But what if he had been a reporter of some sort? Computer and journalistic skills weren’t mutually exclusive. And if he had been a reporter, maybe he’d been after a story Roger didn’t want revealed, the secret agenda Jean had already suspected.
She was just starting off down the driveway—wet shoes wouldn’t kill her—when the Bouchards hurried around the corner of the house, sheltering beneath a big black umbrella that was hardly fashionably Parisian but was much more practical.
“You go to town?” asked Sophie.
Charles unlocked the doors of their pale gold Renault. “Here. Come to ride with us. Not so wet.”
“Why thank you!” Jean flattened her umbrella and tumbled awkwardly into the back seat.
Sophie glided swan-like into the front seat and adjusted her scarf around her shoulders. “The gendarmes, they tell us to go. They will search our room, they say. Very unpleasant.”
The police would search the Lodge, too, Jean thought, and with a stab of regret realized she wouldn’t be there when they asked Kirsty to open the locked door.
Charles started the car. A cold gust from the defrost parted Jean’s hair. She propped her umbrella next to the door, where it could drip on the carpet and not on the books lying on the seat: a Michelin Guide, an Automobile Association map of the UK, two Art and Antiquities magazines, and the same paperback edition of Ambrose’s biography of Crowley as Jean’s own. “What do y’all do?” she asked, and modified the idiom into, “What is your work?”
“Ah,” Sophie said with a flutter of her hands, “it is a shop for objets antiques. La Bagatelle d’Or.”
Jean did a mental double-take. Sophie could wave her hands all she liked—she wasn’t driving. The steering wheel was on the left, not the right. Duh. The car had a French license plate, already. “It’s brave of you to bring your own car. I’d be really nervous driving on the left side of the road with my steering wheel on the outside. Isn’t it hard to see when you can pass?”
“Sophie helps to see,” said Charles, and took a right onto the main road without even stopping, let alone looking left, sublimely assured that even if Sophie couldn’t see a thing, their guardian angel was playing traffic cop.
Jean winced, and in a voice that sounded like a Mickey Mouse impression, asked, “Are you enjoying your holiday?”
“Yes,” replied Sophie.
“What did you think of the Pitclachie Stone?”
“Very amusing.”
“Where do you go?” Charles asked. “The Festival? Beyond?”
“To the Festival, although if you could just drop me off at . . .” Having been spared being struck by a car, Jean was now struck with an inspiration. “. . . the Cameron Arms hotel. It’s tea-time, more or less.”
“Ah. Tea and cakes,” said Sophie. “Very amusing.”
“We,” Charles added, “have later dinner at the Glengarry Castle Hotel.”
“Nice place,” Jean said. Although she’d never been there, she knew from the reviews in Great Scot that it was both exclusive and expensive. The couple was not honeymooning on the cheap. She wondered if Miranda had ever visited chez Bouchard, trolling for just the right knickknack. Funny, how one era’s tchotchke became a later era’s antique.
Charles guided the car into the parking lot of the Cameron Arms. The rain slackened into a few spits and splats, and the freshly-painted white sides of the building gleamed in an uncertain ray of sun. The Water Horse van sat skewed across two parking places, as though Roger and Brendan couldn’t wait to abandon it. On the far side of the Atlantic this wouldn’t be tea-time but happy hour. Maybe Roger and his acolyte had gone to ground in the hotel bar.
Jean slid across the supple leather seat to the door. “Did y’all see the boat blow up last night?”
“Yes,” said Sophie, darting a glance at Charles. “We saw from the village. Very bad.”
“Very sad, the man who dies,” Charles went on. “He was not so pleasant when we visited the boat, but that is not important, is it?”
Jean paused with her hand on the door handle. “Y’all toured the boat?”
“We were walking, and the boat was there, and the lady—Madame Dempsey—she says to come to look, it is open to all.”
Sophie indicated an Omnium brochure tucked into the console, good as a ticket stub. “See here?”
“I see,” said Jean, and opened the door. The car had become so warm in just a few minutes that the outside air felt like a cool compress on her fevered brow. “Thank you very much for the ride.”
