The Murder Hole (40 page)

“Did you know of the passage grave at
Pitclachie, then?” Alasdair asked.

“Oh aye. My father, he helped build up the
entrance way. Was still pointing the location out to me in his last
years. Nothing wrong with it as an archaeological exercise, he was
saying, but Ambrose didna want it only for that. Cursed ground, it
was, even after it went back to the elements.”

The hotel owner had testified at Ambrose’s
trial about white-robed figures carrying flaming torches. Jean
herself had seen the graffiti on the curbstone. Ambrose had been
playing his occult games there as well as in the upper room of the
Lodge. What a handy dandy place to dump a body! All Ambrose had to
do was fill in the entry way and the area just outside it, and let
the rain and the heather do their work. The Dempseys had clearly
been reading Ambrose’s papers, ones that had inspired their—it was
a scam, wasn’t it?

“Was that what Iris was telling you last
night, that Dr. Dempsey’s uncovered the grave?” Alasdair asked.

Fraser said nothing.

“There’s a human skeleton inside. We’ve got
reason to think it was placed there in nineteen-thirty-three, the
year both Edith and Eileen disappeared. It’s the skeleton of a
woman five foot ten inches in height who’s missing her left
forefinger, amputated well before death.”

Still Fraser didn’t react.

Alasdair tried stating the obvious. “We’re
thinking it’s your aunt, Edith Fraser.”

Again the room fell silent. This time, along
with the traffic and pedestrian noise from outside, Jean detected
the scent of frying potatoes and grilling meat. Her stomach
growled. Man did not live by testimony alone, no matter how
interesting. And contradictory.

Gunn stirred in his chair and tapped his
pencil against his notebook. Alasdair sat unmoving, not staring at
Fraser so much as watching him. Waiting. Even he seemed to be
developing just a bit of a sweat-sheen along his hairline. Unless
it was his brain leaking lubrication fluid.

At last the old man stirred, limbs creaking,
chair squeaking. “My mother and father, they taught me my aunt was
dead, and I honored them as I should do. They taught me she had
fallen from grace, and I honored them. Even so, after all these
years I’m thinking that she deserved a second chance. Ambrose was
giving her a second chance. He wisna pointing out the mote in her
eye when he was feeling the beam in his own. Scripture tells us
that if we’re not forgiving others, then our Father in heaven will
not be forgiving us.”

Alasdair rewarded Fraser’s laudable
sentiments with a thin smile.

“And now, Chief Inspector Cameron, my shop
needs seeing to. If you canna see your way clear to driving me
home, there’s a bus . . .”

“No need, Mr. Fraser.” Alasdair rose from his
inquisitor’s throne, shook Fraser’s hand, and ushered him out the
door. Jean heard his voice giving instructions.

Gunn closed his notebook and mopped at his
temples. “The world lost a grand gambler when the Chief Inspector
turned to police work.”

Laughing, Jean stood up and shook out her
skirt and blouse.
Whoa. Air
. “He’s also a scientist. You
know, testing hypotheses and reproducing results.”

Car doors slammed. An engine started up and
was absorbed in the general traffic noise.

Alasdair walked back into the office and shut
the door with an emphatic click. After a long moment of dazed
silence, he said, “I’ve never before been stonewalled with such
class.”

“He was really helpful for a while there,”
Jean said. “All that about Edith’s early life and Crowley and
everything fits what we already know.”

“Dr. Dempsey might could be Edith’s
grandson,” suggested Gunn, “if she had a child before she died, and
it was him taken to America.”

Jean shook her head. “But that’s not what he
said. Or rather, that’s not what he said Tracy said. He shut down
when you disproved her story. There’s more to that, and to what
Iris said to him last night, but he doesn’t want to tell. Can’t
tell, because telling violates his principles.”

“Got it in one,” Alasdair said, brows
knit.

Jean’s own eyebrows were knitting and
purling. “I bet my book spent a long time in that mildewed box in
the lumber room of the Lodge. Maybe not seventy years, though.
Thirty years? Ever since Ambrose died and Iris came back to
Pitclachie with her new broom?”

“I’m believing Tracy gave Fraser the book in
April, all right, that bit he saw for himself . . .”

