Martin? One of the Ducketts? Ghosties and ghoulies? Jean walked as casually as she could into the library. The ranks of books, the mantelpiece, the display cases with their ancient ornaments, Kirsty’s knitting piled on the wingback chair, all were inert. Mandrake, though, crouched on the floor by the roll top desk, guarding his victim, a rectangular shape in a bread bag. He was sniffing so intently that his head was inside the bag.
Well, Jean thought, look what the cat dragged in. Or off the desk, most likely—the sliding top of the desk wasn’t quite shut, leaving plenty of room for an inquisitive paw to grope around and an efficient claw to snag the plastic. Maybe Kirsty thought the book would be suitably hidden in the desk, maybe she tucked it away until she had a chance to put it somewhere else. Or give it to Iris.
Knowing the folly of coming between a hunter and his prey, Jean slowly pulled the package away from Mandrake. At last the cat withdrew, his eyes crossed and his whiskers lopsided, as though the sweet, moldy odor was heady as catnip. Maybe it evoked rancid mouse.
To Jean and her full stomach, the odor was even more nauseating than it had been. Depending on when Kirsty took the book, it could have spent hours outside in the damp. Way to go, she told herself. She should have put it in the lumber room with the mildewed curtains.
Her morning caffeine suddenly cut in. Wait a minute. How could Iris have told Kirsty to hide this book? Iris didn’t know Jean even had it, let alone where it was. All Jean had overheard was a suggestive reference to hiding one of Ambrose’s books. She could have misinterpreted the entire conversation, poetic justice for eavesdropping.
Still, Kirsty had taken the book and hadn’t asked about it. Jean stood up, holding the book and the bag at arm’s length. What to do now? Put it back in the desk? If she didn’t, someone would miss it, whether Kirsty sooner or Iris later. Or save it to show Alasdair? In the desk it wouldn’t smell up the Lodge, and maybe Alasdair’s steel-trap mind could discern its significance. Even Jean’s steel-sieve imagination couldn’t devise a connection between Tracy’s murder and Aleister Crowley’s life story.
Mandrake leaped onto the chair, snuggled up next to Kirsty’s knitting, and began licking the odor into, or out of, his multi-colored fur. Wrapping the bag back around the book, Jean raised the lid of the desk a bit further. It squealed, not too loudly, but loudly enough. Quickly, she leaned over and thrust the book into what felt and sounded like a pile of papers. Her nostrils flared. A cloying scent, stirred up by her movement, was either that of flowers past their prime or a heavy perfume, or perhaps even aromatic tobacco . . .
The smell was that of the nightly apparition in the Lodge.
She straightened up, pushing the lid back down to where it had been, slowly, so the squeal was as thin as her nerves. Well, the desk had been Ambrose’s desk, and the book his book, and the curtains in the lumber room had probably been his, too. He haunted Pitclachie on several different levels. He and Eileen’s tiny sepia-toned eyes were even watching her from the photo atop the desk.
Abandoning Mandrake to his ablutions, Jean fled into the open air. Outside, the sun was shining brightly, drawing wraiths of mist up from the green fields and the glistening surface of the loch to dissipate against the blue bowl of the sky. So much for Thursday’s forecast of torrential rain. Although any number of Thursday’s assumptions had been exploded by now, and too many had been confirmed.
The sound of bells rippled down the cool breeze. Jean was tempted to go sit in a church and think thoughts of peace and justice, poetic or otherwise. She settled for breathing deeply of the fresh air, which loosened the tight muscles in her chest and shoulders so effectively she inhaled again. This time she caught a whiff of cigarette smoke and looked around.
Martin Hall was standing where Tracy’s body had lain, his long, thin neck cocked back as he peered up at the tower. He looked like a stork swallowing a fish.
“Good morning,” said Jean.
Martin took a deep drag of his cigarette, as though in defiance of the fresh air, then inspected either his feet or the carved flagstone they stood on.
“Noreen says y’all are staying on for a few days, during the police investigation.” Not that Noreen had said that to her, but Jean wasn’t going to let an inconvenient explanation get in her way.
