The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  On it was taped a poster: Midsummer Monster Madness, sponsored by Starr Beverages PLC and the NEW! Cameron Arms Hotel. Drumnadrochit, Loch Ness, June 21-23. Beneath the words a green cartoon dragon wearing a Glengarry bonnet held a pint of beer in one hand—not flipper, hand—and a set of bagpipes in the other. The conceit was innocuous to the point of banality, the cold depths of the loch notwithstanding.

  With a wry shrug, Jean headed back to Ramsay Garden. She was just skirting a shiny red sports car that was now parked next to and repeating the color of her potted geraniums when she realized her front door was standing open. What with Dougie, she hadn’t locked it. But she could have sworn she’d shut it.

  Oh boy. And then there was the myth that your own doorstep was free of danger. Clenching her fists at her sides, she climbed the steps and paused on the threshold. “Hello?”

  Chapter Two

  From inside came Miranda Capaldi’s melodious voice. “It’s only me.”

  “Oh, hi!” Feeling vaguely indignant—she’d earned her paranoia the hard way, darn it—Jean shut the door. She should have recognized the car. It belonged to Miranda’s—well, Duncan wasn’t a boyfriend, with the soda-shop implications of that word. And “lover” was a bit bald for such a civilized relationship.

  “Sorry!” Like a cuckoo clock, Miranda glanced out of the kitchen doorway and then vanished back inside. “I came round with the papers for your hire car and chapped at the door like a proper guest, and then I thought I’d just try the knob, and I was inside before I quite knew what I was about. I’ve just missed your friends from the Museum, have I?”

  “Afraid so.” Jean found her friend and business partner spooning leftover Szechuan tofu and rice onto a clean plate.

  “May I?” Miranda asked. “Your meal smells delicious. And fortune cookies as well! Super!” Her manicured fingertips played a solo on the microwave, the tiny diamonds on her tennis bracelet winking. Today her crest of hair was chestnut red. Fashionable high-water pants and a pastel cotton sweater accentuated a figure that was almost as slender at forty as it had been at twenty, when she and Jean were college roommates. The brilliant silk scarf draped around her shoulders probably revealed the designer’s name to anyone sophisticated enough to recognize the symbols, or logos, as they were now called. The symbols on the Pitclachie Stone must have carried similar meaning.

  Self-consciously Jean brushed crumbs off her size medium T-shirt with its decorative dribble of soy sauce—her chopsticks, like the plans of mice and men, had gone oft agley. She’d long ago given up on fashion just as she’d given up on calculus, and was fond of saying she couldn’t tell the difference between Armani and Old Navy. Which, Miranda was fond of retorting, was snobbery of its own. That Jean had just recently started coloring the strands of gray infiltrating her mop of brown hair she attributed to Miranda’s influence, not self-consciousness, no, not at all.

  “You’re away first thing the morn, then,” Miranda stated. “No need to go writing up the Festival, though you’ll be asking Iris her opinion of it. She’ll say it’s all for the tourists, I expect.”

  “I’m not much more than a glorified tourist myself.”

  “Ah, no, like Dorothy in the Emerald City, you’ve seen behind the screen.”

  “That’s my job, writing about what’s behind the screen.”

  The microwave beeped. Miranda extracted her plate and set it on the cabinet. Rejecting chopsticks in favor of a knife and fork, she assessed a small bite. “Mmmm. Nice burn. You’ve got a dab hand with a chili pepper, Jean.”

  “I was weaned on a jalapeno.” Jean started filing the plates and glasses in the dishwasher. “Michael and Rebecca told me a bit about Ambrose Macintosh. But what can I expect from Iris?”

  “She’s a bit of an eccentric, but not so much as her father, not by a long chalk. Mind you, I don’t know her well. We cross paths at meetings of Scotland the Green, when they’re sharing out the grants for deer fences, re-forestation, mountain path repair, and such.”

  “She’s a board member, isn’t she?”

  “Oh aye. And you’re not invited to sit on the board unless you’ve donated a packet to the cause, as I’m knowing all too well. The B&B must be quite the success. Could be Iris inherited from her mum, the American heiress, or is selling off her father’s collections. I’ll ask about, shall I?”

