The Murder Hole (18 page)

“But I bet she can use a computer, too.”

Did Kirsty grimace at that, or simply frown
in concentration as each stitch moved with a brisk stab and an
abrupt tug from the first needle to the second. “Oh aye, Aunt Iris
has a computer. Canna run the business without one, I’m
thinking.”

Yes, Iris
could
have sent the letters
to Roger. But Jean still bet she hadn’t. Irritating, to have to
contradict the woman’s own confession. “Was it you who tidied up
the Lodge today?”

“I dinna usually, but Aunt Iris was obliged
to go away to Inverness.”

That was a delicate way of putting it. But
some games Jean just wouldn’t play. “I know. D.C.I. Cameron told me
Iris was helping the police with their inquiries.”

Kirsty’s hands stopped moving on the
stitches, but she didn’t look up. Maybe she was wondering not so
much whose side Jean was on as whether there were sides to be
taken.

Having run her standard up the flagpole, Jean
went on, “It’s nice of you and Iris to let me have so much space.
You could put several people in the Lodge. Or you could if you
opened that room with the locked door. Is that another
bedroom?”

“It’s a lumber room is all. Bits of furniture
and the like.” Kirsty started knitting again, reached the end of
the row, and turned the scarf around.

An old sepia-tinted photograph stood on the
desk. It showed a summerhouse, the intricately-carved barge boards
looking as though they’d been designed by William Morris and
executed by elves. A man and a woman sat in the wide doorway, on
either side of a tea table. The man Jean recognized as Ambrose,
holding his cup and saucer like rare artifacts. The woman was
dressed in the shapeless dress and thick stockings of circa 1930.
The top of her head barely came to his shoulder, although whether
this meant she was small or he was tall Jean couldn’t say. A
certain fox-like sharpness to the woman’s face reminded Jean of
Iris. “Is that Ambrose and Eileen?” she asked.

“Oh aye. Having tea in the summerhouse.”

“Here? There’s no summerhouse in the garden
now, not that that one looks sturdy enough to survive seventy years
or so of Scottish weather.”

“Iris had it torn down. I saw it once, years
ago. It was overgrown, dark, with a bad smell and a bad feel.”

“A bad feel?” Had Kirsty sensed the garden
ghost? “You mean it felt spooky? Eerie?”

“Uncanny, aye, but I was no more than six or
eight, mind, and right fanciful.” The young woman’s head bent even
further, concealing her face, and her shoulders hunched as
defensively as Gunn’s. Who had criticized her for being
imaginative? Iris?

Taking the hint, Jean finished her trek
across the room and peered into the glass case.
Oh my, yes
.
By today’s standards Ambrose had been little more than a grave
robber, ignoring occupation layers in his quest for ancient
artifacts, and then failing to record those artifacts’ exact
provenance. But their lure was undeniable. A small bronze pot lay
with its hanger-chain wrapped around it like a dragon’s tail.
Several silver-gilt crescents that could have been anything from
scabbard tips to brooches were etched with knot work designs and
ended in stylized animal heads. They weren’t quite the homogenized
interlace that signaled Celtic art to today’s consumers—they had an
angularity, an edge, a nervous energy.

What particularly caught her eye were two
matching diamond-shaped silver plaques, only a few inches long,
engraved with the same crescent and line design as the Stone.
Another plaque, somewhat larger, displayed the Stone’s figure eight
symbol, the double disc. Holes at the top of all three told Jean
she was looking at two earrings and a necklace.

If the symbols on the Stone were the names of
a local magnate and his wife, then this might have been the bride’s
wedding attire. Maybe the groom had worn the chain with the thick
silver links, an engraved cuff holding the ends together, that lay
next to the earrings. Such chains were so heavy and so rare, they
must have been symbols of power.

Hmmm
. Several areas of the burgundy
velvet background cloth were more deeply-colored than the rest, and
defined in the shapes of several artifacts. The objects in the case
had been rearranged, exposing areas that had been protected from
the light for, perhaps, decades. Jean counted first the objects,
then the patches. Yes, there were now three fewer artifacts.

Michael had said that the Museum was recently
offered a similar silver chain. Maybe it had spent the last sixty
years or so in this exact display case. “Did Ambrose find these
when he excavated in the area?”

