The Murder Hole (20 page)

The police would search the Lodge, too, Jean
thought, and with a stab of regret realized she wouldn’t be there
when they asked Kirsty to open the locked door.

Charles started the car. A cold gust from the
defrost parted Jean’s hair. She propped her umbrella next to the
door, where it could drip on the carpet and not on the books lying
on the seat: a Michelin Guide, an Automobile Association map of the
UK, two
Art and Antiquities
magazines, and the same
paperback edition of Ambrose’s biography of Crowley as Jean’s own.
“What do y’all do?” she asked, and modified the idiom into, “What
is your work?”

“Ah,” Sophie said with a flutter of her
hands, “it is a shop for
objets antiques
. La Bagatelle
d’Or.”

Jean did a mental double-take. Sophie could
wave her hands all she liked—she wasn’t driving. The steering wheel
was on the left, not the right.
Duh
. The car had a French
license plate, already. “It’s brave of you to bring your own car.
I’d be really nervous driving on the left side of the road with my
steering wheel on the outside. Isn’t it hard to see when you can
pass?”

“Sophie helps to see,” said Charles, and took
a right onto the main road without even stopping, let alone looking
left, sublimely assured that even if Sophie couldn’t see a thing,
their guardian angel was playing traffic cop.

Jean winced, and in a voice that sounded like
a Mickey Mouse impression, asked, “Are you enjoying your
holiday?”

“Yes,” replied Sophie.

“What did you think of the Pitclachie
Stone?”

“Very amusing.”

“Where do you go?” Charles asked. “The
Festival? Beyond?”

“To the Festival, although if you could just
drop me off at . . .” Having been spared being struck by a car,
Jean was now struck with an inspiration. “. . . the Cameron Arms
hotel. It’s tea-time, more or less.”

“Ah. Tea and cakes,” said Sophie. “Very
amusing.”

“We,” Charles added, “have later dinner at
the Glengarry Castle Hotel.”

“Nice place,” Jean said. Although she’d never
been there, she knew from the reviews in
Great Scot
that it
was both exclusive and expensive. The couple was not honeymooning
on the cheap. She wondered if Miranda had ever visited chez
Bouchard, trolling for just the right knickknack. Funny, how one
era’s
tchotchke
became a later era’s antique.

Charles guided the car into the parking lot
of the Cameron Arms. The rain slackened into a few spits and
splats, and the freshly-painted white sides of the building gleamed
in an uncertain ray of sun. The Water Horse van sat skewed across
two parking places, as though Roger and Brendan couldn’t wait to
abandon it. On the far side of the Atlantic this wouldn’t be
tea-time but happy hour. Maybe Roger and his acolyte had gone to
ground in the hotel bar.

Jean slid across the supple leather seat to
the door. “Did y’all see the boat blow up last night?”

“Yes,” said Sophie, darting a glance at
Charles. “We saw from the village. Very bad.”

“Very sad, the man who dies,” Charles went
on. “He was not so pleasant when we visited the boat, but that is
not important, is it?”

Jean paused with her hand on the door handle.
“Y’all toured the boat?”

“We were walking, and the boat was there, and
the lady—Madame Dempsey—she says to come to look, it is open to
all.”

Sophie indicated an Omnium brochure tucked
into the console, good as a ticket stub. “See here?”

“I see,” said Jean, and opened the door. The
car had become so warm in just a few minutes that the outside air
felt like a cool compress on her fevered brow. “Thank you very much
for the ride.”

“
De rien
,” Charles responded. The
moment Jean slammed the door, he took off with yet another
right-hand turn that was more quick than dead, thank goodness for
the slow traffic, and disappeared down the highway to the
south.

So the Bouchards had not been holed up at
Pitclachie when the boat exploded. And they had an antiques shop.
Had they ever bought items from Iris? Or were they simply at the
loch on a busman’s holiday, er, honeymoon?
Busman’s
Honeymoon
, Jean thought, the classic detective novel with the
newlyweds doing their thing upstairs while the murder victim lay
undiscovered in the basement. . . . Damn! She should have thought
of some way of asking Sophie and Charles why they’d moved from the
Lodge to the house. Too late now.

