The Murder Hole (41 page)

“Omnium’s headquartered in Illinois, of
course he’d be getting . . . Wait a minute.” Jean fixed Alasdair
with a triumphant gaze. “The Ducketts are from Moline,
Illinois!”

“Oh aye. Amateur villains that they are, they
paid him from their own account, name, address, and telephone
printed on checks with twee photos of otters and seals.”

“So Brendan was right, Jonathan was a spy. He
was checking out the submersible for the Ducketts. Do you think
they blew up the boat to avenge their son-in-law’s death? Or
Jonathan did it for them, and was accidentally caught in the
explosion?”

“No, not a bit of it. They’d have wanted to
keep the submersible in good shape, as evidence in their
wrongful-death suit, wouldn’t they now? I reckon Jonathan was
sneaking back on board to take photos of the sub for them when the
boat went up.”

“Yeah, that’s the best explanation. Roger and
Tracy themselves as the mad bombers. Oh what a tangled web and all
that.” Jean gritted her teeth and went on, “The Ducketts have both
the motive and the opportunity to kill Tracy, don’t they?”

“Oh aye,” said Alasdair, untroubled by the
personal appeal of the genial couple.

Opening the door, Jean eyed the dragon
knocker. It reminded her of Roger’s mysterious skeleton, a long
sinuous body except with little wings instead of flippers. And the
knocker had feet, too. Back in the mists of the twentieth century
some jokester had used a hippopotamus-foot umbrella holder to make
Nessie tracks along the shore of the loch.

Alasdair tapped the knocker. “Wings and four
legs. Odd how so many fantasy beasties are hexapods.” His hand on
her back urged her on into the house.

For a moment the darkness of the entrance
hall made the air inside seem cool. Then Jean felt the warmth close
in like syrup. Houses in this part of the world were made to keep
heat in, not out. From the library came Elvis’s high-pitched,
perfectly rounded voice. “But Mummy, that big boat’s going out on
the loch. I want to go out on the loch.”

Alasdair seized Jean’s arm, pulling her to a
stop. He might have a scientific bent, but eavesdropping was more
of an art, akin to stalking a stag on the hillside.

“I’m sorry,” said Noreen. “The cruise is only
for the Festival folk.”

“You’re always so quick to give over, aren’t
you?” Martin said, and, his tone going from scornful to softly
cajoling, “I’ll have a word with the man at the pier, Elvis. Slip
him a tenner, like. Maybe a twenty. We’ll get ourselves on that
boat.”

“A twenty?” protested Noreen. “You can’t go
on spending our money like that, Martin, this place here’s bad
enough, we’ll be skint . . .”

“We never paid for this place here, you
stupid cow.”

The door of the private office opened and
Kirsty stepped out. When she saw Jean and Alasdair standing in the
entrance hall, she quailed. So did they. She had abandoned all
pretext at mature sobriety and defaulted to short shorts and a snug
cropped T-shirt that left little to the imagination, and,
accordingly, fueled the fantasy. Her hair was swirled gracefully
atop her head. “Can I help you?”

“The Halls need interviewing,” Alasdair told
her, focusing only on her face. “Could you look after the lad? We
may be some time.”

Kirsty thought that over. “Aye, I’ll mind
him, if it means moving his folk on the sooner.” She started down
the hall, her plastic sandals slapping on the floor, her white
shorts tracing a pattern in the gloom like an animated version of
the Stone’s double disc symbol.

Jean looked at Alasdair. “Kids today!” he
hissed from the corner of his mouth, and with a satiric quirk of
his brow followed Kirsty into the library. At his heels, Jean
smothered her grin.

The large casement windows, open to their
limits, admitted a wheeze or two of damp air that did nothing to
dispel the aura of mold from the oldest books and the breath of
incense, as Jean now realized it was, from the desk. Martin was
slumped in one of the windows, eyeing the excavation in progress
like a Little Leaguer watching the Red Sox. Noreen huddled in a
chair, her sundress crumpled around her. Kirsty’s and then Jean’s
entrance provoked only a dull upward glance, but when she saw
Alasdair, she squeaked in alarm. Martin whirled around and
petrified, every limb at an awkward angle.

It must be hard on Alasdair, Jean thought,
for people to greet his entrance with fear and loathing. But the
moment he stepped through the door he’d buckled on his armor,
closed his visor, and raised his shield.

