The Murder Hole (34 page)

Alasdair thrust the earring into his jacket
pocket. “Good morning, Miss Mackintosh.”

“It’s gone noon,” she replied. “When I phoned
Kirsty at eight a.m. she told me you were digging in my
pasture.”

Roger bridled. “You gave me your permission,
Iris.”

“May you have joy of your findings, then,”
she said in tones that made Alasdair’s iciest voice sound
positively tropical. She turned on her heel and marched back down
the path. With perfect timing, a strain of pipe music swelled in
the Festival field and rolled up the hillside.

“Iris, I never meant to find . . . I didn’t
know this was where . . .” Roger began, then darted quick glances
to the faces around him. Jean could imagine what he saw, Brendan
bewildered, Sophie critical, Alasdair authoritative, and Jean
curious. And none of them on his need-to-know list.

Alasdair took the flashlight from Roger’s
hand and turned toward the excavation. Jean heard her own voice
saying, “Here. Let me. You’ve got your suit on.”

He stopped in mid-stride, looked her up and
down, and with a spark that was anything but subtle, handed over
the flashlight. “If Dr. Dempsey survived the trip, then I reckon
you will do as well.”

“Thanks.” So what was she trying to prove?
Jean asked herself. She wasn’t concerned about his suit. It was her
riposte to his
take it or leave it
.

She stepped down into the mucky depth of the
trench. The opening to the entrance passage was almost blocked by
dirt. Roger hadn’t waited for Brendan to clear it all away before
he’d plunged in. Not that the passage itself, lined by flat rocks,
would be very big. She just hoped it wasn’t very long. Number two
on her phobia list, after darkness, was enclosed spaces. Bones now,
were just that, bones. Structural members. Of course, during her
physical anthropology course the bones had been laid out in trays,
on lab tables, all dried and tidy and remote.

Reassuring herself that this tomb appeared
relatively low and squat, which might indicate a smaller
circumference, and that she didn’t have to go all the way in,
anyway, Jean knelt down and faced the yawning darkness of the
opening. And decided she knew how Anne Boleyn felt on the scaffold,
waiting for the kiss of the headsman’s sword on the back of her
neck.

What she felt were the multiple gazes of her
audience, especially Alasdair’s. The damp soil against her sore
knee. The flashlight in her hand—oh, she might consider switching
it on. Cold air scented with earth oozed over her, and she broke
out in gooseflesh and sweat at the same time. Spirits of the dead?
No. Spirits of her own nervous system.

Go for it
. She forced herself to crawl
forward, between the sill of dirt and the lintel-stone and on into
the passage. The beam of the flashlight bounced around, off the
slabs beside and above, off the water-worn cobbles below. She might
have been able to stand up here, although even as small as she was,
she’d have to walk with knees bent and back horizontal. Safer to
crawl, sore knee or no sore knee.

Blackness gaped before her and she stopped.
In the moving ray of light all she could see at first was an empty
space perhaps ten feet across, a primitive corbelled roof tapering
to a top sealed with one massive stone. The walls were edged by
upright stones, the floor was all brown undulations, the still,
cold air was thick with the moldy odor of undisturbed time. There
were Roger’s footprints in the dirt—jeez, what had the man done,
wallowed? Protocol indeed!

Was something written on one of the flat
curbstones, or was that just a natural crease or smudge on the
rock? Jean squinted, trying to hold the light steady. Yes, those
were words, English words.
Do what thou wilt
. Kilroy might
not have been here, but Ambrose, and perhaps Crowley, had.

To one side lay a set of antlers, Alasdair’s
deer, probably. To the other rose a pile of lumps that had to be an
animal’s bones—those spiky pieces extended in a gentle curve looked
like vertebrae, and the elongated skull could be a horse’s. Funny,
the assemblage
did
sort of look like a Nessie-head on its
long neck. It sure wasn’t likely to be a giraffe.

But there—oh yes. Jean’s neck would have
prickled if she’d had any prickle left in her. Two femurs, an
upturned pelvis like an empty dish, ribs in their ordered rows, a
skull. Jaws separated into a silent scream, each tooth a chip of
marble. Eye sockets looking up into nothingness, like Tracy’s empty
eyes had done last night.

