The Murder Hole (3 page)

“If you want me to be an investigative
reporter, then you took on the wrong partner. There are questions,
and there’s digging through dirty laundry. I bought into Great Scot
because I wanted to drag historical skeletons out of closets, not
air contemporary scandals. No one appreciates privacy issues more
than I do.”

“Privacy? Or secrecy? There’s a difference.
You’ve not lost your nerve, have you now . . .” Miranda bit her
sentence short. Her eyes softened. “Ah, Jean, I’m sorry. If you’re
not remembering your own scandal, then you’re remembering what
happened when you went asking questions last month. You’re quite
right.
Great Scot
is no tabloid rag.”

“Don’t apologize. Someone’s got to rouse the
rabble here. It’s just that I’ve realized what a hypocrite I can
be—show me yours, but I won’t show you mine. I’ve seen how
curiosity can kill, and not just kill me, either.” Jean swished her
dishcloth through the suds, her grimace suddenly buffered by a
chuckle. In her old life she had been accused of asking too many
questions. Making a new life out of asking questions had seemed
like vindication. Discovering that not all the answers were ones
she wanted to hear was poetic justice. Since justice was a rare
enough event, she could live with that. Or so she intended. “What
do you want to bet that my curiosity is only hiding under the bed,
like Dougie does when he thinks he’s completely concealed but his
tail is sticking out in plain sight?”

“There you are,” said Miranda, with one of
her wise expressions. She tore the cellophane away from the cookie
and wadded it crinkling into a ball. “I’ll not be telling you that
history doesn’t repeat itself. You and I both know better than
that. And we’re knowing that it can catch you up no matter where
you are or what you’re doing.”

“Well, yes.”

“And aye, I’m after being a bit cavalier with
Iris’s feelings, but then, I don’t know what her feelings are, do
I? Could be she’d fancy a chance to tell her story.”

True enough. “In other words, when I fall off
my professional horse into a murder investigation, I should climb
right back on?”

“Oh aye. Just that.” Case closed, Miranda
cracked her cookie. She read, “‘A man’s good name is his finest
possession.’”

“No kidding. And a woman’s good name is
hers.”

“You made your point about that, right
enough, when you sued the university for unlawful termination and
won. Well done, Jean.” Crunching, Miranda reached for a
dishtowel.

It was done, whether well or not. Feeling
like Lady Macbeth washing her hands, Jean pulled the stopper out of
the sink. With a gurgle the water spiraled down the drain.

Miranda polished the large platter, made a
face at her reflection, and said with lead-footed nonchalance, “I
suppose the Monster Madness folk will be laying on extra policemen
for the weekend. For the odd drunken brawl and the like. Not to
mention the odd anonymous letter threatening the paying
customers.”

“Probably,” Jean returned. Rats. She’d been
doing a great job of suppressing her queasiness over Dempsey’s
threatening letter.

“Drumnadrochit’s on the Northern
Constabulary’s patch, isn’t it? Your chum D.C.I. Cameron might be
there.”

She hadn’t been doing so well suppressing her
squeamishness over Alasdair Cameron. Her nonchalance just as heavy,
she said, “He’s not my chum. He’s just a business acquaintance. An
acquaintance made during a bad business.”

“Right.”

“Besides, he’s a detective. They’ll only have
the uniformed cops there. The plods.”

“You’ve not heard from Cameron, then? Or
worse, you’ve not contacted him?”

“No, why should I? Maybe we’ll run into each
other—eventually I’ll have to testify about the murder last month .
. .” And how would she react then? Jean imagined the formal
handshake and the sort of polite, “Hello, how are you?” that didn’t
require a truthful answer. Not that that would fool either of
them.

“And this Cameron Arms Hotel in
Drumnadrochit, the name’s only a coincidence, is it?”

“Of course it is. Cameron’s a common name.
It’s not a sign of any . . . Oh.”

Miranda was grinning, the tease. Still, her
keen perception was sandpaper against Jean’s rationalizations.
Fine-grained sandpaper, like a jeweler would use to polish precious
metal, but any sandpaper scraped harshly against a scab. “Damn it,
now you’re ambushing me!”

“You were telling me you moved house to
Scotland because you were tired of playing it safe.”

