The Murder Hole (4 page)

“And there you are,” said the reporter with
another nudge-nudge-wink-wink arch of his eyebrows. “The Starr
Beverages PLC Midsummer Monster Madness Festival gets under way
tomorrow night with fireworks and a pipe band. Be there!”

A musical interlude and a sequence of
dissolving images of clouds, deserts, and monsoons, led into the
weather report. It predicted a generally sunny and warm Friday for
Inverness-shire, gathering clouds and cooler temperatures for
Saturday, and a deluge on Sunday. That figured, Jean thought.
Still, a little typical Scottish weather wasn’t going to stop her
curiosity from creeping out from under the bed. “You don’t suppose
Iris sent the letters?”

Miranda turned off the television. “I can’t
see her wasting her time on something like that, no. This Dempsey
chap, now, he looks to be a bit of a nutter. Could be he sent them
himself, for the publicity.”

“It’s possible, I guess. He’s a no-guts
no-glory type of guy. An engineer like Brad, except unlike Brad,
Dempsey’s mostly a businessman and a heck of a promoter. I met him
once, at a conference in Colonial Williamsburg on the archaeology
of standing buildings. He came sweeping through the meet-and-greet
handing out copies of an article he wrote for
The Journal of
Field Archaeology
that wasn’t much more than a commercial for a
remote sensor that can see through walls. Set my teeth on edge, I’m
afraid.”

“You shot him down, did you?” asked
Miranda.

“I couldn’t help myself. He was making some
generality about the structure of medieval abbeys that was just
flat wrong. I corrected him. He stared at me, turned around, and
stalked off. I spent the rest of the weekend angling for a chance
to—well, not apologize. To smooth things over. But he avoided me.
Maybe he still is avoiding me. He never answered my e-mail
confirming the interview you set up. I’ll tackle him when I get to
the loch.”

“He’d not be avoiding you if he’d been the
one to correct you,” Miranda pointed out.

“You think?” replied Jean. “It’s a shame Brad
was out playing tourist during the conference. He would have loved
to have picked Dempsey’s brains.”

“At least he attended the conference with
you.”

“That was the last one. He finally gave up
trying to explain even his consulting work to me, let alone the
academic stuff, just about the same time I gave up trying to
explain mine to him. It was like speaking different languages, he’s
going on about submersibles and electro-magnetic radiation and I’m
going on about the Casket Letters and the Red Book of Westmarch . .
.” There was an echo in here, Jean thought. She’d told Rebecca and
Michael the same anecdote, in almost the same words.

“Thinking about Brad quite a bit, are you?”
asked Miranda.

“That’s the first lesson in being Scottish,
nursing old grudges and rehearsing old glories.”

Miranda nodded, understanding Jean’s
sentiments if not her examples. “The Casket Letters have to do with
Mary Queen of Scots, but the Red Book . . .”

“
The Lord of the Rings
.”

“Oh aye.” Miranda said politely. Her reading
and movie-viewing leaned toward book-club weepies. Standing up, she
reached for her handbag and produced a folder bearing a yellow
Hertz label. “Here you are. A Focus. Not so posh as Duncan’s
Maserati, but reliable.”

“That’s all I ask. Thanks.” Jean strolled
beside Miranda toward the front door. “So are you off with Duncan,
or just with his car?”

“With Duncan, of course. We thought of
popping across to New York, but I’m thinking a quiet weekend—golf,
dinner at the club—would go down a treat.”

And sex more aesthetic than athletic, Jean
thought. Not that she lusted after Duncan, a silver-haired and
silver-tongued lawyer so polished Miranda must use suction cups to
keep from sliding off him. He was Miranda’s type, not hers. Like
Miranda, Duncan wanted his champagne dry, his facts straight, and
his lovers uncommitted. Although Jean had manifestly never figured
out just what her own type was, she had the awful suspicion that
commitment was too near her center of gravity to encourage a tidy
affair like Miranda’s with Duncan.

Jean watched Miranda and the Maserati
disappear into the sultry twilight, then locked the door. Just as
she returned to the living room the phone rang. She hurried to the
desk. “Hello?”

A hale and hearty male voice with an accent
like her own, ranging between a bleat and a quack, boomed into her
ear. She’d heard that voice emanating from the speaker on her
television only minutes earlier. Speak of the devil. “Jean! Roger
Dempsey! Long time no see!”