  What financial and social blips on the contemporary Scottish radar Miranda didn’t know weren’t worth knowing. “Please don’t. I’ll be prying into her personal affairs quite enough as it is.” Jean shooed a fly away from the pots and pans piled in the sink, turned on the hot water, and added a squirt of Fairy Liquid. Steam billowed. Soap bubbles went floating upward, each one a tiny prism.

  Rebecca had volunteered Michael to help clean the kitchen, but cleaning was Jean’s guilty pleasure. She could achieve the same sort of Zen contemplative state washing, drying, mopping, and sweeping as she could knitting, with the bonus that she then had a tidy environment. Her ex-husband Brad used to say her zeal for tidiness was a control issue. She hadn’t argued with that. She hadn’t argued with much at all. That was one reason for the divorce. Love hadn’t turned to hate, but to apathy.

  Jean realized Miranda had gone ominously silent. “What?” she asked.

  “You’re having a problem asking Iris about Ambrose, then.”

  “Sort of,” Jean admitted. “Whether Ambrose was mistaken about seeing Nessie or whether he was committing a fraud is the question, and not one Iris may want to answer—assuming she knows the answer—especially now that the story has taken on a life of its own. Although, to give Ambrose the benefit of the doubt, weird things do happen.”

  “Weird things happen to you,” Miranda stated, knowing that nothing weird would dare sully her own well-organized life, and mashed the last of the rice onto the back of her fork.

  “I used to think weird things happened only to me. Brad had me convinced of it, at least.”

  “He was wrong.”

  “No, he was playing it safe.” Jean rinsed off Miranda’s empty plate and placed it in the dishwasher.

  “If everyone played safely we’d have no stories to write, would we now? Look at Iris’s mother’s disappearance and all. There’s a grand mystery for you to solve. Me, I’m thinking post-partum depression and suicide by loch, but then, Ambrose was tried for murder.” Miranda leaned over and stirred the fortune cookies in their bowl. She looked like an oracle searching for an omen rather than simply making sure she chose one whose cellophane wrapper hadn’t come open.

  “Miranda, when you spoke with Iris, what did you tell her I was going to ask?”

  “I didn’t speak with Iris. I spoke with Kirsty-something, who booked the room and said she’d set up an interview.”

  “Aha! Iris will assume I’ll be asking about her work, not ambushing her about her parents’ personal lives.”

  Miranda chose a cookie and looked around. “If you’re afraid of asking tough questions, then you’re in the wrong profession.”

  “If you want me to be an investigative reporter, then you took on the wrong partner. There are questions, and there’s digging through dirty laundry. I bought into Great Scot because I wanted to drag historical skeletons out of closets, not air contemporary scandals. No one appreciates privacy issues more than I do.”

  “Privacy? Or secrecy? There’s a difference. You’ve not lost your nerve, have you now . . .” Miranda bit her sentence short. Her eyes softened. “Ah, Jean, I’m sorry. If you’re not remembering your own scandal, then you’re remembering what happened when you went asking questions last month. You’re quite right. Great Scot is no tabloid rag.”

  “Don’t apologize. Someone’s got to rouse the rabble here. It’s just that I’ve realized what a hypocrite I can be—show me yours, but I won’t show you mine. I’ve seen how curiosity can kill, and not just kill me, either.” Jean swished her dishcloth through the suds, her grimace suddenly buffered by a chuckle. In her old life she had been accused of asking
too many questions. Making a new life out of asking questions had seemed like vindication. Discovering that not all the answers were ones she wanted to hear was poetic justice. Since justice was a rare enough event, she could live with that. Or so she intended. “What do you want to bet that my curiosity is only hiding under the bed, like Dougie does when he thinks he’s completely concealed but his tail is sticking out in plain sight?”

  “There you are,” said Miranda, with one of her wise expressions. She tore the cellophane away from the cookie and wadded it crinkling into a ball. “I’ll not be telling you that history doesn’t repeat itself. You and I both know better than that. And we’re knowing that it can catch you up no matter where you are or what you’re doing.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And aye, I’m after being a bit cavalier with Iris’s feelings, but then, I don’t know what her feelings are, do I? Could be she’d fancy a chance to tell her story.”

