“Hello,” said Rebecca’s voice.
“Hi. It’s Jean, calling from the bonny banks of Loch Ness. Literally. I’m walking down to the castle right now.”
“I told you she’d be calling,” Rebecca said faintly, and then, into the phone, “We saw the news this morning. What happened? Was the explosion an accident or sabotage?”
“I don’t know any more than you do right now.”
A couple of clunks signaled Michael switching on the extension. “Well then, Jean. You’ve put the boot in again. That is, a reporter’s after being where the action is and all.”
“Nice try, Michael.” Jean went on, “Iris showed me the Pitclachie Stone this morning, and said something about Ambrose writing about it in his personal papers. I don’t suppose the Museum has any of those?”
“No, but telling me he had private writings is like telling me it’s Saturday. No surprise.”
“How do we know, then, that Ambrose really did find the Stone in the door of the cottage? There are some pictographs carved in the terrace of the house . . .”
“Oh,” said Rebecca. “You think he carved the Stone himself.”
“Not necessarily. I’m just exploring possibilities.”
Michael answered, “We’ve got possibilities aplenty when it comes to Ambrose, but that one’s right out. It was a mason working on the cottage who turned up the Stone, and who went on record about it. Ambrose could have paid the man to say he found it, but why?”
“Good question. Ambrose didn’t try to profit from the Stone—he dumped it into a grove of trees behind the house. You’d expect an antiquarian to set it up. But it was Iris who did that.”
“It was Iris who reported it to us. Mopping up after her father, I’m thinking.”
“Sounds like it.” Jean stopped at the bottom of the slope, next to the medieval siege engine that had recently been constructed for a television show. With its swinging beam removed, it looked like a wooden rocket on a timber launch pad. An American was saying to his wife, “This was used to defend the castle. Pretty well preserved for being so old, isn’t it?”
And so was myth generated, Jean thought. “Was the Stone broken when the mason found it?”
“Good question,” Michael replied. “I’ll look out the man’s statement on the Monday, shall I?”
“Please. Not that Ambrose has anything to do with Roger’s boat blowing up.”
“Does Iris?” Rebecca asked.
“I can’t imagine what Iris might have to do with it. Well, I can imagine any number of things, but whether any of them are even logical, let alone the truth . . .” Jean shook her head, trying to shake away the frustration but only tangling herself further up in it. “I don’t suppose Iris ever tried to sell you the Stone. I mean, renovating an old house and fitting it out as a B&B takes a lot of money.”
“Don’t believe so, no, though we were offered a fine Pictish silver chain from that area just last year, if I’m remembering aright. A bit unusual to find Pictish silver there, but Ambrose’s hoard might could be evidence of an alliance.”
“How about an arranged marriage?” Rebecca suggested. “And the Stone is like the wedding license.”
“Linecrescent Horsehead marries Doubledisc-something, carrying a bouquet of foxgloves and meadowsweet, wearing a becoming gown of blue paint? Maybe the stone was broken to signify a divorce . . . No, that’s right, it was broken recently.” Jean shrugged. “The chain was one of those heavy-duty numbers with the big links and a cuff holding the ends together?”
“Oh aye, just that. I’ll suss out the provenance. Could be from Ambrose’s mysterious hoard, right enough. However . . .”
“Iris would get more money for Ambrose’s artifacts if she took them straight to the antiquities market,” Rebecca chimed in. “Anything from an old family collection like that wouldn’t fall under the laws of treasure trove. She wouldn’t be obliged to offer it to the Museum first.”
Jean stopped on the drawbridge spanning the now-dry moat. “Miranda said something about an old family collection, too. And they are an old family, right?”
“Oh aye,” said Michael. “Mackintosh of Pitclachie is an old landed family, right enough. Bar the one who became a Red Indian chief in your part of the world, they were a right colorless family as well, ‘til Ambrose appeared.”
“On top of his other eccentricities,” said Rebecca, “when he finally got married, it was to an American. Although her wealth cancelled out her nationality, society-wise.”