“You know that we’ve been told to stay on. You’re working with the police, aren’t you now?” The teacher’s pet was implicit in his half-growling, half jeering tone.
“You have a problem with that?” Jean asked, but the sharp angle of his shoulder turned toward her and he didn’t reply.
Could he act any more like he had a guilty conscience? Which probably meant he’d never so much as gotten a traffic ticket. Jean glanced at the constable standing watch beside the tower, but his face remained impassive beneath the bill of his cap, perhaps contemplating the righteousness of toast and tea. Life is brief. Comfort food is eternal.
She walked into the Lodge and up the stairs. The door of the lumber room was standing open—nothing like an architectural feature with contrarian tendencies . . . Her phone rang. She fished it out of her bag and flipped it open too quickly to look at the I.D. Alasdair? “Hello?”
“Jean,” said Hugh’s voice. “I’m just now hearing about your night, the stramash with the car, Tracy Dempsey and all. Are you all right?”
“Sure. Scared, frustrated, curious—in both senses of the word. The usual. How are you?”
“Flattered and fed and right well lubricated. Starr PLC is making sure the lads and I are in good form for the festivities.”
“How was the ceilidh last night?”
“Ah, the room was hot and heaving. Thought my lord Kettering would have to go unbuttoning his jacket. But he kept popping out to massage his mobile phone.”
Hmm, Jean thought. If Kettering was at the ceilidh, he wasn’t pushing Tracy out of the tower. Him killing one of his guests of honor was hardly likely, although Jean wasn’t sure what was.
“Then there was a French couple,” said Hugh, “who stripped off so far I was thinking we’d be hosing them down. They’re stopping at your B&B, are they? They’re well and truly fans of the water of life, it seems. Not quite under the table but crawling fast in that direction.”
“They were drunk? Well, they’d already had a fancy dinner. Most of those multi-course dinners come with so much wine you need to be rolled out on the serving cart. Or I do, at least.” Jean eyed the boxes in the darkened room. Here, too, the odor of mildew was moderated by the sweetish smell of the curtains, as though a wet dog had bathed in perfume.
“I’m away to the Festival,” Hugh said. “We’re playing a set at half past eleven. There’s another ceilidh tonight, after the Festival closes down, if you’ve got a moment amidst your sleuthing.”
“Isn’t there something tomorrow night, too?”
“Oh aye, Starr’s hired a boat for a farewell cruise, just for the punters, I’m thinking. We’re the entertainment—Hugh and the lads, unplugged, unbowed, and un-sober, likely enough. You’ll be there, won’t you now?”
The thought of a boating trip had lost just a bit of its appeal. Nevertheless . . . “Oh yeah, that’s on my marching orders.”
“I’ll expect to see you dancing, then,” said Hugh. “Cheers.”
“Bye,” she returned, without commenting on her lack of resemblance to Ginger Rogers. Jean brushed her teeth, applied lip-gloss, and checked to make sure her laptop was locked in the wardrobe. She couldn’t remember putting it there, but there it was. She’d been on automatic pilot last night.
Next to her canvas carryall sat the plastic bag with the stuffed toys for her younger relatives and for baby Linda . . . Oh my goodness. The wee Scottish-American bairnie had probably made her appearance by now. Jean hoped everyone was all right. Things could go wrong, as the Ducketts kept pointing out like corn-fed versions of a Greek chorus.
The Ducketts, buying bags of gifts for their grandchildren. What had Patti said, something about them losing their father? That phr
asing implied death, not divorce. In Florida, where Roger’s submersible had gone down.
Come on now. She was just as likely to have misunderstood Patti as Kirsty. Lots of people lived in Florida. Lots of them had accidents. Jean knew she had a tendency to build supposition upon conjecture into a structure so flimsy it made a house of cards look sturdy as Edinburgh Castle—just because everyone else seemed to have ulterior motives didn’t mean the Ducketts did, too . . .
The warble of the phone interrupted whatever clever deduction she’d been formulating. Alasdair? she thought again, and told herself to stop acting like a teenager with a crush. This time she checked the I.D. “What ho, Miranda.”
“Up to your neck again,” her partner’s voice said. “Good job you’ve survived. So far.”
