The Murder Hole (21 page)

“Hello,” said Jean. “I’m Jean Fairbairn. I’m
staying at the B&B, and was talking to Martin and Elvis last
night.”

“Oh,” said Noreen. “Bad business that, the
fireworks and all. Or the boat blowing up rather, not the fireworks
themselves, they didn’t cause that, did they now? I didn’t mean to
say they did. That boat could have gone up at any time, and there’s
us, having a tour. Dreadful smelly place, never so nice as the
B&B, and Elvis after pushing every bloody button. I knackered
myself chasing him about.”

“Wasn’t Martin with you?”

Noreen glanced over her shoulder. Martin
stood just outside the courtyard made by one side of the old stone
hotel that housed the Exhibition and the series of shops attached
to it, shops that formed a gauntlet of souvenirs that everyone
exiting from the otherwise quite sober Exhibition had to run.
Martin was smoking a cigarette and not so much chatting with Dave
and Patti Duckett as standing there silent while they chatted at
him.

“He was there, right enough,” Noreen said,
“but he was having himself a natter with Mrs. Dempsey, being in a
similar field and all. Biology. He’s doing ever so important
research for Bristol University, on eels.”

“There’s the theory that Nessie is a giant
eel,” offered Jean, skipping past the fact that while Roger was as
much a biologist as Jean herself was a hard-hitting investigative
reporter, Tracy wasn’t a biologist at all . . . Maybe the shape in
Tracy’s window had been Martin’s, after all.

“I’ve heard tell of that eel idea, oh yes.
And all the others as well.”

“Is Martin a Nessie enthusiast like
Elvis?”

The child was making his plastic creature
swim through the weedy, murky water. “That he is. Like father like
son,” Noreen said with a sigh, quickly suppressed, and another
glance toward her husband.

“Has Elvis seen the Exhibition?”

“Martin took him in when we was here in
April. Me, I had me one look at the price of the ticket and said no
thanks, I’ll wait. That’s me, always waiting, waiting tables in the
motorway caff, waiting on . . .” She cut herself off. This time she
didn’t look at Martin, but by the set of her shoulders Jean deduced
that took a deliberate effort. “I mean, his work’s ever so
important, it’s the least I can do, isn’t it, to help pay the bills
and all?”

The first words that sprang to Jean’s mind
were about the relatively high prices at Pitclachie House. She
tried, “The B&B is very nice. Iris sets a high standard. A good
thing she has Kirsty to help her.”

“Yeh, nothing like a bit of slave labor, is
there? All Kirsty gets is her room and board and a few quid for
spending money, in return for working like a navvy and sucking down
loads of advice from Iris.”

“Kirsty doesn’t seem particularly resentful,”
Jean ventured.

“It’s not like she has a choice, is it? I
mean, we was having us a nice natter back in April, Kirsty and me,
and she told me about the aggro in Glasgow and all. Bloody shame
the lad pushed her into sending those letters and then told the
polis. He should be the one paying the price, not her. But no, her
family sends her up here even though she gave him the elbow quick
smart.”

Jean’s ears pricked up so far they sprouted
points. “Letters?”

“Well, that’s not what we was talking about,
was it? We was talking about choosing the wrong man—it’s always the
woman who pays.” This time Noreen did look over at Martin, her
resentment so heavy it sagged into despair.

Jean tried to think of something positive to
say, but all that came to her mind was the counsel that staying
together for the kids was a much over-rated reason to stick out a
bad relationship. And she was no counselor. Funny how neither Roger
nor Tracy, who had reason to assume someone was waiting to pounce
on them, were acting like prey, and yet here was Noreen behaving
like an antelope downwind of a lion. Marriage could do that to a
woman, Jean told herself with prejudice aforethought. And if Kirsty
had had a manipulative boyfriend back in Glasgow, that would
explain Iris’s attitude toward Brendan . . .

A splash and a cry jerked her around. Noreen
lunged. Elvis, predictably, had leaned too far and was now standing
in the water, his face as bewildered as though the fiberglass
monster had reached up and pulled him in.

Throwing down his cigarette, Martin loped to
the pool, plucked the boy from the pond, and set him down on the
grassy bank. “Have a care there, lad.”

“My shoes,” said Elvis, his face crumpling.
Balancing on one foot, he extended one of his small athletic shoes.
A rivulet of water poured from its heel.

