The Murder Hole

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Did you know of the passage grave at Pitclachie, then?” Alasdair asked.

  “Oh aye. My father, he helped build up the entrance way. Was still pointing the location out to me in his last years. Nothing wrong with it as an archaeological exercise, he was saying, but Ambrose didna want it only for that. Cursed ground, it was, even after it went back to the elements.”

  The hotel owner had testified at Ambrose’s trial about white-robed figures carrying flaming torches. Jean herself had seen the graffiti on the curbstone. Ambrose had been playing his occult games there as well as in the upper room of the Lodge. What a handy dandy place to dump a body! All Ambrose had to do was fill in the entry way and the area just outside it, and let the rain and the heather do their work. The Dempseys had clearly been reading Ambrose’s papers, ones that had inspired their—it was a scam, wasn’t it?

  “Was that what Iris was telling you last night, that Dr. Dempsey’s uncovered the grave?” Alasdair asked.

  Fraser said nothing.

  “There’s a human skeleton inside. We’ve got reason to think it was placed there in nineteen-thirty-three, the year both Edith and Eileen disappeared. It’s the skeleton of a woman five foot ten inches in height who’s missing her left forefinger, amputated well before death.”

  Still Fraser didn’t react.

  Alasdair tried stating the obvious. “We’re thinking it’s your aunt, Edith Fraser.”

  Again the room fell silent. This time, along with the traffic and pedestrian noise from outside, Jean detected the scent of frying potatoes and grilling meat. Her stomach growled. Man did not live by testimony alone, no matter how interesting. And contradictory.

  Gunn stirred in his chair and tapped his pencil against his notebook. Alasdair sat unmoving, not staring at Fraser so much as watching him. Waiting. Even he seemed to be developing just a bit of a sweat-sheen along his hairline. Unless it was his brain leaking lubrication fluid.

  At last the old man stirred, limbs creaking, chair squeaking. “My mother and father, they taught me my aunt was dead, and I honored them as I should do. They taught me she had fallen from grace, and I honored them. Even so, after all these years I’m thinking that she deserved a second chance. Ambrose was giving her a second chance. He wisna pointing out the mote in her eye when he was feeling the beam in his own. Scripture tells us that if we’re not forgiving others, then our Father in heaven will not be forgiving us.”

  Alasdair rewarded Fraser’s laudable sentiments with a thin smile.

  “And now, Chief Inspector Cameron, my shop needs seeing to. If you canna see your way clear to driving me home, there’s a bus . . .”

  “No need, Mr. Fraser.” Alasdair rose from his inquisitor’s throne, shook Fraser’s hand, and ushered him out the door. Jean heard his voice giving instructions.

  Gunn closed his notebook and mopped at his temples. “The world lost a grand gambler when the Chief Inspector turned to police work.”

  Laughing, Jean stood up and shook out her skirt and blouse. Whoa. Air. “He’s also a scientist. You know, testing hypotheses and reproducing results.”

  Car doors slammed. An engine started up and was absorbed in the general traffic noise.

  Alasdair walked back into the office and shut the door with an emphatic click. After a long moment of dazed silence, he said, “I’ve never before been stonewalled with such class.”

  “He was really helpful for a while there,” Jean said. “All that about Edith’s early life and Crowley and everything fits what we already know.”

  “Dr. Dempsey might could be Edith’s grandson,” suggested Gunn, “if she had a child before she died, and it was him taken to America.”

  Jean shook her head. “But that’s not what he said. Or rather, that’s not what he said Tracy said. He shut down when you disproved her story. There’s more to that, and to what Iris said to him last night, but he doesn’t want to tell. Can’t tell, because telling violates his principles.”

  “Got it in one,” Alasdair said, brows knit.

  Jean’s own eyebrows were knitting and purling. “I bet my book spent a long time in that mildewed box in the lumber room of the Lodge. Maybe not seventy years, though. Thirty years? Ever since Ambrose died and Iris came back to Pitclachie with her new broom?”

  “I’m believing Tracy gave Fraser the book in April, all right, that bit he saw for himself . . .”

