“And thinking their ends justify their means.”
That brought them back around to Sawyer’s omelet, but Jean wasn’t going to go there.
Alasdair stepped off the cairn and offered her his hand. His chin was set, she saw. So was his will. Take it or leave it. Taking his large, warm, dry, steady hand, she let him balance her onto clear ground, then quickly subtracted her hand from his before she was tempted to cling to it. “Thanks.”
The answering spark in his eye was so subtle Jean wasn’t sure she’d actually seen it.
Voices outside the grove broke the silence within. Sophie Bouchard said something about digging holes in the ground. Roger replied with a twenty-words-or-less explanation of archaeological technique. A shovel clanged, against rock, perhaps. Alasdair started off toward the gate.
At his elbow this time, Jean said, “The Bouchards were at the ceilidh last night, too. I don’t know where Brendan was.”
“He and the Bouchards need to be giving their statements at the house, not hanging about with Roger and his windmills.”
Tilting at windmills. Yep, that was Roger.
“As for Roger,” Alasdair continued, “I’m thinking that asking him outright about the submersible and all would be counter-productive just now. Same for the Ducketts. Fishing’s only worth the while when you know what sort of fish you’re after and are ready with the proper bait.”
“If you’d like to send photos of the debris to Brad, I can give you his e-mail.”
“No need, thank you just the same.” Alasdair didn’t turn a hair at the name. “We’ve looked out an expert. He’s got the photos now.”
That was a relief. Alasdair opened the gate and held it for Jean. She stepped through and then aside into the bracken while he turned back to make sure the latch caught properly.
In the pasture, Brendan was up to his thighs in the brown soil, his not insignificant chest rising and falling attractively beneath his Water Horse T-shirt. All Jean could see of Roger was his baseball cap and his shoulders, bobbing up and down as he fussed about in the hole which had not yet become a trench. Sophie stood alone and spouseless to one side, her hands in her pockets, her head tilted like a bird’s, her blonde hair fluttering.
Alasdair turned around just in time to see Roger vanish into the earth as abruptly as though he’d been beamed away into inner space.
Chapter Twenty-five
Jean was, for once, rendered speechless. All she could do was run with Alasdair down the path and into the field, where they joined Sophie in craning over the lip of the excavation.
Brendan was down on his knees beside a table-sized and -shaped boulder that filled the hole horizontally, disappearing into its dirt wall on one side and resting on a flat upright stone on the other. A fresh gray scrape on the muddy upright had no doubt been produced by his shovel or by Roger with a trowel. An irregular layer of small water-worn rocks, like the rocks in the cairn beneath the Stone, were half-obscured in the dirt above the boulder and down the sides of the trench.
A pair of work boots extended from beneath the flat stone like the wicked witch’s shoes from beneath Dorothy’s house, and for a second Jean thought it had fallen on top of Roger. But no. It was immobilized. He had uncovered an opening beneath it and with typical go-for-broke bravado had dived right in. Better him than her, Jean thought with a shudder.
“What’s he on about?” Alasdair demanded.
“It’s a passage grave,” explained Brendan. “The big stones and the empty chamber showed up on the survey.”
“Pictish?” asked Sophie.
“These sorts of tombs are ages older than the Picts,” Jean said. “But the Picts supposedly re-used them.” And Ambrose wrote about them, she added to herself.
The boots disappeared. A muted wink of light came from the dark cavity. So Roger had provided himself with a flashlight. Nothing like being prepared. “Bones,” he shouted, his voice muffled. “Big bones. The bones of the Loch Ness monster. The Picts probably worshiped them.”
“Oxen?” Alasdair asked under his breath. “Deer?”
“The Museum needs to know about this,” said Jean, and as Alasdair glanced at her, “I’m not telling you your job, I’m doing mine.”
Brendan reeled back. With a wriggle and a slither, Roger popped out of the hole. He hardly set foot in the trench but leaped straight out of it. He was bedaubed with mud, like a color-blind Pict painting himself brown instead of blue, but his grin was all white teeth framed by the gray-streaked beard. “I’ve found it. I’ve found the bones,” he said, speaking so fast Jean thought he was going to hyper-ventilate. “Nessie bones. Well, there are a lot of other ones down there, too, and small stones and dirt , and some artifacts, I think—we need to get things cleared out, it’s in great shape—Brendan, let’s widen the trench, get the entrance passage dug out, and set up a protocol.”
