Hugh’s voice emanated from the speakers riffing on the more absurd aspects of Scottish history, wry humor being the stick that kept the jaws of tragedy from snapping shut. Overhead the clouds coagulated into a blanket of gray, so that beyond the bright lights of festival and town, Midsummer’s day failed of its promise and darkened to a murky twilight.
“What’s irritating,” Jean said, “is that Iris’s confession is obscuring the real issue.”
“And just what is the real issue, are you thinking?”
“Roger’s expedition, surely.”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Jean.”
“No, it’s not,” she told him. “You talked to every single person who visited the boat yesterday, didn’t you? That’s quite a job.”
“I didn’t interview them personally, mind. I have my resources.”
“Whereas we reporters have to take what scraps we can. Maybe some of my investigative cousins several times removed would have gone ahead and searched the house themselves, but me, I sit here and politely ask you if your team found anything.”
“And if I wasn’t letting you in on the case, would you be waiting to ask?”
“That sounds like the old saying, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
“Are we enemies?” he asked, with a sideways glance that also mingled fire and ice, to the same disquieting effect on her stomach. He sure was saying we easily these days.
“No, we’re not enemies.” As for what they were . . . She let the implications blow away in the wind that flapped the edge of the canvas and ran its cold fingers through her hair. “So did you find anything in the main house? How about the Lodge? There’s a locked door upstairs that’s driving me nuts. Both Kirsty and Iris say it’s only a lumber room.”
”That’s what my team is saying it is, as well. Furniture, boxes, two paintings, a right mixtie-maxtie of bits and pieces. The Mackintosh family collection of mathoms, to use Tolkien’s word.”
“Rats. No boxes of Ambrose’s private papers?”
“Not a one, or so they say.”
“How about the room in the tower, then? Iris’s lair?”
The corner of Alasdair’s mouth quirked. “Nothing helpful in the tower room, either. Bar turning over the place myself—and I’m not discounting that—I’ve got no new evidence about the letters, let alone the explosion. As you say, rats.”
“So what about your interviews? Kirsty’s previous track aside, did you find anyone who isn’t who they say they are? Brendan? Anyone from the B&B?”
“Not a one. They’re a right difficult lot, helpful to a fault. Brendan’s saying he and Jonathan hadn’t been getting on, no—two young stags trying their antlers, I’m thinking—but he made the remark about Jonathan going into the water by chance.”
“No surprise there. If he were planning to eliminate a rival or whatever, he’d hardly signal his intentions that baldly.”
“Not with you listening, no,” Alasdair said. “Some of the witnesses, now, some are more sensitive than others. I mind you saying you smelled petrol on the boat.”
“We’ll skip past my sensitivities, thank you. But yeah, that’s a good point. Let me guess—Noreen Hall smelled it, too. Martin said last night she had a migraine.”
“Oh aye. Mrs. Hall seems a bit nervy, I’m thinking, but . . .”
“Who doesn’t?” Jean finished for him. “Did she tell you they were here in April? Martin has a thing for Nessie, too. And I thought I saw him in Tracy’s hotel room, although, to be fair, it could have been the guy from Starr, Kettering. Still, Noreen said Martin was talking to Tracy on the boat.”
“Ah,” said Alasdair with a nod. “That might could be important.”
“Or not even accurate.”
“Oh aye.” Alasdair tilted his glass so that the last drop of whiskey ran down into his mouth, then licked his lips in a gesture that in anyone else would be sensuous.
And why wouldn’t it be sensuous in Alasdair? Because in him sensuality was only a brief glimpse, like a distant flicker of lightning? Or because knowing Alasdair harbored any sensuality at all beneath his carapace made her uncomfortable? Jean had wondered what it would be like seeing him again, talking to him again. Now she knew. Being with him wasn’t a state, it was a continuum, and multiple answers applied. Sipping her own whiskey—ah, her cheeks were starting to burn, a sure sign of alcohol intake—she looked at the stage.
Hugh wasn’t making sensuous music but was leading the crowd in a rousing chorus of “The John Mclean March.” He was a breath of fresh air, even if at times it was the sort of fresh air that turned your umbrella inside out.