And the devil was speaking to her.
Go
figure
. “Oh, hello, Dr. Demps . . .”

“It’s Roger, it’s Roger. My go-to guy,
Brendan, tells me we’ve got an interview lined up. Tomorrow
afternoon at five, on the boat at the pier in the loch, tra
la!”

“Yes, that’s what my colleague Mir . . .”

“So you’ve gone over to the enemy, you’re a
reporter now! Using your maiden name, huh? Glad to hear you’re out
of the publish and perish rat race, girl! What’s Brad up to here in
the Auld Country? Engineering connectors and breakers in Silicon
Glen? It’ll be great to see you again, hope he can come along too,
we can lift a glass to old times and old friends, right?”

Wrong, on several counts, not least of which
was that she was no girl. But Jean didn’t owe Roger or anyone else
an account of her divorce and relocation-cum-escape. “Wel . .
.”

“See you tomorrow afternoon at five, okay?
Cheers!”

“And cheers to you, too,” Jean said, even
though he’d already hung up. Switching off her phone, she eyed
Ambrose’s book accusingly, as though it were responsible for the
holes in Dempsey’s story.

In her request for an interview she’d skipped
the inconvenient details, saying merely that she’d met Dempsey at
the Williamsburg conference and signing her name as “Jean Fairbairn
(Inglis)”. Maybe he did remember her, and his remark about publish
and perish was meant as a joke at his own expense.

Whatever, there were no old times to lift a
glass to. Dempsey was claiming a closer and more cordial
acquaintance than they’d really had. And not because of her
sparkling personality. Because he wanted her to hype his
expedition. Crass, yes, but hardly surprising. Although you’d think
Dempsey would have learned by now to lose the egregious “girl.”

However, unless she’d mentioned Brad in
conference small-talk before things heated up, Dempsey had no
reason to have even heard of the man . . .
Oh boy
. Jean spun
away from the desk with a two-fisted gesture of frustration.
Dempsey was so eager to ingratiate himself that he’d researched
her
. Once past the
Great Scot
masthead, the first
items in an Internet search on her name were the headlines about
her lawsuit against the university, to say nothing—and heaven only
knew she’d like to say nothing—of the scandal behind it. And then
there was the murder case last month, generating more headlines.
His remark about going over to the enemy gave Dempsey away. It was
Jean who had occasionally found the media to be her adversary. To
Dempsey, reporters were the tools of his trade.

Jean stopped beside the window, considering
the ghostly shape of her own reflection. If her divorce from Brad
Inglis was mentioned on the net at all, it was buried so deeply
that Dempsey even with his remote-sensing devices hadn’t found it,
and so added gaffe to presumption. Typically over-the-top, to claim
Brad, too, as a friend. And odd, too, not that Jean could claim
immunity from oddness.

Outside, the raking light of late evening
glared off the western faces of the buildings but sank their
eastern sides in blackness. Even as she watched, the light faded
into a fragile gloom. Her damp T-shirt lay chill against her breast
and stomach. The water horse, she thought. You get up on it, and it
takes you down into the dark depths of your own soul.

If she had wanted comfort, she could have
stayed in Texas, bunkered in an air-conditioned office while the
sun beat on the parched earth outside. She could never have asked
Alasdair Cameron to dinner, last month, as the gentle rain softened
the green hills of—well, it was home now.

It was time, she told herself, for her voyage
of self-discovery to include a trip down the loch with all the
other tourists who hoped to see the head of something rich and
strange emerge from the waters. When you know fate is lying in wait
for you, you could do a lot worse than get up on your horse, water
or otherwise, and ride out to meet it.

Jean peered around the tour bus clogging the
road ahead of her and spotted a sign reading
Pitclachie
House
. At last! She two-wheeled her rented Focus into an
asphalt drive before the harried paterfamilias in the car hugging
her bumper got a squeaky Nessie in the ear and rear-ended her.