“De rien,” Charles responded. The moment Jean slammed the door, he took off with yet another right-hand turn that was more quick than dead, thank goodness for the slow traffic, and disappeared down the highway to the south.
So the Bouchards had not been holed up at Pitclachie when the boat exploded. And they had an antiques shop. Had they ever bought items from Iris? Or were they simply at the loch on a busman’s holiday, er, honeymoon? Busman’s Honeymoon, Jean thought, the classic detective novel with the newlyweds doing their thing upstairs while the murder victim lay undiscovered in the basement. . . . Damn! She should have thought of some way of asking Sophie and Charles why they’d moved from the Lodge to the house. Too late now.
The interior of the hotel revealed Cousin Hamish’s good taste. He had designed his establishment simply, neither going overboard with tartan tushery nor veering too far into the streamlined European style that to Jean signaled not sophistication but sterility. The lobby smelled faintly of paint, although the more palatable odor of frying and baking grew stronger as she advanced past the reception desk.
She paused in the door of the bar long enough to ascertain that neither Brendan nor Roger was holed up drowning his sorrows. Good. She wasn’t up to a probing conversation right now. She went on into the dining room and within minutes was sitting at a small table covered by a dazzling white table cloth, a blazing hot pot of tea set ceremonially before her. She poured, doctored, and drank. Ahhh. Hot tea, the universal panacea.
Through the nearby window Jean could see the Festival field with its one big tent and several smaller ones, and beyond it cars jockeying for parking places from hotel lots to gravel terraces far up the hillside. A stronger ray of sun illuminated the scene, then winked out.
By the time her food arrived she’d filled a page of her notebook with notes and flow charts—Kirsty, Roger, the Bouchards, Pictish antiquities, Nessies large and small—which made her feel she was accomplishing something. What, she didn’t know, but something. Putting her notes aside with a sigh of frustration, she dug into her omelet and chips, and eyeballed the other people in the room. Tourists, she decided, fortifying themselves for the evening’s music, monsters, and madness.
Well, well, well. Staking out the water hole was paying off. Here came Roger and Tracy, ushered by a white-shirted waiter to a table on the far side of the room. He had changed out of his wilted, muddy clothes into nondescript khaki slacks and a sweater. Tracy wore a smashing tweed outfit, accented by a vintage brooch glittering with what were probably not rhinestones. Jean shifted her chair just a bit, hoping she’d blend into the beige wall with its collection of watercolors and prints, all for sale, of course, but neither Dempsey so much as glanced in her direction. They did not, then, see themselves as prey.
Roger ordered and swiftly consumed a pint of dark ale. Tracy fell as though parched onto a pot of tea. They both stared so glumly at glass and cup, respectively, they could have been seated at separate tables. Then Tracy’s lips moved in a murmur. Roger’s head went up. Their eyes connected, then shied away, as though looking each other in the face was the equivalent of touching a hot iron.
Well, yes, Jean thought, who wouldn’t be upset? But a crisis usually made a couple close ranks. Not that she was any expert on couple behavior. She looked down at her own plate long enough to smear strawberry jam on the second half of her scone. Sugar meant calories, and calories meant energy, right?
When she looked up again, Tracy was leaning
across the table toward Roger, gesturing with her fork as though it were a dagger she held before her. Jean couldn’t quite see her face, but the woman’s jaw was stiff and the sinews in her neck were corded with tension. With anger.
Roger, on the other hand, was doing that typical male vanishing act, face averted, eyes glazed, lower lip almost as pendulous as the bags under his eyes, as though resenting his wife’s intrusion into a more absorbing train of thought. Logarithms, maybe. The newest Microsoft security patch. He might just as well be holding his hands over his ears and humming.
At last Tracy thumped her hand, fork and all, against the table. Crockery jangled and several other diners looked around. Jean could read her body language as surely as though she were holding up cue cards: Listen to me! This is important! Was this their usual M.O. when more or less in private, when the public masks of courageous independent scientist and adoring wife walking three steps behind slipped away, and the woman behind the great man took center stage?