Elvis was trying to entice Mandrake with a
scrap of paper. The cat, lying stretched out like a fur stole on
the cool stone of the hearth, was snubbing him as only a cat could
snub. Pulling a long, flat, colorful box off a lower shelf, Kirsty
said brightly to the child, “Fancy a game of Snakes and Ladders?
We’ll set up on the kitchen table, and the winner gets an ice
cream.”

“May I?” Elvis asked his parents, bouncing to
his feet.

Noreen managed a stiff wave, Martin a stiffer
nod. Kirsty took Elvis’s hand and led him away. No one moved until
his voice, going on about ice cream and snakes and Nessie,
disappeared behind the swing of the kitchen door.

Then, with slow deliberation, Alasdair took
off his jacket, draped it over the desk chair—his gaze strayed to
the photo of Ambrose and Eileen—and loosened his tie. To help him
keep cool, Jean knew, but he was also playing off his threatening
aspect, signaling it was time to get down to brass tacks. “Miss
Fairbairn,” he said calmly, “would you be so kind as to take
notes?”

She almost replied,
Of course, Chief
Inspector Cameron
, but decided that would be laying it on too
thick. From her bag she pulled her decrepit notebook and a pen.

“Shit,” Noreen said, shrinking down even
further. “They’ve found it.”

Martin snapped at her. “Shut up.”

“I told you, Marty, I told you you’d get
yourself banged up if you wasn’t careful, and what about us, then?”
Tears welled in Noreen’s eyes.

Jean stood holding her notebook. Oh. Alasdair
had wanted to see if they’d recognize it. The man had a streak of
low cunning, no doubt about it. And economy—he really did need
someone to take notes. Sitting down in the closest chair, a
high-backed overstuffed antique, she poised her pen over a blank
page. Sweat prickled along her back and beneath her thighs.

“Mrs. Hall,” Alasdair said, “you are not
obliged to testify against your husband, but if you choose to do
so, whatever you say will be used against him.”

Noreen’s face seemed to implode. She buried
it in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Instead of walking across
the room to render aid and comfort, Martin glared at her and
repeated stupid cow under his breath. He glanced around as though
considering whether to leap through the unscreened window, but a
constable—by no chance at all—was strolling past. His legs folded
and deposited him on the windowsill, where he bent double in the
universal posture of woe.

The front door opened and closed. Swift,
light footsteps came down the hall, and like Jeeves bringing a tray
of drinks, Gunn glided into the room. Nodding to Alasdair and then
to Jean, he sat down and produced his own notebook, ready to go.
With relief, she turned hers into a fan.

Alasdair said quietly, to the balding top of
Martin’s head, “I might could charge you with the murder of Tracy
Dempsey, Mr. Hall, unless you’re giving me good reasons not to.
Where did you first meet the woman?”

“At the Bristol University,” said Martin,
voice flat. Noreen looked up with a sniffle, her eyes red and
swollen. “Roger was lecturing. I thought he could help me move up
in my field, but when I went to talk to him I got to talking to
her, and after a bit she said he needed a second research assistant
for work at Loch Ness. I applied straightaway—what a leg-up that
would be, part of the expedition that actually finds the creature.
But Roger chose himself another Yank, didn’t he, that Brendan chap.
Still, Tracy said she liked my work experience and my attitude,
said she could get me a fellowship if I helped her and Roger with a
small problem. Said she’d pay my expenses and bonuses as well, for
work well done. Just as long as I did what she said and didn’t ask
too many questions.”

His attitude being eager to please and
desperate for money and position, Jean footnoted. Susceptible to
Tracy’s wiles.

“What work were you doing here in April?”
asked Alasdair.

“April? You know about . . .” Martin looked
up, assessed the glacier thickening along Alasdair’s jaw, and
slumped even further. “I collected some notepaper for her. And she
said she wanted something that could be identified with the house,
so I lifted an old corkscrew from the desk there. Pretty clever,
eh? Nothing so big they’d call out the plods, but seen to be from
Pitclachie.”

Unimpressed, Alasdair asked, “What else?”

“She wanted an old book as well. One written
by Ambrose Mackintosh.”

Alasdair’s gaze flicked like the snap of a
whip toward Jean. “A book? Not loose notes?”

“No, a bound book.
My Life, by Ambrose
Mackintosh of Pitclachie
. Autobiography, sounds like.”

