The Murder Hole (37 page)

“You were hearing what you expected to hear.
Like seeing Nessie.”

“But ghosts can’t give testimony. They’re not
evidence.”

“Edith’s body needs identifying, right
enough. Proof she, not Eileen, was missing a finger.”

“And some reason why she was wearing Eileen’s
earrings.”

“Earring. One”

“Whatever. Damn it, every time we get an
answer to one question, we get five other ones. Like who’s the ‘he’
Edith was throwing in Ambrose’s face. Crowley? And what happened to
Eileen?”

“She gave up on a bad marriage.” Alasdair’s
hand grasped Jean’s shoulder almost too tightly for comfort. The
crease between his brows indicated deep thought, and not, she bet,
thought entirely about the case.

Loosening his grip, Jean tucked her hand
inside his. Her lips felt bruised from the urgency of their kiss.
That was a fait accompli—a faint accompli, whew—a commitment, even
if the unearthly echo of Edith’s voice had re-introduced issues of
caring, condescension, and marriage gone sour.

The television screen went blank and the
speakers fell silent. Outside, a breeze rustled the leaves on the
trees. Distant laughter stirred the eternal twilight. “Alasdair,”
Jean said, “part of the deal here is that we have to talk to each
other.”

With a ghost of a smile, evoking things past,
things present, things yet to come, he laid his cheek on the top of
her head. “And part of the bargain is that we’re obliged to listen,
is that it?”

“That’s it,” she said, and settled down in
the security of his arms.

Once again the sound of footsteps stirred
Jean’s sleep. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. She’d
had the strangest dream . . . It wasn’t a dream, she realized with
a rush of adrenalin that made her cheeks burn. She and Alasdair
really had—what was the pop-culture expression? Taken their
relationship to a higher level?

Just admitting they had a relationship, let
alone exchanging a passionate kiss and some frank conversation to
prove it, had taken them to nose-bleed heights. Playing tortoises
rather than hares, ants rather than grasshoppers, suited their
emotional phobias. In six months or so they might actually work
their way to erogenous zones below the shoulders.

Smiling, Jean climbed out of the bed and
opened the drapes. A gauzy curtain of mist flirted with the surface
of the loch. Whether those billows beyond it were clouds or
mountains she couldn’t say—they looked like the same substance,
neither earth nor air. “The Misty Mountains of Home” was one of
those evocative old songs she’d always liked. Home was more than a
building, wasn’t it? Home was where the heart was, and right now
her heart, for better or worse, was downstairs asleep on the
couch.

No, she corrected as she heard the sounds
from the kitchen, he was making coffee, bless the man for having
domestic skills. It was his quiet steps past her door, to the
bathroom and back, that had awakened her.

Padding into the hall, she noticed that the
door of the lumber room was now wide open. Alasdair must have shut
it after he’d checked on the pictures last night. When she’d
finally gone to bed, long after midnight, she wouldn’t have noticed
that door if it had flung itself off its hinges and onto her feet.
Her senses had still been humming from Alasdair’s touch, her ears
still satiated by his voice. Their exchanges about seeing ghosts,
their childhoods, their work—but not their marriages—had proved
that the physical was only half of intimacy.

It had been time well-spent, she thought, and
peered at herself in the bathroom mirror. Still, she could tell by
the dark circles cushioning her glassy eyes that she’d stayed up
way too late for two nights in a row. Make-up? Well, just a bit of
mascara. If Alasdair was frightened away by her bed-headed face,
then he was made of weaker stuff than she thought.

Jean walked downstairs, wondering how to
greet him. If she threw herself into his arms, would he disclaim
all knowledge of last night’s alliance and offer her only his name,
rank, and serial number?

He was leaning on the cabinet with a resigned
air, probably telling himself that a watched toaster oven never
toasts. At her step he looked around, considered her awkward smile,
and finally returned a lopsided smile of his own, the crease in one
cheek deeper than the other.
What a revealing development this
is
. With that mutual smile, his drawbridge squealed open by
several more rusty links, and the Gordian knot of her nerves broke
a few more strands. “So far so good,” Jean said.

“We’ve survived a whole nine hours or so
together,” agreed Alasdair, and glanced at the toast. Since he’d
turned his back on it, it was starting to char. They bumped elbows
retrieving it, and between them managed to get the toast, butter,
jam, and coffee onto the table.