“Very amusing” said Sophie, her tone just a bit edged.
Roger stared at her a moment and then held out his hand. On his palm lay a bottle-cap-sized dirt clod. Sophie’s nostrils flared in distaste, as though he’d offered her a dry turd.
Jean caught the quick glint of reflected light from one side of the lump—the same thing that had no doubt attracted Roger’s attention. She took the clod from his hand, dug a tissue from her bag, and began wiping the damp dirt away from what appeared to be interlaced black twigs.
Roger said, “This makes it all worth while, you know, it really . . . Oh, hello there, Chief Inspector.”
“Hello, Dr Dempsey,” Alasdair said, clearly intrigued if far from amused. “Makes all what worth while? The boat explosion? Jonathan Paisley’s death? The hit-and-run? Your wife’s murder?”
Roger’s grin wobbled, and for a moment Jean could see his old self as in a fun-house mirror. Then the grin contracted to a grimace. “She worked hard for this. She wouldn’t want me to stop, not now, not right when I’ve found the bones.”
And the artifacts, Jean finished for him. Ah, the black twigs were tarnished silver, encrusted with tiny whitish knobs. The larger lumps were faceted glass or even semi-precious gems. This was not the sort of object she’d expect to find in a Neolithic tomb, whether re-used by the Picts or not. “I’m impressed, Roger. You went right to the entrance of a passage grave. How long were you digging, Brendan, an hour and a half?”
“Seemed like three.” Brendan brushed dirt from his hands and inspected several red patches that held every promise of turning into blisters. “I’m a diver, not a digger.”
“Of course we went right to it,” said Roger. “I was using Omnium remote-sensing devices.”
Alasdair smiled, thinly and humorlessly, and picked up on his cue. “You were right lucky then, that you began using your devices at just the part of Pitclachie Farm covering the grave, eh?”
“I think I deserve a bit of luck, Chief Inspector, with everything else that’s happened.”
Luck had very little to do with it, Jean thought. Ambrose now, Ambrose and his occult Pictish ceremonies and his unrecorded digging and . . . The last flakes of dirt fell away and light flared from the object in her hand. It was a modern earring with a clip back. And it reminded her of something, something very immediate. “Look at this.”
“Diamonds? That’s why it’s so well-preserved?” hazarded Brendan.
“No,” Sophie said, in a quick intake of breath. “The Pictish have no diamonds.”
“I think it’s badly-tarnished silver,” Jean said, “set with marcasite, which is some sort of stone—I’d have to look it up. And these square gems are probably Czech glass. It’s Art Deco design. It’s only been here since nineteen-thirty-three.”
Alasdair kept his outward composure—she would have expected no less—but she bet his inner child was turning cartwheels. “I hope you noted where you found this,” he said to Roger, and extended his hand. Jean dropped the earring into it.
The ruddy glow in Roger’s face drained away and his grimace contracted even further, so that he looked like a
moss-bearded gargoyle. He stepped back, and would have fallen into the pit if Brendan hadn’t grabbed his arm. “It was lying on some bones. You don’t mean . . .”
“You might could have found some animal bones,” Alasdair told him, “but I reckon this was lying on human bones. I’ll have the torch now, please.”
Brendan was looking from face to face, his noble brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Human bones? Nineteen thirty-three? What the . . ?”
“I know that earring,” said a clipped voice.
Like an ungainly chorus line, everyone spun around to see Iris, tall and stark as a standing stone. If her tanned face held any expression at all, it was of stunned recognition. The portrait in the Lodge lumber room, Jean realized with a frisson that started at her nape and ran all the way to her toes. Eileen was wearing those earrings in that portrait.
Alasdair thrust the earring into his jacket pocket. “Good morning, Miss Mackintosh.”
“It’s gone noon,” she replied. “When I phoned Kirsty at eight a.m. she told me you were digging in my pasture.”
