The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The camera drew back, revealing Dempsey’s T-shirt. It was emblazoned with Celtic-style letters reading, “Operation Water Horse,” as well as with a design that Pictish scholars called a swimming elephant—not that Jean had ever seen elephants with trunks sprouting from their foreheads. The same symbol was also called a gripping beast, although it had neither talons nor even hands to grip with. But since Jean believed imagination was one of the most important human faculties, she couldn’t fault either Picts or scholars for displaying it.

  The camera panned to the side, taking in several bystanders. A woman dressed in another Water Horse T-shirt stood with her arms crossed. A broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses concealed the top half of her face, but the diamond studs in her ears winked with all the subtlety of a stop light. Mrs. Dempsey, probably. The lower half of her face was fixed in the smile of the politician’s wife, appearing to hang on every word while actually thinking of England. Or Chicago, as the case may be.

  Two young men, both wearing Water Horse logos, and a young woman who was not stood a few steps away. The square-shouldered and square-jawed man offered the camera a matinee-idol smile. The one whose bulbous brow indicated either intellect or Klingon ancestry, looked blank. The woman ducked out of the shot, leaving Jean with an impression of long silky brown hair veiling a delicate face out of a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia. Drowned Ophelia . . Imagination, Jean reminded herself, was a wonderful servant but a poor master.

  “Not everyone is pleased to have the controversial Dr. Dempsey here,” the reporter’s voice went on. “Earlier we interviewed Iris Mackintosh, the well-known eco-warrior.”

  Iris appeared on the screen. She looked like the sort of elderly lady Jean intended to become in the far distant future—an iron-gray-haired ramrod-straight gadfly wearing an old cardigan and a no-nonsense expression. She didn’t appear to be chained to a tree, which rather undercut the reporter’s eco-warrior.

  Her gray eyes, so icy they looked silver, targeted the camera. She delivered her statement in the accent of the class and generation of Scots who’d been taught “proper English”. “It has been clearly demonstrated that nothing larger than salmon lives in the loch. Sightings of the so-called monster can be attributed to natural phenomena or fraud. Dr. Dempsey is using the legend to further his own business interests, and in the process is trivializing important environmental issues such as logging run-off.”

  Back to Dempsey. “Hey, if there’s a monster in the loch, it’s part of the ecology, isn’t it? My assistants and I would be glad to include Miss Mackintosh on our Saturday morning cruise for the press. She can check us out—no logging, I promise.”

  “And there you are,” said the reporter with another nudge-nudge-wink-wink arch of his eyebrows. “The Starr Beverages PLC Midsummer Monster Madness Festival gets under way tomorrow night with fireworks and a pipe band. Be there!”

  A musical interlude and a sequence of dissolving images of clouds, deserts, and monsoons, led into the weather report. It predicted a generally sunny and warm Friday for Inverness-shire, gathering clouds and cooler temperatures for Saturday, and a deluge on Sunday. That figured, Jean thought. Still, a little typical Scottish weather wasn’t going to stop her curiosity from creeping out from under the bed. “You don’t suppose Iris sent the letters?”

  Miranda turned off the television. “I can’t see her wasting her time on something like that, no. This Dempsey chap, now, he looks to be a bit of a nutter. Could be he sent them himself, for the publicity.”

  “It’s possible, I guess. He’s a no-guts no-glory type of guy. An engineer like Brad, except unlike Brad, Dempsey’s mostly a businessman and a heck of a promoter. I met him once, at a conference in Colonial Williamsburg on the archaeology of standing buildings. He came sweeping through the meet-and-greet handing out copies of an article he wrote for The Journal of Field Archaeology that wasn’t much more than a commercial for a remote sensor that can see through walls. Set my teeth on edge, I’m afraid.”

  “You shot him down, did you?” asked Miranda.

  “I couldn’t help myself. He was making some generality about the structure of medieval abbeys that was just flat wrong. I corrected him. He stared at me, turned around, and stalked off. I spent the rest of the weekend angling for a chance to—well, not apologize. To smooth things over. But he avoided me. Maybe he still is avoiding me. He never answered my e-mail confirming the interview you set up. I’ll tackle him when I get to the loch.”

  “He’d not be avoiding you if he’d been the one to correct you,” Miranda pointed out.

