The Murder Hole (22 page)

She would have sagged had she not been
holding herself alertly upright. Funny how her arms seemed cold and
weak without the pressure of his hands. Dropping her gaze, she
noticed a few scone crumbs clinging to the breast of her less than
posh tweed jacket and quickly brushed them away.

“You’ve had your tea, then,” said Alasdair,
following her gesture.

“At the new hotel,” Jean replied. “Nice
place. Good food. Kudos to your cousin Hamish.”

Alasdair nodded approval of either Hamish’s
designer or his chef.

“I hope you’ve had more than that sandwich
you were eating earlier,” she said.

“Oh aye, Hamish sent along several meals by
way of having the exploding boat sorted and swept away as soon as
possible. I’m thinking the case is bringing in more business, not
less, but then, there’s more than money to consider.”

“Like safety? Yes, there is that.”

Alasdair gestured toward a nearby booth
stocked with an array of whiskey bottles. They glinted every shade
of amber as one last ray of sun squeezed between the western
mountains and thickening gray cloud. “I could do with a wee dram
just now. Fancy joining me?”

“Sure, as long as you don’t mind my doing a
data-dump at the same time.”

“Eh?”

“Telling you what I learned in my afternoon’s
snooping,” Jean amended.

“That goes without saying. I’d not be sharing
a whiskey with just anyone.” He turned toward the booth.

She told herself not to waste time assaying
that remark.

“A Lagavullin and . . .” He glanced toward
Jean.

Of course he’d like a dry malt flavored with
sea spray and smoke. The Speyside malt she’d drunk last night—five
years ago, it seemed now—had been almost sweet. “The same,” she
said, and reached for her bag.

“It’s my shout. You paid for the dinner in
May.” Alasdair produced suitable coin of the realm before she could
unzip her bag.

Except her bag was already unzipped.
Rats!
She must have been in such a hurry to escape Tracy at
the hotel she hadn’t closed it after paying for her tea . . .
Whew
. There was her billfold, safe and sound. She zipped up
the bag and made sure the tab of the zipper was tucked into its
down and locked position.

Alasdair was holding a plastic glass toward
her. “They’re just out of the Waterford crystal.”

“Thank you,” she said with a smile, and
managed to take the glass from his hand without actually touching
him.

Alasdair tapped his glass against hers. “As
my sainted granny used to say, preserve us from a disorder whiskey
canna cure.”

“Hear, hear.” Jean inhaled more than sipped
the bright, brisk fragrance of the whisky, soothing and
invigorating at once. “First a cousin and now a grandmother. I
thought you were the lone ranger.”

“Chance would be a fine thing,” he replied
sarcastically, and drank. The elegant curve of his lips thinned in
a smile.

Dazzled, she went along quietly as he
escorted her to one of several folding chairs grouped beneath a
canvas canopy, a small no man’s land neither below the big top nor
right next to the police van. Hugh and his band were playing one of
their part folk, part rock specialties, Jean noted with pleasure,
even though this position closer to one set of speakers than the
other distorted the sound just a bit. But it also meant the volume
wasn’t as high.

Alasdair didn’t pull out his handkerchief and
wipe off the seat of her chair. Jean almost wished he had—the damp
seat sent an icy shock wave up her body. Well, that was why the
Scots had invented whiskey to begin with. She drank deeply.
Aaaah
. Liquid fire burst in her mouth and sent rivulets of
flame first into her stomach, then out through each limb like sap
coursing through a tree. Fire and ice met in her gut, and she
shivered with a strange alloy of pain and delight.

Alasdair sat down and gazed expressionlessly
out over the field. Jean gazed at him. What a shame he was wearing
his police uniform of suit and tie—the latter knotted against his
throat, even at the end of day—when so many of the other men were
wearing kilts.

But wee dram or no wee dram, joke or no joke,
tonight he was On Business, his shoulders taut if not exactly
tense, his face still if not exactly stern. “What are you after
telling me, then?”

“I talked to Kirsty, and to everybody else at
the B&B, more or less. And I saw Roger at Pitclachie and later
with Tracy. . . You can tell I’m an academic, can’t you? I start
out by giving you the abstract. Whether it all adds up to an actual
paper or is just random noise is the question.”

She expected him to respond, “That’s for me
to decide, isn’t it?” But he merely tilted his head toward her, the
better to hear.