Roger bridled. “You gave me your permission, Iris.”
“May you have joy of your findings, then,” she said in tones that made Alasdair’s iciest voice sound positively tropical. She turned on her heel and marched back down the path. With perfect timing, a strain of pipe music swelled in the Festival field and rolled up the hillside.
“Iris, I never meant to find . . . I didn’t know this was where . . .” Roger began, then darted quick glances to the faces around him. Jean could imagine what he saw, Brendan bewildered, Sophie critical, Alasdair authoritative, and Jean curious. And none of them on his need-to-know list.
Alasdair took the flashlight from Roger’s hand and turned toward the excavation. Jean heard her own voice saying, “Here. Let me. You’ve got your suit on.”
He stopped in mid-stride, looked her up and down, and with a spark that was anything but subtle, handed over the flashlight. “If Dr. Dempsey survived the trip, then I reckon you will do as well.”
“Thanks.” So what was she trying to prove? Jean asked herself. She wasn’t concerned about his suit. It was her riposte to his take it or leave it.
She stepped down into the mucky depth of the trench. The opening to the entrance passage was almost blocked by dirt. Roger hadn’t waited for Brendan to clear it all away before he’d plunged in. Not that the passage itself, lined by flat rocks, would be very big. She just hoped it wasn’t very long. Number two on her phobia list, after darkness, was enclosed spaces. Bones now, were just that, bones. Structural members. Of course, during her physical anthropology course the bones had been laid out in trays, on lab tables, all dried and tidy and remote.
Reassuring herself that this tomb appeared relatively low and squat, which might indicate a smaller circumference, and that she didn’t have to go all the way in, anyway, Jean knelt down and faced the yawning darkness of the opening. And decided she knew how Anne Boleyn felt on the scaffold, waiting for the kiss of the headsman’s sword on the back of her neck.
What she felt were the multiple gazes of her audience, especially Alasdair’s. The damp soil against her sore knee. The flashlight in her hand—oh, she might consider switching it on. Cold air scented with earth oozed over her, and she broke out in gooseflesh and sweat at the same time. Spirits of the dead? No. Spirits of her own nervous system.
Go for it. She forced herself to crawl forward, between the sill of dirt and the lintel-stone and on into the passage. The beam of the flashlight bounced around, off the slabs beside and above, off the water-worn cobbles below. She might have been able to stand up here, although even as small as she was, she’d have to walk with knees bent and back horizontal. Safer to crawl, sore knee or no sore knee.
Blackness gaped before her and she stopped. In the moving ray of light all she could see at first was an empty space perhaps ten feet across, a primitive corbelled roof tapering to a top sealed with one massive stone. The walls were edged by upright stones, the floor was all brown undulations, the still, cold air was thick with the moldy odor of undisturbed time. There were Roger’s footprints in the dirt—jeez, what had the man done, wallowed? Protocol indeed!
Was something written on one of the flat curbstones, or was that just a natural crease or smudge on the rock? Jean squinted, trying to hold the light steady. Yes, those were words, English words. Do what thou wilt. Kilroy might not have been here, but Ambrose, and perhaps Crowley, had.
To one side lay a set of antlers, Alasdair’s deer, probably. To the other rose a pile of lumps that had to be an animal’s bones—those spiky pieces extended in a gentle curve looked like vertebrae, and the elongated skull could be a horse’s. Funny, the assemblage did sort of look like a Nessie-head on its long neck. It sure wasn’t likely to be a giraffe.
But there—oh yes. Jean’s neck would have prickled if she’d had any prickle left in her. Two femurs, an upturned pelvis like an empty dish, ribs in their ordered rows, a skull. Jaws separated into a silent scream, each tooth a chip of marble. Eye sockets looking up into nothingness, like Tracy’s empty eyes had done last night.
Archaeology, Michael had said, murders its witnesses. Jean backed away, blindly, with no room to turn around in the passage and no strength to go on into the chamber. Her feet hit the dirt sill. She maneuvered backward over it and into the blessed bright light of day, remembering at the last second to grasp the hem of her sweater so it didn’t end up over her head. So she was coming out rump-first, she’d never claimed either grace or glamour.