  “You think?” replied Jean. “It’s a shame Brad was out playing tourist during the conference. He would have loved to have picked Dempsey’s brains.”

  “At least he attended the conference with you.”

  “That was the last one. He finally gave up trying to explain even his consulting work to me, let alone the academic stuff, just about the same time I gave up trying to explain mine to him. It was like speaking different languages, he’s going on about submersibles and electro-magnetic radiation and I’m going on about the Casket Letters and the Red Book of Westmarch . . .” There was an echo in here, Jean thought. She’d told Rebecca and Michael the same anecdote, in almost the same words.

  “Thinking about Brad quite a bit, are you?” asked Miranda.

  “That’s the first lesson in being Scottish, nursing old grudges and rehearsing old glories.”

  Miranda nodded, understanding Jean’s sentiments if not her examples. “The Casket Letters have to do with Mary Queen of Scots, but the Red Book . . .”

  “The Lord of the Rings.”

  “Oh aye.” Miranda said politely. Her reading and movie-viewing leaned toward book-club weepies. Standing up, she reached for her handbag and produced a folder bearing a yellow Hertz label. “Here you are. A Focus. Not so posh as Duncan’s Maserati, but reliable.”

  “That’s all I ask. Thanks.” Jean strolled beside Miranda toward the front door. “So are you off with Duncan, or just with his car?”

  “With Duncan, of course. We thought of popping across to New York, but I’m thinking a quiet weekend—golf, dinner at the club—would go down a treat.”

  And sex more aesthetic than athletic, Jean thought. Not that she lusted after Duncan, a silver-haired and silver-tongued lawyer so polished Miranda must use suction cups to keep from sliding off him. He was Miranda’s type, not hers. Like Miranda, Duncan wanted his champagne dry, his facts straight, and his lovers uncommitted. Although Jean had manifestly never figured out just what her own type was, she had the awful suspicion that commitment was too near her center of gravity to encourage a tidy affair like Miranda’s with Duncan.

  Jean watched Miranda and the Maserati disappear into the sultry twilight, then locked the door. Just as she returned to the living room the phone rang. She hurried to the desk. “Hello?”

  A hale and hearty male voice with an accent like her own, ranging between a bleat and a quack, boomed into her ear. She’d heard that voice emanating from the speaker on her television only minutes earlier. Speak of the devil. “Jean! Roger Dempsey! Long time no see!”

  And the devil was speaking to her. Go figure. “Oh, hello, Dr. Demps . . .”

  “It’s Roger, it’s Roger. My go-to guy, Brendan, tells me we’ve got an interview lined up. Tomorrow afternoon at five, on the boat at the pier in the loch, tra la!”

  “Yes, that’s what my colleague Mir . . .”

  “So you’ve gone over to the enemy, you’re a reporter now! Using your maiden name, huh? Glad to hear you’re out of the publish and perish rat race, girl! What’s Brad up to here in the Auld Country? Engineering connectors and breakers in Silicon Glen? It’ll be great to see you again, hope he can come along too, we can lift a glass to old times and old friends, right?”

  Wrong, on several counts, not least of which was that she was no girl. But Jean didn’t owe Roger or anyone else an account of her divorce and relocation-cum-escape. “Wel . . .”

 
“See you tomorrow afternoon at five, okay? Cheers!”

  “And cheers to you, too,” Jean said, even though he’d already hung up. Switching off her phone, she eyed Ambrose’s book accusingly, as though it were responsible for the holes in Dempsey’s story.

  In her request for an interview she’d skipped the inconvenient details, saying merely that she’d met Dempsey at the Williamsburg conference and signing her name as “Jean Fairbairn (Inglis)”. Maybe he did remember her, and his remark about publish and perish was meant as a joke at his own expense.

  Whatever, there were no old times to lift a glass to. Dempsey was claiming a closer and more cordial acquaintance than they’d really had. And not because of her sparkling personality. Because he wanted her to hype his expedition. Crass, yes, but hardly surprising. Although you’d think Dempsey would have learned by now to lose the egregious “girl.”

