“There’s something from the past.”
“His past or her past?”
Kirsty’s lips moved, counting her stitches. Maybe she’d said all she was going to say to a presumptuous stranger. Maybe she had nothing else to offer.
Jean drifted toward one of the shelves. Tilting her head to read the titles, she inspected the books with all the delectation of a gourmet at a wine-tasting. She had learned long ago how to separate the sheep from the goats among her house-guests. There were the people who abandoned conversation and went through her bookcases, and there were the people who seemed to regard them as so much wallpaper. So far she’d had the good taste, or the good luck, to never host anyone who asked accusingly, “Have you read all of those?” as though reading was the sort of private function you had to wash your hands after doing.
Lining the shelves were books ranging from leather-bound classics to academic tomes to a vast collection of Nessie-ology to popular novels of all eras down to the present . . . Good heavens! That looked like a 1937 first edition of The Hobbit, a very valuable book indeed.
“A librarian stopped here in May,” said Kirsty.
Jean looked up. That’s right, she was pumping the girl for information. “Yes?”
“She worked at the Library of Congress in Washington D. C. Name of Sirikanya—isn’t that pretty? Originally from Thailand, she was saying. You should have seen her the day she came running in to read the Nessie books, over the moon, sure she’d seen the monster in the loch! She was telling Aunt Iris she had some right valuable books and should be finding herself a proper expert.”
Scanning the shelves again, this time critically rather than curiously, Jean noted not the books themselves but the gaps where ones had been removed. “I doubt, er, suspect that Iris knows exactly what she has here. Has she ever done business with the rare-book dealer from Fort Augustus, the one who’s at the Festival?”
“Gordon Fraser, is it? Now there’s a pillock. We were at the shops in Fort Augustus not a month since when Aunt Iris saw a cookbook in his window and stopped in to buy it, and here’s him taking her money like it’s cursed and showing us both the door before we could so much as look about.”
Jean’s ears perked up like the cat’s. “I was talking to Fraser at the Festival. He seemed uneasy about Ambrose’s relationship with Aleister Crowley. And, I assume, the, er, mystery about Ambrose and Eileen.”
“Oh aye,” Kirsty said with a bored sigh and beseeching look upward. “That verdict of Not Proven went down right badly in these parts. My folk were away to Glasgow, putting the past behind them and all.”
And convincing you that imagination was a bad thing, thought Jean, people having a tendency to throw babies out with tubs of bathwater. She pointed toward three books tucked away in the darkest corner of the room. Two of their spines displayed the names Lawrence and Boccaccio, the third . . . “I see Iris has a copy of Crowley’s own Moonchild. Plus a couple of other popularly unpalatable books from Mandrake Press. There’s a really obscure and short-lived publisher.”
Kirsty looked up. “Mandrake Press, is it? That’s the cat’s name, Mandrake. Here’s me, thinking he was named for the screaming plants in Harry Potter. Not that Aunt Iris has time for fanciful stories such as that.”
The calico cat opened an eye, partly acknowledging the name, mostly not caring less.
“The press was named for the plant, I bet, which has all sorts of magical properties and is toxic to boot. If that’s the cat’s name, it sounds like Iris has some sense of humor about her past.” The elephant of “the past” had been lying in the middle of the room all this time. It was time to goad its massive rump. “The question, and I’m sure the police asked you this, is whether Iris has enemies from her past. Or present, for that matter. Someone who could have sent those anonymous letters, trying to . . .”
“Bloody hell,” said Kirsty. “I dropped a stitch two rows back. They’ll want unraveling.”
“I’ll show you how to pick it up.” Jean hurried across the room and took the needles with their pendant scarf from Kirsty’s hands. While the interruption might have occurred conveniently before she finished her question, Jean saw that the dropped stitch was only too real. “Do you have a crochet hook? Or a bobby pin—a hair clip—would do.”
Kirsty reached to the hair piled on her head and pulled out a pin. Sitting down in the desk chair, Jean used the pin to pick up and interlock each errant stitch in turn. She added the last loop of yarn to the row of stitches already on the needles and handed everything back to Kirsty. “See? Like most things, it’s not hard once you know how to do it.”
