The Murder Hole (32 page)

Jean ducked under the tape, feeling as though
she were being ushered past the bouncer into an exclusive
nightclub. But the room inside the door was blank and bare except
for blocks of sunlight cut by the curving shadows of the mullions
in the east windows and was several times taller than it was
square, like the inside of a bell tower. “Kirsty said that Iris
keeps the tower locked up. Was this door locked last night?”

“By the time we arrived it was.” Alasdair led
the way onto the staircase that angled up the interior walls. Its
wrought-iron banister was a neo-Gothic fantasy, but the stark stone
treads seemed suitably medieval, if not at all hollowed by
centuries of climbing feet. On the second floor landing he
indicated an arched doorway. “This door now, this one was unlocked.
It opens into the upper corridor.”

“So the killer ran out this way?”

“Either that or he flew.”

She was tempted to say that the murderer
could have climbed down the wall of the tower like Dracula, but
restrained herself. She followed Alasdair up the next flight,
carefully, favoring her sore knee. “Are you saying ‘he’ for any
particular reason?”

“No. Could have been ‘she,’ right
enough.”

Four stories up—Jean was grateful she wasn’t
acrophobic—the staircase ended at a trap door in an expanse of
rafters and planks, the floor of the tower room. Alasdair threw
open the trap, climbed through, and disappeared. He wasn’t going to
offer her his hand, then. Once bitten, twice shy.

Not that she needed a hand up. Grasping the
edge of the opening to steady herself, Jean climbed up into Ambrose
and Iris’s eyrie and stood catching her breath.

Kirsty had said nothing was here but dust,
and there was plenty of that, especially around and about the
ceiling rafters. A table and a straight-backed chair sat in front
of one of the windows, beside a bookshelf that held only a pair of
binoculars. Perhaps the notebook Alasdair was leafing through had
also come from there. The wooden planks of the floor were scuffed
and dirty in the center of the room, sprinkled with forlorn yellow
broom blossoms, and were clouded by sheets of dust in the corners,
even the corner propped up by several rusty gardening tools.

Jean had expected the place to look like a
monastic cell, perhaps even the sort of cell in which an anchorite
would have him or herself walled up, the better to contemplate the
mysteries of the soul. But she hadn’t taken into account the view.
Two windows on each side of the room opened it to the glory of the
physical world—the moss-edged slates of the roof, the cascading
leaves of trees, the green fields stitched with pink foxgloves, the
mauve humps of the mountains, the royal blue sky above indigo water
that flowed to the wind and to its own subtle rhythms, its depths
concealing a mystery . . . Wasn’t that one of Aleister Crowley’s
magical precepts,
as above, so below?

Jean frowned. A crease in the surface of the
loch showed several low undulations, darker than the already dark
water . . . Oh. It was the wake of a barge that was just
disappearing behind the tower of Urquhart Castle. Shaking her
head—as inside, so outside—she turned toward another window.

It was closed now, but last night it had been
open, and Tracy had fallen through. Jean walked over to it, noting
that the sill and the floor beneath were clear of dust. The crime
scene specialists had been thorough. She peered through one of the
windowpanes.

There was the roof of the Lodge, and the
terrace, each stone looking smooth, hard, and unforgiving. Now it
was the Ducketts, their bodies oddly foreshortened from this angle,
who were standing where Tracy’s body had lain. They were leaning
together the same way the Bouchards had been leaning together last
night, for mutual support, Jean supposed. And to what end? Her
suspicions about them were one more thing to dump on, er, share
with Alasdair.

The glassed-in murder holes ran around the
edge of the floor, two or three to each wall. She leaned over to
peer through the closest one and saw a dizzying vista straight
down. Something was caught on a branch of ivy—no, the glass was
cracked, that was all.

She straightened. “I take it there’s nothing
in that notebook.”

“The stubs where some pages have been torn
out is all.” Alasdair replaced the book on the shelf, inspected his
fingertips, then brushed them off.

“What evidence did your people collect here
last night?”

Leaning against the edge of the table, he
crossed his arms and looked at Jean. It was the first time he’d
looked at her since he’d stood on her doorstep. His face was so
uncommunicative it might just as well have been covered with a
visor. The visor of a plain, simple helmet, without plumes or the
trailing tokens of a favored lady. “Fingerprints,” he said.
“Footprints. Dirt and pollen. A skein of wool and a broken knitting
needle. Bread crumbs. A cigarette butt. Some bits of plastic,
cloth, and threads. Nothing that shouts, ‘clue here.’”

