The Murder Hole (27 page)

The transcripts. She owed it to Alasdair to
do her assignment conscientiously. She opened a new file on her
computer and dumped a short stack of paper out of the envelope,
copies of typewritten pages. A post-it note obscured the cover
sheet. “Jean. Here you are. Thanks for helping out. A.” The
handwriting was solid, the strokes as precise, as controlled, as
letters carved onto a stone monument. But his capitals hinted at
frustration, the “J” of her own name slashing downward . . . Good
grief! Here she was analyzing the man’s handwriting! Next she’d be
drawing little hearts with his initials in them in the margins of
the papers. She began to read.

According to the police reports and
interviews, the only physical evidence in the case of Mrs.
Mackintosh’s disappearance was a freshly-scrubbed floor at the foot
of the stairs in Ambrose’s study and a bloodstained scarf
identified as Eileen’s that was found caught in a shrub. The police
had established that the blood on the scarf was human, but that was
the forensic limit in 1933.

The trial transcripts repeated the interviews
in the voices of the participants. Jean began typing notes,
occasionally smiling at the archaic language of both the era and
the court.

The servants—Eileen’s maid, a cook, a
butler/valet and several gardeners—and members of the local
community all agreed that Eileen and Ambrose were not on good
terms, but that Iris’s birth had gratified them both and given them
hope for the future. Eileen had last been seen by her maid on the
morning of March 29. Then the servants had departed and left
Eileen, baby Iris, Ambrose, and a companion alone.

Jean sat up, earning an eyelid shiver from
Mandrake. A companion? Oh. The woman hadn’t been a servant, a petty
but relevant point in the days when social status had been
meticulously graded. She had been a
companion
, and not even
a paid one, apparently, just a woman who had lived at Pitclachie
since the previous fall, fetching and carrying for Eileen during
her pregnancy and then for baby Iris.

She, too, disappeared on March 29. And her
name, Jean saw with a micro-thrill, was Edith Fraser. From Foyers,
which was near Crowley’s Boleskine estate. But that didn’t mean
Edith was connected to Crowley, let alone Gordon Fraser the
bookseller, who disapproved so strongly of The Beast from
Boleskine. Inverness-shire was Fraser territory. Still, Alasdair
would be interested in this bit of synchronicity. Jean typed
Edith’s name, added an exclamation point, and hurried ahead to
Ambrose’s own testimony.

The prosecution said, probably with a sniff,
“It is suggested here by the Crown that on March twenty-ninth,
nineteen-thirty-three, you killed your wife, Eileen Fleming
Mackintosh.”

Ambrose replied, probably with an indignant
bridle, “That is absolute bunkum with a capital B, if I may say it.
Why should I kill my wife?”

“Mr. Mackintosh seems to have great
difficulty recognizing bunkum, whether capitalized or not,”
retorted the prosecutor, no doubt referring to Ambrose’s admiration
for Crowley and implying that murdering one’s wife was the logical
outcome of such admiration.

The defense had contented itself with a
stiff, “The Mackintosh family has always borne the stamp of
respectability and truthfulness.”

Ambrose had conducted himself accordingly,
displaying his credentials as landed gentleman and benign scholar.
No, he and his wife had sadly not been getting on well. As for the
day she disappeared, its quiet had been broken only by a cup of
coffee spilled at the foot of the staircase in his study. He had
emerged from his sanctum late in the afternoon to find both Mrs.
Mackintosh and her companion Miss Fraser gone and the infant Iris
wailing in her cradle, her condition of hunger and dampness
indicating that she had been unattended for quite some time. He
could not explain the bloodied scarf.

What had happened to his wife? The
tribulations of childbirth and motherhood had proved too much for
her delicate constitution and she had thrown herself into the loch.
Dreadful business, a great tragedy.

What had happened to Miss Fraser? Perhaps the
terrible event had unhinged her mind. Or, fearful of attracting
blame, however unjustified, she had not stayed to give notice but
had run away. She was above the age of consent. He was not her
keeper. She was a destitute young woman from the area, who, out of
the goodness of his heart and his desire to see his wife catered to
during her very difficult—blush—confinement, he had taken in.