Archaeology, Michael had said, murders its
witnesses. Jean backed away, blindly, with no room to turn around
in the passage and no strength to go on into the chamber. Her feet
hit the dirt sill. She maneuvered backward over it and into the
blessed bright light of day, remembering at the last second to
grasp the hem of her sweater so it didn’t end up over her head. So
she was coming out rump-first, she’d never claimed either grace or
glamour.

Regaining her feet, she clambered quickly up
and out of the hole, Alasdair pulling one arm and Brendan the
other. Roger was shifting impatiently, his fingers opening and
shutting beside the seams of his sagging jeans. Behind him Sophie
stood huddled in her canvas jacket, every one of its pockets as
tightly shut as her face.

Alasdair took the flashlight and switched it
off. “Well?”

Jean expelled the thick odor from her lungs
and rubbed her arms—beneath her sweater her skin must look like
that of a plucked chicken. “There’s a human skeleton there, all
right.”

“And the creature?” asked Roger.

“There’s some sort of animal, too.”

Roger’s mouth set with determination. He
grabbed the flashlight. “Brendan, my trowel . . .”

“Hang on,” Alasdair said. He produced his
cell phone from an inside pocket, punched a couple of buttons and
informed whoever answered, “We’ve got another body at Pitclachie.
No, this one’s a bit older. Set up a perimeter and call in the
forensic boffins.”

“This is my dig!” Roger protested. “I did the
research, I provided the sensors. The bones of the Loch Ness
monster, they’re my discovery!”

“Just now this is a crime scene.” Alasdair
snapped his phone shut like John Wayne re-holstering his gun. “Just
now you’re away to the house to make a statement. You as well, Mr.
Gilstrap. Madame Bouchard. I’ll stop here until my people
arrive.”

“You don’t understand, Inspector, I have to
do this, I have to vindicate . . .”

Brendan took Roger’s arm and pulled him away
and down the path, saying, “You can’t fight city hall.”

Sophie took off past them, her hair flying
out behind her, bearing the news to her better half, Jean supposed.
She dragged her shoes sideways along the grass, cleaning them off.
Her hands were filthy. So were her jeans. Whatever. She turned to
Alasdair.

He was actually smiling. “Well done.”

“I’d say I aim to please, except it’s pretty
obvious that I don’t.”

“Ah no, you made a good point about Roger and
his dig, here. He’s swotted up on Ambrose’s writings.”

“Sure he has. But I’ve read all of Ambrose’s
books, and nowhere does he say he found a passage grave, let alone
where it was. He wouldn’t, not if he was getting up to fun and
games there. Crowley’s ‘do what thou wilt’ is written on an
upright.”

“Ambrose’s excavating did make it easy to
hide a body, then.”

“But Roger didn’t expect that, did he? It’s
like he was apologizing to Iris.”

“Eh?” Alasdair said encouragingly.

Encouraged, Jean said, “Those papers of
Ambrose’s that Iris was talking about. What if Roger read them?
What if Ambrose not only gave the location of the passage grave but
also said Nessie bones were there? Maybe some old bones were why
Ambrose came up with the Nessie story to begin with. Vast
mythologies have been based on less. Especially with people like
Roger filling the pulpits.”

“Oh aye.”

“I wonder . . .” Jean looked down the hill
toward the loch. A tourist boat was heading out of the bay and
around the Castle. In the Festival field the pipes and drums played
on. Somewhere a horn honked. One of her brain cells clicked over,
like a domino falling against its neighbor. “Roger was afraid I was
going to expose his past. Maybe the only reason he went out on that
limb—and a damned shaky one it is, too—is because he was already
out there, blackmailing Iris by threatening to expose Ambrose’s
past. I mean, most of Ambrose’s seamy side’s been exposed already,
sort of. But the entire Edith and Eileen thing . . . well, if Iris
knew her mother’s bones were in that grave, she’d never have given
him permission to dig there.”

Alasdair looked a bit giddy. Leaping after
her thoughts took the agility of a mountain goat. He was with her,
though, and started to speak, then went to attention.

Jean looked around. Two constables were
walking up through the garden. “Duty calls, I see.”

“And yours as well.”

“I need to stop at the house and make a
statement. Yes, I’ll take care of it, soon as I clean up.”

“I’ll come round the Lodge after dinner. You
might as well let me in, as I’ll be squatting on the step in any
event.”