“A cigarette? Martin Hall smokes, and he was
one of the first people on the scene. I think there was something
going on between him and Tracy. But then, we saw Roger almost bash
her one at the Festival.”

“Roger’s right out. He has an alibi. Sawyer
flushed him out of the ceilidh.”

“And was probably less than diplomatic
informing him he’s now a widower.”

“Like as not,” Alasdair agreed, desert-dry.
“Even so, we’re taking fingerprints, clothing samples, and the like
from everyone concerned, and a few who are not.”

“Did you find any evidence on Tracy’s
body?”

“Nothing yet.” His gaze fell, as though he
pictured the medical examiners going about their work. When he
looked up again, she could see the cold steel of the morgue
reflected in his eyes. “What was it you were telling me last
night?”

Jean’s breath snagged in her throat. But no.
He just wanted the facts, ma’am. She told him the facts, trying not
to stray into opinion any further than she had to. Ambrose’s trial.
Iris’s instructions to Kirsty about one of his books. Roger and the
submersible. The bug in the toy Nessie. She didn’t spare herself
Brad’s role, and she didn’t spare Alasdair her wilder speculations
about the Ducketts and the Bouchards.

He listened, his brows lifting and tightening
in turn, his eyes casting sharp glances at the stairway or the
windows, as though he could look down on the suspects, the
bystanders, even the dead. Like hers, his mind worked just fine as
a remote sensor. “Well then,” he said when Jean reached her last
full stop and with a gesture ceded the floor to him. “That’s a tale
and no mistake. A bug in your soft toy, is it? The man’s not half
daft.”

“Roger, you mean? Or Ambrose?”

“I’m thinking Roger, but Ambrose, now, he
must have been quite a piece of work. One of his books, eh? You’re
right, Iris can’t have known you bought one at the Festival just as
we were taking her away.”

“Kirsty says Iris is on her way back here,
that you’ve let her go.”

“We couldn’t keep her without bringing
charges, and once she told us she’d confessed to sending the
letters to protect Kirsty, we had no charges to bring.”

“And you don’t think Kirsty sent the
letters.”

“I had a word with her this morning. She
owned up to the incident in Glasgow and says she had nothing to do
with Roger’s letters, and, well, I’m believing her.”

“What did you do, try trapping her with the
exact wording or something?” Alasdair glanced down at his feet, an
affirmative answer if Jean had ever seen one. “So she and Iris are
both in the clear, for the letters and the explosion?”

“The former, aye. And the latter, I reckon.
Still, Iris knows more than she’s telling—and who doesn’t—but . .
.”

“She has a cast-iron alibi for Tracy’s
murder,” Jean finished.

“Oh aye. Opportunity’s not everything,
though. Motive, there’s your bottom line.”

“That’s what lacking in Ambrose’s case.
Motive.”

Alasdair strolled over to one of the windows,
braced his hands on both sides of it, and tilted forward, looking
at something outside. “What about this Edith, then? Is she the ‘E’
in your book? Was there a love triangle? Or a lust triangle, come
to that? Jealousy, there’s a motive for you.”

Trust Alasdair to call a spade a spade. Jean
looked at the rusty old tools in the corner next to where he was
standing and thought of the spick and span house and garden below.
She hefted a small dirt-crusted shovel. “Iris wouldn’t let her
gardening tools get this dilapidated, would she? And why would she
haul them all the way up here? I bet these are Ambrose’s excavation
tools.”

Alasdair looked around.

The metal blade fell off the rickety handle.
Jean skipped back, but it missed her feet and clanked to the floor,
sending up a cloud of dust and dirt particles. “That’s the sort of
sound that woke me up this morning. I wondered if it was another
ghost noise. Kirsty said it was Roger and Brendan going to work. I
guess Roger’s on automatic pilot, not that you’d let him leave
anyway. Them.”

“They’re up the field behind the house,
digging themselves a trench, right enough.”

