The Murder Hole (16 page)

“May have?” demanded Sawyer. “We’ve got her
dead to rights.”

“Her?” Jean asked. “You mean Iris?”

In three steps, Sawyer was across the room
and looming over Jean. “What do you know about it, then?”

Alasdair said nothing. Jean turned her face
upward to meet Sawyer’s glare. His eyebrows were so pale they were
almost invisible. No wonder he didn’t seem quite human. Even
cartoon animals had eyebrows, to show emotion. “Who doesn’t suspect
Iris, with her attitude toward Dempsey? When I heard her typing on
an old typewriter yesterday afternoon, even I wondered if the
letters were typewrit . . .”

Sawyer’s already narrowed eyes became
slits.

“You’re kidding me.” Jean swung back around
to Alasdair. “You mean those letters
were
typewritten? On
Iris’s typewriter?”

“Not typed, no,” he said. “Computer-generated
and printed, the both of them. But Iris has a computer as
well.”

“That makes sense. Why would Iris or anyone
else incriminate herself by using a typewriter?”

“Or by printing those letters on paper and
posting them in envelopes provided to the guests at her own
B&B?” Alasdair asked.

“Say what?” replied Jean.

“Oh aye.” Sawyer said. “Thanks to reporters
like yourself, everyone knows his way round the forensics. You’ve
made our job that much more difficult.”

“Don’t look at me, I only write about cases
long over and done with,” Jean retorted, and added before he could,
“As for the case in May, all I wrote was a series of historical
articles. Period. And they haven’t been published yet.”

Alasdair re-called the meeting to order by
clearing his throat. “You’ve got no more reason than Iris’s dislike
of Dempsey to suspect her of sending the letters, have you, Miss
Fairbairn?”

“No. She seems to be way too smart to stoop
to anonymous letters, to say nothing of incriminating herself up
one side and down the other.”

“You’re handing Iris too much credit, las—”
Sawyer thought better of one diminutive but defaulted to another
“—Jean. She’s telling us she used her own paper and envelopes, and
posted the letters in Inverness to Dempsey’s office in Chicago, the
first on May five, just after he announced his plans, and the
second on June twelve, so it would reach him just before he came
away from the US.”

“She’s confessed?” demanded Jean, not of
Sawyer but of Alasdair.

“Aye,” his lips stated, but his eyes were far
from convinced.

Jean could only shake her head. That did not
compute.

Beside her, Sawyer went smugly on. “If you
smelled petrol on the boat, then the bomb was hidden there before
you arrived. Iris was seen pottering about the bay in her boat on
the Thursday evening, whilst Dempsey and the others were
interviewing with ITN at the castle.”

“She’s researching the ecology of the loch,”
said Jean. “Did anyone actually see her on the Water Horse
boat?”

“She climbed on board from the side facing
away from the shore.”

“But the bomb didn’t go off until Friday
evening.”

Alasdair said, “You were telling me she
wasn’t at the B&B just then.”

“I said I didn’t see her at the B&B. She
could have been there. Besides, why not take the bomb out to the
boat at the same time you intend to set it off? Sounds to me like
there was some kind of timing mechanism. Or that Jonathan set it
off himself, which doesn’t make sense. Or doesn’t make sense with
the evidence we have now.”

Judging by the roll of Sawyer’s eyes, he
resented her imperial “we.”

Jean didn’t correct herself. “Even if Iris
did send the letters, that doesn’t mean she blew up the boat.”

“She’s not confessed to that, no,” said
Alasdair. “Still, the dive teams found a corkscrew from the B&B
amidst the debris.”

“A corkscrew?” This time it was her brows
that went up. “Well, yeah, Martin Hall was looking for one last
night, but corkscrews all look alike, don’t they?”

“This one was a bit of an antique, with
Ambrose’s monogram. Miss Wotherspoon identified it.”

Sawyer darted Gunn a sneer and said, “Kirsty
the crumpet. Didn’t realize she was grassing up Aunt Iris, did
she?”

What?
Jean wondered. Had Gunn flirted
with Kirsty? Inappropriate, maybe, but hardly the hanging offense
Sawyer’s scorn made it out to be. Or else, more likely, Sawyer had
been ogling Kirsty and Gunn had been offended enough to call him on
it.

“That’s Miss Wotherspoon to you, Andy,” said
Alasdair, in the quiet but menacing voice Jean remembered only too
well.

