The Murder Hole (6 page)

“Hello, Dr. Dempsey.” His hand was as soft
and damp as a sponge, but it steadied her sensible shoes across the
washboard-like gangplank and onto the deck, which was rising and
falling to the swell. Her stomach was more likely to react to the
faint odors of bilge, fish, and gasoline than to the motion, but
fortunately the wind blew the smell away.

Dempsey was taller than she remembered, but
then, she was short enough that most people seemed tall. He
squeezed her hand, approximating a handshake, and let it go. “It’s
just Roger. The PhD is honorary, recognition from the old alma
mater for my work, they said, but we both know it was actually for
my building them a state-of-the-art science lab.”

Jean smiled appreciatively at that. “Roger.
How’s it going?”

“Great,” he returned. “Sit down, sit
down.”

A large wave, probably reflected off the
tourist cruiser just putting out from the public dock down the way,
slapped up against the boat. Jean dropped into a canvas chair.
Roger perched on a stool surrounded by tentacles of wire, control
panels, screens, and, for all Jean knew, the remnants of Skylab. He
bellowed toward the cabin, “Tracy! How about some tea!”

“A cuppa will have to do, we’ve got no
biscuits at all,” returned a female voice

“That’s okay!” Roger muted his bellow to a
confidential rumble. “The first time I was in Scotland, right out
of college and wet behind the ears, a waitress asked if I’d like an
egg with my tea. I figured it would be a hard-boiled egg floating
in the cup like those buoys in the water there, but hey, if that’s
the custom of the country, go for it.”

“And what you got was a full supper,
right?”

“Oh yeah. My wife’s from England, she’s been
teasing me about that ever since we met. Which was right out of
college, too. She’s done a real good job of drying out my
ears.”

He was another American soul seduced by
Britain. Jean identified with that.

“Yo, Brendan,” Roger called to the
diving-suited man as he flopped back onto the boat. Consulting one
of several monitors, Roger delivered instructions in electronic
Esperanto.

“Sure thing,” Brendan replied, and back over
the side he went.

So he was the “go-to guy” Roger had referred
to on the phone, the assistant with the broad shoulders, square
jaw, and cleft chin. If Brendan peeled off his hood, would he have
a curl in the middle of his forehead, like Superman?

Judging by his accent, the other assistant,
Jonathan, was a Brit. His domed brow made his head look too heavy
for his body. His arms and legs were positively spindly beside and
below his padded chest. Jean told herself that he probably had a
very nice personality, his belligerent greeting to the
contrary.

Carrying a coil of wire, Jonathan picked his
way across the gangplank and then the deck. He leaned over the
gunwale and called, “Mind you don’t mess the flex about, Sunshine.
It’s not pasta.”

“Give me a break,” Brendan’s muffled voice
replied.

“And it’s not five minutes you were asking me
to take your place this evening.” Jonathan handed down the
wire.

“What? That gives you the right to insult me?
You’d better be sure you don’t fall in the water. With that giant
chip on your shoulder you’d sink like a rock, life-jacket or no
life-jacket.” A splash like that of a sounding whale cut off
Jonathan’s reply. With a quick, wary glance toward Roger, Jonathan
retreated back to the dock.

Roger ignored the static. Turning to Jean, he
radiated sincerity. Either he didn’t remember her putting him in
his place, or was willing to let it go. She appreciated someone
capable of letting go, no matter what his ulterior motive was. “Are
your assistants both electronics experts, like you?” She fished her
notebook and pen out of her bag and jotted,
June 20. Loch Ness.
Roger Dempsey
.

“I’m no expert, just a hobbyist.
Jonathan—Jonathan Paisley—he’s a geek, could hack into NORAD, I
bet. Brendan Gilstrap’s a marine biology student, just got back
from a tour of the Great Barrier Reef.”

“And why are you here, searching for a
legend?”

“Because it’s there!” Roger replied, with an
expansive gesture toward the loch and the hills beyond. “Even if
Nessie’s not obviously there, no one can prove she doesn’t exist,
just like no one can prove there’s no such thing as a UFO. Absence
of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”

Absence of evidence didn’t prove a thing, but
Jean gathered that was Roger’s point. “Are you into ufology as well
as crypto-zoology?”

