The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  In exchange for being in on it, Roger would expect her to follow his script. Jean cast her gaze right and left, from Sophie and Charles’s disdainful sniffs to Brendan’s dubious shrug. Martin’s mouth hung open. Elvis clung to his father’s hand, eyes huge. There had to be some logical explanation for those bones, but no one was raining on Roger’s parade with it. Yet.

  “They worshiped them,” Roger went on. “The Picts, that is, they worshiped the Nessie population. That’s what the whole story of St. Columba is about, driving away the old pagan Nessie religion. That old guy from Foyers, whose grandmother warned him about the loch, that just goes to show you how long memories last here. The Nessie cult must have been active for centuries. See, there are some little plaque things. Offerings.” He pointed toward Sophie, who was holding a small and scabrous metal plaque between thumb and forefinger, like a worm.

  “Thanks.” Jean was about to start asking some rather pointed questions about Roger’s sources of information and inspiration when her cell phone rang. She fished it out of her bag. Whoa! Alasdair! She retreated down the path, out of earshot. “Hello again.”

  “Come down by the station, Jean, Gordon Fraser’s just arriving.”

  “That was fast.”

  “The lads stopped by his shop as he was opening up.”

  “I’m on my way.” Stuffing the phone back into her bag, Jean shot one last dubious glance at Roger and another at the camera-laden figure just emerging from the garden path. Up the garden path was where Roger was leading them all. It had to be.

  The mist evaporated into a clean-washed blue sky. The loch shone blue in the sunlight, each slow swell viscous as Jell-O. A large boat—or small ship, nautical nomenclature not being Jean’s area of expertise—was gliding into Urquhart Bay. Strings of colored flags rippled lazily fore and aft. Ah, yes, the evening cruise. Alasdair would have everything up to and including a SWAT team inspecting that boat for combustibles. Pity the steward who tried to flambé a dessert.

  The sunlight intensified the humidity and, in just the few hundred yards between the excavation and the house, Jean started to ooze sweat. Even in the tree-shaded parking area the air was so heavy with the scent of mud and vegetation she expected to see serpents dripping from the trees. Instead, a cloud of midges descended upon her like micro-miniature vampire bats and she launched into the midgie jig, a version of St. Vitus’s dance.

  Roger’s van was squeezed up against her car. She couldn’t begin to open the driver’s side door wide enough to climb in, so she went around to the other side, next to the Bouchard’s Renault. Its pale gold coat had been dulled by rain and run-off to nickel.

  Just as she opened her passenger door, Dave and Patti Duckett burst around the side of the house and jogged toward their own car. Dave was unlocking its doors by the time Jean called, “Hello!”

  “Oh!” Patti almost stumbled. “Oh, hello.”

  Jean winced. Yeah, we’re all nervy. And the midges didn’t make for a leisurely chat. “Sorry to startle you. Off for a drive?”

  “Mailing some things home,” said Dave. “Overweight baggage fees, you know.” He took a bulging shopping bag from Patti’s hand and threw it in the back seat, where it spilled clothing and small objects, including a toothbrush.

  “See you later.” Patti barely got her door shut before Dave started the car and peeled off down the drive, scattering gravel like buckshot. He would have run down a reporter lurking by the road if one of the constables stationed there hadn’t dragged him away. The car turned north, toward Inverness. Surely the closest post office would be in Drumnadrochit . . .

  A toothbrush. Funny how indicative toothbrushes could be. And mailing a shopping bag? Yeah, right. The Ducketts were doing a midnight—er, midday—flit. Running away. Like Martin, they couldn’t look any guiltier if they tried.

  Apparently the constable agreed. He was already talking into his radio by the time Jean drove by, taking a dozen or so midges on a brisk ride to the police station.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Jean burst through the doorway of the little police office. Alasdair half rose from his barricade behind the desk and tucked his phone into his shoulder. “The Ducketts are away,” he told her.

  “Yeah, I saw. Their car is something dark green and bigger than my Focus, and there’s a five in the license number.”

  “Very helpful,” he told her, and put his phone back to his ear. “North on the A82, aye. No, don’t go chasing them down, stop them at an intersection.”