“I know about that. Eileen was half his age, only eighteen.”
“Oh aye,” said Michael. “Not that that was scandalous, mind.”
Rebecca snorted. “Never has been. Now if it had been the other way around . . .”
Jean nodded agreement, even though they couldn’t see her. A group of schoolchildren rushed past her and into the castle like cheerful lemmings, the wood of the drawbridge shivering to the soft pounding of their sneakers. “So was it a love match, do you think? Or another kind of alliance, new American money—her family got rich selling mustard gas and tinned food during the war—for the prestige of an old if not exactly wealthy family name?”
“Who knows?” said Rebecca. “People were more discreet with their private lives then.”
“My granny says Eileen used to be quite the lady of the manor,” Michael went on, “but what with Ambrose’s building projects they might could have got through all her money. They’d sacked most of the servants by the time Iris was born, and by all accounts the marriage itself was falling apart.”
“So they had a baby,” Rebecca said. “When will people learn?”
“Never, probably. If they did, Miranda and I would go out of business.” Jean straightened up and turned toward the castle. “A psychologist could have had a field day with Ambrose. No surprise Iris is so matter-of-fact. I bet she wants to make the world safe for rationality.”
“Ah, but the world isn’t rational,” Rebecca said. “At least, not the human part of it.”
“Amen,” Jean said. “And thanks. I’ll keep you posted. If you’ll let me know what you find out about the chain, I’d sure appreciate it. Pet Dougie for me, will you?”
“He and Riccio are having a nap just now,” Michael said. “They’ve been playing with the wee Nessie—thank you kindly for sending it along.”
“Only Roger Dempsey would think of sending Nessies out with his press kits.”
“You take care, Jean,” said Rebecca, showing her friend enough respect not to repeat her nothing’s going to sneak up on you.
“You do, too, you and little Linda. And don’t worry about me—this time I’m an innocent bystander.” And if she repeated that often enough, it might turn out to be true.
Jean switched off the phone and stowed it away, telling herself that discretion might be the better part of valor, yet discretion didn’t answer questions or discharge responsibilities.
Bracing her shoulders back, she walked into the entrance tunnel of the castle and peered warily upward. The passageway had once had a wooden ceiling. The upper side of that ceiling had been a floor pierced with openings called murder holes, handy for ambushing attackers with boiling water, arrows, rocks—whatever was convenient. Now, though, the stone vault of the passageway was no more than a blank arch, stained dark and exuding the musty scent of age.
Jean emerged from the corridor’s shadow into another sort of shadow, a gray cloud drifting past the sun. The oldest part of the castle, a few Pictish stones fused together by fire, sat atop the higher ground to her right. The fortress had been built, and had fallen, and more structures had been built on top, only to be themselves modified over the centuries by the exigencies of war and clan raids and the weather, a formidable foe itself. Now even the “new” tower perched above the loch had partly collapsed, exposing the floor levels inside like an architectural model.
Tourists walked up and down and children played hide-and-seek along battlements that had once run with blood, but the cas
tle itself remained aloof, listening to the music of another time. Or today, as the case might be. A piper in full kilt and bonnet outfit was tuning his pipes in the courtyard of the tower, emitting sounds that combined the squeal of a frightened pig with the squawk of a stepped-on cat. Funny, how the actual music was glorious. Anticipating glory, Jean tossed a pound coin into the piper’s carrying case and went inside.
A spiral stairway led upwards. She placed each foot carefully on the narrow, hollowed treads, thinking that medieval people must have had prehensile toes. Just as she emerged onto the small landing at the top of the tower, she was greeted by a burst of sunlight from above and a burst of music from below. Scotland the Brave! All right!
Her grin petrified. Like a downpour of burning oil through some psychic murder hole, recognition seared every nerve in her body. That man, his sturdy hands bracing his compact body against the railing as though preparing to repel raiders—that man, his cropped hair rippling in the wind like a field of wheat touched by frost—that man, wearing his dark business suit like armor. His back was turned, but she knew him. Alasdair Cameron.