No need to get out her notebook, it was all
fresh in her mind. Jean summed up her conversation with Kirsty—Iris
and Roger and the tower, Ambrose’s corkscrew, books, Gordon Fraser,
Jonathan, Brendan. Even the bad feel in the summerhouse and the
knitting.

Alasdair listened, his eyebrows making sine
waves of comprehension and intelligence. Then they furrowed.
“Knitting?”

“Well, the knitting itself isn’t important.
It just gave me a chance to read Kirsty’s body language. Obviously
she’s upset about Jonathan and about Iris being taken away for
questioning. But it was when I told her that Iris had confessed to
the letters that she really cringed. And . . .”

“You told her that?”

“Did you want to keep that quiet?”

“No, no. Kirsty didn’t already know about the
confession?”

“Why should she? All she knew was that Iris
had gone off to Inverness.”

The crease between his brows deepened. “Iris
and Kirsty are both playing silly beggars with us, like as not.
Have you gone and asked yourself why Iris confessed?”

“I can make a guess . . .” A spark in his eye
tipped her off—she was just about to take a big bite out of her
deerstalker. “Okay, Alasdair. What do you know that I don’t
know?”

“We’ve checked the backgrounds of everyone at
all associated with the Water Horse Expedition, as per routine.
Only one is known to the police. Kirsty Wotherspoon.”

Jean felt her jaw drop. Retrieving it, she
said, “Really?”

“Oh aye. Two years since, she was one of
several students harassing a teacher by making it appear the school
had a poltergeist.”

“You mean they threw things around when the
teacher’s back was turned and then claimed it was a
poltergeist?”

“Oh aye. Most poltergeist cases involve
adolescents. It’s hard to say how many are genuine. Like ghosts,”
he added in a soft growl.

Jean wondered whether Alasdair had been able
to sense the paranormal all his life, as she had been all of hers,
and whether his friends and relations had given him as much grief
about it in his youth. Before he, like her, had learned to keep his
uncanny light—his will o’ the wisp of perception—under a bushel.
Traditionally, the Highlanders were more open to the paranormal,
but then, Kirsty’s family hadn’t been, unless that was a result of
Ambrose’s aversion therapy. “If Kirsty has a sixth sense, perhaps
acting out as a poltergeist wasn’t that far-fetched for her.”

“That’s as may be, but the affair in Glasgow
was admitted to be a hoax and sorted by the juvenile authorities.
What’s interesting is that the scheme fell apart when Kirsty wrote
a poison-pen letter to the teacher, gilding the lily, so to speak.
Or perhaps deliberately giving the game away. It was then the
teacher called in the police.”

“Aha! I knew that!” Jean exclaimed.

Alasdair didn’t leap out of his chair in
surprise, but he did tilt forward in interest.

“Noreen Hall said something about a boyfriend
getting Kirsty into trouble over some letters. He must have been
one of the other students involved, maybe even the driving
force.”

“A boyfriend, eh?”

Ah, something he didn’t know. “I bet that’s
why her family sent her here, to get her away from not only the
school, but also the exploitive boyfriend. And now Iris thinks
Kirsty sent the letters to Roger. She confessed to protect her. And
Kirsty cringed the way she did because she knows that’s what Iris
is doing, and she’s blaming herself.”

“Great minds think alike, Jean.” Alasdair
raised his glass in a salute. There was that spark again, and
another, not enough to be fireworks and yet not unlike the lit
fuses of fireworks.

Focusing on the case, Jean said, “But Kirsty
didn’t send the letters, did she? It makes even less sense for her
to have done it than for Iris. Unless she thought she was helping
Iris for some reason. And here I was picturing Kirsty as Ophelia. I
guess you don’t have many of these contemporary girls doing the
Ophelia bit.”

“Make up your mind. Earlier you were
comparing her to Juliet.”

“Yeah, well.” Not so long ago, that sort of
remark would have yanked her hackles out by the roots. Now Jean sat
back and sipped again at her whiskey, barely prickling.

Hugh’s voice emanated from the speakers
riffing on the more absurd aspects of Scottish history, wry humor
being the stick that kept the jaws of tragedy from snapping shut.
Overhead the clouds coagulated into a blanket of gray, so that
beyond the bright lights of festival and town, Midsummer’s day
failed of its promise and darkened to a murky twilight.