  However, unless she’d mentioned Brad in conference small-talk before things heated up, Dempsey had no reason to have even heard of the man . . . Oh boy. Jean spun away from the desk with a two-fisted gesture of frustration. Dempsey was so eager to ingratiate himself that he’d researched her. Once past the Great Scot masthead, the first items in an Internet search on her name were the headlines about her lawsuit against the university, to say nothing—and heaven only knew she’d like to say nothing—of the scandal behind it. And then there was the murder case last month, generating more headlines. His remark about going over to the enemy gave Dempsey away. It was Jean who had occasionally found the media to be her adversary. To Dempsey, reporters were the tools of his trade.

  Jean stopped beside the window, considering the ghostly shape of her own reflection. If her divorce from Brad Inglis was mentioned on the net at all, it was buried so deeply that Dempsey even with his remote-sensing devices hadn’t found it, and so added gaffe to presumption. Typically over-the-top, to claim Brad, too, as a friend. And odd, too, not that Jean could claim immunity from oddness.

  Outside, the raking light of late evening glared off the western faces of the buildings but sank their eastern sides in blackness. Even as she watched, the light faded into a fragile gloom. Her damp T-shirt lay chill against her breast and stomach. The water horse, she thought. You get up on it, and it takes you down into the dark depths of your own soul.

  If she had wanted comfort, she could have stayed in Texas, bunkered in an air-conditioned office while the sun beat on the parched earth outside. She could never have asked Alasdair Cameron to dinner, last month, as the gentle rain softened the green hills of—well, it was home now.

  It was time, she told herself, for her voyage of self-discovery to include a trip down the loch with all the other tourists who hoped to see the head of something rich and strange emerge from the waters. When you know fate is lying in wait for you, you could do a lot worse than get up on your horse, water or otherwise, and ride out to meet it.

  Chapter Four

  Jean peered around the tour bus clogging the road ahead of her and spotted a sign reading Pitclachie House. At last! She two-wheeled her rented Focus into an asphalt drive before the harried paterfamilias in the car hugging her bumper got a squeaky Nessie in the ear and rear-ended her.

  The big blank spot to the southeast of Loch Ness on a Scottish road map said as much about the terrain as a topographical survey. Jean had had two ways to get to Drumnadrochit from Edinburgh, neither of them remotely related to flying crows. She’d chosen the northern route, through Inverness. That way she could stop at Culloden, the 1746 battlefield, to pay her respects to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s lost cause, scour the visitor center bookstore, and eat lunch. Her cup of tea and sandwich had been spiced by the presence at the next table of three re-enactors, a Highlander, a redcoat, and a woman wearing an apron splattered with red. Jean had driven away thinking that here time didn’t heal, it only numbed.

  The main road ran along the northwestern bank of Loch Ness, the most scenic of scenic routes, especially on a sunny day. To her left, the water had glowed an opaque indigo below the green banks and braes of its far shore. To her right, steep hills patched with yellow fields had climbed toward craggy heights skimmed by clouds. But except for quick glances, all Jean had seen was the tailpipe of a bus and its back window stacked with knapsacks.

  Now she sighed in appreciation of a gust of fresh air and followed the long driveway as it wound up the hill, toward several trees from which sprouted a square tower and the peak of a roof. The former displayed a satellite dish and the latter a set of intricate Tudor-twist brick chimneys. Parking her car, Jean collected her things, turned toward the house, and thought, Cool!

  Pitclachie House might have been built in the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic style beloved of horror movies, but in the afternoon sunshine Jean found the place enchanting, every mullioned window, half-timbered gable, and decorative spire of it. The same reddish stone as that of Urquhart Castle peered cheerily from between swags of ivy. The castellations of the tower were so crisply defined, Jean suspected it wasn’t part of the original 1830's house, but was part of the renovations and improvements program Ambrose had put into effect after marrying his heiress.

  A path led across the corner of a lawn smooth enough for the genteel arts of lawn bowling and croquet, and skirted a slate terrace edged by rose bushes thick with large blooms and broom thick with small blossoms. Jean made a point of stopping to smell a rose, which was blood-red, of course . . . Something rustled in the underbrush. She spun around. A cat was watching her, its fur so aggressively calico it looked as though it had been painted by Picasso. “Hello there,” she said, and grinned as much at herself as at the cat.