  It would have been entertaining to get a jump on Alasdair, but she had to admit that getting a jump on the Ducketts was more important. At least she’d called his attention to them to begin with. Jean seated herself on a plastic chair out of the line of fire, next to D.C. Gunn and his notebook. He was already in his shirtsleeves, ready for action and almost suppressing his grin—Sawyer was exhilaratingly conspicuous by his absence. Alasdair would be shocked if she and Gunn high-fived each other, though, so Jean offered him a friendly smile.

  From the incident room next door came a low hum of activity, almost drowned out by the hum of activity from Alasdair’s brain. Somehow he’d found time since he left the Lodge to shave and put on a clean shirt, plus a different tie, this one with little figures on it that looked suspiciously like dragons. He seemed less drawn and pale than he had yesterday morning, due perhaps to his progress on fronts both public and personal.

  He switched off his phone and lifted a plastic bag containing a small metallic object, like half a ballpoint pen, from the desk. “Here’s your listening device. Your bug. No Omnium trademark, more’s the pity. I’ll be having a word with Roger directly.”

  Jean’s smile evaporated. “Yeah, you and me both. The nerve of the man. I wasn’t any threat to him.”

  “Right,” Alasdair said, with no more than a hint of skepticism. He set the bag down and closed the cover of a file folder lying in front of him. “Crime scene reports. We’ve got a couple of items from the tower room that look to be interesting, a scrap of plastic and a knitting needle. The trace evidence reports haven’t come along yet.”

  The outer door opened and a constable ushered in Gordon Fraser. His glance around the room missed nothing. His gray eyebrows were so thick and heavy they were set in a perpetual frown, which deepened when he registered Jean’s presence. His granite-domed head, square granite jaw, and sharp granite shoulders reminded her of an ambulatory Easter Island statue.

  Alasdair stood up and extended his hand. “Chief Inspector Cameron, Mr. Fraser. I’m in charge of investigating the recent deaths here in Drumnadrochit. Please, sit down.”

  Fraser shook hands, his huge hand engulfing Alasdair’s merely large one, and sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair. It squeaked a protest. “My shop needs seeing to, Chief Inspector. I gave my assistant a day out, with him working all the weekend whilst I was at the Festival.”

  “We’ll be taking you back to your shop soon as you help us with our inquiries.”

  “I wish I could help, but I’ve got nothing for you.”

  “That’s for me to decide, Mr. Fraser,” Alasdair said in his menacing yet mild manner. “You were born and raised in this area, were you?”

  Gunn began to write. Jean leaned forward, the better to listen, to observe, to counsel and comment when the time came.

  “That I was,” Fraser answered. “In Foyers.”

  “Near Aleister Crowley’s house at Boleskine, then.”

  “He was long gone from the area by the time I was born, and good riddance to him.”

  “You were telling Miss Fairbairn here that Crowley raised demons. That people went mad and suffered accidents when he was about. But you say you weren’t seeing any of this for yourself?”

  “My mother and her mother, they raised me up to fear God and walk righteously. They warned me off folk like Crowley and those telling tales of the loch as well.”

  Jean half rose from the chair and sat herself back down. Roger’s old guy from Foyers. She was l
ooking at him.

  Alasdair caught her reaction, even though he had no way short of ESP—which she wouldn’t put past him—of knowing what had produced it. “By ‘those telling tales of the loch’ do you mean Ambrose Mackintosh?”

  “He was right daft. Not wicked, not like Crowley, but daft.”

  “You knew him, then?”

  Fraser shifted his weight, the chair creaking piteously. Gunn turned a page. Jean held her breath. At last the man said, “He was a bit of a kenspeckle figure in the district, known by all.”

  “But not liked by all?”

  “You’re known by the company you keep, Chief Inspector. You’re known by the fruit of your work. Ambrose was a fine scholar, a decent man in some ways, but well off his head in others.”

  Alasdair lifted and then let fall the cover of the file folder. “Your father was a stone mason who worked for Ambrose.”

  “Aye, he was that,” Fraser replied without surprise—he didn’t know Alasdair hadn’t had time to actually check him out. “I worked with him for some years, then on my own, conservation and restoration work, mostly.”

  “Your father turned up the Pitclachie Stone.”