“What’s irritating,” Jean said, “is that
Iris’s confession is obscuring the real issue.”

“And just what is the real issue, are you
thinking?”

“Roger’s expedition, surely.”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Jean.”

“No, it’s not,” she told him. “You talked to
every single person who visited the boat yesterday, didn’t you?
That’s quite a job.”

“I didn’t interview them personally, mind. I
have my resources.”

“Whereas we reporters have to take what
scraps we can. Maybe some of my investigative cousins several times
removed would have gone ahead and searched the house themselves,
but me, I sit here and politely ask you if your team found
anything.”

“And if I wasn’t letting you in on the case,
would you be waiting to ask?”

“That sounds like the old saying, keep your
friends close and your enemies closer.”

“Are we enemies?” he asked, with a sideways
glance that also mingled fire and ice, to the same disquieting
effect on her stomach. He sure was saying we easily these days.

“No, we’re not enemies.” As for what they
were . . . She let the implications blow away in the wind that
flapped the edge of the canvas and ran its cold fingers through her
hair. “So did you find anything in the main house? How about the
Lodge? There’s a locked door upstairs that’s driving me nuts. Both
Kirsty and Iris say it’s only a lumber room.”

”That’s what my team is saying it is, as
well. Furniture, boxes, two paintings, a right mixtie-maxtie of
bits and pieces. The Mackintosh family collection of mathoms, to
use Tolkien’s word.”

“Rats. No boxes of Ambrose’s private
papers?”

“Not a one, or so they say.”

“How about the room in the tower, then?
Iris’s lair?”

The corner of Alasdair’s mouth quirked.
“Nothing helpful in the tower room, either. Bar turning over the
place myself—and I’m not discounting that—I’ve got no new evidence
about the letters, let alone the explosion. As you say, rats.”

“So what about your interviews? Kirsty’s
previous track aside, did you find anyone who isn’t who they say
they are? Brendan? Anyone from the B&B?”

“Not a one. They’re a right difficult lot,
helpful to a fault. Brendan’s saying he and Jonathan hadn’t been
getting on, no—two young stags trying their antlers, I’m
thinking—but he made the remark about Jonathan going into the water
by chance.”

“No surprise there. If he were planning to
eliminate a rival or whatever, he’d hardly signal his intentions
that baldly.”

“Not with you listening, no,” Alasdair said.
“Some of the witnesses, now, some are more sensitive than others. I
mind you saying you smelled petrol on the boat.”

“We’ll skip past my sensitivities, thank you.
But yeah, that’s a good point. Let me guess—Noreen Hall smelled it,
too. Martin said last night she had a migraine.”

“Oh aye. Mrs. Hall seems a bit nervy, I’m
thinking, but . . .”

“Who doesn’t?” Jean finished for him. “Did
she tell you they were here in April? Martin has a thing for
Nessie, too. And I thought I saw him in Tracy’s hotel room,
although, to be fair, it could have been the guy from Starr,
Kettering. Still, Noreen said Martin was talking to Tracy on the
boat.”

“Ah,” said Alasdair with a nod. “That might
could be important.”

“Or not even accurate.”

“Oh aye.” Alasdair tilted his glass so that
the last drop of whiskey ran down into his mouth, then licked his
lips in a gesture that in anyone else would be sensuous.

And why wouldn’t it be sensuous in Alasdair?
Because in him sensuality was only a brief glimpse, like a distant
flicker of lightning? Or because knowing Alasdair harbored any
sensuality at all beneath his carapace made her uncomfortable? Jean
had wondered what it would be like seeing him again, talking to him
again. Now she knew. Being with him wasn’t a state, it was a
continuum, and multiple answers applied. Sipping her own
whiskey—ah, her cheeks were starting to burn, a sure sign of
alcohol intake—she looked at the stage.

Hugh wasn’t making sensuous music but was
leading the crowd in a rousing chorus of “The John Mclean March.”
He was a breath of fresh air, even if at times it was the sort of
fresh air that turned your umbrella inside out.

Tracy Dempsey came shouldering her way
through the multitude, dragging Roger along like a mother dragging
her child off to the woodshed. Jean leaned over toward Alasdair to
point them out just as he leaned over to her, so that they were
each encompassed by the other’s warm whiskey breaths.