A splash and a cry jerked her around. Noreen lunged. Elvis, predictably, had leaned too far and was now standing in the water, his face as bewildered as though the fiberglass monster had reached up and pulled him in.
Throwing down his cigarette, Martin loped to the pool, plucked the boy from the pond, and set him down on the grassy bank. “Have a care there, lad.”
“My shoes,” said Elvis, his face crumpling. Balancing on one foot, he extended one of his small athletic shoes. A rivulet of water poured from its heel.
“Hush,” said Martin. “They’ll dry themselves. No harm done.”
With a heavy sigh, not suppressed, Noreen sat down on a rock, pulled Elvis onto her lap, and began to untie his shoelaces. “Those shoes, they cost a packet.”
“Well then, you should have been minding him properly.” Martin’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in his stalk of a throat, a judge’s gavel rising and falling. “Leave off your fussing. Take him back to the B&B before he catches a chill.”
Noreen didn’t respond. She didn’t keep working with Elvis’s shoes, either.
Jean looked up at Martin, a foot taller and half as wide as she was, but he took no notice of her. She looked down at Noreen, who even when standing up was two inches shorter and twice as broad. Compared to this couple, the Dempseys resembled twins.
She wandered diplomatically away, to where the Ducketts were diplomatically gazing off toward the mountains. Martin’s cigarette lay smoking on the cement. Jean ground it under her shoe, harder than was necessary.
“We waved at you earlier,” Dave said. “You were getting out of the French couple’s car at the Cameron Arms. We’d just had an early supper and were heading over here to the Exhibition.”
“I didn’t see you, sorry.” If she’d been an antelope she’d be dismembered and half-digested by now, she added to herself. A lively fiddle tune echoed from the Festival, signaling an end to the Starr Beverages PLC commercial break. “That’s Hugh Munro. If you haven’t heard him before, he’s worth a listen and a few CDs, too.”
“Sounds nice and cheerful. Let’s go listen to the music, hon.” Patti hoisted her shopping bag, brimming with yet more toys and tiny garments. Jean was reminded of one of her cousins, lavishing gifts on her grandchildren after her son’s divorce, trying to stay a part of their lives. But Patti had said something about the kids moving back to Illinois, hadn’t she?
Dave took the bag, and Patti’s arm, and escorted her toward the music. The Halls, too, walked away, Elvis wriggling like a marionette at the end of Martin’s long arm. Noreen made nervous gestures over him and shot nervous glances at her husband. Her dishwater blonde head bending over Elvis’s golden one looked like after and before photos in a hair color ad.
Shuddering, Jean took a step and caromed off a kilted man the size and coloring of a grizzly bear. With mutual apologies they danced around each other, and she hurried back to the Festival field chiding herself yet again. Too much input. That was it.
The swing and sway of the music, the rhythm of a kilt around a man’s knees, summoned her to the main tent. Hugh and his back-up lads—Billy on pipes, Jamie on guitar, Donnie on keyboard—were playing a bravura reel that might not actually wake the dead but would certainly rouse the comatose. Shuffling her feet, Jean joined in the clapping and hooching. At least she hoped her cries of enthusiasm were proper Scottish hooching, the secular cousin of the gospel audience’s occasional outburst of prayer: Amen, brother! If music was like prayer, then Hugh’s fiddle was the next best thing to a holy relic.
And the bagpipes! Pipe music was an acquired taste for the non-Celt, or even for the odd reconstructed Celt. It was in-your-face and up-your-spine. It was wildly romantic. In other words, it was dangerous.
Jean saw Noreen and Elvis, now alone, trudging along the sidewalk toward Pitclachie. And here came Tracy striding toward the Festival. Noreen pulled Elvis out of the way and all but curtseyed. Tracy brushed by without acknowledging them, picked her way through the gate into the field, and disappeared into the crowd. Noreen jerked Elvis, collateral damage, into a fast trot.
At the edge of the tent, several couples began performing the intricate sets of Scottish country dancing, the ancestor of the American square dance. One red-headed man’s short-sleeved shirt revealed arms covered with tattoos. All he needed was a tunic instead of jeans—or nothing but blue vegetable dye—and he’d be a painted Pict from Roman legend. Unless the Picts had been blue from the cold.