Jean let her head fall back against the
scratchy velvet of her chair. So that was it. Ambrose’s
autobiography. He had written it and had it printed and bound—once
a publisher, always a publisher, perhaps. A truthful autobiography,
not a puff piece, would be sensational, the location of the passage
grave the least of the revelations that Iris would be dead set on
keeping private. But if Tracy and Roger already had a copy,
wherever it came from, why did they want another one?

“You found the book, then, Mr. Hall?”
Alasdair was asking.

“I looked at every book in this bleeding
house, even the ones in the trout’s office. I turned up one buried
in a filthy old box in the lumber room of the Lodge,
The Realm
of the Beast
, and thought maybe Tracy’d make do with that. And
she took it, right enough, said thank you kindly, very useful, but
not the one she wanted. If Iris has a copy of
My Life
, she’s
walled it up in her tower.”

But if it was that well-hidden, Jean told
herself, why would Iris call Kirsty and ask her to hide it? Martin
just hadn’t looked carefully enough.

Alasdair said, “You were stopping at the
Lodge in April.”

“Ever so much more room,” said Noreen through
her teeth. “I could cook the meals, save a few pence—you never told
me, Marty, you never told me she was paying the tariff for us!”

“Was the lumber room unlocked then?”
Alasdair’s cool voice cut Noreen’s sweaty mumble.

“I pinched the key from the office,” answered
Martin. “Had it copied, put it back. The trout, she never knew, did
she?”

Jean saw that her exploratory efforts had
been hampered by honesty.

“I knew.” Noreen sniffed, a sound like a
drain clearing, and sat up straighter. “I knew. I told you that
woman would leave you banged up, and I was right!”

Alasdair’s stern expression neither
contradicted nor agreed with her. “You returned to Pitclachie in
June, for the Water Horse Expedition.”

“The frogs, they got the Lodge, then moved
out, then you . . .” Martin’s glance at Jean would have been
hostile if it wasn’t so lifeless, like his pale face, drained of
blood as though by some deep internal injury. “I used my key and
searched again, Friday night, just so the trout hadn’t changed
things round from April. No joy.”

Jean wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or
insulted that she hadn’t been the object of the night crawler.

“The key, the copy, it’s in my sponge bag
upstairs,” said Noreen. “He thought no one would go looking for it,
there, with my things.”

Alasdair tilted his head toward Gunn. Gunn
tilted his head toward Alasdair.
Check
. “Please go on, Mr.
Hall,” Alasdair said.

“She told me to hide the corkscrew from the
drinks table on the Friday, and I did—it’s in the shrubbery. She
told me to lift your notebook . . .” His chin jutted toward Jean.
“Your bag was hanging open there at the Festival, didn’t even have
to go back into the Lodge to get it.”

If he survived this, Martin had a future in
pickpocketing, Jean thought. She’d never felt a thing.

“What did Mrs. Dempsey do with Miss
Fairbairn’s notebook?” asked Alasdair.

“Glanced through it, then told me to throw it
down somewheres, so she’d think she lost it.”

“Why did Mrs. Dempsey want Miss Fairbairn’s
notebook?” A subtle difference, but a vital one.

“Cause she, Fairburn . . .” Martin wasn’t the
first person to skew Jean’s name. Still she frowned. “She’s a
reporter, isn’t she? She had something on Roger, Tracy never said
what. She had something on him and was going to make trouble, and
if she did, then Roger wouldn’t be able to fund a fellowship for
me. She was asking too many questions, Tracy said.”

Asking questions was her job, damn it! Jean
tried to meet Martin’s eye with a hostile glare of her own, but he
ducked, wrapping his long arms around his narrow chest and folding
back on the windowsill. So Tracy had read through her notebook for
the same reason Roger had bugged the toy. To see what she knew
about the submersible disaster. To see if she was going to
publicize it. There was privacy, and there was secrecy . . .

Alasdair walked to the empty fireplace and
looked down at the cat, who was dozing peacefully, his calico sides
rising and falling. Not that Alasdair was interested in the cat. He
was deploying one of his significant silences, letting the Halls
sweat. Letting Jean sweat, too, but not because she was on the hot
seat. “Were you working just for Tracy,” he asked in that prickly
velvet voice of his, “or for Roger as well?”

“I never talked with him at all. Why should
I? She was a strong woman, she was, dressed right smart, had a good
head on her shoulders. She knew what she was about.”