“Hell, no. That’s just people letting their
imaginations run away with them.”

“Imagination is the explanation for most of
the Nessie sightings. Wind, waves, birds, otters, deer—the loch
creates illusions, especially when you’re looking for a mysterious
creature.”

“Just because people jump to conclusions, and
just because there have been outright frauds, doesn’t mean the
creature doesn’t exist. There’s just too much eyewitness
evidence.”

“Any policeman will tell you that
eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable,” Jean stated, knowing what
she was talking about. “We have photos of snow leopards in the
Himalayas, but not one of Nessie, who lives over the river and
through the woods from millions of people. Scientists of all
stripes have spent decades exploring the loch, and haven’t proved
any creature exists.”

“They’ve come up with such bizarre
explanations it would be easier to believe all those eyewitnesses
are lying. Animals acting in ways completely atypical of their
species. Logs propelled by decaying gasses. Yeah, right! There have
been sightings of mysterious water beasts going back centuries, not
just in Loch Ness.”

“The sources before nineteen-thirty-three are
references to references to other references,” Jean said. “By the
time you track them down, they turn out to have been taken out of
context or are simply wrong. This scenery has been a tourist
attraction for over two hundred years. Before then the loch was a
major thoroughfare. No one ever reported a creature in the water
until Ambrose Mackintosh did, unless you count the story of St.
Columba,”

“And you don’t, I take it.”

“In context it’s a typical saintly miracle
tale. And if it happened at all it was in the river up near
Inverness, not here in the loch.”

Roger leaned forward. Beneath the bill of the
cap his eyes danced. They were an odd color, an indeterminate
gray-blue-green, as though he’d spent so many hours in sunlight
reflected off water they’d bleached out. “Let me guess. You’re
playing devil’s advocate.”

Not exactly, no, but she replied mildly, “You
think?”

“I do think, yes I do,” he said with a
chuckle.

How about that? His wiry shoulders covered by
the Water Horse T-shirt appeared to be one hundred percent
chip-free.

“Up to a point,” he went on, “Ambrose
Mackintosh was a fine scientist, the first one to seriously
research the creature. The point comes with the crap about Aleister
Crowley—that makes rotting logs and stuff look reasonable. Ambrose
ignores any evidence from before his own time because it violates
his thesis about Crowley.”

“That’s not good science,” Jean murmured.

“It sure as hell isn’t good science. Ambrose
should have mentioned the old legends. Shape-changing animals like
water bulls and water horses and kelpies were the local people’s
way of explaining heads, humps, snaky coils—a variety of sightings.
I talked to one old guy who grew up in Foyers in the thirties, says
his grandmother told him to stay away from the loch because there
were nasty creatures in it. They take their myths seriously
here.”

Yes they did, realizing that myth didn’t have
to be true to be real. And yet taking legends
too
seriously
could be as big a mistake as not taking them at all—or so Alasdair
maintained, and, as usual, he had a point. Jean suggested, “What
better way to keep a little kid from drowning than to scare him so
badly that he doesn’t go near the water?”

“Listen,” Roger insisted, blithely
disregarding that that’s exactly what she was doing, “just a few
years ago the skipper of a sport-fishing boat wanted to sneak
through the Caledonian Canal during the night because his customers
had caught over their limit. But the crew absolutely refused to
sail up Loch Ness after dark.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“From a guy who knew the skipper
himself.”

“Roger, that’s urban legend territory. For
one thing, how was the boat planning to get through the canal when
all the locks close down and their operators go home for the
night?”

He stared at her for a long moment, then
grinned. So he’d learned since the conference that when painting
your way into corners, charm got you out again much faster than
combativeness. “Well, okay, so much for eyewitness evidence, huh?
Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“I don’t.” Jean couldn’t help but return his
grin and remind herself that she had not come here to praise, bury,
or even debate him, simply to report on his point of view.

Dempsey raised his hands in surrender.
“Granted, if the sightings were just a matter of opinion, of
hearsay, that wouldn’t be good science. Even if you count
psychology as a science, which I don’t. Where I come in is crossing
quantifiable science—you know, the bit about repeatable results,
that sort of thing—with something that makes academically-trained
scientists uncomfortable.

