The Murder Hole (25 page)

Voices shouted. Bodies bustled. Jean stood
swaying, tremors running along her limbs, the rain plastering her
hair to her head and smearing her glasses so that the scene became
increasingly impressionistic. The bright blue lights of first
police cars, and then an ambulance, strobed. Jean felt as though
she and Roger were surrounded by paparazzi. But then, someone
probably
was
taking photos.

Roger had borne the brunt of the fall and the
nettles, but was still healthy enough to stand unsupported and
bellow profanities at all and sundry. Including Tracy, when she
finally appeared. She stammered that she’d been having a drink with
Kettering in the bar of the Drumnadrochit Hotel, she hadn’t noticed
anything until she’d heard the ambulance siren, what happened,
someone was out to get them, she’d said so, hadn’t she? And the
police hadn’t listened.

Kettering was close behind her, elbowing
through the official cordon into the frenetic lights, his face
stamped with an expression that said so clearly
Now what?
it
might just as well have been tattooed on his sallow cheeks.

Then Jean found herself handed into the back
of the ambulance, where she was probed and tested like a product
under development. Her hand burned where it had gone into the
nettles. The paramedic spread salve on it. Her knee oozed blood and
mud through ripped nylon. The paramedic cut away the leg of her
panty-hose, cleaned off her knee, and wrapped it in a bandage. She
could have done all that herself. What she needed was a warm bath
and clean clothes and a snort of sedative from one of the little
phials sparkling seductively on a nearby rack.

Roger, his store of invective emptied at
last, lay silently on the stretcher across from her as a second
paramedic tended to various abraded, bruised, and stung body parts.
Poor Roger, Jean thought. He would probably have looked just as
bleary if her glasses had been clean.

The blurred ovals of faces floated
disembodied in the doorway—Tracy’s red lips turned down in a scowl,
Kettering gabbling, Sawyer stony rather than truculent. Then the
paramedics were easing her back out into the darkness. Oh, there
was Alasdair again, his firm grasp on her upper arm steering her
across the sidewalk and into the back of a police car. Maybe it was
the same one she’d ridden in earlier that day. Last week.
Whenever.

Alasdair was sitting beside her, his keen,
cold face winking in and out of shadow as the car jolted past the
brightly-lit island of the hotel and into the driveway leading up
the hill to Pitclachie House. More lights flashed as another car,
coming from the opposite direction, turned in just behind them.
Lights glowed among the trees and solidified into arched
windows.

The car door opened. Kirsty took one arm and
Brendan the other, helping Jean onto her feet as though she were a
centenarian. In the distance a couple of vaguely familiar voices,
male and female, asked questions in halting French-accented
English. All the dialects blended into a Tower of Babel moment—Jean
didn’t understand a word.

Kirsty opened the door of the Lodge. Alasdair
cut Jean from the herd and ushered her through the door. Lodge, she
thought. Home away from home. She took a breath so deep it made her
ribs hurt and groped for the light switch. The room leaped into
color and definition. Her voice was scraped a bit thin, but it
worked. “I’m fine. More scared and shocked and angry and all that,
you know, than hurt.”

Whether or not she’d intended to dissuade him
from coming inside made no difference. Grimly, Alasdair shut the
door, brushed past her, and set her bag on the table. How long had
he been carrying that?

Over the arm of the chair next to the
fireplace appeared a small bewhiskered face and two bat-like ears.
The calico cat, Mandrake, looked with a proprietary air toward the
door, decided to permit the interlopers entrance, and settled back
down again. He must have sneaked in when the police did their
search.

With a narrow glance at the cat, Alasdair
proceeded to open doors, try windows, and close curtains downstairs
and up. He might be back in full inscrutable mode, but his
practiced expressionlessness didn’t fool Jean one bit. That quick
look at the brim of disaster had shattered any remaining
rationalizations about his feelings for her, or hers for him.
Oh
God
.