Roger focused, his face no longer blank but resentful, perhaps even angry. When the waiter brought his fish and chips, Roger looked at it as though the fish were still raw and wriggling. Tracy used her fork to stab viciously into a salmon salad.
Jean decided she’d gleaned all she was going to glean—not much. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. “Roger-Tracy in dining room,” she wrote in her notebook. “Stunned. Angry. Big surprise.” Replacing the cap on her pen, she stowed everything, including her umbrella, in her bag and slipped away as furtively as a rat, around the edges of the room and out into the hall.
A glance back showed Roger pushing bits of potato and fish around his plate, liberally doused with blood-red catsup, and Tracy squinting into a small mirror, equally red lipstick ready to fill in the maroon outline of her lips. . . . She looked up and saw Jean.
The two women stared at each other, Tracy hostile, Jean trying to put together a polite smile and failing. Then, like wrestlers told to break a hold, Tracy raised her mirror and Jean did a swift about-face.
She paid her bill at the reception desk and hurried out of the building, reassuring herself that Tracy’s hostility wasn’t personal. Maybe the Dempseys had courted Great Scot before the explosion, just as they’d courted all the media, but now reporters equaled bad publicity. If marketing was a way of protecting your investment, right now Tracy was seeing her and Roger’s investment sinking like that boat.
Jean could almost side with the Dempseys, not against them, except Jonathan was dead, and the ripples of his death were spreading outward like those in the famous photo of Nessie. Alasdair was just about the only person here she could trust. She needed to talk to Alasdair.
Chapter Sixteen
Jean realized she was almost running, whether toward or away from she couldn’t say, and forced herself to slow down before she slipped in one of the puddles dotting the asphalt sidewalk hugging the road. Never mind Kirsty learning to take care of herself. One hostile stare and Jean was acting like a veteran with post-traumatic stress syndrome. She was a big girl. She could put off the moment of truth with Alasdair—or the moment of inconsequence, whatever—a little while longer.
The sun was shining again, its rays focused between mounds of white and gray clouds and illuminating the hillsides into a green so intense it was like a platonic ideal. The wind had grown colder, teasing the hem of Jean’s skirt and sending sneaky little drafts up her legs. The muddy patch inside the gate to the Festival Field was now a muddy quilt. Undeterred by the chill and the mud, people of all ages and races were milling around and through the tents. Two constables paced around the periphery, and a camper-van marked with the logo of the Northern Constabulary sat discreetly to one side. A couple of men bearing TV mini-cams wandered about like inquisitive aardvarks. At least print reporters could be a little more subtle.
Alerted by the sound of amplified voices, Jean looked toward the big top. Several roadies were fussing around with cords and amplifiers, not unlike the way Brendan and Jonathan had been fussing around with cords and gadgets on the boat. Peter Kettering stood to one side, consulting a clipboard, a cell phone, and his watch simultaneously. In his three-piece suit he looked like a waiter, compared to the be-kilted figures that stood at the front of the stage extolling the virtues of Starr Beverages.
A kilt was a surpassingly attractive garment, Jean thought with a smile. It complemented almost any male shape and dressed up any number of professions. Including police detectives.
She reconnoitered the outer ring of tents and booths as though clues would be laid out on tables at markdown prices. Gordon Fraser was doing good business, although presumably not in books about Aleister Crowley, Ambrose’s or any other. How sad that despite his “poor wee Iris,” he was visiting Ambrose’s—well, maybe not sins, eccentricities—upon the daughters. Memories did go back a long way in this part of the world.
So did appetites. A food vendor’s booth emitted the full-bodied scent of fried meat and pastry. Brendan and Kirsty stood nearby, munching on meat pies. She was snapping bites out of hers, he was nibbling, with wary sideways glances at Kirsty.
Jean walked on. More than once she had to turn sideways and ease past chattering knots of people. Someone would occasionally react to her murmured apology, but more often than not no one took any notice of her, leaving her feeling invisible. Or maybe covert, as in covert operator.