“Who knows? Aunt Iris was telling me of an
old cemetery atop the hill. Don’t know why he’d spend time and
effort digging round old bones, but digging up artifacts, now,
there’s motivation for you.”

“Very definitely.” Jean leaned over the case
toward the window. There, beyond the garden, in the field beside
the grove of pines, Brendan trundled along a large box on wheels
while Roger guided the wires extending from it. That had to be some
sort of geophysical implement that showed cavities beneath the
ground.

Again Jean thought how eccentric it was for
Dempsey to look for Nessie, alive or dead, on land. Or at least on
land so high above the water. And suddenly, like the tumblers of a
lock falling into place at the insertion of the correct key, her
thoughts formed a pattern. What if Roger wasn’t looking for the
Loch Ness monster? What if he was searching for more Pictish
artifacts, ones that fit the definition of treasure? What if Nessie
were no more than scaly-hided, protective coloring?

For a moment Jean basked in the dazzling
light of her bright idea. Then she told herself that that idea sure
opened a can of worms—or miniature Nessies, as the case might be.
Not least being the question of why, of all the ancient and
possibly treasure-bearing sites in Scotland, had Dempsey come here
to Pitclachie, where he was not welcome? Because of the cryptic
message on the Stone, which he chose to interpret as proof of an
ancient Nessie tradition? But how did that tie in with treasure of
the silver and bronze variety? Because Ambrose had written about
ancient Pictish ceremonies and had also turned up an ancient
Pictish hoard?

What her idea didn’t open was any insight
into who blew up the boat and caused Jonathan’s death, not to
mention who wrote the anonymous letters. But still she needed to
tell Alasdair. He wouldn’t laugh at her for free-associating. He
knew that evidence could be more slippery than the Loch Ness
monster, and as likely to be caught between the rock and the hard
place of seeing and believing.

Exhaling through pursed lips, Jean looked on
suspiciously as Roger and Brendan trudged across the field, much as
ancient Picts must have done with oxen dragging a wooden plow.
Beyond them the pines swayed, concealing the Stone, and clouds
spilled like wisps of smoke over the mountaintop.

And here came the Bouchards out of the glade,
closing the gate behind them. Charles strolled over to Roger and
Brendan. Roger stopped in his tracks, forcing Brendan to stop too.
The younger man stood flexing his arms and hands while Charles and
Roger gesticulated so broadly they might have been mimes,
communicating in symbols rather than words. Digging, Jean
interpreted. Structures. People walking. Caverns—or graves, maybe?
The creature dog-paddling through the loch. Sophie waited on the
path, glancing at her watch.

Then, with a tally-ho gesture, Charles led
his wife on toward the house and clean clothes, food, and drink.
The day had grown so dark the lighted window of the library
probably beckoned invitingly . . . Sophie looked right at Jean and
waved. She waved back, less at Sophie than at her own ghostly
reflection in the glass.

The front door opened and shut. Footsteps
climbed the staircase. Another door slammed and floorboards
squeaked. Jean turned to Kirsty. “What are Roger and Brendan
looking for?”

“Herself. Nessie, or so Brendan’s telling
me.” Kirsty frowned down at her knitting. “Bones, I reckon.”

“Funny,” Jean said, “that Iris would let
Roger search here at Pitclachie. There doesn’t seem to be much love
lost between them. She objects to his methods, I gather. Or is
there more to it than that?”

“There’s something from the past.”

“His past or her past?”

Kirsty’s lips moved, counting her stitches.
Maybe she’d said all she was going to say to a presumptuous
stranger. Maybe she had nothing else to offer.

Jean drifted toward one of the shelves.
Tilting her head to read the titles, she inspected the books with
all the delectation of a gourmet at a wine-tasting. She had learned
long ago how to separate the sheep from the goats among her
house-guests. There were the people who abandoned conversation and
went through her bookcases, and there were the people who seemed to
regard them as so much wallpaper. So far she’d had the good taste,
or the good luck, to never host anyone who asked accusingly, “Have
you read all of those?” as though reading was the sort of private
function you had to wash your hands after doing.

Lining the shelves were books ranging from
leather-bound classics to academic tomes to a vast collection of
Nessie-ology to popular novels of all eras down to the present . .
. Good heavens! That looked like a 1937 first edition of
The
Hobbit
, a very valuable book indeed.