“It’s not my fault,” Jean insisted, then launched into the tale of the listening device in the Nessie and story of the sinking submersible, which proved that some of the epic, if not her fault, could at least be considered a flaming paper bag left on her doorstep.
Miranda responded with murmurs augmented by the discreet peal of fine china. She must be having her breakfast. “Well, well, well,” she said at last, “no surprise, then, that I’m hearing Dempsey’s been asked to resign from the Omnium board of directors. They’re putting it about that he’s after pursuing his own researches and will still have an advisory role and whatnot. But . . .”
“They haven’t exactly scheduled a farewell banquet and the presentation of an engraved gold watch. Roger hasn’t breathed a word of this. He’s implying Omnium is his own personal fiefdom.”
“Of course he is. He’s under something of a cloud. No one’s saying just how thick that cloud is, but if it’s to do with that lawsuit, that’s enough for a wee rain shower, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would,” said Jean. The door of the lumber room was closed again. She opened it halfway, as an experiment, and went on down the stairs.
“Could be the lawsuit’s been settled on the sly.”
“Or that they’re piling on as much red tape as possible, to hide it. Neither Omnium nor Roger want any publicity over it, that’s for sure. Are they still paying him anything, a pension or whatever?”
“Haven’t a clue. As for Tracy, for what it’s worth now, mind, my friends at the Chicago Sun-Times are telling me she built herself one of those faux-European mansions and filled it with antiques and collectibles.”
Collectibles, Jean thought. A synonym for junque. “What sort of antiques?”
“Objets d’art and French furniture.”
“Ah, that spindly gilded stuff.”
“Not all French furniture is Marie Antoinette tushery. Though Tracy’s taste might have run to such. All show and no comfort.”
“Like high-heeled shoes?” asked Jean.
“Shoes are another topic entirely,” Miranda replied demurely.
Not really. Tracy had worn high-heeled shoes to make herself taller. To rise in the estimation of the people she dealt with. She’d died wearing athletic shoes. It didn’t seem quite fair. “Speaking of French antiques, do you know a shop called La Bagatelle d’Or in Paris?”
“I’ve heard tell of it, aye. Rare books and antiquities, genuine and faux. No furniture, but small things, easily carried through customs, shall we say.”
“So they have a reputation for not being entirely conscientious about the niceties of the antiquities trade such as import-export licenses, signed expertises, attested provenances?”
“If the rumors have any truth to them. It’s possible to have smoke but no fire, as you know yourself. Why are you asking?”
“The owners of La Bagatelle, the Bouchards, are staying here at the B&B.” Jean looked around the living room of the Lodge and decided nothing had been either moved or removed. Even the gallery of old Nessie photos hung blandly in their frames. “I’m thinking antiquities like the artifacts Ambrose uncovered. Iris has sold off a few, and I bet she’s sold off some rare books, too . . .”
“Oh aye, she’s done that, I’ve got a chum who’s a dealer.”
“And Roger’s looking for Nessie on land.”
Miranda laughed. “Is he now?”
“I’m wondering if he’s after artifacts himself, with the Bouchards standing by as receivers, and the whole monster thing is just a smokescreen. If he has money problems, it could be.”
“He and Tracy looked to be heading toward a divorce, although how recently the cracks appeared is hard to say. So is whether Tracy had a pre-nup.”
“Pre-nuptial agreements weren’t in style twenty-five years ago. She probably thought that investing in Roger was enough . . .” Jean opened the door of the Lodge. Alasdair was standing on the threshold, his hand raised to knock.
Chapter Twenty-four
Jean jerked back into the house with an annoyingly loud gasp. Alasdair recoiled.
“Jean?” Miranda asked.
“I’m okay, no problem,” Jean lied. “I need to go. Talk to you later.”
“Take care then. Ta ta.”
Jean spent longer than was necessary switching off the phone and tucking it away. When she finally stepped outside, locked her door, and turned to face Alasdair, he was, of course, waiting as patiently as a cat outside a mouse hole.