Her knees buckled and deposited her onto the
couch, wet clothes and all. She took off her glasses, vaguely
surprised they were still on her face, and mopped at them with a
tissue. When she put them back on she saw that the books were still
in order and the dishes still gleamed in the drainer. Except for
admitting the cat, the police team had come and gone invisibly. So
far, only the mysterious nocturnal visitor and the ghosts had left
any hints of their presence. Perhaps last night’s visitor was one
of the ghosts. Or perhaps he or she was only too corporeal, and had
tonight been behind the wheel of a car.
Oh God, oh God.

Alasdair descended the staircase, walked
straight to the kitchen, and ran water into the tea kettle. They
might be alone at last, but what he’d ask next would not be
personal but professional. Had she seen anything? She collected the
bits and pieces of imagery clinging like lint to her memory. No,
she’d seen only the thick gray air and the tail lights of the car
winking as it disappeared into the distance. Which, considering the
range of visibility, wasn’t all that distant.

Aha
. “The lights. The car that almost
hit us didn’t have its headlights on. I saw the tail lights come on
right after it passed.”

“I’m thinking it did hit you.” Alasdair
spooned tea into the pot. “Driving without lights, were they? They
were after hitting you, then.”

“Well, no—they could have left the lighted
parking lot and not realized their lights weren’t on. They could
have had too much to drink. In fact, that’s probably the
explanation, right there. It was an accident.”

“Then they’d have been better off stopping
and rendering aid.”

“Maybe they didn’t realize they, um, hit us.
Maybe they did, and were scared, and weren’t thinking straight. It
was an accident, wasn’t it?”

Alasdair committed himself to nothing more
than pouring boiling water into the pot.

Jean pulled her jacket more tightly across
her chest. The room was cold. She was cold, damp, chilled through
and through. And not only physically. She could feel her psyche
contracting into a ball, like an armadillo showing only its scales.
Not that she’d seen many live armadillos, just armadillo bodies
lying alongside a road, creased with tire tracks . . . It was an
accident.

Alasdair’s strong hands were extending a mug
of tea toward her. She took it, carefully, so it wouldn’t slop into
her lap. Its warmth was almost painful against her chilled fingers,
but the fragrant steam wafting upward, caressing her face, and her
grimace loosened.

Alasdair switched on the anachronistic but
welcome electric fire. He paused by the chair to offer Mandrake a
quick ear-scratch. The cat tilted his head into Alasdair’s hand,
smirking, then blinked in disdain when Alasdair broke off the
contact and walked back to the couch and Jean.

Given a less fraught occasion, Jean would
have smiled—Alasdair probably knew the secret cat passwords, he was
so feline in mood and movement himself. But now, now she
didn’t.

He stood next to the couch, arms crossed,
looming protectively. “Drink your tea.”

She almost returned,
You can stop fussing
over me now
, but he didn’t deserve that. Obediently, she forced
the cup between her teeth and drank. The hot liquid oozed downward
into the fist of her stomach. Not that she was going to rekindle
any glow. Third time was not the charm.

“I shouldn’t have sat you down outside the
police van,” Alasdair said. “I shouldn’t have let Uncle Tom
Cobleigh and all see you talking with me.”

“Why not talk to me in front of everyone?
There’s always been an unholy alliance of reporters and police. And
our association last month is a matter of public record. Heck, I
told Kirsty I was working with you, just to salve my conscience.
This isn’t your fault.”

His face was still carefully blank. “Last
time I let you work with me and you found yourself in danger.”

“Last time I volunteered to work with
you.”

“Who came to whom doesn’t matter.”

Yes it does
, Jean thought. The day
with its exposures and denials had been long and embarrassing
enough without him becoming paternalistic.

“This time,” he said, “you’re away to
Edinburgh the morn. Away from this.”

“No way.”

“Jean . . .”

“I mean, yeah, I know, it wouldn’t look good
on your record having a colleague . . .” She bit her tongue before
it said the word die. That came too close to the territory occupied
by Sawyer’s insult at the police station, reminding Alasdair of the
tragic situation with his former partner. Which had earned him a
promotion into this solitary responsibility, where passersby were
less likely to smell the rotting albatross hanging around his
neck.

He didn’t reply, but snowflakes began to
settle on his expression.