The big blank spot to the southeast of Loch
Ness on a Scottish road map said as much about the terrain as a
topographical survey. Jean had had two ways to get to Drumnadrochit
from Edinburgh, neither of them remotely related to flying crows.
She’d chosen the northern route, through Inverness. That way she
could stop at Culloden, the 1746 battlefield, to pay her respects
to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s lost cause, scour the visitor center
bookstore, and eat lunch. Her cup of tea and sandwich had been
spiced by the presence at the next table of three re-enactors, a
Highlander, a redcoat, and a woman wearing an apron splattered with
red. Jean had driven away thinking that here time didn’t heal, it
only numbed.

The main road ran along the northwestern bank
of Loch Ness, the most scenic of scenic routes, especially on a
sunny day. To her left, the water had glowed an opaque indigo below
the green banks and braes of its far shore. To her right, steep
hills patched with yellow fields had climbed toward craggy heights
skimmed by clouds. But except for quick glances, all Jean had seen
was the tailpipe of a bus and its back window stacked with
knapsacks.

Now she sighed in appreciation of a gust of
fresh air and followed the long driveway as it wound up the hill,
toward several trees from which sprouted a square tower and the
peak of a roof. The former displayed a satellite dish and the
latter a set of intricate Tudor-twist brick chimneys. Parking her
car, Jean collected her things, turned toward the house, and
thought,
Cool!

Pitclachie House might have been built in the
nineteenth-century neo-Gothic style beloved of horror movies, but
in the afternoon sunshine Jean found the place enchanting, every
mullioned window, half-timbered gable, and decorative spire of it.
The same reddish stone as that of Urquhart Castle peered cheerily
from between swags of ivy. The castellations of the tower were so
crisply defined, Jean suspected it wasn’t part of the original
1830's house, but was part of the renovations and improvements
program Ambrose had put into effect after marrying his heiress.

A path led across the corner of a lawn smooth
enough for the genteel arts of lawn bowling and croquet, and
skirted a slate terrace edged by rose bushes thick with large
blooms and broom thick with small blossoms. Jean made a point of
stopping to smell a rose, which was blood-red, of course . . .
Something rustled in the underbrush. She spun around. A cat was
watching her, its fur so aggressively calico it looked as though it
had been painted by Picasso. “Hello there,” she said, and grinned
as much at herself as at the cat.

It whisked away, like most of its species
unimpressed by mere humanity. Jean walked across a courtyard, past
a cottage whose door was set into a circular turret, and up to an
arched porch hollowed into the facade of the main house. The door
inside was equipped with a knocker shaped like a dragon dangling a
brass ring from its teeth. Tapping the ring against the door, she
produced a sound that was less a sepulchral thud than a comedian’s
rim shot. Jean’s grin widened.

The door opened silently, on oiled hinges, to
reveal a young woman. Her silky brown hair was swept in an Art
Nouveau swirl back from a delicate face. White jeans and a
lime-green blouse suggested rather than revealed a lissome figure.
She gulped, probably less in awe of Jean than in swallowing her
chewing gum, and smiled a well-rehearsed smile, just dignified
enough to set the tone of the establishment, just friendly enough
to be welcoming. “Good afternoon.”

“Hello. I’m Jean Fairbairn. Miranda Capaldi
booked a room for me for four nights. And she set up an interview
with Miss Mackintosh.”

“Oh aye. Kirsty Wotherspoon here. Please come
through.” The girl—she could hardly be twenty—waved Jean and her
baggage into the house.

In the moment it took her eyes to adjust from
sunlight to shadow, Jean saw the after-image of the scene on her TV
screen last night, the young woman standing with Dempsey’s
assistants and then ducking aside when the camera turned in her
direction. “Did I see you on television, Kirsty? The ITN piece on
Operation Water Horse last night?”

Jean’s vision cleared in time for her to see
Kirsty’s peaches-and-cream complexion redden into a
strawberries-and-cream hue. Her stance went from formal to stiff,
and she darted a quick glance toward a slightly open door marked
Private
. “I was having a squint at the Festival is all,” she
said, more loudly than was necessary.

Uh oh
. The girl doth protest too much.
And in a Glasgow accent that was two glottal stops short of
incomprehensible. She’d probably wandered down to the Water Horse
interview and then remembered that Iris, her employer, wasn’t on
the best of terms with Dempsey and company. Was Iris sitting behind
that door, listening as Jean made a meal of her own foot? An
apology would only compound her misdemeanor. She tried a diversion.
“Hugh Munro and his band will be playing at the Festival. I really
like his new album, don’t you?”