At last she worked her way back around to the road and strolled further toward the town. A hundred yards along, in a garden area near the entrance of the Official Loch Ness Exhibition, she spotted another familiar face. Little Elvis Hall, a plastic Nessie clutched in his hand, squatted beside a pond eyeing a fiberglass Nessie the size of a huge swan that floated in the water teasingly out of reach.
The plump blond woman standing over him was Noreen, his mum. Every curve of her face sagged in defeat, as though she had lost not a skirmish but an entire campaign.
“Hello,” said Jean. “I’m Jean Fairbairn. I’m staying at the B&B, and was talking to Martin and Elvis last night.”
“Oh,” said Noreen. “Bad business that, the fireworks and all. Or the boat blowing up rather, not the fireworks themselves, they didn’t cause that, did they now? I didn’t mean to say they did. That boat could have gone up at any time, and there’s us, having a tour. Dreadful smelly place, never so nice as the B&B, and Elvis after pushing every bloody button. I knackered myself chasing him about.”
“Wasn’t Martin with you?”
Noreen glanced over her shoulder. Martin stood just outside the courtyard made by one side of the old stone hotel that housed the Exhibition and the series of shops attached to it, shops that formed a gauntlet of souvenirs that everyone exiting from the otherwise quite sober Exhibition had to run. Martin was smoking a cigarette and not so much chatting with Dave and Patti Duckett as standing there silent while they chatted at him.
“He was there, right enough,” Noreen said, “but he was having himself a natter with Mrs. Dempsey, being in a similar field and all. Biology. He’s doing ever so important research for Bristol University, on eels.”
“There’s the theory that Nessie is a giant eel,” offered Jean, skipping past the fact that while Roger was as much a biologist as Jean herself was a hard-hitting investigative reporter, Tracy wasn’t a biologist at all . . . Maybe the shape in Tracy’s window had been Martin’s, after all.
“I’ve heard tell of that eel idea, oh yes. And all the others as well.”
“Is Martin a Nessie enthusiast like Elvis?”
The child was making his plastic creature swim through the weedy, murky water. “That he is. Like father like son,” Noreen said with a sigh, quickly suppressed, and another glance toward her husband.
“Has Elvis seen the Exhibition?”
“Martin took him in when we was here in April. Me, I had me one look at the price of the ticket and said no thanks, I’ll wait. That’s me, always waiting, waiting tables in the motorway caff, waiting on . . .” She cut herself off. Th
is time she didn’t look at Martin, but by the set of her shoulders Jean deduced that took a deliberate effort. “I mean, his work’s ever so important, it’s the least I can do, isn’t it, to help pay the bills and all?”
The first words that sprang to Jean’s mind were about the relatively high prices at Pitclachie House. She tried, “The B&B is very nice. Iris sets a high standard. A good thing she has Kirsty to help her.”
“Yeh, nothing like a bit of slave labor, is there? All Kirsty gets is her room and board and a few quid for spending money, in return for working like a navvy and sucking down loads of advice from Iris.”
“Kirsty doesn’t seem particularly resentful,” Jean ventured.
“It’s not like she has a choice, is it? I mean, we was having us a nice natter back in April, Kirsty and me, and she told me about the aggro in Glasgow and all. Bloody shame the lad pushed her into sending those letters and then told the polis. He should be the one paying the price, not her. But no, her family sends her up here even though she gave him the elbow quick smart.”
Jean’s ears pricked up so far they sprouted points. “Letters?”
“Well, that’s not what we was talking about, was it? We was talking about choosing the wrong man—it’s always the woman who pays.” This time Noreen did look over at Martin, her resentment so heavy it sagged into despair.
Jean tried to think of something positive to say, but all that came to her mind was the counsel that staying together for the kids was a much over-rated reason to stick out a bad relationship. And she was no counselor. Funny how neither Roger nor Tracy, who had reason to assume someone was waiting to pounce on them, were acting like prey, and yet here was Noreen behaving like an antelope downwind of a lion. Marriage could do that to a woman, Jean told herself with prejudice aforethought. And if Kirsty had had a manipulative boyfriend back in Glasgow, that would explain Iris’s attitude toward Brendan . . .
The Murder Hole Page 15