“Oh!” Jean exclaimed. “Martin Hall! I
overheard him talking to Noreen, something about ‘she’ making
promises about getting him a fellowship. Tracy. She who must be
obeyed.”

“She seems to have been our organizing
principle,” said Alasdair.

Gunn flipped open his notebook again and
began to write.

“Oh yeah. If she and Roger sent themselves
the letters—if they blew up the boat themselves, for that
matter—then she could have had Martin pick up the notepaper and the
corkscrew in April. And the book, if she had him searching for
those personal papers. They had to have had at least some of them
already, to get them started.”

“They blew up the boat themselves,” Gunn
repeated doggedly. “They planted the corkscrew. They sent the
letters.”

“Time to have a word with Martin Hall,” said
Alasdair. “Jean, your car’s outside?”

“Just up the way in the Tourist Information
Center parking lot.”

“Good. We’ll have us a lunch, first. Neville,
stay here ‘til P.C. Milton returns, then come by Pitclachie. Oh,
and have yourself a meal as well.”

“Yes, sir.” Gunn shut his notebook and walked
purposefully over to the desk. Alasdair opened the door for Jean,
offering her a softer smile than the one he’d offered Fraser.

She responded in kind and stepped out into
the sultry—afternoon, she saw with a glance at her watch. The day
was burning away like the fuse connected to a bomb.

In the sunlight, the Gothic extravagance of
Pitclachie House seemed more whimsical than sinister. The
castellated battlements of the tower looked like a gap-toothed
grin, Jean thought as she drove up the driveway, and the arched
windows like eyebrows raised perhaps less in humor than
astonishment at how deceptive appearances could be. A case in point
being the business-suited, tie-knotted detective sitting next to
her and casting a cold eye on passersby. The same detective who had
turned out to be a great kisser with a gratifyingly ticklish spot
just behind his right ear lobe.

She and Alasdair had scarfed down salmon
salads in one of the restaurants beside the village green. They had
not talked about the case, but had confined themselves to
meaningful glances and the occasional monosyllable. Still, the
reporters buzzing around like overgrown midges no doubt noted that
the mildest-mannered of their number, the one from
Great
Scot
, had the inside track. That she had no desire to write
about the case, merely to survive it, was probably beyond their
ken.

Now Jean reclaimed her spot beside the
Renault, noting that while the Water Horse van was gone, the Halls’
nondescript car was still there. She stepped out onto the gravel
with a wary look around. Swallows skimmed through the cloud of
midges, scooping up beak full after beak full and driving the
ragged remnants into the dark branches above, where each leaf hung
heavy and motionless. On the Festival field, tents were coming down
and trash coming up. Police cars were parked on the road leading to
Temple Pier, their fluorescent stripes washed out by the damp
sunlight. A smoke-like haze was gathering over the mountains to the
east, blotting rock and rill into a blur.

Alasdair wasn’t scanning the scene but the
front of the Renault. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his
handkerchief, and gingerly removed a couple of leaves that were
caught in the curling end of the bumper. “Nettles. And look here, a
bit of a scrape and dent on the finish.”

“Nettles?” Jean walked around her car and
peered at the soggy shriveled leaves. “Like the nettles along the
sidewalk where Roger and I . . . Oh boy. You can see where I
brushed up against the car not two hours ago, there, where the dirt
is smudged, but I never looked at the bumper.”

“Who owns this car, then?”

“Charles and Sophie Bouchard.”

“Where were they on the Saturday night?”

“They said they were going to eat dinner at
the Glengarry Castle Hotel and headed off south. They got back
right after the, er, accident . . .” A metaphorical light bulb
illuminated a dark corner of Jean’s memory. “But then they came
from the north, not the south. Whoa—what if they hit Roger and me
as they drove by, then kept on going past Pitclachie, to Abriachan,
maybe, and turned around and came back? That’s a left-hand drive
car. Whoever was driving was right on top of us.”

“There you are.” With a half-smile that she
chose not to interpret as
Gotcha
, Alasdair tucked the folded
handkerchief into his pocket, produced his phone, and called for
both crime scene investigation and back-up.

“But their motive,” Jean said, reminding
herself this was not a competition. “They have no reason to try and
kill me. Even if they thought I was Tracy walking along with Roger,
wouldn’t they want to keep the Dempseys alive and producing
artifacts for sale? And they didn’t exactly come back for Tracy
later on, did they? They were at the ceilidh when she was killed.
Maybe it was an accident, after all.”