  True enough. “In other words, when I fall off my professional horse into a murder investigation, I should climb right back on?”

  “Oh aye. Just that.” Case closed, Miranda cracked her cookie. She read, “‘A man’s good name is his finest possession.’”

  “No kidding. And a woman’s good name is hers.”

  “You made your point about that, right enough, when you sued the university for unlawful termination and won. Well done, Jean.” Crunching, Miranda reached for a dishtowel.

  It was done, whether well or not. Feeling like Lady Macbeth washing her hands, Jean pulled the stopper out of the sink. With a gurgle the water spiraled down the drain.

  Miranda polished the large platter, made a face at her reflection, and said with lead-footed nonchalance, “I suppose the Monster Madness folk will be laying on extra policemen for the weekend. For the odd drunken brawl and the like. Not to mention the odd anonymous letter threatening the paying customers.”

  “Probably,” Jean returned. Rats. She’d been doing a great job of suppressing her queasiness over Dempsey’s threatening letter.

  “Drumnadrochit’s on the Northern Constabulary’s patch, isn’t it? Your chum D.C.I. Cameron might be there.”

  She hadn’t been doing so well suppressing her squeamishness over Alasdair Cameron. Her nonchalance just as heavy, she said, “He’s not my chum. He’s just a business acquaintance. An acquaintance made during a bad business.”

  “Right.”

  “Besides, he’s a detective. They’ll only have the uniformed cops there. The plods.”

  “You’ve not heard from Cameron, then? Or worse, you’ve not contacted him?”

  “No, why should I? Maybe we’ll run into each other—eventually I’ll have to testify about the murder last month . . .” And how would she react then? Jean imagined the formal handshake and the sort of polite, “Hello, how are you?” that didn’t require a truthful answer. Not that that would fool either of them.

  “And this Cameron Arms Hotel in Drumnadrochit, the name’s only a coincidence, is it?”

  “Of course it is. Cameron’s a common name. It’s not a sign of any . . . Oh.”

  Miranda was grinning, the tease. Still, her keen perception was sandpaper against Jean’s rationalizations. Fine-grained sandpaper, like a jeweler would use to polish precious metal, but any sandpaper scraped harshly against a scab. “Damn it, now you’re ambushing me!”

  “You were telling me you moved house to Scotland because you were tired of playing it safe.”

  “Yes, I did. And I am.” Jean rinsed out the sink, splashing so vigorously a wave leaped onto her T-shirt. “Oh, for the love of . . .”

  Her grin going lopsided, bracketing sympathy and amusement, Miranda handed over the dishtowel and wandered discreetly away.

  The air in the kitchen was no longer scented with garlic and soy but with Fairy Liquid and a whiff of Miranda’s perfume, a clean, fresh scent like the intoxicating smell of the Highlands. With a smile, one a lot dryer than her shirt, Jean threw in the towel.

  From the television in the living room came a reporter’s oh-so-sincere voice. “. . . Madness, sponsored by Starr Beverage PLC here at Loch Ness.”

  Chapter Three

  Jean found Miranda sitting on the couch, waving the television remote like a wand. “ITN’s reporting on the Festival just now.”

  The screen was filled by the image of a large pavilion set up in a field beside several buildings, all silhouetted against a green hillside. Flags, both national and decorative, rippled in the wind while people bustled around with speakers, coils of wire, and chairs. Another shot filled the screen, the familiar picture postcard of Urquhart Castle on the shores of the loch. The ruinous red stone walls cut a ragged edge against a mirage-like shimmer of water, reminding Jean of the mutilated symbol stone.

  “This ancient castle,” said the reporter’s voice-over, “dates back to Pictish times. It was visited by Saint Columba. Here he saved one of his followers from the monster. The famous Shiels photograph of the monster was taken from here. Dr. Shiels said he called the monster from the loch with his telepathic powers.”

  There was the photo, of an open-mouthed serpent’s head rising from the waves. The picture could just as well have been, and probably was, of a plastic dinosaur in a farm pond. Jean laughed. “Are they going for the record amount of misinformation or what?”