Chapter Ten
Alasdair hadn’t seen her. She could creep back down the stairway. . . No. Even if she wanted to turn tail and run, here came a family clogging the escape route, parents cajoling the children in Italian.
He didn’t look around at the sound of their voices, just as he hadn’t looked around at the sound of her steps. But Jean knew that his stillness was deceptive. He was very much aware of how many people were gathered behind him, and yet, intent on the expanse of water before him, he saw no need to take notice of them.
This encounter was part serendipity, part Murphy’s Law. Here she was and here he was and what kind of adolescent game would she be playing to pretend she hadn’t wanted to see him again? She realized she was holding her breath and let it out in a long sigh of acceptance.
He spun around as though answering a peal of alarm bells. As though he’d felt her breath on the back of his neck. His slate blue, sleet blue, eyes brightened. His lips with their elegant curve expanded into a grin as bright as lightning and as quickly gone. “Jean.” Just the one word, falling like a rock down a well and landing with a resounding thump deep in her abdomen.
She blinked, thinking she’d imagined that grin, knowing she hadn’t. She inhaled, tried a wobbly smile, and groped through several greetings: We have to stop meeting like this, or Seen any ghosts lately? and settled on a simple, “Hello, Alasdair.”
He made no effort to bridge the arm’s length gap between them with a handshake. Instead his patented expressionless gaze roamed up the mountain crags behind Pitclachie Farm to where minute reddish dots might be deer, to the official vehicles gathered at the pier across the bay, to the family washing around him and Jean like a stream around the stones in its course. Then his gaze re-connected with hers, and his quiet voice said, “Here you are, then. You found me.”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t that. She emitted a lame, “What?”
“You didn’t come looking me out, after asking questions about the explosion?”
“No. Sawyer turned up at Pitclachie House so I thought I’d make myself scarce. I just came down here to look around the castle . . .” She stopped herself before her tongue ran off at the end with, nothing personal.
“Ah. Well then. Good show, Andy’s temper has hardly improved. You’ll not be getting shut of us quite so easily as that, though. Dempsey handed in a list of the people visiting the boat—the ones he knew, at the least. Half the folk in Inverness-shire, it sounds like, and your name amongst the rest. Gave me a bit of a turn, that.”
I bet it did. Nothing was personal. Yeah, right. At least she hadn’t ambushed him quite as badly as she’d first thought. “I was the last . . .”
His elevated forefinger counseled caution. The Italian family edged past and trooped back down the staircase, leaving Jean and Alasdair alone atop the tower. Below, the piper began to play “Amazing Grace,” another of the old standards likely to earn him tips.
Feeling less than graceful and not at all amazing, Jean tried again. “They pulled the boat out into the bay right after I left, so I was the last visitor.”
“You came here to interview Roger Dempsey, then.”
“And Iris Mackintosh. I’m hoping to do an article about her father Ambrose, the antiquarian and part-time nut case. I had nothing to do with the boat explosion, but as long as I’m here . . .”
“You might could write a story about it,” he said.
“I don’t want to write about it, no—I’m trying to avoid being the ambulance-chasing kind of reporter. It’s just that I can’t help but wonder what the story is. What the stories are. You know me, I can’t leave well enough alone.”
An oscillation at the corners of his mouth made her suspect that he was curbing a laugh, a rueful laugh not at her but with her.
Jean looked down at her feet, avoiding his intense—intensely curious—gaze. Why, a small voice in the back of her mind whined, why was it that Alasdair never saw her at her best? Right now she probably looked like Rip van Winkle wandering back into town after his “nap,” creased and confused . . . Damn. She was concerned about how she looked to him.
She peered warily into his face. The line of concentration between his eyebrows was deeper than she remembered and his eyes more guarded. It wasn’t so much that his upper lip was stiff, as that it was stiff all the way to his hairline. If her contents were under pressure, his were doubly so. She doubted if anything she could say would help, let alone anything she could ask. But she had to ask, just as she had to breathe. “Have you found Jonathan Paisley yet?
