationality,
society-wise.”

“I know about that. Eileen was half his age,
only eighteen.”

“Oh aye,” said Michael. “Not that that was
scandalous, mind.”

Rebecca snorted. “Never has been. Now if it
had been the other way around . . .”

Jean nodded agreement, even though they
couldn’t see her. A group of schoolchildren rushed past her and
into the castle like cheerful lemmings, the wood of the drawbridge
shivering to the soft pounding of their sneakers. “So was it a love
match, do you think? Or another kind of alliance, new American
money—her family got rich selling mustard gas and tinned food
during the war—for the prestige of an old if not exactly wealthy
family name?”

“Who knows?” said Rebecca. “People were more
discreet with their private lives then.”

“My granny says Eileen used to be quite the
lady of the manor,” Michael went on, “but what with Ambrose’s
building projects they might could have got through all her money.
They’d sacked most of the servants by the time Iris was born, and
by all accounts the marriage itself was falling apart.”

“So they had a baby,” Rebecca said. “When
will people learn?”

“Never, probably. If they did, Miranda and I
would go out of business.” Jean straightened up and turned toward
the castle. “A psychologist could have had a field day with
Ambrose. No surprise Iris is so matter-of-fact. I bet she wants to
make the world safe for rationality.”

“Ah, but the world isn’t rational,” Rebecca
said. “At least, not the human part of it.”

“Amen,” Jean said. “And thanks. I’ll keep you
posted. If you’ll let me know what you find out about the chain,
I’d sure appreciate it. Pet Dougie for me, will you?”

“He and Riccio are having a nap just now,”
Michael said. “They’ve been playing with the wee Nessie—thank you
kindly for sending it along.”

“Only Roger Dempsey would think of sending
Nessies out with his press kits.”

“You take care, Jean,” said Rebecca, showing
her friend enough respect not to repeat her
nothing’s going to
sneak up on you
.

“You do, too, you and little Linda. And don’t
worry about me—this time I’m an innocent bystander.” And if she
repeated that often enough, it might turn out to be true.

Jean switched off the phone and stowed it
away, telling herself that discretion might be the better part of
valor, yet discretion didn’t answer questions or discharge
responsibilities.

Bracing her shoulders back, she walked into
the entrance tunnel of the castle and peered warily upward. The
passageway had once had a wooden ceiling. The upper side of that
ceiling had been a floor pierced with openings called murder holes,
handy for ambushing attackers with boiling water, arrows,
rocks—whatever was convenient. Now, though, the stone vault of the
passageway was no more than a blank arch, stained dark and exuding
the musty scent of age.

Jean emerged from the corridor’s shadow into
another sort of shadow, a gray cloud drifting past the sun. The
oldest part of the castle, a few Pictish stones fused together by
fire, sat atop the higher ground to her right. The fortress had
been built, and had fallen, and more structures had been built on
top, only to be themselves modified over the centuries by the
exigencies of war and clan raids and the weather, a formidable foe
itself. Now even the “new” tower perched above the loch had partly
collapsed, exposing the floor levels inside like an architectural
model.

Tourists walked up and down and children
played hide-and-seek along battlements that had once run with
blood, but the castle itself remained aloof, listening to the music
of another time. Or today, as the case might be. A piper in full
kilt and bonnet outfit was tuning his pipes in the courtyard of the
tower, emitting sounds that combined the squeal of a frightened pig
with the squawk of a stepped-on cat. Funny, how the actual music
was glorious. Anticipating glory, Jean tossed a pound coin into the
piper’s carrying case and went inside.

A spiral stairway led upwards. She placed
each foot carefully on the narrow, hollowed treads, thinking that
medieval people must have had prehensile toes. Just as she emerged
onto the small landing at the top of the tower, she was greeted by
a burst of sunlight from above and a burst of music from below.
Scotland the Brave! All right!

Her grin petrified. Like a downpour of
burning oil through some psychic murder hole, recognition seared
every nerve in her body. That man, his sturdy hands bracing his
compact body against the railing as though preparing to repel
raiders—that man, his cropped hair rippling in the wind like a
field of wheat touched by frost—that man, wearing his dark business
suit like armor. His back was turned, but she knew him. Alasdair
Cameron.

Alasdair hadn’t seen her. She could creep
back down the stairway. . . No. Even if she wanted to turn tail and
run, here came a family clogging the escape route, parents cajoling
the children in Italian.

He didn’t look around at the sound of their
voices, just as he hadn’t looked around at the sound of her steps.
But Jean knew that his stillness was deceptive. He was very much
aware of how many people were gathered behind him, and yet, intent
on the expanse of water before him, he saw no need to take notice
of them.