  “Ah, but the consumers make a meal of it,” Miranda pointed out.

  Back to the reporter, who held up a rubber Nessie probably made in Hong Kong, and squeezed a squeak from it. His smirk said as clearly as words, what a joke. “A new Nessie-hunting expedition is launching this weekend. Operation Water Horse is directed by Dr. Roger Dempsey, from the Omnium Technology Organization in Chicago, America.”

  “His degree is in business administration,” Jean told Miranda, “and his doctorate is honorary. He’s a dilettante like Ambrose Mackintosh, except he’s using electronic devices that Ambrose would have thought were magic.”

  Dempsey’s image appeared on the screen. It had been seven or eight years since they’d met, although she’d seen a recent photo in the press kit he’d sent Great Scot—and no doubt every other media outlet in the UK. Animated, his scrub brush of a beard framing a grin too knowing to be childlike, the bill of his baseball cap bobbing and weaving, Dempsey seemed more like a teenager on a joy ride than a businessman testing the company product. The wrinkles framing his eyes and the gray streaks in his facial hair looked like aging make-up troweled onto a youth performing in a high school play.

  “Dr. Dempsey,” asked the television reporter, “has the arrival of a second threatening letter discouraged you in any way?”

  “Second?” Jean asked. “There’s been another one?”

  “Well, well, well.” If Miranda had been a cat, her whiskers would have gone on alert.

  Or maybe ill, ill, ill, Jean thought, but held her tongue.

  “Those letters are too wishy-washy to be threats,” answered Dempsey. “We’re not going to give up our quest for the truth because some yellow-bellied yahoo who’s afraid to face me sends a few letters saying that Loch Ness never gives up its dead, that sort of pure-D crap.”

  True, Jean thought, people who sent anonymous letters weren’t automatically confrontational. But false, people drowned quickly and easily in the cold, dark waters of the loch, if drowning could be considered an easy death, and their corpses were seldom recovered. Loch Ness was one of the deepest bodies of water in Britain, given to odd winds and waves, as dangerous as it was beautiful. Long before Ambrose or anyone else spotted Nessie, the loch itself had been a tourist destination. There was a reason Nessie was sometimes equated with the water horse, the each uisge of Celtic legend, a creature that bore unwary riders down into the depths.

  The reporter asked Dempsey, “Do you have any idea who’s sending the letters?”

  “The scientific establishment doesn’t want us to find any trace of the creatures that live in the loch because that might upset their preconceptions. The tourist industry doesn
’t want us to prove there is no monster because that would close down all the souvenir shops.”

  “Not bloody likely,” said Miranda.

  Jean said, “All the electronics in the world can’t prove a negative.”

  “Scientists or tourist officials are trying to frighten you away?” the reporter persisted.

  Dempsey waved his hand—devil take the hindmost. “Whoever it is, we’re not taking their games seriously. We’re not letting them disrupt our work.”

  “Still, you’ve handed the letters in to the police.”

  “Far be it from me to deprive the Northern Constabulary of work.”

  “D.C.I. Alasdair Cameron of the Northern Constabulary told us this morning that his technicians are examining the letters,” the reporter intoned in an aside.

  “Aha,” Miranda stage-whispered. “Kismet.”

  The prickle of gooseflesh across Jean’s shoulders—like the nettle shirt of a fairy tale—was not entirely unpleasant. But this was no time to start analyzing her feelings yet again, when, as Alasdair himself would be the first to say, there was a threat to analyze. She said, “A nut threatened and then fire-bombed an expedition back in the eighties. But two anonymous letters don’t have to mean anything like that. The reporter’s trying to build up his story. So is Dempsey, for that matter.”

  “Public relations make the world go round,” said Miranda.

  On the television, Dempsey plunged onward, parading his dogs and ponies. “Our expedition is using state-of-the-art remote sensing devices manufactured by Omnium. It will prove once and for all whether the Loch Ness monster exists, or has existed in the past.”

  “Some of your funding is from Starr Beverages, as well as your own Omnium.”

  “Let’s face it. The Loch Ness monster is quite a draw. A real star, you might say.” Dempsey’s grin emphasized his pun.