The interior of the hotel revealed Cousin
Hamish’s good taste. He had designed his establishment simply,
neither going overboard with tartan tushery nor veering too far
into the streamlined European style that to Jean signaled not
sophistication but sterility. The lobby smelled faintly of paint,
although the more palatable odor of frying and baking grew stronger
as she advanced past the reception desk.

She paused in the door of the bar long enough
to ascertain that neither Brendan nor Roger was holed up drowning
his sorrows. Good. She wasn’t up to a probing conversation right
now. She went on into the dining room and within minutes was
sitting at a small table covered by a dazzling white table cloth, a
blazing hot pot of tea set ceremonially before her. She poured,
doctored, and drank.
Ahhh
. Hot tea, the universal
panacea.

Through the nearby window Jean could see the
Festival field with its one big tent and several smaller ones, and
beyond it cars jockeying for parking places from hotel lots to
gravel terraces far up the hillside. A stronger ray of sun
illuminated the scene, then winked out.

By the time her food arrived she’d filled a
page of her notebook with notes and flow charts—Kirsty, Roger, the
Bouchards, Pictish antiquities, Nessies large and small—which made
her feel she was accomplishing something. What, she didn’t know,
but something. Putting her notes aside with a sigh of frustration,
she dug into her omelet and chips, and eyeballed the other people
in the room. Tourists, she decided, fortifying themselves for the
evening’s music, monsters, and madness.

Well, well, well
. Staking out the
water hole was paying off. Here came Roger and Tracy, ushered by a
white-shirted waiter to a table on the far side of the room. He had
changed out of his wilted, muddy clothes into nondescript khaki
slacks and a sweater. Tracy wore a smashing tweed outfit, accented
by a vintage brooch glittering with what were probably not
rhinestones. Jean shifted her chair just a bit, hoping she’d blend
into the beige wall with its collection of watercolors and prints,
all for sale, of course, but neither Dempsey so much as glanced in
her direction. They did not, then, see themselves as prey.

Roger ordered and swiftly consumed a pint of
dark ale. Tracy fell as though parched onto a pot of tea. They both
stared so glumly at glass and cup, respectively, they could have
been seated at separate tables. Then Tracy’s lips moved in a
murmur. Roger’s head went up. Their eyes connected, then shied
away, as though looking each other in the face was the equivalent
of touching a hot iron.

Well, yes, Jean thought, who wouldn’t be
upset? But a crisis usually made a couple close ranks. Not that she
was any expert on couple behavior. She looked down at her own plate
long enough to smear strawberry jam on the second half of her
scone. Sugar meant calories, and calories meant energy, right?

When she looked up again, Tracy was leaning
across the table toward Roger, gesturing with her fork as though it
were a dagger she held before her. Jean couldn’t quite see her
face, but the woman’s jaw was stiff and the sinews in her neck were
corded with tension. With anger.

Roger, on the other hand, was doing that
typical male vanishing act, face averted, eyes glazed, lower lip
almost as pendulous as the bags under his eyes, as though resenting
his wife’s intrusion into a more absorbing train of thought.
Logarithms, maybe. The newest Microsoft security patch. He might
just as well be holding his hands over his ears and humming.

At last Tracy thumped her hand, fork and all,
against the table. Crockery jangled and several other diners looked
around. Jean could read her body language as surely as though she
were holding up cue cards:
Listen to me! This is important!
Was this their usual M.O. when more or less in private, when the
public masks of courageous independent scientist and adoring wife
walking three steps behind slipped away, and the woman behind the
great man took center stage?

Roger focused, his face no longer blank but
resentful, perhaps even angry. When the waiter brought his fish and
chips, Roger looked at it as though the fish were still raw and
wriggling. Tracy used her fork to stab viciously into a salmon
salad.

Jean decided she’d gleaned all she was going
to glean—not much. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill.
“Roger-Tracy in dining room,” she wrote in her notebook. “Stunned.
Angry. Big surprise.” Replacing the cap on her pen, she stowed
everything, including her umbrella, in her bag and slipped away as
furtively as a rat, around the edges of the room and out into the
hall.