“Thank you kindly.”
“Glad to help. Did Iris teach you to knit?”
“That she did. Told me if I kept my hands busy I’d not be biting my nails.” Kirsty waggled her pristine fingertips. “Knitting’s not so naff a business as it was a few years back, now it’s right trendy.”
“I’ve been knitting since I was a girl. I’m glad to see it’s respectable again. It’s a metaphor for life, really. Stitches can be too tight, too loose, or just right. Patterns can be plain or intricate. You can use up all your yarn and not be able to find the same color or texture. You can tie yourself into a knot and have to start over. You can notice that you made a mistake several rows earlier, but it’s not a simple dropped stitch—if you, like, cable front to back instead of back to front, you have to cut or unravel, but either way it’s a nuisance and you can dump a bunch of stitches before you’re done.”
Kirsty was staring, the needles stationary in her hands, her expression compounded of confusion and caution.
Yes, it was a rare mind that appreciated free-association. Jean glanced again at the photo, where Eileen looked as though she was a bit out of her depth and resentful of finding herself there. Jean couldn’t help Eileen, but she could take pity on Kirsty and cut to the chase already. “If you need help with anything else, just ask. With the explosion and the police taking Iris away, your schedule’s really been disrupted.”
“What I’m needing is Aunt Iris back.” Taking a deep breath, Kirsty set her chin and sat up straighter. “You say you’re chums with this Cameron chap. Can you tell me, then, why they took Aunt Iris away? What was she telling them, that they’d suspect her of blowing up boats?”
It was Jean’s turn to stare, jaw slack, possible responses doing a Keystone Kops routine in her mind. Would she be exceeding her brief if she told Kirsty about Iris’s confession? No. “Iris was seen puttering about the bay Thursday evening, during Roger’s ITN interview.”
“She’s after doing that every few days, checking her flatworm traps. Keeps a power boat at the pier.”
“That’s as may be,” Jean began, and realized she sounded like Alasdair. “Maybe so, but she also confessed to sending the anonymous letters to Roger Dempsey. I know she doesn’t care for him, but does threatening him seem any more likely to you than it does to me?”
“She confessed to . . ?” A flush started in Kirsty’s cheeks and bloomed outward. With deliberate if jerky movements she finished the row of stitches and dropped her knitting into her lap, so that the scarf and the ball of yarn made a puddle the same color as her face. Then the sudden flow of crimson ebbed so completely from her complexion that even in the lamplight she seemed ghostly pale and cold. A strand of hair dangled beside her face, limp as seaweed.
Once again, Jean thought of drowned Ophelia, a pawn in the designs of others. More steps clumped slowly, almost stealthily, across the ceiling, accompanied by the sound of trickling water. Mandrake stretched and began to groom his already sleek fur. Finally Jean asked gently, “Kirsty, what’s going on here? Do you think Iris sent the letters?”
“No, she couldna have done, it’s not like her. But I dinna know, do I? She’s come over all strange since the Water Horse folk arrived. She’s always been one to get on with what needs doing, but now, no, she’s sitting up the tower instead of washing dishes and the like.”
“What’s at th
e top of the tower?”
“A room. All dust and cobwebs. Iris locks it up, disna allow the guests there, but then, there’s nothing there worth doing.”
“Except looking out at the loch?” Jean hazarded. “And, the last few days, at the Water Horse boat?”
This time it was Kirsty’s gaze that strayed to the framed photo and then back to Jean’s face, where it clung. Any port in a storm, it seemed. “She used to tell you straight out what she’s thinking, but not now, no, she’s after keeping something back”
“She’s pretty straightforward about her feelings for Roger. And she didn’t mince words about not wanting you to see Brendan any more. Sorry,” Jean added to the flash in Kirsty’s eyes, “I was on the terrace this morning and overheard you talking to her.”
“So did half the town, I’m thinking. Oh aye, she’s dead set against Brendan, for no more reason than that he’s working with Roger, so far as I can tell. As for why she’s taken against Roger, that’s a question she’ll not be answering.”