Tracy Dempsey came shouldering her way through the multitude, dragging Roger along like a mother dragging her child off to the woodshed. Jean leaned over toward Alasdair to point them out just as he leaned over to her, so that they were each encompassed by the other’s warm whiskey breaths.
“And is Mrs. Dempsey playing Lady Macbeth?” he murmured.
“If you’re asking me if she ordered someone—like Jonathan—killed, I can’t imagine anyone doing that. But then, killers are your specialty, not mine.”
“You spotted the killer last month.”
“I owed you that much.”
“Oh aye, that you did.” His face turned toward Tracy. Jean followed his gaze.
Roger wrenched his arm away from Tracy’s grasp and shouted, “Haven’t you done enough already?” His words sliced cleanly into Hugh’s brief fiddle solo between verses of the song. Several people faltered in their clapping and looked around.
Tracy rose in her shoes, into Roger’s truculent face. Her red lips hissed “investment.” Jean could fill in the rest—in for a penny in for a pound or some similar sentiment.
Roger’s right arm was still extended. His hand clenched, and for a second Jean thought he was going to commit wife abuse right in front of her. Alasdair stiffened, probably wondering if he should intervene. Then the song started up again, Roger dropped his hand to his side, and those people who’d been attracted by his shout turned away—except for the Ducketts, Jean saw, who watched from the rim of the crowd with every appearance of horrified fascination.
Peter Kettering appeared just beyond them, twisted like an Egyptian wall-painting, both standing still and retreating. Tracy spotted him. Shooting a commanding glance at Roger, she marched up to Kettering. Roger’s fierce scowl at her back deepened the creases on his face to trenches. With an intake of breath so deep his entire body heaved, he moderated his expression, flexed his hands, and followed.
Kettering smiled politely, even as his gaze darted back and forth, scanning the throng. It lit upon Alasdair and Jean and leaped away again, press plus police equaling doubly negative publicity.
Roger said his piece to Kettering, punctuated with the same digging motions he’d used to Charles Bouchard. Kettering replied, his gestures both soothing and dismissive. Tracy stood with her hands on her hips, shoulders back, looking first at one man, then at the other. Her smile had a feral quality to it, as though she were both the lady and the tiger.
Roger didn’t look at her at all. He offered his hand. Kettering took it. They shook, then turned abruptly away from each other. Kettering’s cell phone leaped into his hand and he was in full conversation before he had walked two paces. Roger strode purposefully, even grimly, toward the whiskey booth. The Ducketts subtracted themselves from the scene.
Left alone, Tracy sagged, one manicured hand pressed to her face. Then Jean caught the gleam of eyes through Tracy’s fingers. If she hadn’t noticed the peanut gallery of police and press before, she did now.
She snapped back upright and whipped around too fast for Jean to register her expression—a snarl, a grimace of determination, the bared teeth of a cornered animal?—and walked off after Kettering, moving amazingly fast in her high heels. Then she, too, was gone, like the others no more than a figment of a fever dream.
Chapter Eighteen
Jean really was feeling a bit fev
erish. She could blame that on the whiskey, on the Dempsey drama, on the friction—physical, emotional, and intellectual—between her and Alasdair. She looked at him.
He looked at her, great minds still thinking alike. “They’re seeing their funding from Starr run through their fingers, I reckon, though I doubt there’s more to it than that.”
“Roger looks more decisive than he did at the hotel. Then he was punch-drunk. I would have said it was impossible to faze him, but having someone killed on his watch would do it.”
“You saw them just after we told them we turned up Paisley’s body, then.”
“How’d they react to the news?”
“As you’d expect.”
“So in the restaurant she was telling him they had to pull their socks up and get on with it. ‘Onward, onward, half a league onward . . .’”
“‘. . . into the valley of death,’” Alasdair concluded dourly.
Thanks. “If Roger’s expedition is the issue—and he was getting on with it just fine earlier today, Tracy or no Tracy—then Roger himself is the epicenter. I’d like to know why Iris gave him permission to search Pitclachie. Why they put together a truce of some sort.”