“No. He’s not been seen since the boat went up. We’re thinking he was aboard at the time, and went into the water. ”
“Yeah, I saw lights on the boat right before the fireworks started,” Jean said, and added before he could ask, “I saw it go up from the terrace of Pitclachie House.”
Alasdair nodded, deadpan.
“Poor Jonathan,” Jean said. “He was—and I guess the word is ‘was’—just a kid. His family must be devastated. And I bet Roger’s plenty upset.”
“He is that. Kept repeating, ‘I don’t believe it’, as though believing it makes some sort of difference.”
Poor Roger, too. “Was the explosion an accident?”
“We don’t know as yet. The forensics chaps are having a go at the debris, though most of that’s on the bottom of the loch. I daresay Paisley’s there as well. In water this cold, it takes some time for decomposition to bring a body to the surface. If it ever does at all.”
“So I hear. Loch Ness never gives up its dead.” She firmly rejected the imagery that went along with his statement.
“Did you have your interview with Roger, then?”
“Yes. He’s doing both water and land surveys looking for Nessie. I assume he’s sucking up to the other reporters as blatantly as he is to me, except with me he’s acting like we’re old friends because we once met. To no good purpose, but we met.”
“He’s presuming on the acquaintance, is he?”
“Yes, and that makes me . . . Okay, okay, I’ve only been a journalist for a few months and already I’m firmly convinced that everyone has a secret agenda. He wants publicity, that’s all.”
Alasdair said nothing, expressing no skepticism about Dempsey’s agendas, Jean’s convictions, or even Nessie’s existence. Unlike her, he was very good at that old journalist’s trick, to keep so quiet the subject runs on and on. She might be a subject and not a suspect, but she didn’t have much to run on about. “There was a lot of electronic equipment on board the boat, like you’d expect, although I couldn’t tell you anything about it. It’s just as well I didn’t stay very long, that boat aroma, you know, bilge and gasoline, got to me . . .”
“Gasoline?” asked Alasdair. “You’re saying that you smelled petrol?”
“I’ve got kind of a sensitive nose, I notice smells . . .”
/> “The Water Horse boat was powered by diesel.”
Her brain screeched around a sharp curve, only two wheels in contact with coherence. Gasoline. Diesel. That’s right, she’d smelled the diesel fumes when the boat pulled away from the pier. “They could have had gasoline for a generator or—or . . . You don’t mean the smell could have come from a Molotov cocktail!”
“A petrol bomb. Oh aye.”
Good God. She’d been sitting on a bomb. She filed that thought in her denial basket and plunged on, “Someone threw a petrol bomb at an expedition camping along the shore about twenty years ago. No one was hurt, and no one was ever charged. The nut they suspected left the area and that was that. Or it was that, until now.”
“Oh aye?” Alasdair said again. His left eyebrow arched upward, infinitesimally.
“That bomb was thrown from a passing boat. This one must have already been on board. Someone had to have been there to light the fuse or start the timer or something.”
“Perhaps Jonathan himself, but he didn’t escape before it went up.”
“Why would he want to blow up the boat he was working on?” She frowned out over the water. Below the tower, a tourist boat wallowed in the waves while its passengers took photos. Since her picture was going to be in several vacation albums, maybe she should wave or even curtsey.
She swiveled back around without doing either. “When I first got there and Jonathan demanded my bona fides, Brendan shouted, ‘You’re as jumpy as a guy tap-dancing in a minefield.’ Then, later on, Jonathan said to Brendan, ‘And it’s not five minutes you were asking me to take your place this evening.’ Take his place working on the boat that evening, or somewhere else? Why was he so nervous? And Brendan said that Jonathan should be careful about going into the water, he’d sink like a rock from the weight of the chip on his shoulder. They weren’t getting along well, in other words, although that bit about going into the water could just be a badly-timed turn of phrase.”
“Or it might could have been a threat. Anything else?” Alasdair’s other eyebrow arched upward to join the first.
The Murder Hole Page 9