“The answer lies in the past,” Jean said half to herself, and, louder, “As for the present, I heard you identified a corkscrew the police found in the wreckage of the boat. It must have been taken from here recently—there wasn’t one on the drinks table last night.”
“Iris forgot it when she made up the table, did she? Like I was saying, she’s not herself.” Kirsty shook her head. “The corkscrew the polis showed me, now, that was never on the drinks table. It went missing from the desk here a couple of months ago.”
That was interesting. “Do you think someone’s trying to frame Iris for blowing up the Water Horse boat, not to mention for writing those letters?”
“So it seems.” Kirsty turned the knitting over and over in her lap, inspecting it carefully but not actually making any stitches. The twin spikes of the needles chimed together.
Funny, Jean thought, every time the subject of the letters came up, Kirsty ducked and covered. That might be something worth exploring, but then, there was a lot else to explore, too. “What about Brendan? You went to the Tourist Authority dinner with him last night. You were with him when the boat exploded.”
“Oh aye, that I was.”
“I know how Iris felt about your going with him. But how did Roger and Tracy feel?”
“The trout, Tracy, asked right sharpish where Jonathan was, why Brendan was there instead. She never took any notice of me. Roger now, he seemed right pleased to see me. Thought he was putting one over on Iris, most likely.”
Jean’s ears pricked again. “So Jonathan was supposed to be at the dinner.”
“He was that, aye. Tracy, she wanted the Brits front and center for the Brit press, didn’t she? But Jonathan told Brendan he couldn’t be bothered with a posh dinner. Brendan swapped with him so as to take me out.” Some of the color seeped back into Kirsty’s face at that.
“Was Brendan supposed to have stayed on the boat?”
“No, he’d been told to drive to Inverness. The post needed collecting.”
“But Jonathan wasn’t driving to Inverness, he was on the boat. Why?”
“If he’d told anyone you’d not be asking me, would you?” Kirsty returned, cutting Jean no slack for a rhetorical question. “Brendan, now, he reckons Jonathan was a spy. Industrial espionage. He sneaked onto the boat to take photos of the submersible he might could sell to another company.”
Jean sat up straight, wondering if she was hearing more tumblers falling into place or simply the clatter of scattershots, taken at random. “Photos of one of the ROVs, you mean?”
“Brendan said submersible. Close to being the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Close, yes. Why does he think Jonathan was a spy?”
“He was asking too many questions and prying about in areas that weren’t his affair.”
“If asking questions and prying is enough to make someone suspicious of you, then I should have been carried off by the police long ago!”
A dry, almost sarcastic laugh escaped Kirsty’s lips. “But you’re a reporter, and you’re working with the polis, aren’t you now? Jonathan wasn’t a reporter, he was a computer . . .”
A sudden thudding sound cut Kirsty off in mid-sentence and made both women sit back abruptly, like conspirators interrupted at their plotting.
Chapter Fifteen
The sound, Jean realized, was coming from the business end of the dragon knocker. The front door opened and a male voice called, “Miss Wotherspoon?”
“In here!” Kirsty returned, and shrank down in her chair, her face curdling into a scowl. “That Sawyer chap, he said he’d be sending a forensics team.”
Jean clenched her jaw. Good timing. In another few minutes Kirsty might have shared a confidence or two. Typical Sawyer, a Scottish bull in a pottery shop.
The thunder of footsteps in the hall sounded like the running of the bulls at Pamplona. Jean hauled herself to her feet. “Well, you can always hope they have D.C. Gunn with them.”
“Who?” Kirsty asked,
“D.C. Gunn. The cute young guy about your age.”
Kirsty looked blank. If he’d been flirting with her, she hadn’t noticed.
A constable peered through the doorway. “Miss Wotherspoon?”
“Hang in there,” Jean told Kirsty, and received an impatient but not actively hostile snort in acknowledgment.