“Having excavating equipment on hand would
have made it easy for Ambrose to bury a body. A lot easier than
hauling one across the main road and pitching it into the loch.”
Jean set down the handle and inspected her fingertips for
splinters. All clear. “Odd, isn’t it, how we’ve gone from thinking
Eileen committed suicide to thinking Ambrose did kill her. She fell
down the stairs while she and Ambrose were arguing and smashed her
head. He wrapped the wound in her scarf and buried her, then
cleaned up the floor and blamed the wet patch on a coffee spill. He
knew he had such a bad reputation in the neighborhood, no one would
believe the truth. The only reason they brought him to trial to
begin with was that same reputation.”

“Ghosts aren’t evidence,” Alasdair pointed
out, not without a hint of a smile.

She shrugged agreement.

“We’ll never know the truth of the matter.
And it might not make any difference, not when it comes to Jonathan
and Tracy.”

“You think it does, though, don’t you? It’s
not just an intellectual exercise.”

“We’ve got no time for intellectual exercises
just now. The lads are setting up in the dining room to interview
everyone here at Pitclachie, about Tracy, mostly, but we’ll have
another go at Jonathan’s death as well, with your information and
all.”

“Glad I could help.” Jean hoped he’d take
that statement the way she meant it, straight up.

He did. There was that implication of a smile
again, but still his face didn’t crack. “Let’s have us a look at
the Pitclachie Stone and see what Roger’s on about.” Without
waiting for her reaction, he headed for the trap door and the
staircase.

All right—not only a couple of
we
’s
but also a
let’s
.
Be careful what you ask for
, Jean
reminded herself. Her knee reminded her to take the stairs slowly.
Alasdair had never asked about it, had he? Well, she couldn’t have
it both ways.

He held the outside door for her, then locked
it and made sure the police tape cut just the right diagonal across
the opening.

D.C. Gunn was kneeling beside the open front
door, balancing a laptop on his thigh and stroking Mandrake’s
helpfully arched back. Just as Alasdair and Jean approached, Andy
Sawyer burst through the doorway with all the subtlety of a train
exiting a tunnel. “Oh for love of . . . Get a move on, Nancy. We’ve
got a nice bit of crumpet inside, not that you’re up for it, are
you now?”

His face going flat white, Gunn leaped to his
feet, computer in hand, and disappeared into the house. The cat
showed great discernment, if not excellent taste, by sprinting
across the courtyard into the shrubbery.

Sawyer’s bull neck swiveled just enough to
see Alasdair gazing at him as gimlet-eyed as a gunner taking aim.
Sawyer gave off a sound between a snort and a cough and followed
Gunn into the house. Alasdair took off into the garden so fast,
Jean could hardly keep up with him.

Each one of his steps hit the path so hard,
the gravel crunched like a shot. It was probably just as well she
could see only the back of his head. His ears were cherry-red. In
another moment smoke would be trailing from them. And she’d thought
earlier he was under pressure. Sawyer’s toxic smog was coming close
to melting Alasdair’s ice cap.

He pushed through the gate and on up into the
pasture, toward where Brendan was digging while Roger stood by. A
long trench, extending perpendicularly from the fence encircling
the pine glade, was marked out by pegs connected with string. So
the remote-sensing equipment had detected something, then. Or Roger
believed it had. He stood very still, the bill of his cap low over
his face, holding a rock in his hands in the same pose as Hamlet
contemplating the skull of Yorick.

Two days ago he’d been brash but charming.
Yesterday he’d seemed flabby, somehow, like a balloon that had lost
most of its helium. And now? Jean couldn’t see his face and wasn’t
sure how to read his stance—tense, certainly. And not only because
parts of his body had been chopped and pureed by the hit-and-run.
Two major emotional blows in as many days must have taken their
toll, and yet he was keeping on keeping on. Jean had to admire the
man for that.

Alasdair stalked past Roger and Brendan as
though they were so many sheep and burst through the gate in the
deer fence. Jean followed, on tiptoe, into the shadow of the glade,
where she found Alasdair standing before the Stone like a pilgrim
before a shrine, head lowered.

The Stone was standing as it had the day
before, aloof but not lonely, a riddle of lost time. Several of the
tumbled rocks at its base seemed darker and grayer than Jean
remembered, showing not the bright whorls of lichen but damp root
tendrils . . . Oh no. Someone had turned more than a few rocks
over. The Bouchards, perhaps, treasure-hunting? She’d seen them
coming out of the enclosure yesterday afternoon. Or Martin? He
seemed to be on Roger’s wavelength. Or Tracy’s.