  “Oh!” Jean exclaimed. “Martin Hall! I overheard him talking to Noreen, something about ‘she’ making promises about getting him a fellowship. Tracy. She who must be obeyed.”

  “She seems to have been our organizing principle,” said Alasdair.

  Gunn flipped open his notebook again and began to write.

  “Oh yeah. If she and Roger sent themselves the letters—if they blew up the boat themselves, for that matter—then she could have had Martin pick up the notepaper and the corkscrew in April. And the book, if she had him searching for those personal papers. They had to have had at least some of them already, to get them started.”

  “They blew up the boat themselves,” Gunn repeated doggedly. “They planted the corkscrew. They sent the letters.”

  “Time to have a word with Martin Hall,” said Alasdair. “Jean, your car’s outside?”

  “Just up the way in the Tourist Information Center parking lot.”

  “Good. We’ll have us a lunch, first. Neville, stay here ‘til P.C. Milton returns, then come by Pitclachie. Oh, and have yourself a meal as well.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gunn shut his notebook and walked purposefully over to the desk. Alasdair opened the door for Jean, offering her a softer smile than the one he’d offered Fraser.

  She responded in kind and stepped out into the sultry—afternoon, she saw with a glance at her watch. The day was burning away like the fuse connected to a bomb.

  Chapter Thirty

  In the sunlight, the Gothic extravagance of Pitclachie House seemed more whimsical than sinister. The castellated battlements of the tower looked like a gap-toothed grin, Jean thought as she drove up the driveway, and the arched windows like eyebrows raised perhaps less in humor than astonishment at how deceptive appearances could be. A case in point being the business-suited, tie-knotted detective sitting next to her and casting a cold eye on passersby. The same detective who had turned out to be a great kisser with a gratifyingly ticklish spot just behind his right ear lobe.

  She and Alasdair had scarfed down salmon salads in one of the restaurants beside the village green. They had not talked about the case, but had confined themselves to meaningful glances and the occasional monosyllable. Still, the reporters buzzing around like overgrown midges no doubt noted that the mildest-mannered of their number, the one from Great Scot, had the inside track. That she had no desire to write about the case, merely to survive it, was probably beyond their ken.

  Now Jean reclaimed her spot beside the Renault, noting that while the Water Horse van was gone, the Halls’ nondescript car was still there. She stepped out onto the gravel with a wary look around. Swallows skimmed through the cloud of midges, scooping up beak full after beak full and driving the ragged remnants into the dark branches above, where each leaf hung heavy and motionless. On the Festival field, tents were coming down and trash coming up. Police cars were parked on the road leading to Temple Pier, their fluorescent stripes washed out by the damp sunlight. A smoke-like haze was gathering over the mountains to the east, blotting rock and rill into a blur.

  Alasdair wasn’t scanning the scene but the front of the Renault. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, and gingerly removed a couple of leaves that were caught in the curling end of the bumper. “Nettles. And look here, a bit of a scrape and dent on the finish.”

  “Nettles?” Jean walked around her car and peered at the soggy shriveled leaves. “Like the nettles along the sidewalk where Roger and I . . . Oh boy. You can see where I brushed up against the car not two hours ago, there, where the dirt is smudged, but I never looked at the bumper.”


  “Who owns this car, then?”

  “Charles and Sophie Bouchard.”

  “Where were they on the Saturday night?”

  “They said they were going to eat dinner at the Glengarry Castle Hotel and headed off south. They got back right after the, er, accident . . .” A metaphorical light bulb illuminated a dark corner of Jean’s memory. “But then they came from the north, not the south. Whoa—what if they hit Roger and me as they drove by, then kept on going past Pitclachie, to Abriachan, maybe, and turned around and came back? That’s a left-hand drive car. Whoever was driving was right on top of us.”

  “There you are.” With a half-smile that she chose not to interpret as Gotcha, Alasdair tucked the folded handkerchief into his pocket, produced his phone, and called for both crime scene investigation and back-up.

  “But their motive,” Jean said, reminding herself this was not a competition. “They have no reason to try and kill me. Even if they thought I was Tracy walking along with Roger, wouldn’t they want to keep the Dempseys alive and producing artifacts for sale? And they didn’t exactly come back for Tracy later on, did they? They were at the ceilidh when she was killed. Maybe it was an accident, after all.”