The defense inferred that Edith killed Eileen
and fled, but could not come up with a motive other than a vague
suggestion of missing jewelry. Out of respect for the Fleming
family’s sensibilities, though, no one had inventoried Eileen’s
belongings. When the maid said she was under the impression nothing
was gone, that was that.

Edith’s destitution might explain why her
family was absent from the transcripts and presumably the trial. It
did explain why no one seemed more than perfunctorily concerned
about where she’d gone. She had been something between a parasite
and a slave, neither part of the servant’s hall nor known to the
friends Eileen had liked to entertain before her “confinement” had
confined her within the walls of Pitclachie, alone except for
Ambrose and a skeleton crew—
hah
, Jean told herself—of
servants.

Edith
. Was it just coincidence that
“Edith” also started with an “E”?
To my dear E, remembering the
good times
. What? Had there been some sort of love triangle?
That could explain a lot, up to and including Edith’s abrupt
departure. As for the Lodge’s ghost-video . . .

Jean swiveled, but the staircase was silent
and empty, and beyond the fringes of the rug the stone flags of the
floor revealed no lingering stains, of coffee, blood, or anything
else. Had her ghost-sensing been confirmed by outside evidence? If
so, that was both encouraging and creepy.

Jean hitched the duvet further up over her
chest, rested her head against the back of the couch, and massaged
her eyes. The original uneven and slightly smeared typewritten
lines would have been hard enough to read, let alone the
copies.

The room was growing colder and colder, as
much from the iceberg whose tip was barely revealed in the
transcripts as from the chill night outside. The ticking of the
kitchen clock sounded like the plunking of raindrops onto
stone—well, okay, she was hearing the occasional plop of a raindrop
falling from the roof onto the courtyard. The malodorous air of the
old book seemed to be coagulating in her throat like slime. She was
going to have to put it, as well as the cat, out for the night.

Yawning, Jean told herself that if she went
upstairs and lay down, she could get to sleep before any paranormal
activities started up. Maybe. But she had only a few more pages to
go.

The prosecution offered only the merest hints
of occult activities, either sparing the sensibilities of the court
and the Crown or else assuming that those activities were so well
known in Inverness-shire they went without saying. If the defense
had ever considered a change of venue, to, say, Timbuktu, it was
not recorded.

Aleister Crowley had last visited Pitclachie
when he sold Boleskine in 1919. The proprietor of the local hotel,
the building that was now the Official Exhibition with the floating
Nessie, reported white-robed figures carrying flaming torches on
the hillside behind Pitclachie House. Ambrose pooh-poohed the idea
of secret rituals and the like, wisely cutting himself off before
launching into a defense of Crowley’s not-so-secret and
less-than-savory activities. That, Jean supposed, had come
indirectly, in his theories about ceremonial magic in
Pictish
Antiquities
.

While many locals had not been gladdened by
this business of digging up graves, let alone associating with
wizards, digging at the castle was seen as a legitimate endeavor.
As for Ambrose’s collection of bronze and silver artifacts, Jean
deduced that it served as a character reference. And Nessie? Well,
every landed gentleman was allowed his eccentricities, especially
one who had suffered such a terrible tragedy. Jean reminded herself
that at the time of the trial, in late 1933, the Nessie tsunami was
no more than a wavelet on the loch.

Manners and morals had changed so drastically
in seventy years that trying to understand those of an even earlier
period—why the Picts carved and erected their stones, for
example—was the philosophical equivalent of landing on Mars.
Impatient, she skimmed ahead to the verdict and the formal
discharge of the prisoner. The court had probably greeted “Not
Proven” with an air of bemused futility, no joy but no sorrow for
either defense or prosecution. So Ambrose’s life had gone on, and
Iris’s life had begun, under a cloud.

Jean stacked the pages and tucked them away
in the envelope, thinking that if not for Ambrose’s slightly
sinister reputation, the jury would have found him Not Guilty and
had done with it. Trust the Scots, with their streak of grim
practicality, to invent a verdict that split the difference between
Guilty and Not Guilty. Not Proven was draped in shades of gray that
hung over you like your own personal overcast the rest of your
life—and after. People who had actually done the deed deserved
that. People who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time
did not. But it wasn’t Jean’s responsibility to pass judgment,
tempted as she often was.