“Yes, I did. And I am.” Jean rinsed out the
sink, splashing so vigorously a wave leaped onto her T-shirt. “Oh,
for the love of . . .”

Her grin going lopsided, bracketing sympathy
and amusement, Miranda handed over the dishtowel and wandered
discreetly away.

The air in the kitchen was no longer scented
with garlic and soy but with Fairy Liquid and a whiff of Miranda’s
perfume, a clean, fresh scent like the intoxicating smell of the
Highlands. With a smile, one a lot dryer than her shirt, Jean threw
in the towel.

From the television in the living room came a
reporter’s oh-so-sincere voice. “. . . Madness, sponsored by Starr
Beverage PLC here at Loch Ness.”

Jean found Miranda sitting on the couch,
waving the television remote like a wand. “ITN’s reporting on the
Festival just now.”

The screen was filled by the image of a large
pavilion set up in a field beside several buildings, all
silhouetted against a green hillside. Flags, both national and
decorative, rippled in the wind while people bustled around with
speakers, coils of wire, and chairs. Another shot filled the
screen, the familiar picture postcard of Urquhart Castle on the
shores of the loch. The ruinous red stone walls cut a ragged edge
against a mirage-like shimmer of water, reminding Jean of the
mutilated symbol stone.

“This ancient castle,” said the reporter’s
voice-over, “dates back to Pictish times. It was visited by Saint
Columba. Here he saved one of his followers from the monster. The
famous Shiels photograph of the monster was taken from here. Dr.
Shiels said he called the monster from the loch with his telepathic
powers.”

There was the photo, of an open-mouthed
serpent’s head rising from the waves. The picture could just as
well have been, and probably was, of a plastic dinosaur in a farm
pond. Jean laughed. “Are they going for the record amount of
misinformation or what?”

“Ah, but the consumers make a meal of it,”
Miranda pointed out.

Back to the reporter, who held up a rubber
Nessie probably made in Hong Kong, and squeezed a squeak from it.
His smirk said as clearly as words,
what a joke
. “A new
Nessie-hunting expedition is launching this weekend. Operation
Water Horse is directed by Dr. Roger Dempsey, from the Omnium
Technology Organization in Chicago, America.”

“His degree is in business administration,”
Jean told Miranda, “and his doctorate is honorary. He’s a
dilettante like Ambrose Mackintosh, except he’s using electronic
devices that Ambrose would have thought were magic.”

Dempsey’s image appeared on the screen. It
had been seven or eight years since they’d met, although she’d seen
a recent photo in the press kit he’d sent
Great Scot
—and no
doubt every other media outlet in the UK. Animated, his scrub brush
of a beard framing a grin too knowing to be childlike, the bill of
his baseball cap bobbing and weaving, Dempsey seemed more like a
teenager on a joy ride than a businessman testing the company
product. The wrinkles framing his eyes and the gray streaks in his
facial hair looked like aging make-up troweled onto a youth
performing in a high school play.

“Dr. Dempsey,” asked the television reporter,
“has the arrival of a second threatening letter discouraged you in
any way?”

“Second?” Jean asked. “There’s been another
one?”

“Well, well, well.” If Miranda had been a
cat, her whiskers would have gone on alert.

Or maybe ill, ill, ill, Jean thought, but
held her tongue.

“Those letters are too wishy-washy to be
threats,” answered Dempsey. “We’re not going to give up our quest
for the truth because some yellow-bellied yahoo who’s afraid to
face me sends a few letters saying that Loch Ness never gives up
its dead, that sort of pure-D crap.”

True, Jean thought, people who sent anonymous
letters weren’t automatically confrontational. But false, people
drowned quickly and easily in the cold, dark waters of the loch, if
drowning could be considered an easy death, and their corpses were
seldom recovered. Loch Ness was one of the deepest bodies of water
in Britain, given to odd winds and waves, as dangerous as it was
beautiful. Long before Ambrose or anyone else spotted Nessie, the
loch itself had been a tourist destination. There was a reason
Nessie was sometimes equated with the water horse, the
each
uisge
of Celtic legend, a creature that bore unwary riders down
into the depths.

The reporter asked Dempsey, “Do you have any
idea who’s sending the letters?”

“The scientific establishment doesn’t want us
to find any trace of the creatures that live in the loch because
that might upset their preconceptions. The tourist industry doesn’t
want us to prove there is no monster because that would close down
all the souvenir shops.”