“Because of a common enemy?”
“Spoken like a policeman. How about a common interest? You know, capitalism at work. United in greed we stand.”
Alasdair’s right eyebrow arched upward, Spock-like. “We’ve not counted out an insurance scam, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not seeing how that would involve Iris, though.”
“No, that’s not what I’m thinking. I was looking at the display case of Ambrose’s artifacts at Pitclachie, and at Roger and Brendan doing some sort of survey of the hillside, and it hit me—what if the Nessie search is only part of the story? Maybe even a full-fledged diversion? What if Roger is really after more valuable artifacts? There’s an almost undisturbed Pictish cemetery uphill from the Stone. The Picts aren’t known for their grave goods, but still, most of Ambrose’s collection was found in one hoard somewhere around here.” She waved her hand toward the hillside, although she could just as well have waved it toward the loch.
“Or so he said.” Alasdair’s eyebrow drifted back down and assumed a contemplative curl.
“The Bouchards have a shop in Paris, maybe they’re working with Roger. Or with Iris. Maybe all the hissing and spitting between Iris and Roger is just for show. Maybe it’s a vast conspiracy.”
His eyebrows tightened. He wasn’t buying it, and now that she’d articulated it, she wasn’t either. She started again. “The bottom line is, why, out of all the ancient sites in Scotland, did Roger come to Pitclachie? Yeah, supposedly Nessie’s been spotted crossing the road—to get to the other side, I know, I know—but she’s an aquatic beast, already. Unless you elaborate some Pictish Nessie-cult from the pictographs on the Pitclachie Stone, and then factor in Ambrose’s treasure, there’s no reason for even a nut like Roger to be looking for her on land.”
Jean knew that Alasdair knew how she could extrapolate from zero to sixty in five seconds. When she finally stopped for breath, she could hear the gears grinding in his brain. Catching up with her, he said, “More than a little depends on whether Roger or any other folk believe Nessie exists.”
“Do you believe she exists?”
“Do you?”
“If seeing is believing, then believing is seeing,” she replied. “‘A triumph of hope over experience,’ as Samuel Johnson said.”
“That’s his definition of a second marriage,” said Alasdair, so dry dust eddied around him. “As for Nessie, I’m after keeping my fantasy compartmented.”
And his memories, too. Jean leaned back, if not deflated at least down some pressure. They’d had similar discussions before, conducted with less cordiality but also with fewer undercurrents. Feel as she might about Brad, the one time Alasdair had spoken of his marriage his bitterness had been sharp enough to acid-etch the subject of relationships with No Trespassing.
Damn it, she was parsing his every word. “It’s all your fault. You’re making me look for double and triple meanings in everything. Pretty soon I’ll start analyzing a baked potato for means and motives.”
“Right,” he said, with a ghost of smile that perhaps acknowledged those undercurrents, that perhaps didn’t. “If Roger’s motive is to find something on land, he’s gone a bit overboard—no pun intended there, either—stocking the boat with equipment.”
“True. I’m not saying that’s the entire picture. Or any of it, for that matter.”
“You were saying Kirsty thinks Jonathan was a reporter. Or a spy of some sort.” Alasdair didn’t add, but that’s redundant. “There is one thing. Everyone’s background has checked out, aye, but Jonathan told his mum he was working for someone else as well as for Roger. Someone here, at Loch Ness. Not surprising, he was a bit of a hired gun, electronically-speaking—though I’m never speaking electronics—but there was something a bit hush-hush about this job. We’ve not yet found a soul who’s owned up to hiring him, let alone what he was doing. Our opposite numbers in England are speaking with his bank manager.”
“Tracking down any paychecks not from Omnium.” Jean nodded approval, not that Alasdair needed her approval—it kept her from thinking about Jonathan’s mother. “If he was into, say, industrial espionage, that might explain his nervousness. So would his being on to something Roger wanted kept quiet, a treasure hunt or anything else.”
“Either might could be a motive for murder.”
“Yeah, but it would have to be a heck of an either, to drive you to murder.”
“To drive you to murder, aye.”