Regaining her feet, she clambered quickly up and out of the hole, Alasdair pulling one arm and Brendan the other. Roger was shifting impatiently, his fingers opening and shutting beside the seams of his sagging jeans. Behind him Sophie stood huddled in her canvas jacket, every one of its pockets as tightly shut as her face.
Alasdair took the flashlight and switched it off. “Well?”
Jean expelled the thick odor from her lungs and rubbed her arms—beneath her sweater her skin must look like that of a plucked chicken. “There’s a human skeleton there, all right.”
“And the creature?” asked Roger.
“There’s some sort of animal, too.”
Roger’s mouth set with determination. He grabbed the flashlight. “Brendan, my trowel . . .”
“Hang on,” Alasdair said. He produced his cell phone from an inside pocket, punched a couple of buttons and informed whoever answered, “We’ve got another body at Pitclachie. No, this one’s a bit older. Set up a perimeter and call in the forensic boffins.”
“This is my dig!” Roger protested. “I did the research, I provided the sensors. The bones of the Loch Ness monster, they’re my discovery!”
“Just now this is a crime scene.” Alasdair snapped his phone shut like John Wayne re-holstering his gun. “Just now you’re away to the house to make a statement. You as well, Mr. Gilstrap. Madame Bouchard. I’ll stop here until my people arrive.”
“You don’t understand, Inspector, I have to do this, I have to vindicate . . .”
Brendan took Roger’s arm and pulled him away and down the path, saying, “You can’t fight city hall.”
Sophie took off past them, her hair flying out behind her, bearing the news to her better half, Jean supposed. She dragged her shoes sideways along the grass, cleaning them off. Her hands were filthy. So were her jeans. Whatever. She turned to Alasdair.
He was actually smiling. “Well done.”
“I’d say I aim to please, except it’s pretty obvious that I don’t.”
“Ah no, you made a good point about Roger and his dig, here. He’s swotted up on Ambrose’s writings.”
“Sure he has. But I’ve read all of Ambrose’s books, and nowhere does he say he found a passage grave, let alone where it was. He wouldn’t, not if he was getting up to fun and games there. Crowley’s ‘do what thou wilt’ is written on an upright.”
“Ambrose’s excavating did make it easy to hide a body, then.”
“B
ut Roger didn’t expect that, did he? It’s like he was apologizing to Iris.”
“Eh?” Alasdair said encouragingly.
Encouraged, Jean said, “Those papers of Ambrose’s that Iris was talking about. What if Roger read them? What if Ambrose not only gave the location of the passage grave but also said Nessie bones were there? Maybe some old bones were why Ambrose came up with the Nessie story to begin with. Vast mythologies have been based on less. Especially with people like Roger filling the pulpits.”
“Oh aye.”
“I wonder . . .” Jean looked down the hill toward the loch. A tourist boat was heading out of the bay and around the Castle. In the Festival field the pipes and drums played on. Somewhere a horn honked. One of her brain cells clicked over, like a domino falling against its neighbor. “Roger was afraid I was going to expose his past. Maybe the only reason he went out on that limb—and a damned shaky one it is, too—is because he was already out there, blackmailing Iris by threatening to expose Ambrose’s past. I mean, most of Ambrose’s seamy side’s been exposed already, sort of. But the entire Edith and Eileen thing . . . well, if Iris knew her mother’s bones were in that grave, she’d never have given him permission to dig there.”
Alasdair looked a bit giddy. Leaping after her thoughts took the agility of a mountain goat. He was with her, though, and started to speak, then went to attention.
Jean looked around. Two constables were walking up through the garden. “Duty calls, I see.”
“And yours as well.”
“I need to stop at the house and make a statement. Yes, I’ll take care of it, soon as I clean up.”
“I’ll come round the Lodge after dinner. You might as well let me in, as I’ll be squatting on the step in any event.”
She searched his eyes and saw only concern informed by courtesy, nothing to pin either her hopes or fears on. “Come for dinner. I’ll throw something together. Sevenish. Whenever you’re free.”
The Murder Hole Page 25