She searched his eyes and saw only concern
informed by courtesy, nothing to pin either her hopes or fears on.
“Come for dinner. I’ll throw something together. Sevenish. Whenever
you’re free.”

His minions were tramping up the path. “Aye
then. As you wish,” he said, and went to meet them.

This had nothing to do with what she wished.
And everything. Jean passed the three men, already deep in
technical consideration, and headed down the hill.

Jean stood in the courtyard watching as
Alasdair’s forensics technicians trooped away, bearing boxes and
bags of evidence. The working day was over, then. She glanced at
her watch, warily. Seven-thirty p.m.

The official delegation left a temporary
fence of orange netting surrounding the excavation and probably
scaring the sheep. It shone like a beacon—
There’s something
interesting up here!
But so far, any attempt by the reporters
keeping vigil at the end of the drive to penetrate the fastness of
Pitclachie had been repulsed by a flying squad of constables, the
same constables who had admitted the various witnesses to the house
and ushered them out again after they’d given statements about
Tracy’s death.

Jean had said her piece without provoking any
reaction from Sawyer, who showed as much personality as mud from
his post at the windows of the dining room. Did he realize he’d
royally teed off his boss? He had to. He was an obnoxious
overbearing ego on two legs. He wasn’t stupid.

Now the last of the car doors slammed and
silence fell over the house and the hillside, broken only by the
occasional burst of amplified voices or music from the Festival
field. The closing ceremonies, with or without Roger Dempsey at the
helm, were under way. The Sunday night ceilidh was still to come,
and the cruise tomorrow, but the Midsummer Monster Madness Festival
and its unanticipated criminal sideshows were almost over.

Even the constable who’d been standing by the
tower door had taken off for parts unknown, Jean noted. Feeling as
though she were the last person left on planet Fairbairn, not one
of the solar system’s more scenic destinations, she went into the
Lodge and moved her canvas carryall, laptop, and notebook from the
dining table to the coffee table. Yeah, she’d gotten a lot done
today. Every time she’d sat down to work on an article, any
article, all she could see in the screen was Jonathan’s beetling
brow, Tracy’s carefully outlined lips, the empty eye sockets of the
skull. She no longer doubted it was all part of the same intricate
pattern, right down to that small dropped stitch that was herself.
But she couldn’t see the entire design to save her life—and she
certainly hoped she wouldn’t have to.

Now she set the table with silverware,
plates, glasses, and bottles of whiskey and water. The whiskey
might help wash down her serving of crow. It might not. Crow wings.
Stir-fried crow. Crow and cornbread dressing. Whether Alasdair
would listen to her apology, whether he would think her trying to
discuss their relationship wildly inappropriate, considering,
whether he, too, felt matters had come to a head, murder cases or
no murder cases . . . Why were relationships so damned difficult,
she wailed silently, and galloped up the stairs, ignoring her sore
knee.

The door of the lumber room was still ajar.
Every time she’d passed it that afternoon, it had been ajar. She
was onto something.

Jean went into the bedroom and changed
clothes yet again, from the
Great Scot
T-shirt she’d worn to
splash food on, back to the blouse she’d worn with her khaki pants
for her day’s formal appearances, errands, and reportorial duties .
. . What the heck? She caught a glimpse of her bare back in the
mirror above the dressing table. A tiny black bump was stuck to her
skin just above her waist.

She craned around with her hand mirror and
then shuddered in revulsion. She’d picked up a deer tick from the
bracken fronds. It had been crawling up her leg and digging in
beneath the waistband of her jeans just as she had been crawling
into and out of the tomb.

Grabbing a pair of tweezers and leaving her
blouse un-tucked, Jean hurried back downstairs and toward the door.
She’d go across to the main house and get Kirsty, Iris,
Noreen—whichever female she fell over first—to get the
blood-sucking beastie off of her.

Her hand was on the doorknob when she heard
the voices. Alasdair and Sawyer. She diverted to the front window,
where she peeked out from behind the curtain to see the two men
standing in the courtyard, their shadows long parallel streaks on
the flagstones. Sawyer was holding the laptop beneath his arm.
Alasdair was holding Sawyer’s attention. His shoulders were back,
his chin up, and his forefinger pointed into Sawyer’s chest might
just as well have been a dirk.