  “Oh aye. A pagan stone, he said. Just the thing for a pagan like Ambrose.”

  Most people, Jean reflected, would have asked what the heck the Pitclachie Stone had to do with the recent deaths. But no. Fraser had been warned.

  “Was your father the only member of your family to have dealings with Ambrose?”

  Fraser hadn’t exactly been slumping, but at that he sat up a little straighter. Jean couldn’t see his face, but from the clenching of his shoulders she deduced an internal struggle. Alasdair waited, his hands folded on the desk in front of him, not looking away, not even blinking.

  Fraser said, “No. My aunt, my father’s sister, worked at Pitclachie.”

  “Edith.”

  “How do you . . . Ah. You’ve read up on Ambrose’s trial, have you?”

  “Your aunt disappeared just as surely as Mrs. Mackintosh did do, but no one inquired after her,” Alasdair went on. “Why not?”

  Fraser didn’t reply. His shoulders rose toward his ears and his massive hands clenched into clubs on his lap. The room was so quiet that Jean could hear Gunn breathing, and the voices and footsteps of people on the sidewalk outside, and the low rumble and cough of a passing bus. She was starting to sweat against the plastic chair—two small windows did nothing to keep the room from being still and close and hot. Alasdair, though, was wrapped in his cool professional shell.

  Fraser was beginning to sweat, too. At last his shoulders relaxed, and his hands opened and his gnarled fingers spread out on his thighs. Decision made, Jean thought, and sat back with a glance at Gunn. His pencil was poised.

  “You’re known by the company you keep,” Fraser said, his voice as deep a rumble as that of the bus, dragged out of his depths. “Mind, I never knew Edith, save as a cautionary tale whispered about the fire on a Sunday evening. She was first at Pitclachie in nineteen-nineteen, as scullery maid. Respectable work that, no shame in it. Then Crowley came to visit. He had an eye for the ladies, he did, and promised her clothes and jewels and adventure. Away she went with him, to the Continent and to God in his heaven knows what sorts of evil doings. And that after maiming her for life.”

  “Maiming her?” Alasdair asked, with a glance at Jean.

  “Another so-called accident. She was cutting a joint of venison and struck off her forefinger. My father said ‘twas God’s judgment for her impure thoughts, but I’m thinking ‘twas Crowley.”

  “And your family disowned her when she went away with him?”

  “She fell into sin, forsaking her proper upbringing to follow the Beast.”

  “But your father went to work for Ambrose even so.”

  “He was feeding six bairns—I’m the seventh—and the two grannies as well, then. When Ambrose made his apologies fair enough, asked that bygones be bygones, and offered a steady wage, well . . . Edith was dead to the family. As a lad I was thinking she was genuinely dead and in the ground, be it sanctified ground or no.”

  “But she came back to the area in nineteen thirty-two and Ambrose took her in.”

  “Felt guilty, like as not, more credit to him.”

  Alasdair’s gaze darted to Jean and back again to Fraser. She knew he was hearing Ambrose’s ghostly voice saying, I’m caring for you, as is my duty.

  “He was daft, right enough, but not so wicked as Crowley,” Fraser insisted. “Crowley, he raised demons, and I reckon one took Edith. My father did his best with the pagan stone and all, but there was no help for her.”

  Alasdair was inhaling for the next question. Jean made a cramped time-out signal in her lap. Gunn looked over curiously, which reminded her that unless Alasdair was a closet fan of American football, he wouldn’t know what she meant. But her gesture attracted his cool blue gaze. She mouthed the word stone, and made a breaking motion with her hands.

  With a nod considerably more subtle than her gesture, and with a telltale curl at the corner of his mouth—historians!—he asked, “What did you father do with the pagan stone, Mr. Fraser?”

  “He cut it in half, so Crowley widna be getting his hands on it and using it to raise more demons. I mind we’re thinking now there’s no harm in such stones, and maybe not, but when the Beast himself is squatting on your doorstep, you do what you can to defend yourself.”

  Jean buried her face in her hand. Her first impulse when she’d seen the photo of the Stone had been almost right. Unfortunately. She tried telepathy: Ask him where the other half is.