“A librarian stopped here in May,” said
Kirsty.

Jean looked up. That’s right, she was pumping
the girl for information. “Yes?”

“She worked at the Library of Congress in
Washington D. C. Name of Sirikanya—isn’t that pretty? Originally
from Thailand, she was saying. You should have seen her the day she
came running in to read the Nessie books, over the moon, sure she’d
seen the monster in the loch! She was telling Aunt Iris she had
some right valuable books and should be finding herself a proper
expert.”

Scanning the shelves again, this time
critically rather than curiously, Jean noted not the books
themselves but the gaps where ones had been removed. “I doubt, er,
suspect that Iris knows exactly what she has here. Has she ever
done business with the rare-book dealer from Fort Augustus, the one
who’s at the Festival?”

“Gordon Fraser, is it? Now there’s a pillock.
We were at the shops in Fort Augustus not a month since when Aunt
Iris saw a cookbook in his window and stopped in to buy it, and
here’s him taking her money like it’s cursed and showing us both
the door before we could so much as look about.”

Jean’s ears perked up like the cat’s. “I was
talking to Fraser at the Festival. He seemed uneasy about Ambrose’s
relationship with Aleister Crowley. And, I assume, the, er, mystery
about Ambrose and Eileen.”

“Oh aye,” Kirsty said with a bored sigh and
beseeching look upward. “That verdict of Not Proven went down right
badly in these parts. My folk were away to Glasgow, putting the
past behind them and all.”

And convincing you that imagination was a bad
thing, thought Jean, people having a tendency to throw babies out
with tubs of bathwater. She pointed toward three books tucked away
in the darkest corner of the room. Two of their spines displayed
the names Lawrence and Boccaccio, the third . . . “I see Iris has a
copy of Crowley’s own
Moonchild.
Plus a couple of other
popularly unpalatable books from Mandrake Press. There’s a really
obscure and short-lived publisher.”

Kirsty looked up. “Mandrake Press, is it?
That’s the cat’s name, Mandrake. Here’s me, thinking he was named
for the screaming plants in
Harry Potter
. Not that Aunt Iris
has time for fanciful stories such as that.”

The calico cat opened an eye, partly
acknowledging the name, mostly not caring less.

“The press was named for the plant, I bet,
which has all sorts of magical properties and is toxic to boot. If
that’s the cat’s name, it sounds like Iris has some sense of humor
about her past.” The elephant of “the past” had been lying in the
middle of the room all this time. It was time to goad its massive
rump. “The question, and I’m sure the police asked you this, is
whether Iris has enemies from her past. Or present, for that
matter. Someone who could have sent those anonymous letters, trying
to . . .”

“Bloody hell,” said Kirsty. “I dropped a
stitch two rows back. They’ll want unraveling.”

“I’ll show you how to pick it up.” Jean
hurried across the room and took the needles with their pendant
scarf from Kirsty’s hands. While the interruption might have
occurred conveniently before she finished her question, Jean saw
that the dropped stitch was only too real. “Do you have a crochet
hook? Or a bobby pin—a hair clip—would do.”

Kirsty reached to the hair piled on her head
and pulled out a pin. Sitting down in the desk chair, Jean used the
pin to pick up and interlock each errant stitch in turn. She added
the last loop of yarn to the row of stitches already on the needles
and handed everything back to Kirsty. “See? Like most things, it’s
not hard once you know how to do it.”

“Thank you kindly.”

“Glad to help. Did Iris teach you to
knit?”

“That she did. Told me if I kept my hands
busy I’d not be biting my nails.” Kirsty waggled her pristine
fingertips. “Knitting’s not so naff a business as it was a few
years back, now it’s right trendy.”

“I’ve been knitting since I was a girl. I’m
glad to see it’s respectable again. It’s a metaphor for life,
really. Stitches can be too tight, too loose, or just right.
Patterns can be plain or intricate. You can use up all your yarn
and not be able to find the same color or texture. You can tie
yourself into a knot and have to start over. You can notice that
you made a mistake several rows earlier, but it’s not a simple
dropped stitch—if you, like, cable front to back instead of back to
front, you have to cut or unravel, but either way it’s a nuisance
and you can dump a bunch of stitches before you’re done.”