The Murder Hole (48 page)

Jean’s hand was frozen onto Alasdair’s
collar. Even when he wrapped an arm around the life preserver and
looked up with wide eyes reflecting the multicolored light, still
she hung onto him. She couldn’t feel her feet. Shivers were
wracking her body.

His icy fingers fumbled for hers, and closed
around them, and held on.

From her table on the terrace of the Visitor
Center, Jean gazed down over Urquhart Castle and the loch beyond
it, trying to think serene thoughts. A Scottish flag rose from the
highest rampart, fluttering in the brisk, cool wind, its colors
repeating the blue of the sky and the white of the occasional
meringue-like cloud. The afternoon sun picked out the shape of each
battered red stone, the swell of each pewter-blue wave, the bright
paint of the boats that were transporting cargo, and carrying
tourists, and searching for Roger Dempsey’s body.

Her thoughts were more dazed than calm. She
felt the bone-chilling cold of the water, the brush against her
leg, the men dragging her into the inflatable. She felt the warm
blankets and the hot tea that had tingled in her fingertips and
toes. She saw the ambulance, maybe the same one she’d seen Saturday
night. This time Alasdair was sitting across from her, his face
white, strained, closed, and Brendan was standing by the door
wearing a blanket like a toga, Kirsty pressed against his side. She
heard the worried voices, Hugh, Gunn, Iris, Noreen.

She saw her clothes making a teal puddle on
the floor of the bathroom in the Lodge. And she saw herself tossing
and turning all night without hearing a single ghostly noise.
Perhaps Ambrose, Edith, and Eileen’s confession, teased from them
by the critical mass of two watchers, had been good for their
souls.

Jean saw the dawn creep across the loch, and
heard her phone ringing again and again—Michael and Rebecca and
Miranda, was she all right, was Alasdair all right? “Well then,”
said Miranda, “if you throw yourself into Loch Ness of ill repute
to save the man’s life, I’m thinking the pair of you, you’re an
item.”

Jean did not disagree.

“Mind you, Peter Kettering is by way of
making lemonade from the lemons you handed him—he’s auctioning off
the rights to his eyewitness account of the entire weekend, let
alone the stramash on the boat. Great Scot isn’t bidding.”

Jean heard her own voice saying, “Thank you.”
And she saw the newspapers, her own body in black and white,
looking like a drowned rat. But of the four people who had gone
into the water last night, only one had drowned. Loch Ness had
given up Jonathan Paisley’s body, but Jean doubted it would ever
relinquish Roger Dempsey’s.

Breaking the surface of her own thoughts, she
inhaled the fresh air, licked the crumbs of scone and jam from her
lips, and drank deep of the rich, sweet, milky tea. Her backup pair
of glasses steamed up. When they cleared, she could see Alasdair
seated next to her, and Iris across the table. It was all over but
the shouting, and neither of them was likely to shout.

Iris was caught in her own reverie, her
knitting motionless in her gnarled hands, her weathered face turned
to the far hills, still as a plaster death mask.

Alasdair gazed down at the castle his
ancestors had sacked. His face may have blushed in Monday’s heat
and light, but today his complexion was pallid, stretched tautly
across the austerity of his cheekbones, and his eyes were the
bleached blue of yesterday’s sky. He’d been up most of the night,
and to Inverness and back today. What wasn’t over was the
paperwork.

“Did you get everyone taken care of?” Jean
asked.

“For the time being.” He shook himself very
slightly, as though shrugging off cold water droplets. “We’ve sent
Martin on his way with Noreen and Elvis. The lad, he’s saying he
saw Nessie’s head and humps in the water while Roger was holding
him up on the railing. That’s why he sat so still. I’m thinking he
saw the wake of the boat.”

“One often sees strange wave effects on the
loch,” said Iris, half to herself.

Jean felt the dark water closing over her
head, and the black depths of the abyss beneath her, and again swam
up through her own mind.

Alasdair’s gaze lingered on Jean for a long
moment, curious and cautious at once. If his eyes were the mirror
of his soul, then he was doing some heavy-duty soul-searching. “The
Bouchards now,” he said, “they’ve finally owned that hitting you
and Roger was less than an accident. Seems Roger was that horrified
to learn Tracy blew up the boat, he let it slip to his
collaborators, Charles and Sophie.”