A shiver trickled down her spine, and not one
of fear. The voice drew no reaction from Sawyer except another roll
of his eyes. She said, “I’m impressed you can find anything
identifiable in the debris.”

“It’s a matter of noting the objects you’re
not expecting to find. We expected quite a few bits of electronic
equipment, pieces of Dempsey’s submersible, and the like. What we
weren’t expecting were the broken wine and liquor bottles.”

“Well, that would explain the corkscrew, sort
of. Roger’s a pretty hard drinker. Although how he got the
corkscrew from the B&B . . .”

Alasdair spelled it out for her. “As luck
would have it, one bottle wasn’t broken. It contained petrol. The
bomb was made of several bottles partially filled with petrol and
fitted up with fuses. Amongst the electronic debris might could be
the remains of a timing mechanism. Perhaps Paisley was having a go
at defusing the bomb when it exploded.”

“Oh.” Jean visualized a young man trying
frantically to—to what? Cut the blue wire? Had he thought he didn’t
have enough time to call the authorities, or had he thought he
could handle it? Her knowledge of bombs and timing devices was on a
par with her knowledge of nuclear physics. “Rigging up a timing
mechanism would indicate some expertise, wouldn’t it? Could Iris
have done it?”

“She worked with the electric flex whilst
renovating the house,” said Sawyer. “She makes the repairs to the
appliances. Kirst—Miss Wotherspoon was telling us that, as
well.”

Jean didn’t think the one translated to the
other, but didn’t waste her breath saying so. “I ran into Roger a
little while ago. He thinks the explosion was caused by the propane
stove, said it had been acting up.”

“He was telling us that, aye,” Alasdair said.
“The chap who owns the boat says that’s nonsense, he’d vetted every
item on board. Including a small generator that runs on
petrol.”

“That could explain the smell, someone was
being careless with the petrol. The gasoline. That could explain
the explosion, for that matter. Except,” Jean said, sinking down in
the chair so that her spine rattled across the hard ribs of the
back, “except you found a bottle filled with petrol, something the
boat owner would keep in a proper container. But . . .”

“We’re not asking your opinion.” Sawyer said,
ignoring the fact that Alasdair
was
asking her opinion.

The door to the other room opened and a
constable beckoned to Sawyer. With never a by-your-leave he stepped
across to the door and slammed it behind him.

Whoa, there was oxygen in the room again.
Jean was about to make some snide remark about Sawyer, then decided
that someone had to take the high road.

Alasdair’s face was, if anything, even more
cold and quiet than usual. She already knew that he could exercise
admirable restraint, but still, she was impressed.

He frowned at the door, shedding an iceberg
or two in the process, and shot an impenetrable look at Gunn. She
glanced around to see the young officer huddled in his chair as
though he was trying to vanish into the woodwork like an insect.
Even as she watched he relaxed, straightened, and sent a bashful
half-smile toward her and Alasdair, either separately or
together.

So what was going on? She’d learned the
dynamics of the investigative trio the last time around—Sawyer
butting his head against Cameron’s chill shell, with Gunn playing
both ingénue and straight man. But something had changed, like an
already tart fruit gone rancid. “Well,” she said to Gunn, “at least
you still have all the paperwork from last time. You know, my name,
rank, serial number.”

“That we do, Miss Fairbairn.”

Jean looked back to see one side of
Alasdair’s mouth tucking itself up in a suppressed smile, although
whether it was at her or Gunn she had no way of deciphering. “What
else was Dempsey telling you just now?” he asked.

“Not much, just that the remote-sensing
equipment he brought along for the land part of the expedition was
stored at the hotel, reasonably enough. He must have lost some of
his computers, though, not to mention the sonar and the ROVs, the
remote operating vehicles. That’s what you meant by submersible.
Not quite the same thing, a submersible is a mini-sub and has a
person inside. An ROV doesn’t.”

Alasdair nodded, filing that away in the
infinite recesses of his mind.

“It’s a tough break for him. That sort of
equipment is so expensive an expedition will rent it—like Roger did
with the boat—although I guess he didn’t have to rent or buy
anything manufactured by Omnium.” She told herself that if anyone
was resilient, it was Dempsey. Or would be, tomorrow. As for
Iris—well, even though Alasdair hadn’t formally arrested her, he
wasn’t satisfied with her story. “If Iris hadn’t confessed, I’d say
that someone was trying to frame her. It wouldn’t be that hard to
pick up some paper and envelopes matching the ones from the
B&B.”