“Not bloody likely,” said Miranda.

Jean said, “All the electronics in the world
can’t prove a negative.”

“Scientists or tourist officials are trying
to frighten you away?” the reporter persisted.

Dempsey waved his hand—devil take the
hindmost. “Whoever it is, we’re not taking their games seriously.
We’re not letting them disrupt our work.”

“Still, you’ve handed the letters in to the
police.”

“Far be it from me to deprive the Northern
Constabulary of work.”

“D.C.I. Alasdair Cameron of the Northern
Constabulary told us this morning that his technicians are
examining the letters,” the reporter intoned in an aside.

“Aha,” Miranda stage-whispered. “Kismet.”

The prickle of gooseflesh across Jean’s
shoulders—like the nettle shirt of a fairy tale—was not entirely
unpleasant. But this was no time to start analyzing her feelings
yet again, when, as Alasdair himself would be the first to say,
there was a threat to analyze. She said, “A nut threatened and then
fire-bombed an expedition back in the eighties. But two anonymous
letters don’t have to mean anything like that. The reporter’s
trying to build up his story. So is Dempsey, for that matter.”

“Public relations make the world go round,”
said Miranda.

On the television, Dempsey plunged onward,
parading his dogs and ponies. “Our expedition is using
state-of-the-art remote sensing devices manufactured by Omnium. It
will prove once and for all whether the Loch Ness monster exists,
or has existed in the past.”

“Some of your funding is from Starr
Beverages, as well as your own Omnium.”

“Let’s face it. The Loch Ness monster is
quite a draw. A real star, you might say.” Dempsey’s grin
emphasized his pun.

The camera drew back, revealing Dempsey’s
T-shirt. It was emblazoned with Celtic-style letters reading,
“Operation Water Horse,” as well as with a design that Pictish
scholars called a swimming elephant—not that Jean had ever seen
elephants with trunks sprouting from their foreheads. The same
symbol was also called a gripping beast, although it had neither
talons nor even hands to grip with. But since Jean believed
imagination was one of the most important human faculties, she
couldn’t fault either Picts or scholars for displaying it.

The camera panned to the side, taking in
several bystanders. A woman dressed in another Water Horse T-shirt
stood with her arms crossed. A broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses
concealed the top half of her face, but the diamond studs in her
ears winked with all the subtlety of a stop light. Mrs. Dempsey,
probably. The lower half of her face was fixed in the smile of the
politician’s wife, appearing to hang on every word while actually
thinking of England. Or Chicago, as the case may be.

Two young men, both wearing Water Horse
logos, and a young woman who was not stood a few steps away. The
square-shouldered and square-jawed man offered the camera a
matinee-idol smile. The one whose bulbous brow indicated either
intellect or Klingon ancestry, looked blank. The woman ducked out
of the shot, leaving Jean with an impression of long silky brown
hair veiling a delicate face out of a pre-Raphaelite painting of
Ophelia. Drowned Ophelia . . Imagination, Jean reminded herself,
was a wonderful servant but a poor master.

“Not everyone is pleased to have the
controversial Dr. Dempsey here,” the reporter’s voice went on.
“Earlier we interviewed Iris Mackintosh, the well-known
eco-warrior.”

Iris appeared on the screen. She looked like
the sort of elderly lady Jean intended to become in the far distant
future—an iron-gray-haired ramrod-straight gadfly wearing an old
cardigan and a no-nonsense expression. She didn’t appear to be
chained to a tree, which rather undercut the reporter’s
eco-warrior
.

Her gray eyes, so icy they looked silver,
targeted the camera. She delivered her statement in the accent of
the class and generation of Scots who’d been taught “proper
English”. “It has been clearly demonstrated that nothing larger
than salmon lives in the loch. Sightings of the so-called monster
can be attributed to natural phenomena or fraud. Dr. Dempsey is
using the legend to further his own business interests, and in the
process is trivializing important environmental issues such as
logging run-off.”

Back to Dempsey. “Hey, if there’s a monster
in the loch, it’s part of the ecology, isn’t it? My assistants and
I would be glad to include Miss Mackintosh on our Saturday morning
cruise for the press. She can check us out—no logging, I
promise.”