“Did you sleep well? I thought I heard the
footsteps a time or two.” Jean nodded toward the velvet curtain,
now pulled across the vestibule.

“You did that. They were up and down all the
night long. But policemen are like doctors, they learn to sleep
when they can.”

“No one living tried to get in, anyway,
although I suppose that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Not a thing.” Alasdair crunched his toast,
to the accompaniment of Mozart . . .

Oh.
After a brief scramble, Jean found
her bag beneath the coffee table and fished out her phone. The tiny
screen was illuminated with the legend “Michael Campbell-Reid.”

“Michael! How are you? How’s Rebecca?”

It was Rebecca’s voice that replied. “I’m
just fine, thank you. Sitting up in an uncomfortable hospital bed
and wishing they’d hurry up and let me take Linda home.”

“That’s where it gets really fun, I hear.”
Jean spared one second’s thought for her own very brief pregnancy,
back in the distant deeps of time. It hadn’t lasted long enough for
her to start seriously researching issues of childbirth, let alone
baby homecomings.

“You should see her, Jean. Eight pounds, a
little Amazon.”

“I can’t wait. I guess she’s got all her
fingers and toes and everything?” From the corner of her eye Jean
saw Alasdair look up sharply.
Policemen!
she thought. “How’s
Michael?”

“Standing here teeming with information. He’s
been to work and back already this morning, just to amaze and
gratify you with his research. Here he is.”

Michael’s voice said, “Good morning, Jean. I
saw the headlines about Mrs. Dempsey. Dreadful, that. I hope you’re
watching your back.”

“It’s being watched,” Jean said.

“I handed the bug from the Nessie in to the
police here yesterday, and they’ve sent it up to your D.C.I.
Cameron in Drumnadrochit. Bit of luck, him being on the case again,
eh?”

“I prefer to think of it as fate.”

“You wanted the name of the mason who
uncovered the Pitclachie Stone whilst working for Ambrose,” Michael
went on. “Turns out to be a chap named Gordon Fraser.”

“Gordon Fraser found the Stone?” That took
the wind out of Jean’s sails. She ran aground on the couch.
Alasdair, brows on full alert, stopped pretending not to listen and
sat down beside her. She tilted the phone so he could hear.

“What’s right interesting,” Michael went on,
“is that according to the report, the Stone wasna broken when he
found it. There’s a drawing of it on file—above that double disc
was a gripping beast crossed by a Z-shaped line, a Z-rod. The hole
was there already, why, no one knows.”

So Roger was right about the missing
pictograph being a gripping beast. Pretty damn good guess, that.
“But you have nothing about it being dropped when they moved it or
anything?”

“Not a word. As for the silver chain the
Museum was offered last year, a dealer in Paris was trying to get
up an auction for it, but we couldn’t compete. He claimed the chain
was from the Great Glen, then admitted he’d bought a job lot of
goods at an estate sale in London and there it was, Pictish and
genuine, but no provenance at all.”

Feeling as though fate was playing the old
shell game with her, Jean repeated, “A dealer in Paris? His name is
Charles Bouchard, isn’t it?”

“Oh aye, that it is. Friend of yours?”

“He and his wife are here, probably hoping to
grab up whatever Pictish artifacts Roger Dempsey uncovers.”

“Dempsey’s gone from searching for the
monster to searching for artifacts, has he?”

“Yes and no. What he’s done is uncover a
passage grave, just up the hill behind the house. So far, all he’s
found there are bones, some of them human. We think . . .”
Alasdair’s elbow landed sharply in her ribs. “We think the police
will identify who it is fairly soon now.”

“Surely it’s Eileen,” said Michael.

“Well,” Jean replied, her own elbow nudging
Alasdair back again, “did your granny ever say anything about
Eileen missing part of her left forefinger?”

“Not that I can recall, no. You’re not
meaning . . .” He was interrupted by the delicate piping cry of a
newborn baby. Rebecca’s voice crooned a response. Michael said to
Jean, “You’ll be telling us all about it soon. We’re holding Dougie
hostage ’til you do, right enough. Must run.”

“Hug the baby for me,” Jean said, and clicked
off the phone.

Beside her Alasdair was sitting to attention.
“Gordon Fraser found the Stone?”