“Hush,” said Martin. “They’ll dry themselves.
No harm done.”

With a heavy sigh, not suppressed, Noreen sat
down on a rock, pulled Elvis onto her lap, and began to untie his
shoelaces. “Those shoes, they cost a packet.”

“Well then, you should have been minding him
properly.” Martin’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his stalk of
a throat, a judge’s gavel rising and falling. “Leave off your
fussing. Take him back to the B&B before he catches a
chill.”

Noreen didn’t respond. She didn’t keep
working with Elvis’s shoes, either.

Jean looked up at Martin, a foot taller and
half as wide as she was, but he took no notice of her. She looked
down at Noreen, who even when standing up was two inches shorter
and twice as broad. Compared to this couple, the Dempseys resembled
twins.

She wandered diplomatically away, to where
the Ducketts were diplomatically gazing off toward the mountains.
Martin’s cigarette lay smoking on the cement. Jean ground it under
her shoe, harder than was necessary.

“We waved at you earlier,” Dave said. “You
were getting out of the French couple’s car at the Cameron Arms.
We’d just had an early supper and were heading over here to the
Exhibition.”

“I didn’t see you, sorry.” If she’d been an
antelope she’d be dismembered and half-digested by now, she added
to herself. A lively fiddle tune echoed from the Festival,
signaling an end to the Starr Beverages PLC commercial break.
“That’s Hugh Munro. If you haven’t heard him before, he’s worth a
listen and a few CDs, too.”

“Sounds nice and cheerful. Let’s go listen to
the music, hon.” Patti hoisted her shopping bag, brimming with yet
more toys and tiny garments. Jean was reminded of one of her
cousins, lavishing gifts on her grandchildren after her son’s
divorce, trying to stay a part of their lives. But Patti had said
something about the kids moving back to Illinois, hadn’t she?

Dave took the bag, and Patti’s arm, and
escorted her toward the music. The Halls, too, walked away, Elvis
wriggling like a marionette at the end of Martin’s long arm. Noreen
made nervous gestures over him and shot nervous glances at her
husband. Her dishwater blonde head bending over Elvis’s golden one
looked like after and before photos in a hair color ad.

Shuddering, Jean took a step and caromed off
a kilted man the size and coloring of a grizzly bear. With mutual
apologies they danced around each other, and she hurried back to
the Festival field chiding herself yet again. Too much input. That
was it.

The swing and sway of the music, the rhythm
of a kilt around a man’s knees, summoned her to the main tent. Hugh
and his back-up lads—Billy on pipes, Jamie on guitar, Donnie on
keyboard—were playing a bravura reel that might not actually wake
the dead but would certainly rouse the comatose. Shuffling her
feet, Jean joined in the clapping and hooching. At least she hoped
her cries of enthusiasm were proper Scottish hooching, the secular
cousin of the gospel audience’s occasional outburst of prayer:
Amen, brother!
If music was like prayer, then Hugh’s fiddle
was the next best thing to a holy relic.

And the bagpipes! Pipe music was an acquired
taste for the non-Celt, or even for the odd reconstructed Celt. It
was in-your-face and up-your-spine. It was wildly romantic. In
other words, it was dangerous.

Jean saw Noreen and Elvis, now alone,
trudging along the sidewalk toward Pitclachie. And here came Tracy
striding toward the Festival. Noreen pulled Elvis out of the way
and all but curtseyed. Tracy brushed by without acknowledging them,
picked her way through the gate into the field, and disappeared
into the crowd. Noreen jerked Elvis, collateral damage, into a fast
trot.

At the edge of the tent, several couples
began performing the intricate sets of Scottish country dancing,
the ancestor of the American square dance. One red-headed man’s
short-sleeved shirt revealed arms covered with tattoos. All he
needed was a tunic instead of jeans—or nothing but blue vegetable
dye—and he’d be a painted Pict from Roman legend. Unless the Picts
had been blue from the cold.

Some experts postulated that the designs
carved on the stones began as tattoos, which led Jean back to her
musings on Pictish treasures, whether “treasure” could be defined
as artifacts valuable to collectors or potsherds of interest to no
one but scientists. Or the bones of a mythical beast. Whether the
Bouchards with their shop and Ambrose with his collection and Roger
with his scientific interests were simply on different parts of the
same spectrum. Whether the fact that people often killed for
treasure meant anyone was intent on killing for it now.