  But Alasdair was after more immediate answers. “What happened to Edith, then, Mr. Fraser?”

  He gestured, stiffly, looking right and left with a sort of desperation. “No one knew, so far as I can tell. I most certainly didna know. ‘Til just last year.”

  “What happened last year?”

  “After Mrs. Mackintosh, Eileen, disappeared—driven to suicide, I’m thinking, may God have mercy on her soul—Edith went off to America. She was in the family way with Ambrose’s child. Truly, once you step off the straight and narrow path, ‘tis a long way down.”

  Jean felt her eyes fly open so far dust settled on them. Edith being pregnant she could buy, even though Ambrose’s charms escaped her personally. But Edith fleeing to America? Crowley’s so-called magic or not, she couldn’t have been in two places at once, both dead and alive.

  “And how were you finding this out?” Alasdair asked, his eyes showing no reaction at all.

  Fraser’s hands worked on his thighs, flexing and loosing, digging out an entrance passage to the past. “No harm in saying, now that the woman’s dead. ‘Twas Mrs. Dempsey told me the tale.”

  Aha! Jean thought, so clearly that she almost clapped her hand over her mouth. But no, she hadn’t spoken aloud. Finally the story got back around to Roger and Tracy.

  “Mrs. Dempsey,” Alasdair enunciated clearly. Again he shot a quick glance at Jean, a glance that if it didn’t say aha at least said hmm.

  Fraser sighed so heavily Jean could see Alasdair’s hair wave in the breeze. “She and her husband came to me a year or so past, whilst organizing their expedition. Looking out a creature in the loch, the man’s got more silver than sense. I was telling him how my granny talked of water horses and the like, her putting superstition behind her like the braw, virtuous lady she was, meaning to put him off, but he took it all the other way round.”

  If believing is hearing, Jean thought, then hearing is believing.

  “Mrs. Dempsey visited again in April this year—a handsome fair-spoken woman, for a Sassenach wed to a Yank . . .” Fraser’s eyes turned toward Jean. “Meaning no insult, Madam.”

  “None taken,” Jean told him.

  Alasdair cut to the chase. “Why did the Dempseys come to you?”

  “They were asking me whether my father had uncovered a pagan tomb at Pitclachie.”

  “How did they know about that?”


  Fraser’s face twisted, so that its seams deepened into fissures. “Mrs. Dempsey was telling me her husband was Edith’s grandson. Ambrose’s grandson. She was telling me we’re cousins.”

  Jean’s mouth dropped open. What? Gunn’s hand jerked so that he had to cross out what he’d already written and try again. Even Alasdair reacted to that, his eyes narrowing.

  “She gave me a book that Ambrose had given to Edith, by way of proving their claim,” Fraser said, calmly, carefully. “The same one you bought, Madam. Twould be better for a burning, it has got an unhealthy air about it, and no mistake.”

  Jean’s disapproval of book-burning matched Fraser’s disapproval of Crowley, although she agreed that that particular book did tempt the business end of a match. But the book itself didn’t prove a thing. If it weren’t for the testimony of the ghosts—she knew she shouldn’t be counting that, but she did—and the testimony of the skeleton, which she knew Alasdair was very much counting, Fraser’s story would make sense. But it didn’t.

  “Let me guess,” said Alasdair. “Iris is denying Roger Dempsey his birthright, some part of Pitclachie.”

  “She’s embarrassed to acknowledge the man. Here he is, looking to be the spit of Ambrose, a right loony, and here’s Iris, gey respectable, a fine sensible woman and all.”

  Which wasn’t exactly what Fraser had been saying Saturday, Jean noted.

  “So sensible she stopped in last night, by way of talking all this over with you?” asked Alasdair.

  By this time Fraser had accepted Alasdair’s prescience, and responded with nothing more than a nod. “She was after owning the truth, aye. And me, I apologized for having been sharpish with her, soon after I first heard the story.”

  “Right,” said Alasdair, almost whispering.

  Jean mopped surreptitiously at the moisture dewing her forehead. Wait for it. Gunn flexed his fingers and re-installed his pen. Fraser looked down at his monumental and empty hands. The back of his neck and the top of his head, between thin strands of hair, glowed pink and damp.