  It whisked away, like most of its species unimpressed by mere humanity. Jean walked across a courtyard, past a cottage whose door was set into a circular turret, and up to an arched porch hollowed into the facade of the main house. The door inside was equipped with a knocker shaped like a dragon dangling a brass ring from its teeth. Tapping the ring against the door, she produced a sound that was less a sepulchral thud than a comedian’s rim shot. Jean’s grin widened.

  The door opened silently, on oiled hinges, to reveal a young woman. Her silky brown hair was swept in an Art Nouveau swirl back from a delicate face. White jeans and a lime-green blouse suggested rather than revealed a lissome figure. She gulped, probably less in awe of Jean than in swallowing her chewing gum, and smiled a well-rehearsed smile, just dignified enough to set the tone of the establishment, just friendly enough to be welcoming. “Good afternoon.”

  “Hello. I’m Jean Fairbairn. Miranda Capaldi booked a room for me for four nights. And she set up an interview with Miss Mackintosh.”

  “Oh aye. Kirsty Wotherspoon here. Please come through.” The girl—she could hardly be twenty—waved Jean and her baggage into the house.

  In the moment it took her eyes to adjust from sunlight to shadow, Jean saw the after-image of the scene on her TV screen last night, the young woman standing with Dempsey’s assistants and then ducking aside when the camera turned in her direction. “Did I see you on television, Kirsty? The ITN piece on Operation Water Horse last night?”

  Jean’s vision cleared in time for her to see Kirsty’s peaches-and-cream complexion redden into a strawberries-and-cream hue. Her stance went from formal to stiff, and she darted a quick glance toward a slightly open door marked Private. “I was having a squint at the Festival is all,” she said, more loudly than was necessary.

  Uh oh. The girl doth protest too much. And in a Glasgow accent that was two glottal stops short of incomprehensible. She’d probably wandered down to the Water Horse interview and then remembered that Iris, her employer, wasn’t on the best of terms with Dempsey and company. Was Iris sitting behind that door, listening as Jean made a meal of her own foot? An apology would only compound her misdemeanor. She tried a diversion. “Hugh Munro and his band will be playing at the Festival. I really like his new album, don’t you?”

  “That I do,” Kirsty returned, picking up her cue. But this time Jean w
as the object of the quick glance, one that barely concealed resentment.

  Checking out the entrance hall gave her an excuse to break eye contact. The vaulted ceiling and stenciled arcades were exquisitely detailed. A staircase edged by intricate banisters curved upwards. Beyond it, a doorway opened onto a library. The gilded letters on the spines of leather-bound books sparkled in the light streaming through tall windows. Not the faintest breath of mold or mildew reached Jean’s nostrils, only the odor of books, potpourri, and baking bread. Miranda could keep her French perfume. Jean would rather dab bits of this heady mixture behind her ears.

  “. . . change in plans,” Kirsty was saying. “Mr. and Mrs. Bouchard booked The Lodge, our self-catering cottage, for their honeymoon. But now they’re after finishing out their holiday in the main house. Aunt Iris went and transferred your booking to the cottage. At no extra charge. You’re welcome to take breakfast here in the dining room and to sit in the library as well.”

  Aunt Iris? Well, well, well. “The Lodge is the cottage with the turret?”

  “Oh aye, that. Right posh. No extra charge.”

  “It sounds great, no problem.”

  Kirsty turned toward a small table. A rack held not only the usual sightseeing brochures but also a collection of environmentalist pamphlets. Next to a wicker basket labeled “Letters” lay an iron key so large it was surely intended for a dungeon. She handed it to Jean.

  The key was heavy, and so cold Jean wondered whether they’d been keeping it refrigerated. “When will Miss Mackintosh be free to talk to me?”

  “She’ll show you round the garden after breakfast the morn. She’s mad keen to discuss her work.” Kirsty’s brittle voice, not to mention the upward flicker of her dark eyes, indicated that she did not share either Iris’s keenness or her point of view.

  From behind the private door came the sudden rattle of an old-fashioned typewriter, the clicks syncopated, as though whoever was hitting the keys was only doing so perfunctorily. Like any good Gothic house, Pitclachie’s walls did have ears. Jean, too, pitched her voice a bit louder. “I want to write about her work, of course, but I was also hoping to discuss her father’s work and life story as well.”