Some experts postulated that the designs carved on the stones began as tattoos, which led Jean back to her musings on Pictish treasures, whether “treasure” could be defined as artifacts valuable to collectors or potsherds of interest to no one but scientists. Or the bones of a mythical beast. Whether the Bouchards with their shop and Ambrose with his collection and Roger with his scientific interests were simply on different parts of the same spectrum. Whether the fact that people often killed for treasure meant anyone was intent on killing for it now.
Time to download some data before her brain exploded. Kirsty and something about letters, for one thing. That would surprise and gratify Alasdair, or she’d eat her junior detective’s magnifying glass and deerstalker hat. Pulling out her cell phone, she told herself that with her luck, he’d gone back to Inverness and she’d have to wait until tomorrow for a face-to-face meeting. Not that there was anything wrong with that.
Whoa. Here came a bulky shape casting a grotesquely long shadow in the evening sun. D.S. Sawyer was cruising the crowd, so heavy-footed Jean could almost feel each step reverberating in the earth. She imagined tiny biplanes circling his head while he drummed on his chest and swatted at them, and she started looking for an escape route. But Sawyer was after fresher meat.
D.C. Gunn was chatting to Kirsty and Brendan, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a soft drink. Brendan and Kirsty looked less woebegone than they had earlier, if far from cheerful. Gunn said something that was accompanied with a shrug. That they hadn’t made any progress on the case? Brendan opened his mouth to reply just as Kirsty saw Sawyer bearing down on them and quailed so quickly she bounced off Brendan’s nicely filled-out chest.
Shutting his mouth with a snap, Brendan put his arm around Kirsty and pulled her close. For a second she stood stiffly against him, then leaned into his embrace. Gunn stood his ground, his face set with icy courtesy—a copy of one of Alasdair’s repertory of expressions. Gunn chose his role models well.
Sawyer bore down on the trio. His forefinger targeted Kirsty and Brendan. His recessed chin split with a humorless smirk like the smile on the snout of a crocodile. He slowed down just long enough to hiss something into Gunn’s ear.
Gunn made a face like that of the offendee in a mouthwash ad. His left hand came out of his pocket and hung clenched at his trouser seam. Jean could almost hear the creak of the soft drink can as his other hand tightened on it. And yet he said nothing, only stood his ground as Sawyer stomped on by.
Kirsty blinked and Brendan frowned. Sawyer, having counted coup against Gunn, continued his circuit of the tent. He was headed directly for Jean. She spun around and pushed through the crowd, propelled by righteous anger and frustration—at what, she wasn’t sure, but she’d back Gunn over Sawyer any day. Heck, she’d back Kirsty and Brendan over Sawyer, and for all she knew they were hip-deep in conspiracy.
Jean bounced off the soft body of a woman, ricocheted off the skinny body of a man, and thudded straight into a third body. This one was hard, rock-steady. Large, firm hands grasped her upper arms and both pushed her away and held her upright. She knew who it was before she tilted her face up to his.
“Well now,” said Alasdair’s brushed-velvet voice, the warmth of his breath bathing her cool cheeks. “What’s all this then?”
Chapter Seventeen
One corner of his mouth was tucked in and his eyes were twinkling . . . No, that was heresy. Alasdair’s eyes didn’t twinkle. They might scintillate gravely, or elude Jean’s gaze like a will o’ the wisp
, or glow like twin blue flames.
He wasn’t eluding Jean’s gaze. He was staring back, his brows drifting downward and his lips tightening, no doubt thinking his policeman-as-cliché joke had thudded down like another cliché, the infamous lead balloon. If she’d laughed he might have come back with a smile and a Move along, nothing to see here. But it was too late now for a light moment, drat it all anyway.
“It’s been a long day,” Jean said neutrally, hoping to excuse her lack of appreciation. Hoping to excuse her blindly playing human pinball, for that matter, without dragging Alasdair back to humorless reality by mentioning Sawyer.
“Oh aye,” said Alasdair, also neutral.