Time to download some data before her brain
exploded. Kirsty and something about letters, for one thing. That
would surprise and gratify Alasdair, or she’d eat her junior
detective’s magnifying glass and deerstalker hat. Pulling out her
cell phone, she told herself that with her luck, he’d gone back to
Inverness and she’d have to wait until tomorrow for a face-to-face
meeting. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

Whoa
. Here came a bulky shape casting
a grotesquely long shadow in the evening sun. D.S. Sawyer was
cruising the crowd, so heavy-footed Jean could almost feel each
step reverberating in the earth. She imagined tiny biplanes
circling his head while he drummed on his chest and swatted at
them, and she started looking for an escape route. But Sawyer was
after fresher meat.

D.C. Gunn was chatting to Kirsty and Brendan,
one hand in his pocket, the other holding a soft drink. Brendan and
Kirsty looked less woebegone than they had earlier, if far from
cheerful. Gunn said something that was accompanied with a shrug.
That they hadn’t made any progress on the case? Brendan opened his
mouth to reply just as Kirsty saw Sawyer bearing down on them and
quailed so quickly she bounced off Brendan’s nicely filled-out
chest.

Shutting his mouth with a snap, Brendan put
his arm around Kirsty and pulled her close. For a second she stood
stiffly against him, then leaned into his embrace. Gunn stood his
ground, his face set with icy courtesy—a copy of one of Alasdair’s
repertory of expressions. Gunn chose his role models well.

Sawyer bore down on the trio. His forefinger
targeted Kirsty and Brendan. His recessed chin split with a
humorless smirk like the smile on the snout of a crocodile. He
slowed down just long enough to hiss something into Gunn’s ear.

Gunn made a face like that of the offendee in
a mouthwash ad. His left hand came out of his pocket and hung
clenched at his trouser seam. Jean could almost hear the creak of
the soft drink can as his other hand tightened on it. And yet he
said nothing, only stood his ground as Sawyer stomped on by.

Kirsty blinked and Brendan frowned. Sawyer,
having counted coup against Gunn, continued his circuit of the
tent. He was headed directly for Jean. She spun around and pushed
through the crowd, propelled by righteous anger and frustration—at
what, she wasn’t sure, but she’d back Gunn over Sawyer any day.
Heck, she’d back Kirsty and Brendan over Sawyer, and for all she
knew they were hip-deep in conspiracy.

Jean bounced off the soft body of a woman,
ricocheted off the skinny body of a man, and thudded straight into
a third body. This one was hard, rock-steady. Large, firm hands
grasped her upper arms and both pushed her away and held her
upright. She knew who it was before she tilted her face up to
his.

“Well now,” said Alasdair’s brushed-velvet
voice, the warmth of his breath bathing her cool cheeks. “What’s
all this then?”

One corner of his mouth was tucked in and his
eyes were twinkling . . . No, that was heresy. Alasdair’s eyes
didn’t twinkle. They might scintillate gravely, or elude Jean’s
gaze like a will o’ the wisp, or glow like twin blue flames.

He wasn’t eluding Jean’s gaze. He was staring
back, his brows drifting downward and his lips tightening, no doubt
thinking his policeman-as-cliché joke had thudded down like another
cliché, the infamous lead balloon. If she’d laughed he might have
come back with a smile and a
Move along, nothing to see
here
. But it was too late now for a light moment, drat it all
anyway.

“It’s been a long day,” Jean said neutrally,
hoping to excuse her lack of appreciation. Hoping to excuse her
blindly playing human pinball, for that matter, without dragging
Alasdair back to humorless reality by mentioning Sawyer.

“Oh aye,” said Alasdair, also neutral.

She liked the feel of his hands on her arms,
and had to resist the temptation to flatten her own hands on the
lapels of his coat. Or open the lapels of his coat and press her
palms against the starched white front of his shirt. And yet, at
the same time, she also had to resist the temptation to flinch and
flounce away with a feminist mutter. She did neither, which was a
compromise like most compromises, less than satisfactory to both
sides. “You can let me go now.”

“Ah.” Releasing her, he raised his hands in
front of his chest, palms out, making simultaneously a warding
motion and the universal gesture of
I’m unarmed
.