A glance back showed Roger pushing bits of
potato and fish around his plate, liberally doused with blood-red
catsup, and Tracy squinting into a small mirror, equally red
lipstick ready to fill in the maroon outline of her lips. . . . She
looked up and saw Jean.

The two women stared at each other, Tracy
hostile, Jean trying to put together a polite smile and failing.
Then, like wrestlers told to break a hold, Tracy raised her mirror
and Jean did a swift about-face.

She paid her bill at the reception desk and
hurried out of the building, reassuring herself that Tracy’s
hostility wasn’t personal. Maybe the Dempseys had courted
Great
Scot
before the explosion, just as they’d courted all the
media, but now reporters equaled bad publicity. If marketing was a
way of protecting your investment, right now Tracy was seeing her
and Roger’s investment sinking like that boat.

Jean could almost side with the Dempseys, not
against them, except Jonathan was dead, and the ripples of his
death were spreading outward like those in the famous photo of
Nessie. Alasdair was just about the only person here she could
trust. She needed to talk to Alasdair.

Jean realized she was almost running, whether
toward or away from she couldn’t say, and forced herself to slow
down before she slipped in one of the puddles dotting the asphalt
sidewalk hugging the road. Never mind Kirsty learning to take care
of herself. One hostile stare and Jean was acting like a veteran
with post-traumatic stress syndrome. She was a big girl. She could
put off the moment of truth with Alasdair—or the moment of
inconsequence, whatever—a little while longer.

The sun was shining again, its rays focused
between mounds of white and gray clouds and illuminating the
hillsides into a green so intense it was like a platonic ideal. The
wind had grown colder, teasing the hem of Jean’s skirt and sending
sneaky little drafts up her legs. The muddy patch inside the gate
to the Festival Field was now a muddy quilt. Undeterred by the
chill and the mud, people of all ages and races were milling around
and through the tents. Two constables paced around the periphery,
and a camper-van marked with the logo of the Northern Constabulary
sat discreetly to one side. A couple of men bearing TV mini-cams
wandered about like inquisitive aardvarks. At least print reporters
could be a little more subtle.

Alerted by the sound of amplified voices,
Jean looked toward the big top. Several roadies were fussing around
with cords and amplifiers, not unlike the way Brendan and Jonathan
had been fussing around with cords and gadgets on the boat. Peter
Kettering stood to one side, consulting a clipboard, a cell phone,
and his watch simultaneously. In his three-piece suit he looked
like a waiter, compared to the be-kilted figures that stood at the
front of the stage extolling the virtues of Starr Beverages.

A kilt was a surpassingly attractive garment,
Jean thought with a smile. It complemented almost any male shape
and dressed up any number of professions. Including police
detectives.

She reconnoitered the outer ring of tents and
booths as though clues would be laid out on tables at markdown
prices. Gordon Fraser was doing good business, although presumably
not in books about Aleister Crowley, Ambrose’s or any other. How
sad that despite his “poor wee Iris,” he was visiting
Ambrose’s—well, maybe not sins, eccentricities—upon the daughters.
Memories did go back a long way in this part of the world.

So did appetites. A food vendor’s booth
emitted the full-bodied scent of fried meat and pastry. Brendan and
Kirsty stood nearby, munching on meat pies. She was snapping bites
out of hers, he was nibbling, with wary sideways glances at
Kirsty.

Jean walked on. More than once she had to
turn sideways and ease past chattering knots of people. Someone
would occasionally react to her murmured apology, but more often
than not no one took any notice of her, leaving her feeling
invisible. Or maybe covert, as in covert operator.

At last she worked her way back around to the
road and strolled further toward the town. A hundred yards along,
in a garden area near the entrance of the Official Loch Ness
Exhibition, she spotted another familiar face. Little Elvis Hall, a
plastic Nessie clutched in his hand, squatted beside a pond eyeing
a fiberglass Nessie the size of a huge swan that floated in the
water teasingly out of reach.

The plump blond woman standing over him was
Noreen, his mum. Every curve of her face sagged in defeat, as
though she had lost not a skirmish but an entire campaign.