This encounter was part serendipity, part
Murphy’s Law. Here she was and here he was and what kind of
adolescent game would she be playing to pretend she hadn’t wanted
to see him again? She realized she was holding her breath and let
it out in a long sigh of acceptance.

He spun around as though answering a peal of
alarm bells. As though he’d felt her breath on the back of his
neck. His slate blue, sleet blue, eyes brightened. His lips with
their elegant curve expanded into a grin as bright as lightning and
as quickly gone. “Jean.” Just the one word, falling like a rock
down a well and landing with a resounding thump deep in her
abdomen.

She blinked, thinking she’d imagined that
grin, knowing she hadn’t. She inhaled, tried a wobbly smile, and
groped through several greetings:
We have to stop meeting like
this
, or
Seen any ghosts lately?
and settled on a
simple, “Hello, Alasdair.”

He made no effort to bridge the arm’s length
gap between them with a handshake. Instead his patented
expressionless gaze roamed up the mountain crags behind Pitclachie
Farm to where minute reddish dots might be deer, to the official
vehicles gathered at the pier across the bay, to the family washing
around him and Jean like a stream around the stones in its course.
Then his gaze re-connected with hers, and his quiet voice said,
“Here you are, then. You found me.”

Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t
that. She emitted a lame, “What?”

“You didn’t come looking me out, after asking
questions about the explosion?”

“No. Sawyer turned up at Pitclachie House so
I thought I’d make myself scarce. I just came down here to look
around the castle . . .” She stopped herself before her tongue ran
off at the end with,
nothing personal
.

“Ah. Well then. Good show, Andy’s temper has
hardly improved. You’ll not be getting shut of us quite so easily
as that, though. Dempsey handed in a list of the people visiting
the boat—the ones he knew, at the least. Half the folk in
Inverness-shire, it sounds like, and your name amongst the rest.
Gave me a bit of a turn, that.”

I bet it did
. Nothing was personal.
Yeah, right. At least she hadn’t ambushed him quite as badly as
she’d first thought. “I was the last . . .”

His elevated forefinger counseled caution.
The Italian family edged past and trooped back down the staircase,
leaving Jean and Alasdair alone atop the tower. Below, the piper
began to play “Amazing Grace,” another of the old standards likely
to earn him tips.

Feeling less than graceful and not at all
amazing, Jean tried again. “They pulled the boat out into the bay
right after I left, so I was the last visitor.”

“You came here to interview Roger Dempsey,
then.”

“And Iris Mackintosh. I’m hoping to do an
article about her father Ambrose, the antiquarian and part-time nut
case. I had nothing to do with the boat explosion, but as long as
I’m here . . .”

“You might could write a story about it,” he
said.

“I don’t want to write about it, no—I’m
trying to avoid being the ambulance-chasing kind of reporter. It’s
just that I can’t help but wonder what the story is. What the
stories are. You know me, I can’t leave well enough alone.”

An oscillation at the corners of his mouth
made her suspect that he was curbing a laugh, a rueful laugh not at
her but with her.

Jean looked down at her feet, avoiding his
intense—intensely curious—gaze.
Why
, a small voice in the
back of her mind whined,
why was it that Alasdair never saw her
at her best?
Right now she probably looked like Rip van Winkle
wandering back into town after his “nap,” creased and confused . .
.
Damn
. She was concerned about how she looked to him.

She peered warily into his face. The line of
concentration between his eyebrows was deeper than she remembered
and his eyes more guarded. It wasn’t so much that his upper lip was
stiff, as that it was stiff all the way to his hairline. If her
contents were under pressure, his were doubly so. She doubted if
anything she could say would help, let alone anything she could
ask. But she had to ask, just as she had to breathe. “Have you
found Jonathan Paisley yet?

“No. He’s not been seen since the boat went
up. We’re thinking he was aboard at the time, and went into the
water. ”

“Yeah, I saw lights on the boat right before
the fireworks started,” Jean said, and added before he could ask,
“I saw it go up from the terrace of Pitclachie House.”

Alasdair nodded, deadpan.

“Poor Jonathan,” Jean said. “He was—and I
guess the word is ‘was’—just a kid. His family must be devastated.
And I bet Roger’s plenty upset.”

“He is that. Kept repeating, ‘I don’t believe
it’, as though believing it makes some sort of difference.”

Poor Roger, too. “Was the explosion an
accident?”

“We don’t know as yet. The forensics chaps
are having a go at the debris, though most of that’s on the bottom
of the loch. I daresay Paisley’s there as well. In water this cold,
it takes some time for decomposition to bring a body to the
surface. If it ever does at all.”