“Every science needs dedicated amateurs,” he
continued, “Archaeology had Schliemann uncovering Troy and Ventris
deciphering Linear B and, well, me. You saw the article in the
press kit—I plotted a Roman city in Turkey that was being flooded
by a new dam. Nessie had Mackintosh and Dinsdale and Edgerton and
all, and now she has me, too. Nothing against academics. Some of my
best friends are academics.”

“Mine too. And a more hidebound group it
would be hard to find. Fundamentalists, maybe, but I’m not going to
go there.”

“Then we’re on the same side.”

Jean wouldn’t go that far, but she said only,
“Tell me about your equipment. Your flyers talk about submersibles
. . .”

“No, no, no. Old hat.” He shooed that concept
away as though it were a mosquito. “We’ve got state of the art
ROVs. Remote operating vehicles. You control the whole shebang from
the boat, safe and sound. No risk to the operator. We’ve got
cameras, sonar, hydrophones that can hear an underwater fart at
three hundred meters. And that’s just for the water part of the
mission. On land we have a magnetometer, a new ground-penetrating
radar, an electromagnetic ground conductivity meter—all
manufactured by Omnium, top of the line. We’re going to work from
the boat while the Festival crowds are milling around, then look
for evidence on land when it’s over.”

“On land?” Jean repeated. “It would be even
harder for Nessie to hide on the land than in the water.”

“There have been sightings on land, and not
just by people on their way home from the pub.” He paused while she
laughed, then indicated the boat, the pier, the water, and the
distant hillsides, like an evangelist beseeching the Almighty for a
sign. “Jean, people have been laughing at me for years. They said
I’d never make a living buying used lab equipment, fixing it up,
and selling it. Wrong! Rebuilt lab equipment, computers, sensors,
some tweaks of the existing technology, and the next thing you
know, I was starting Omnium. They said it would never get off the
ground. Wrong again. So here I am, re-paying my debt to the
scientific community. Like Thomas Edison moving on from inventing
the light bulb to doing research in physics.”

Unlike Edison, Roger hired other people to
invent his light bulbs. But like Roger, Edison had also been a
businessman with a good opinion of himself. No one built empires on
either light bulbs or used microscopes, Jean allowed to herself,
without nerve as well as brain.

Brendan heaved himself back over the gunwale
and splashed onto the deck. That water was forty-two degrees. Even
with the diving suit he must be cold.

“There you are! What took you so long?” said
Roger, not to Brendan but to a woman who emerged from the hatchway
carrying a tray lined with several mugs.

“That cooker’s a beast itself,” she said.
“I’m resigning as galley slave. With people tramping about here all
day long I could do with a sundowner.” Like flicking a switch, she
turned a neon smile on the tramp of the moment. “Hello! Jean, isn’t
it? I’m Tracy.”

Jean politely accepted a mug. “Jean Fairbairn
with
Great Scot
. So you’re the woman behind the great
man?”

“That I am, yes,” said Tracy, without the
least hint of sarcasm. “Is your husband here with you, Jean? I’m
looking forward to meeting him.”

So both Dempseys had checked Jean out. Well,
she, too, believed in being prepared, and answered coolly, “Brad
and I are no longer married.”

“I, uh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Roger’s
caterpillar-like eyebrows crawled toward his hat, then toward each
other.

Tracy shot him a sharp glance Jean could not
interpret. To Jean she said, “Ah. That’s why you’ve gone back to
your maiden name, I expect, not the change of career. Quite
right—mustn’t cling to the past.”

Jean smiled politely, sipped her tea, and
offered no more details, since the details had nothing to do with
the case in hand, Roger’s false intimacy and genuine charm be
damned.

Roger took off his cap, revealing shaggy
salt-and-pepper hair, and tilted the mug into his beard.

For a moment Jean thought she detected the
scent of Earl Grey tea, but no, hers was plain black tea, brewed so
strong that even with milk and sugar it was stiff enough to scrub
the deck. Sipping, she watched as Jonathan and Brendan claimed
their mugs and retreated toward the front deck of the boat. They
sat there, either chatting or exchanging barbs, short English
vowels dueling with long American ones.