“Or to pinch some from the B&B itself.
Along with the odd corkscrew, come to that.”

“I figured you’d come to that all-too-obvious
corkscrew.”

“Someone might could be trying to stitch Iris
up for the explosion,” Alasdair went on, “but the letters, now, the
letters are a bit of a problem. Iris isn’t telling us all she
knows.”

“Or she’s telling Sawyer what he wants to
hear, to get him off her back.”

“I reckon the immovable object’s meeting the
irresistible force.” This time it was the other side of Alasdair’s
mouth that almost smiled, and directly at Jean.

“You don’t seriously think she sent the
letters.”

“You’re telling me my business again,
Jean.”

She caught the glint in his eye, like a lamp
glowing behind an ice-covered windowpane and thawing a peephole.
Here we go again
. This time, though, the thought wasn’t
heavy and dull. There was an odd sort of sparkle to it. With all
due respect to Jonathan, of course. And Dempsey, and Iris. She said
over her shoulder, “D.C. Gunn, I’d sure like a cup of tea. Do you
think you could rustle one up for me?”

Her idiom made him smile. “Oh aye, no
problem.” Gunn put his notebook down and vanished into the main
part of the building.

He had a nice smile when he let it escape,
bright and open. No matter if he was a bit gawky, Sawyer had no
right to bully him.

Jean turned back to Alasdair. With him
sitting behind the desk she felt like a supplicant or a client, not
an equal. But then, she wasn’t an equal, not when it came to police
work. “What’s repeating itself here is you letting me in on the
case. If all you want to know is what Iris or Roger has to say for
public consumption, you could ask anyone. What is it you’re trying
to lure me into doing for you?”

“Is it that hard to guess?” he asked, leaning
forward.

There was the energy field again, tightening
her follicles. It was like sensing a ghost, except it wasn’t like
sensing a ghost. Alasdair was no disembodied flash of emotion.
Clearing her throat, she held her ground. “I can play devil’s
advocate for you, no problem. But there’s more to it than that. The
letters seem to have come from the B&B. I’m staying there. I’m
a reporter, I have an excuse to ask questions. I’m a nice person,
so maybe I can offer to help Kirsty while Iris is gone. In other
words, you expect me to spy for you.”

“I’m expecting you to conduct yourself as a
public-spirited citizen and help the police with their inquiries.
Without putting yourself in danger, mind. We’ve got a criminal here
who’s either determined or careless. I’m hoping for the former, as
that would make him predictable. Program your mobile with my number
and Gunn’s. Here you are.” He scribbled two numbers on a bit of
notepaper and shoved it across the desk.

She tucked the paper into her pocket. “I’m
here because I’m curious—because curiosity is my job—but I’m only a
member of the audience, not part of the play. There’s no evidence
I’m in danger.”

“Someone’s roaming about your wee house in
the night. There’s less proper evidence than that for Nessie, and
she’s supporting an entire industry.”

“Nessie being a ‘she’ because of her stubborn
and uncooperative temperament?”

He grinned at that, a little less briefly
than he had grinned at seeing her atop the castle.

The effect made Jean slide back into her
chair.
Oh my
. No, this was not a debate. She might as well
save her energy for an argument she wanted to win. “Okay. I’ll help
you with the case without putting myself in danger. And without
putting myself forward, either. I get it.”

“You were already planning to suss out the
story of Iris’s father, weren’t you now?”

“Yes I was, although I don’t see . . .” Jean
caught herself in mid-phrase. “You don’t know yet what’s relevant
to the case, so you’re looking into everyone’s background. Besides,
Eileen Mackintosh’s disappearance was never really solved, and
you’re curious about it.”

“There’s a bit of residual feeling about that
in the area, or so I hear.”

“From whom?”

“Hamish Cameron, who owns the Cameron Arms
Hotel.”

“A relative of yours?”

“Second cousin twice removed.”

Jean laughed. Once she had thought Alasdair
had sprung full-blown from the brow of the Chief Constable,
solitary as a hermit. But no. He was a Cameron, with all that
implied. The last clan raid in this area had been perpetrated by
Camerons in 1545. They had taken everything not nailed down,
including women, and pried up a few things that were. Alasdair’s
shell, thick as armor, was probably suppressing centuries of
passion for good and bad.