  “I’m thinking a word with them as well wouldn’t go amiss.” Just as he tucked his phone away, it rang again. Hauling it back out, he answered, “Cameron.”

  Jean walked on toward the house, casting her gaze heavenward. Iris was still sitting beside the now-open tower window, her hands webbed with white yarn, knitting away so efficiently the needles flashed like dueling sabers. She looked down on Jean with god-like disapproval. Jean did not genuflect.

  Alasdair ranged up beside her, tucking the phone away yet again, and followed the direction of her gaze. “No need for her to be playing hard to get. The letters are a moot point by now, and she’s got the best possible alibi for the time of Tracy’s murder.”

  “We thought Roger might be blackmailing Iris. Now it looks like he’s adding scam to blackmail by claiming to be her nephew. She thinks the body in the grave is Eileen’s and that he’s telling her the truth. A truth she doesn’t want to go public.”

  “Roger’s hoist himself with his own petard, then, finding Edith’s body. As for Eileen . . .”

  Jean couldn’t complete his sentence. She looked up again, then spun toward Alasdair. “What were you saying back at the police station about a knitting needle?”

  “The crime scene boffins found a broken plastic needle. Looks to be blood on its tip. Could be there was a struggle, Tracy found it ready to hand, and she stabbed her killer with it.”

  “You could do a DNA test.”

  “Easier and quicker to have a suspect strip off. But then, having just one suspect for the letters, the explosion, the hit-and-run, and the murder would be easier and quicker as well. I doubt you’re right. We’ve got at least two people each working his own dodge and compounding each other’s crimes as they go.”

  “I could live with being wrong every now and then,” Jean told him, and received a hollow laugh in return.

  The Water Horse van crunched into the parking area and stopped. Brendan leaped out, carrying a couple of grease-stained paper bags, whose pungent odor identified them as fish lunches for the excavator-cum-tomb robbers. With a friendly, guilt-free smile at Alasdair and Jean’s cynical faces, he loped past the house and up the hillside.

  Jean and Alasdair strolled far enough into the garden that they could see the dig and Brendan doling out the food. Roger sat down beside his bones, close enough to occasionally reach over and pat one—they were real, yes, precious, indeed they were. Brendan sat with his back turned to Roger, facing toward the house, probably watching for the fair if fickle Kirsty. Charles and Sophie, mopping their brows, retreated to the shade of the pines and made pained faces over their fried fish and vinegar-doused chips. Jean wished them ticks, and then rapped her wish over its knuckles.

  Alasdair considered the pattern made by the bones. “That’s never Nessie.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Just now, none of my concern. As for what is my concern, I’ll not be interviewing Roger in front of the Bouchards. Or the other way round. Soon as the lads have done their car, I’ll have them taken in and questioned through a translator.”

  The thuds of slamming doors reverberated from the parking area. A constable materialized from the garden—oh, he’d been sitting on a bucket behind the boxwood hedge, surveilling the group on the hillside. Another strolled around the far corner of the house and took up a position at the end of the terrace. Alasdair was keeping his suspects covered. And in play. Turning toward the front door, he said, “Now for Martin Hall, and his wife as well. We’ve talked to them one at a time already. Let’s see if a mutual interview gets better results. Gunn’s not yet here, do you have your notebook?”

  “Sure.” Jean said, following close behind. “At least little Elvis isn’t on your short list of suspects. Brendan’s okay, and Kirsty, too. Iris sure didn’t kill Tracy, not that she’s giving you the whole truth and nothing but. And just because the Ducketts might be connected to the submersible doesn’t mean they’re up to no good, although running away this morning doesn’t look . . .”

  Alasdair stopped so suddenly she collided with him. For appearance’s sake, with the constables in view and all, she took a step backward. “That was the second phone call just now,” he said, walking again. “You mind how Jonathan told his family he was working for someone else besides Roger? The manager of his bank is saying he received two sizeable checks written on a bank in Illinois, USA.”