She shrugged understanding. “If Roger wanted to kill Jonathan, it would have been easier to just bash him over the head or poison his tea or something, not rig up an elaborate plot with anonymous letters and a bomb that would blow up his boat and all his equipment. At a time Jonathan wasn’t even supposed to be there.”
“I see we’ll be having another go at Roger,” said Alasdair, with a set to his mouth that made Jean glad she wouldn’t be the one he would be going at. “Brendan, now, he’s not changed his story, told us everything he told Kirsty and is dead certain there was a submersible on board. He’s had experience of marine biology, mind, he knows the difference. Roger keeps going on about his ROVs, but judging by the bits we’ve been bringing up from the loch, a small sub went up and then down with the boat.”
“And you knew all this before I lectured you on submersibles and ROVs at the police station this afternoon, right?”
“Right.”
“Alasdair,” Jean said, “you’d make a great poker player.”
“Well now, there’s a valuable skill for a detective.” He almost managed a poker face at that, but a crinkle at the corners of mouth and eyes gave him away.
Either he was giving a lot away this evening, or she had learned to read him too damned well. But then, she was someone he could trust, wasn’t he? Maybe he was running, too.
Jean skipped around that thought. “Roger told me submersibles were old-hat. If Jonathan was a spy, wouldn’t he be after the newest technology? Maybe some hush-hush project of Roger’s that just resembles a submersible?”
“We’re looking out an expert, but being Saturday and all, we’ve not found one yet.”
“Oh.” Jean’s glow, strained to its utmost, burst. The damp chill of the evening closed in around her. The lights were ringed with haloes, mist choking the air the way unshed tears choked the throat. But she couldn’t back off from her inspiration, not when circumstances transcended her own sensitivities. “I know a mechanical engineer you could probably get hold of right away. My ex-husband, Brad Inglis.”
Alasdair didn’t move a muscle, but still Jean could sense him withdrawing, mind and body, from the demilitarized zone where they’d been parlaying. She hadn’t realized how warm his voice had become until it chilled back into cool, correct formality. “He’s back in the States, is he?”
“He should be
, not that I keep track of his movements. It’s afternoon there. I’ll give him a call. I mean, no time like the present. If nothing else maybe you could e-mail him some photos of the debris or something . . .” Clamping her teeth on her babbling, she reached for her bag and pulled her cell phone from its pocket.
Damn it, she was trying so hard to satisfy both her curiosity and Alasdair’s directive she’d just hoisted herself with her own petard. She hadn’t really wanted to know that she felt uncomfortable talking to Alasdair about Brad.
“I’ll just have a word with the constable on duty, shall I?” Alasdair picked up her empty glass and his and walked determinedly toward the police van, leaving Jean in her own little island of solitude. Not that any woman was an island.
With similar determination, she scrolled down her phone’s menu. She and Brad had had to touch bases a time or two about the sale of the house. Investing in a cell phone that worked world-wide meant she could get those calls over with as fast as possible . . . There. She punched Talk and put the phone to her ear. A good thing Hugh was spinning another tale, not playing. She had an even chance of being able to hear.
Static. A phone on the other side of the world rang. An answering machine picked up. She heard Brad’s voice, the bland accent, tones that were calm and correct without at all resembling Alasdair’s, whose calmness and correctness concealed nuclear fires, magma pools, lightning bolts.
“Hi,” she said at the beep. “It’s me, Jean. I’m at Loch Ness. Roger Dempsey’s here searching for the monster, but someone blew up his boat last night, and, um, the police are asking questions about submersibles and ROVs. I figured you could help. It’s, um, a matter of telling the difference between the two by looking at some wreckage. Sort of. Anyway, call me back when you get the chance. Oh, and it’s six hours later here. Thanks.”
She punched End, hoping she’d given him enough information that he’d have his act together when he did call back, so that she wouldn’t have to listen to the slow unspooling of his thought . . . Heck, she could have given Alasdair’s number to Brad and she wouldn’t have had to talk to him at all. Although she wasn’t sure whether putting the two men into direct contact would be a good thing. There might be a matter and anti-matter effect.
The Murder Hole Page 17