She liked the feel of his hands on her arms, and had to resist the temptation to flatten her own hands on the lapels of his coat. Or open the lapels of his coat and press her palms against the starched white front of his shirt. And yet, at the same time, she also had to resist the temptation to flinch and flounce away with a feminist mutter. She did neither, which was a compromise like most compromises, less than satisfactory to both sides. “You can let me go now.”
“Ah.” Releasing her, he raised his hands in front of his chest, palms out, making simultaneously a warding motion and the universal gesture of I’m unarmed.
She would have sagged had she not been holding herself alertly upright. Funny how her arms seemed cold and weak without the pressure of his hands. Dropping her gaze, she noticed a few scone crumbs clinging to the breast of her less than posh tweed jacket and quickly brushed them away.
“You’ve had your tea, then,” said Alasdair, following her gesture.
“At the new hotel,” Jean replied. “Nice place. Good food. Kudos to your cousin Hamish.”
Alasdair nodded approval of either Hamish’s designer or his chef.
“I hope you’ve had more than that sandwich you were eating earlier,” she said.
“Oh aye, Hamish sent along several meals by way of having the exploding boat sorted and swept away as soon as possible. I’m thinking the case is bringing in more business, not less, but then, there’s more than money to consider.”
“Like safety? Yes, there is that.”
Alasdair gestured toward a nearby booth stocked with an array of whiskey bottles. They glinted every shade of amber as one last ray of sun squeezed between the western mountains and thickening gray cloud. “I could do with a wee dram just now. Fancy joining me?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t mind my doing a data-dump at the same time.”
“Eh?”
“Telling you what I learned in my afternoon’s snooping,” Jean amended.
“That goes without saying. I’d not be sharing a whiskey with just anyone.” He turned toward the booth.
She told herself not to waste time assaying that remark.
“A Lagavullin and . . .” He glanced toward Jean.
Of course he’d like a dry malt flavored with sea spray and smoke. The Speyside malt she’d drunk last night—five years ago, it seemed now—had been almost sweet. “The same,” she said, and reached for her bag.
“It’s my shout. You paid for the dinner in May.” Alasdair produced suitable coin of the realm before she could unzip her bag.
Except her bag was already unzipped. Rats! She must have been in such a hurry to escape Tracy at the hotel she hadn’t closed it after paying for her tea . . . Whew. There was her billfold, safe and sound. She zipped up the bag and made sure the tab of the zipper was tucked into its down and locked position.
Alasdair was holding a plastic glass toward her. “They’re just out of the Waterford crystal.”
“Thank you,” she said with a smile, and managed to take the glass from his hand without actually touching him.
Alasdair tapped his glass against hers. “As my sainted granny used to say, preserve us from a disorder whiskey canna cure.”
“Hear, hear.” Jean inhaled more than sipped the bright, brisk fragrance of the whisky, soothing and invigorating at once. “First a cousin and now a grandmother. I thought you were the lone ranger.”
“Chance would be a fine thing,” he replied sarcastically, and drank. The elegant curve of his lips thinned in a smile.
Dazzled, she went along quietly as he escorted her to one of several folding chairs grouped beneath a canvas canopy, a small no man’s land neither below the big top nor right next to the police van. Hugh and his band were playing one of their part folk, part rock specialties, Jean noted with pleasure, even though this position closer to one set of speakers than the other distorted the sound just a bit. But it also meant the volume wasn’t as high.
Alasdair didn’t pull out his handkerchief and wipe off the seat of her chair. Jean almost wished he had—the damp seat sent an icy shock wave up her body. Well, that was why the Scots had invented whiskey to begin with. She drank deeply. Aaaah. Liquid fire burst in her mouth and sent rivulets of flame first into her stomach, then out through each limb like sap coursing through a tree. Fire and ice met in her gut, and she shivered with a strange alloy of pain and delight.
Alasdair sat down and gazed expressionlessly out over the field. Jean gazed at him. What a shame he was wearing his police uniform of suit and tie—the latter knotted against his throat, even at the end of day—when so many of the other men were wearing kilts.
But wee dram or no wee dram, joke or no joke, tonight he was On Business, his shoulders taut if not exactly tense, his face still if not exactly stern. “What are you after telling me, then?”