“I’m thinking a word with them as well
wouldn’t go amiss.” Just as he tucked his phone away, it rang
again. Hauling it back out, he answered, “Cameron.”

Jean walked on toward the house, casting her
gaze heavenward. Iris was still sitting beside the now-open tower
window, her hands webbed with white yarn, knitting away so
efficiently the needles flashed like dueling sabers. She looked
down on Jean with god-like disapproval. Jean did not genuflect.

Alasdair ranged up beside her, tucking the
phone away yet again, and followed the direction of her gaze. “No
need for her to be playing hard to get. The letters are a moot
point by now, and she’s got the best possible alibi for the time of
Tracy’s murder.”

“We thought Roger might be blackmailing Iris.
Now it looks like he’s adding scam to blackmail by claiming to be
her nephew. She thinks the body in the grave is Eileen’s and that
he’s telling her the truth. A truth she doesn’t want to go
public.”

“Roger’s hoist himself with his own petard,
then, finding Edith’s body. As for Eileen . . .”

Jean couldn’t complete his sentence. She
looked up again, then spun toward Alasdair. “What were you saying
back at the police station about a knitting needle?”

“The crime scene boffins found a broken
plastic needle. Looks to be blood on its tip. Could be there was a
struggle, Tracy found it ready to hand, and she stabbed her killer
with it.”

“You could do a DNA test.”

“Easier and quicker to have a suspect strip
off. But then, having just one suspect for the letters, the
explosion, the hit-and-run, and the murder would be easier and
quicker as well. I doubt you’re right. We’ve got at least two
people each working his own dodge and compounding each other’s
crimes as they go.”

“I could live with being wrong every now and
then,” Jean told him, and received a hollow laugh in return.

The Water Horse van crunched into the parking
area and stopped. Brendan leaped out, carrying a couple of
grease-stained paper bags, whose pungent odor identified them as
fish lunches for the excavator-cum-tomb robbers. With a friendly,
guilt-free smile at Alasdair and Jean’s cynical faces, he loped
past the house and up the hillside.

Jean and Alasdair strolled far enough into
the garden that they could see the dig and Brendan doling out the
food. Roger sat down beside his bones, close enough to occasionally
reach over and pat one—they were real, yes, precious, indeed they
were. Brendan sat with his back turned to Roger, facing toward the
house, probably watching for the fair if fickle Kirsty. Charles and
Sophie, mopping their brows, retreated to the shade of the pines
and made pained faces over their fried fish and vinegar-doused
chips. Jean wished them ticks, and then rapped her wish over its
knuckles.

Alasdair considered the pattern made by the
bones. “That’s never Nessie.”

“Then what is it?”

“Just now, none of my concern. As for what is
my concern, I’ll not be interviewing Roger in front of the
Bouchards. Or the other way round. Soon as the lads have done their
car, I’ll have them taken in and questioned through a
translator.”

The thuds of slamming doors reverberated from
the parking area. A constable materialized from the garden—oh, he’d
been sitting on a bucket behind the boxwood hedge, surveilling the
group on the hillside. Another strolled around the far corner of
the house and took up a position at the end of the terrace.
Alasdair was keeping his suspects covered. And in play. Turning
toward the front door, he said, “Now for Martin Hall, and his wife
as well. We’ve talked to them one at a time already. Let’s see if a
mutual interview gets better results. Gunn’s not yet here, do you
have your notebook?”

“Sure.” Jean said, following close behind.
“At least little Elvis isn’t on your short list of suspects.
Brendan’s okay, and Kirsty, too. Iris sure didn’t kill Tracy, not
that she’s giving you the whole truth and nothing but. And just
because the Ducketts might be connected to the submersible doesn’t
mean they’re up to no good, although running away this morning
doesn’t look . . .”

Alasdair stopped so suddenly she collided
with him. For appearance’s sake, with the constables in view and
all, she took a step backward. “That was the second phone call just
now,” he said, walking again. “You mind how Jonathan told his
family he was working for someone else besides Roger? The manager
of his bank is saying he received two sizeable checks written on a
bank in Illinois, USA.”