Jean pushed her way through the front hall and away, telling herself, If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. But she wasn’t faking her wish to reassure Kirsty. Or her need to know. It was only after she had spurted out into a fine, misty rain and was halfway across the courtyard that she registered neither Gunn nor Sawyer in the official group milling around the front hall. That made her feel a bit better about abandoning Kirsty, not that she wouldn’t have been requested to remove herself from the area anyway. And if Kirsty didn’t know how to take care of herself, she needed to learn that particular life lesson ASAP.
The Lodge was so silent Jean could hear the ticking of the kitchen clock. She skimmed up the stairs, and with another glare at the locked room—no, she hadn’t suddenly developed x-ray vision—she grabbed her notebook and folding umbrella. Back outside, Jean keyed Michael and Rebecca’s number into her phone. A series of chirps and clicks hinted the call was being forwarded, and Michael’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Hi, it’s Jean. Sorry to bug you again, but the questions are coming faster and faster.”
“No problem, though you’ll have to be going on with one set of answers. I came away to the Museum to work so’s Rebecca could have a good rest.”
“Well, it’s a Museum question. Is there any evidence Ambrose found that hoard in the Pictish cemetery up the hill from Pitclachie?”
“Like excavating King Tut’s tomb? Not likely. The Picts didna believe in grave goods. And Ambrose only excavated the one grave.”
“So he said.”
“Oh aye. He might could have turned over the entire hillside and no one’s the wiser. Come to that . . .” His pause was as pregnant as his wife. “The silver chain we were talking about earlier the day, the one offered the Museum last year. It came from the Great Glen all right, but not from Iris. She sold one to the Museum twenty years since, though.”
“When she started fixing up the house.” Maybe the marks on the velvet backing from that one had faded. Maybe it had never been in the cabinet. Fantasizing about treasure chests in Pitclachie’s dungeons, Jean said, “She’s sold some old books too, I bet, but she’s still got three from Mandrake Press, including Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild. You think they might be valuable?”
“Most likely, aye, depending on whether you’re after collecting or burning them.” Computer keys clicked. “Oh aye. Mandrake was started up by two of Crowley’s admirers in nineteen-twenty-nine. Almost failed the next year, but was re-organized by a consortium led by Crowley himself—and here you are, Ambrose Mackintosh had a financial interest. They published a small load of obscure and controversial items, but went b
ankrupt after eighteen months.”
“Ambrose invested in a publisher? He’d have gotten a better return betting on horse races. Thanks, Michael. I’ll check with you on Monday about Ambrose’s stone mason. And see what else you can find about that silver chain from last year while you’re at it, please.”
“My powers are limited, but I’ll do my best. Take care, now.”
“That’s the idea. Cheers.” Thrusting her phone into her purse, Jean contemplated the plants and trees alongside the terrace, wondering where the summerhouse had once stood. Leaves rustled and flowers bobbed up and down in the wind. Or against the wind, actually. A faint prickle oozed through her body, raising gooseflesh, and then passed on. The mysterious ghost in the garden or just the breeze, not so much the physical one as the chilly breath of the past.
A shape in a nearby window became Mandrake the cat, his sleek body distorted by the old glass, his eyes hard and steady, focused on the same patch of greenery that had attracted Jean’s extra-sensory attention. His tail curled back and forth, making question marks. Jean had heard that animals could sense ghosts. Probably, like people, some did and some didn’t. But if Pitclachie’s pet had been immune to the paranormal, she’d have been disappointed.
Frowning up at the tower—there was another mysterious if not necessarily locked room—Jean walked around the corner of the house.
In the parking area, Roger was clambering into the driver’s seat of the Water Horse van while Brendan slammed the back door. Their jeans were muddy and their hair slicked down, wet with rain. Back to headquarters to crunch the data, Jean supposed. She waved as Brendan vaulted into the van, but Roger had already started the engine and neither somber face turned toward her as they drove away.
A short sharp shower of rain made her hoist her umbrella. She contracted herself into its meager shelter, seeing not the gray waves of rain rumpling the water of the loch but Jonathan Paisley’s floating body, hearing not the spatter of the raindrops but Kirsty’s voice: Jonathan wasn’t a reporter, he was a computer . . . Nerd or geek, Jean finished for her.
The Murder Hole Page 14