Even though he was wearing his uniform of dark suit and white shirt, enhanced by a tie patterned in a flowing gray and red design, he looked as though he’d been dragged through a barbed wire fence backwards—to use the vernacular of her state of origin. His skin was pallid, his cheekbones sharp, his eyes hard, the curve of his lips flattened into a rigid line. How much longer was he going to endure the pressures of his job, she wondered, before he collapsed in on himself like a black hole?
Without demonstrating any Einsteinian physics just yet, Alasdair said, “Sorry to startle you,” and held out something small and flat.
It was her notebook, the pages curled with damp and a muddy footprint embossed on the cover. She took it and flipped through it. The moisture had made the ruled lines bleed blue, and the pencil tracks of her notes were almost illegible. She popped it into her bag. “Where did you find it?”
“One of the lads turned it up in the nettles beside the road. I’d be thinking it fell from your bag when the car hit you, but you’d already found it missing.”
Found it missing. She liked that. “So did someone take advantage of the, er . . .” No point in wasting her breath with the word “accident,” not any more. “Of the car, or were they working with the driver of the car?”
“Good question. We’ve got loads of good questions, haven’t we?”
“Is that an editorial we, Alasdair?”
He looked at her, unblinking, unmoving, impenetrable.
“You could have sent Gunn or someone with the notebook. You didn’t have to bring it yourself.”
“I told you we’d have us a blether the morn.” He took several deliberate paces to where Martin had been standing earlier but was now, thankfully, not. Beyond the edge of the terrace the roses and the broom rustled to the breeze. Against the breeze.
Jean’s skin prickled to the touch of invisible cobwebs and her shoulders puckered beneath the chill weight of another reality as she walked slowly to Alasdair’s side. He was watching the invisible shape move through the leaves. Except now it wasn’t invisible. The branches and the flowers bowed and parted as the transparent shape of a woman ran past them. Ran through them, the red and yellow petals becoming part of the flowered skirt she wore beneath an oversized cardigan, blending with the silk scarf that trailed from her hand. Her face was little more than eyes and mouth agape with alarm, turned toward the Lodge. A small hand, a diamond flashing from the fourth finger, swept up and covered the mouth, and a cry of dismay mingled with the wind. Then she was gone. The plants waved innocently, no longer reacting to an uncanny memory-movement but to an ordinary breeze scented with the raw, chill odor of the loch.
Jean closed her eyes and opened them again. Beside her Alasdair said matter-of-factly,
“The ghost was walking in the shrubbery all the while we were working last night, but I never saw her, not the once. ”
“I have the awful feeling that the two of us together make some sort of critical mass,” Jean replied. “It did last month, when we saw the ghost walking down the hall.”
Alasdair didn’t follow up on that one. “This ghost’s Eileen, is it?”
“Oh yeah. There’s both a painting and a picture of her in the Lodge. I wonder what she . . . why she . . . I mean, her ghost is in two places at once. Although I guess if Anne Boleyn’s ghost turns up all over England, why not Eileen twice here?”
“Loads of questions,” he repeated, this time without the evocative we, “and bloody few answers. Do you fancy a tour of the tower room?”
“Yes, please,” she said, and walked across the terrace an arm’s length from his side.
Was that offer an olive branch? Or was he rewinding the tape, pretending those too-revealing moments the night before had never happened? Yesterday his manner had come perilously close to flirtatious, but now—thanks to her own sharp tongue—he was locked in his emotional tower, buttressed by duty. She was overdue for a meal of crow, yes, but now wasn’t the time to serve it up. Not if she didn’t want him to retire beneath a layer of frost like an old-fashioned freezer.
The constable on guard might have wondered why Alasdair and Jean had been staring into the underbrush. Now he acknowledged his superior’s nod by dutifully stepping aside and lifting the tape. Alasdair drew a key from his pocket and opened the wooden slab of a door.
Jean ducked under the tape, feeling as though she were being ushered past the bouncer into an exclusive nightclub. But the room inside the door was blank and bare except for blocks of sunlight cut by the curving shadows of the mullions in the east windows and was several times taller than it was square, like the inside of a bell tower. “Kirsty said that Iris keeps the tower locked up. Was this door locked last night?”
The Murder Hole Page 23