“I talked to Kirsty, and to everybody else at the B&B, more or less. And I saw Roger at Pitclachie and later with Tracy. . . You can tell I’m an academic, can’t you? I start out by giving you the abstract. Whether it all adds up to an actual paper or is just random noise is the question.”
She expected him to respond, “That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?” But he merely tilted his head toward her, the better to hear.
No need to get out her notebook, it was all fresh in her mind. Jean summed up her conversation with Kirsty—Iris and Roger and the tower, Ambrose’s corkscrew, books, Gordon Fraser, Jonathan, Brendan. Even the bad feel in the summerhouse and the knitting.
Alasdair listened, his eyebrows making sine waves of comprehension and intelligence. Then they furrowed. “Knitting?”
“Well, the knitting itself isn’t important. It just gave me a chance to read Kirsty’s body language. Obviously she’s upset about Jonathan and about Iris being taken away for questioning. But it was when I told her that Iris had confessed to the letters that she really cringed. And . . .”
“You told her that?”
“Did you want to keep that quiet?”
“No, no. Kirsty didn’t already know about the confession?”
“Why should she? All she knew was that Iris had gone off to Inverness.”
The crease between his brows deepened. “Iris and Kirsty are both playing silly beggars with us, like as not. Have you gone and asked yourself why Iris confessed?”
“I can make a guess . . .” A spark in his eye tipped her off—she was just about to take a big bite out of her deerstalker. “Okay, Alasdair. What do you know that I don’t know?”
“We’ve checked the backgrounds of everyone at all associated with the Water Horse Expedition, as per routine. Only one is known to the police. Kirsty Wotherspoon.”
Jean felt her jaw drop. Retrieving it, she said, “Really?”
“Oh aye. Two years since, she was one of several students harassing a teacher by making it appear the school had a poltergeist.”
“You mean they threw things around when the teacher’s back was turned and then claimed it was a poltergeist?”
“Oh aye. Most poltergeist cases involve adolescents. It’s hard to say how many are genuine. Like ghosts,” he added in a soft growl.
Jean wondered whether Alasdair had been able to sense the paranormal all his life, as she had been all of hers, and whether his friends and relations had given him as much grief about it in his youth. B
efore he, like her, had learned to keep his uncanny light—his will o’ the wisp of perception—under a bushel. Traditionally, the Highlanders were more open to the paranormal, but then, Kirsty’s family hadn’t been, unless that was a result of Ambrose’s aversion therapy. “If Kirsty has a sixth sense, perhaps acting out as a poltergeist wasn’t that far-fetched for her.”
“That’s as may be, but the affair in Glasgow was admitted to be a hoax and sorted by the juvenile authorities. What’s interesting is that the scheme fell apart when Kirsty wrote a poison-pen letter to the teacher, gilding the lily, so to speak. Or perhaps deliberately giving the game away. It was then the teacher called in the police.”
“Aha! I knew that!” Jean exclaimed.
Alasdair didn’t leap out of his chair in surprise, but he did tilt forward in interest.
“Noreen Hall said something about a boyfriend getting Kirsty into trouble over some letters. He must have been one of the other students involved, maybe even the driving force.”
“A boyfriend, eh?”
Ah, something he didn’t know. “I bet that’s why her family sent her here, to get her away from not only the school, but also the exploitive boyfriend. And now Iris thinks Kirsty sent the letters to Roger. She confessed to protect her. And Kirsty cringed the way she did because she knows that’s what Iris is doing, and she’s blaming herself.”
“Great minds think alike, Jean.” Alasdair raised his glass in a salute. There was that spark again, and another, not enough to be fireworks and yet not unlike the lit fuses of fireworks.
Focusing on the case, Jean said, “But Kirsty didn’t send the letters, did she? It makes even less sense for her to have done it than for Iris. Unless she thought she was helping Iris for some reason. And here I was picturing Kirsty as Ophelia. I guess you don’t have many of these contemporary girls doing the Ophelia bit.”
“Make up your mind. Earlier you were comparing her to Juliet.”
“Yeah, well.” Not so long ago, that sort of remark would have yanked her hackles out by the roots. Now Jean sat back and sipped again at her whiskey, barely prickling.
The Murder Hole Page 16