Mandrake lifted his head and looked past her,
toward the stairs. The fur along his back rose into a serrated
edge. His eyes were chips of amber, unblinking. If she leaned over
and looked into those eyes, she’d see what he was seeing. But she
didn’t need to. The back of her neck puckered. The frigid air
pressed her down into the couch, a cement overcoat.

Jean, too, looked toward the stairs, but saw
nothing. Mandrake’s head, though, lowered and turned, tracing the
path of the ghost as it walked down the steps and across the floor
to the vestibule. The velvet curtain twitched. One edge curved
outward, grasped by an unseen hand. It moved slowly across its rod
and with a flutter fell back into place.

Was she hearing faint voices, male and female
intermingled? Or were the microscopic hairs in her ears waving like
sea anemones to otherwise undetectable currents in the air? Ah,
there was that coffee smell again, and tobacco, and something
else—the reek of the old book, probably, cutting through the
extrasensory odors.

Mandrake’s pink nose expanded and contracted.
And then, with an audible sigh, his eyes closed, his fur smoothed,
and his chin dropped onto the duvet. Jean wished it were that easy.
She sat there, skin prickling, waiting for the oppression to lift,
for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a minute.
Exhale, inhale, exhale, and her own fur settled. The tick of the
clock filled the silence. That, and . . . Well of course there
would be footsteps outside, the constable was walking his beat.

Maybe that ghostly display had been the
exhibition for tonight. Maybe it was only the prelude to something
more vivid. She wasn’t going to wait around. It was almost
midnight, time to finally call Saturday a done deal. Midsummer’s
Day, the longest day of the year. No joke.

Yawning again, and resisting the urge to
scrub at the grit in her eyes, she saved her file and shut down the
computer. If nothing else—and there was plenty else—the transcript
gave her an excuse to call Alasdair tomorrow. To talk to him, face
to face. He’d be polite, professional, distant. He’d look like an
ice sculpture. If she wanted to start him thawing again she’d have
to . . .

The trilling notes of Mozart sounded abruptly
from the kitchen.

Jean broke her own record at the sitting high
jump. The duvet went one way and, in a scramble of paws, the cat
went another. Pressing her heart back into her chest, Jean stumbled
to her bag, still sitting beside the sink, and pulled out her cell
phone.
Alasdair?

It was Brad, his voice bland as mashed
potatoes. “Hi. I got your message. What’s going on?”

She leaned against the counter, catching her
breath and waggling her knee. She’d told him what was going on.
She’d told him . . . “Brad, it’s midnight here.”

“Yeah. Six hours later—I knew that, you
didn’t have to tell me. But you said it was a police matter, so I
thought I’d better call. You can get pretty impatient.”

She shouldn’t fault him for those remarks.
Trying not to do so, Jean walked over to the table, pulled some
notepaper and a pen out of the drawer, and established the order of
business: “Someone blew up Roger Dempsey’s boat.”

“What for?” Brad asked.

“That’s what the police want to know,
especially since a man was killed.”

“Whoa. That’s not good.”

She didn’t need to explain the entire case to
him. He’d probably object if she tried. “Roger’s here showing off
all his equipment and searching for the Loch Ness monster.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing he’d go for.
He was telling me all about some treasure galleon sunk off a
Scottish island—you’d know all about that.”

“What do you mean, he was telling you? You’ve
never met him.”

“Sure I have. I was sitting at the bar at
that convention in Williamsburg —you remember, the one about layers
of wallpaper and blocked-up doorways and stuff.”

“The archaeology of standing buildings. Yeah,
that’s where I met Roger, but I didn’t . . .”

“I told you I talked to him.”

She winced. He probably had. But they’d
started tuning each other out a long time ago, more shame to them
both.

“Anyway, I was sitting in the bar and he was
sitting in the bar and we started visiting, you know, the way you
do when you’re just having a drink. He asked me if I was at the
conference and I said I was only there to carry my wife’s
luggage.”