Jean would say something about a fraternity
of thieves, but there was no point. “They got to talking about it
during their boozy dinner, and when they saw me walking with Roger,
they thought I was Tracy and tried to frighten her into leaving. Or
even take her out.”

“They meant no harm to Roger himself—he was
looking out antiquities for them. But Tracy, she’d become a loose
cannon. When she was killed later on that same night, they reckoned
Roger to be the guilty party and tried to protect him without
digging themselves any further into his hole.”

“All this being the sort of thing that seems
logical when you’re drunk.” Jean refilled Alasdair’s cup, and her
own, and offered the teapot to Iris.

“Thank you, no,” she said, and leaned forward
slightly, peering down over the terrace railing.

Jean followed the direction of her gaze. Ah,
Kirsty and Brendan came strolling out of the castle and stopped on
the drawbridge to embrace and nuzzle. Kids today, she thought. Or
any day. Damn the emotional torpedoes, full steam ahead. But then,
Brendan was the sole survivor of the Water Horse Expedition. He
deserved a little consolation. And he was going to have go home to
the U.S. At least she and Alasdair lived in the same country,
separated by only one hundred fifty miles of motorway. They could
meet for tea at some halfway point.

Meeting halfway. They were already working on
that. Distance could fan a large flame or extinguish a small
one.

Briskly Iris turned her sweater-in-progress
around and started another row. “Have you sent Jonathan’s and
Tracy’s bodies on to their families? I assume Tracy has family
beyond—Roger.”

“Jonathan’s gone back to his people in
England, aye. Tracy will be another day or so, the mills of the
judiciary grinding right slowly.”

“The Ducketts stopped in at Pitclachie to get
their things,” Iris said. “They’re away home.”

“Maybe the publicity will wring some money
out of Omnium for their grandkids,” Jean suggested. “A one-time
settlement or something. I just hope they’re not blaming themselves
for Jonathan’s death.”

“I expect they will do. That path paved with
good intentions and all. Even so, they’re not as culpable in
Jonathan’s death as I am in Roger’s. I overestimated his hold on
sanity. I pushed him over the edge. Literally, in your case, Chief
Inspector.”

“You can’t be blamed for telling the truth,”
Alasdair told her.

“I didn’t tell the truth, not in time.” Iris
turned to him, her voice astringent, her eyes like steel. “He was
blackmailing me, you know that. You know about my father’s
autobiography.”

Jean nodded. So did Alasdair.

“I finally decided that Roger should not be
allowed to go on, no matter the cost to me. So I denounced him.
And, selfishly, I hoped that if he turned about and denounced me,
the witnesses would believe his denunciation came from the same
source as his identification of the bones.”

“But his copy of the book . . .” Jean
began.

“Was incomplete. So Kirsty told me, this
morning, Brendan having told her.” Iris looked down again at the
young couple.

Jean saw no need to tell Iris that she and
Alasdair could have told her the same thing, yesterday, if only
she’d come down from her tower. It wouldn’t have made any
difference in the end. “Brendan never knew what Roger’s hold over
you was.”

“His hold over you being Edith Fraser,” added
Alasdair.

“In part, yes.” Iris secured her knitting,
then reached for her basket. She pulled out the old biography of
Crowley, now wrapped in a clear plastic book bag, and handed it to
Jean. “This is yours.”

“No, it’s not. It was stolen from your
cottage.”

“No matter. It’s no more than a curiosity, a
confirmation of poor Edith’s existence. Of my mother’s existence,
but I suppose you’ve twigged that as well.” Her keen eyes looked
from face to face with more challenge than embarrassment.

“The bones in the passage grave,” Alasdair
said, “they’re . . .”

“Edith’s. Yes. I knew once Roger exposed the
tomb, he’d turn them up. And yet there were other secrets that
needed protecting—or so I thought. But in the end, it’s like this
book. If I’d only kept it out in the open air all this time, it
would never have taken on such a bad smell.”

Jean tucked the book into her bag and met
Alasdair’s eye.
Here it comes
.

From her basket Iris drew out two more
objects, a tiny velvet jeweler’s box and a leather-bound book.
The Decameron
, by Boccaccio, Mandrake Press edition.