It wasn’t all about him, the reasonable part
of her mind told her. He was worried for her because he cared for
her. She probably was in danger. The irrational part of her mind,
the part that was still palpitating, shoved the reasonable part
aside. “If someone is trying to get me because I’m helping you out,
that implies I know something that could be dangerous to that
someone. And I don’t.”

“You might not know what you’re knowing,
Jean. Someone nicked your notebook and an hour later you’re hit by
a car. You might could have been killed.”

“Maybe I only misplaced the book. Maybe it
was taken by a casual pickpocket.” She’d tried those rationales
already. They were even less likely to work now. He was right, and
that just made her more stubborn. “Maybe the crazy driver was
trying to get Roger, trying again to stop the expedition. I just
happened to be there. What if he thought Roger was walking with
Tracy? She and I are about the same size, well, without her shoes.
But whoever it was couldn’t have seen her shoes anyway.”

“If someone was having a go at Roger, then it
was no accident, was it?” Alasdair’s frosty expression was taking
on a crust, the crisp layer of ice atop a drift of snow.

Jean knew that at any moment she’d break
through and be in it up to her neck. But she heard her voice keep
on talking. “This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. What
if I put myself in danger, what if I put someone else in danger,
what if I . . .” She left the
met you again
twisting gently
in the chill air. “Don’t waste your time giving me an engraved
invitation to bug out. It’s too late for that. I’m here. I’m part
of the case. I have to find out what the hell is going on. I’m not
going to run away. I’m not . . .”

Alasdair finished her sentence for her.
“Doing what I’m telling you to do. I’m that great a threat to you,
am I?”

And she couldn’t fool him. He graciously
granted her permission to follow his orders and then admitted he
knew exactly how she’d react to such noblesse oblige. Maybe that
shared look hadn’t meant much after all.

“I’ll have a constable outside for the night,
so you can have some sleep,” Alasdair said, retreating toward the
vestibule. At the velvet curtain he paused to send her a formal,
almost stern, backwards glance. Then he was gone, the door shut so
silently behind him the sleeping cat didn’t twitch a whisker.

She wished he’d just gone ahead and slammed
it so hard pictures fell off the walls and a rudely-awakened
Mandrake shuffled off one of his lives. Gulping down the rest of
her tea—it had cooled just enough in Alasdair’s blizzard blast that
she didn’t burn her mouth—Jean stamped halfway up the stairs. At
that point a vicious twinge in her knee brought her to a dead
stop.

Gasping, she hung onto the banister and
wondered if the pain was in her knee so much as in the foot she’d
just shot. Damn Alasdair! Why hadn’t he sat down on the couch
beside her instead of looming? Yes, he’d intended to convey
professional protectiveness. No, he hadn’t intended to patronize
her. Yes, he’d realized too late how she was reading his concern.
No, he hadn’t deserved what she’d said.

She remembered Roger and Tracy glowering at
each other over their tea. A crisis was just as likely to separate
a couple as bring them together. At least Roger and Tracy were a
couple. She and Alasdair were simply a mutual threat, it seemed.
They could so easily have taken the accident or attempt on her life
or whatever the hell it was as an excuse to further their detente.
But no.

Now he'd hunker down in his emotional keep
and pull up his drawbridge. The next time she approached with a
flag of truce, he’d pour not boiling oil but ice water through the
murder holes. Damn it all anyway.

Favoring her knee, swearing less at it than
at herself and Alasdair combined, Jean hobbled into the upper hall.
Where the erstwhile locked door stood wide open. Odd, how the
police team had left the door open when they’d been so careful to
leave everything else undisturbed. Still, here was her chance.

Reaching into the shadowed room, she fumbled
for, found, and flicked on the light switch, and only then realized
what she’d done. If savaging Alasdair meant she would be freed from
her fear of the dark, she’d just go on and be afraid of the dark,
thanks anyway.

From the shadows leaped the shapes of three
dilapidated cardboard boxes, a couple of framed paintings, a little
table with one broken leg, and a set of dining chairs with
beautifully carved backs but seat cushions in tatters. Jean was
looking at exactly what Iris and then Kirsty had said was in the
room, old family stuff.