“That’s the name of the mason who uncovered
it when Ambrose had the Lodge moved up here from the road. It can’t
be the book dealer, he’s elderly, but he sure wasn’t an adult in
the nineteen-twenties.”

“Even so, the name Fraser keeps turning up,
doesn’t it now? The mason. The dealer. Edith. Did your Fraser say
anything that might could connect him to Edith?”

“No, but he was saying that Ambrose was too
much like Crowley when it came to women, and I’m thinking now he
didn’t mean as a babe magnet. Maybe he meant when it came to women
meeting premature and nasty ends. But he wouldn’t know about Edith.
Or Eileen.”

Or would he?
Alasdair’s eyebrows
asked.

“He was telling me some lurid stories about
Crowley, his butcher severed an artery and—oh my.”

“There’s someone with a meat cleaver for
you.”

“We’re onto something.” She was getting
mighty free and easy with that “we,” Jean told herself, but if
Alasdair had a problem with that, he’d let her know. She dug
through her bag. “Here you go, Fraser’s card. He’s in Fort
Augustus. Kirsty was telling me that Fraser had no use for Iris,
but . . .”

“Damn and blast! Why weren’t you telling me
this yesterday, Jean?”

“What?”

“Iris was away to Fort Augustus last night.
If I could have had a word with them separately! By now they’ve
compared their stories, synchronized their watches, and sung the
same chorus of ‘Will Ye No Come Back Again!’” He stood up, lunged
toward his jacket draped over the chair, and yanked his own phone
from an inside pocket.

“You don’t know Iris went to see Fraser,”
Jean retorted, and added indignantly, “What did you expect me to
do, foretell the future?”

“Hello? Is that D.C. Gunn? Get on to Fort
Augustus. I want Gordon Fraser, the book dealer, collected and
brought here.” Alasdair extended his hand. Like a nurse assisting
at an operation, Jean placed the card in it. “Highland Books and
Maps. Aye, that’s it. Good man.”

She assumed Gunn was the good man, not
Fraser, whose reputation was open to discussion at the moment.

Alasdair thrust his phone into his pocket and
his arms into his jacket. He started toward the door, then whirled
back around, suddenly recalled to a different duty. “Jean, sorry
about that . . .”

This is a test
, she told herself.
It’s only a test
. Besides, he was probably right about Iris
and Fraser, circumstances making strange bedfellows and everything.
“It’s all right. Go on, I’ll hang around here. Maybe I’ll find that
little hank of yarn that connects all of this into one story.”

“We’re getting to it,” he told her, and with
a swift kiss that missed her lips to land on her cheek, he pushed
past the curtain and slammed through the door.

She stood listening to his receding steps,
then shook her head. Yep, this was going to be interesting, and she
didn’t mean only the resolution of the case. She pitched the dishes
into the sink, then gathered up her computer and papers. Taking
them upstairs, she stowed them in her wardrobe. A quick pit-stop
for toothpaste and lipstick, and to check that the site of the tick
incursion was healing properly, and she was ready to go—do what?
Make waves, she supposed.

The door to the lumber room was now shut.
Inside, something was making a scratching sound. A mouse? Warily,
Jean opened the door and peeked into the shadowed room. A sudden
movement at the window made her leap as though she’d been shocked,
then laugh. She could see the shape of the bird perched on the
outside sill through the gap between the shutters. Poe’s raven, no
doubt, coming home to roost.

Her nostrils dilated. What was the smell in
that room, anyway, over and beyond the scent of mildew? It was the
same cloying sweet smell that clung to the book, and to the objects
in the desk in the library. The smell of perfume that had
accompanied the ghostly re-enactment of Edith’s fall?

She should ask Miranda what posh perfume had
been dabbled behind wealthy ears in 1933. Roses, she thought with
another sniff. Distilled roses, spilled and then spoiled. But there
was something spicy, too, like the first whiff of a National Trust
shop with its potpourri, or even a New Age shop with its . . .
“Incense,” she said aloud. That’s what she’d been smelling all
along, not pipe tobacco. Incense.

Jean’s gaze moved from Eileen’s painted,
impassive face to the plaster ceiling with its smudges of what had
to be smoke. Candle smoke. Incense smoke. What had Ambrose been
doing, staging occult ceremonies? Or simply burning incense as
inspiration for his wilder theories, like an earlier generation
would have drunk absinthe or smoked opium?