She opened it. Inside nested a simple
cardboard-bound book, smaller and thinner than its protective
covering.
My Life, by Ambrose Mackintosh of Pitclachie
.
Entire and complete. “He wrote his—confession, if you will—in
nineteen-forty-six, and had two copies printed by a printer he had
patronized during his association with Mandrake Press. One was for
me when I came of age in nineteen-fifty-four. The other was for
Aleister Crowley. Crowley must have torn out the last chapter of
his book. Perhaps his monstrous ego couldn’t bear, at the end of
his life, to have his disciple at last condemn his behavior. All
the occult folderol, and what finally drew Ambrose’s censure was
Crowley’s treatment of his women and his children. My father was in
so many ways a traditional old gentleman.”

Iris stroked the book, as though by touching
it she could stroke Ambrose’s hand, no matter how stained. “When
Crowley died in nineteen-forty-seven, his possessions, including
one of Ambrose’s Pictish silver chains, were dispersed.”

“It’s Crowley’s copy that Roger and Tracy
bought from the Bouchards,” said Jean. “And Charles had the chain,
too.”

“That’s the way of it, yes.” Iris opened the
jeweler’s box. The polished silver, marcasite, and Czech glass of
the earring inside flashed like a beacon. “Eileen gave these
earrings to Edith. When she died so terribly and suddenly, Eileen
helped Ambrose to dispose of her—she was never properly buried, was
she? Edith had long hair. They didn’t realize she was wearing the
earrings until they found one on the floor of the study, dislodged
by her fall.”

“They concealed the death for you, did they?”
asked Alasdair.

“Yes. They had put it about that Eileen was
expecting, that Edith was there only as a companion. No one was in
attendance when I was born save the maid and the local doctor, who
was a temporary locum and had never met Mrs. Mackintosh. They made
a gamble, but it succeeded. And then fell to pieces with Edith’s
death soon after.”

“They weren’t able to have a child
themselves,” said Jean.

The corners of Iris’s pale lips turned up in
something that wasn’t quite humor. “Ambrose never explicitly said
so. Just as he never explicitly defined his relationship with
Crowley. Even when he spoke of it to me, on his deathbed, he
employed circumlocutions that would be laughable in today’s rather
overly frank world.”

Not all of us, Jean thought with a glance at
Alasdair, think strewing your guts in public is a good thing.

“I believe,” Iris went on, “that Crowley was
the love of his life. If that was the love that dare not speak its
name, so be it. When Ambrose felt obliged to marry, he agreed to
what was virtually an arranged match. The years passed, and Ambrose
and Eileen led increasingly separate lives, quarreling over money
and friends. Then Crowley cast off yet another mistress, a local
woman, the sister of the mason working to restore the cottage.
Edith Fraser. She was pregnant. Eileen wanted a child and Ambrose
needed an heir. The three of them struck a bargain.”

“Hang on,” said Alasdair. “Edith was pregnant
when she came to Pitclachie?”

Iris looked into his face, then into Jean’s,
sparing herself nothing. “Ambrose was my father. He cared for me.
We were estranged for a time, after I came of age and read his
book, but . . . Well. We made our peace before his death. And yes,
Miss Fairbairn, Chief Inspector Cameron, it’s not only the truth
about Edith’s death that is in last chapter of the book, but of her
life. The truth that I thought needed concealing. The identity of
my genetic father, Aleister Crowley.”

Whoa
, Jean thought, and caught the
flicker in Alasdair’s eye. So much for biological determinism.
“What happened to Eileen?” she asked softly.

“Edith’s death convinced her to cut her
losses and start over. She was still a young woman, mind. She
returned to the United States and obtained a divorce on grounds of
non-consummation—whether truthfully or not, I can’t say. She
re-married, and died surrounded by her children and grandchildren
in nineteen-eighty-five.”

Jean knew Alasdair was hearing Edith’s
ghostly voice:
You dinna care, not for her, not for me, only for
him, the Devil take him and good luck to them both!
And,
A
divorce, I’m thinking, there’s grounds right enough
.

“You’ve met Eileen, then?” he asked.

“Yes. She told me that after Edith’s death
she’d had enough. But she and Ambrose knew that a public divorce
would have brought out my true parentage. Therefore, they arranged
for her to simply disappear, an assumed suicide. They never
suspected he would be charged with her murder. But the scarf she
had wrapped about Edith’s poor wounded head blew away in the wind,
and was found. Eileen would have reappeared to save Ambrose from
the hangman, but, in the event, that was not necessary.” Iris
looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “The maid, by the by,
accepted a considerable settlement for her silence and emigrated to
Australia. We exchanged letters before her death.”