  “Omnium’s headquartered in Illinois, of course he’d be getting . . . Wait a minute.” Jean fixed Alasdair with a triumphant gaze. “The Ducketts are from Moline, Illinois!”

  “Oh aye. Amateur villains that they are, they paid him from their own account, name, address, and telephone printed on checks with twee photos of otters and seals.”

  “So Brendan was right, Jonathan was a spy. He was checking out the submersible for the Ducketts. Do you think they blew up the boat to avenge their son-in-law’s death? Or Jonathan did it for them, and was accidentally caught in the explosion?”

  “No, not a bit of it. They’d have wanted to keep the submersible in good shape, as evidence in their wrongful-death suit, wouldn’t they now? I reckon Jonathan was sneaking back on board to take photos of the sub for them when the boat went up.”

  “Yeah, that’s the best explanation. Roger and Tracy themselves as the mad bombers. Oh what a tangled web and all that.” Jean gritted her teeth and went on, “The Ducketts have both the motive and the opportunity to kill Tracy, don’t they?”

  “Oh aye,” said Alasdair, untroubled by the personal appeal of the genial couple.

  Opening the door, Jean eyed the dragon knocker. It reminded her of Roger’s mysterious skeleton, a long sinuous body except with little wings instead of flippers. And the knocker had feet, too. Back in the mists of the twentieth century some jokester had used a hippopotamus-foot umbrella holder to make Nessie tracks along the shore of the loch.

  Alasdair tapped the knocker. “Wings and four legs. Odd how so many fantasy beasties are hexapods.” His hand on her back urged her on into the house.

  For a moment the darkness of the entrance hall made the air inside seem cool. Then Jean felt the warmth close in like syrup. Houses in this part of the world were made to keep heat in, not out. From the library came Elvis’s high-pitched, perfectly rounded voice. “But Mummy, that big boat’s going out on the loch. I want to go out on the loch.”

  Alasdair seized Jean’s arm, pulling her to a stop. He might have a scientific bent, but eavesdropping was more of an art, akin to stalking a stag on the hillside.

  “I’m sorry,” said Noreen. “The cruise is only for the Festival folk.”

  “You’re always so quick to give over, aren’t you?” Martin said, and, his tone going from scornful to softly cajoling, “I’ll have a word with the man at the pier, Elvis. Slip him
a tenner, like. Maybe a twenty. We’ll get ourselves on that boat.”

  “A twenty?” protested Noreen. “You can’t go on spending our money like that, Martin, this place here’s bad enough, we’ll be skint . . .”

  “We never paid for this place here, you stupid cow.”

  The door of the private office opened and Kirsty stepped out. When she saw Jean and Alasdair standing in the entrance hall, she quailed. So did they. She had abandoned all pretext at mature sobriety and defaulted to short shorts and a snug cropped T-shirt that left little to the imagination, and, accordingly, fueled the fantasy. Her hair was swirled gracefully atop her head. “Can I help you?”

  “The Halls need interviewing,” Alasdair told her, focusing only on her face. “Could you look after the lad? We may be some time.”

  Kirsty thought that over. “Aye, I’ll mind him, if it means moving his folk on the sooner.” She started down the hall, her plastic sandals slapping on the floor, her white shorts tracing a pattern in the gloom like an animated version of the Stone’s double disc symbol.

  Jean looked at Alasdair. “Kids today!” he hissed from the corner of his mouth, and with a satiric quirk of his brow followed Kirsty into the library. At his heels, Jean smothered her grin.

  The large casement windows, open to their limits, admitted a wheeze or two of damp air that did nothing to dispel the aura of mold from the oldest books and the breath of incense, as Jean now realized it was, from the desk. Martin was slumped in one of the windows, eyeing the excavation in progress like a Little Leaguer watching the Red Sox. Noreen huddled in a chair, her sundress crumpled around her. Kirsty’s and then Jean’s entrance provoked only a dull upward glance, but when she saw Alasdair, she squeaked in alarm. Martin whirled around and petrified, every limb at an awkward angle.

  It must be hard on Alasdair, Jean thought, for people to greet his entrance with fear and loathing. But the moment he stepped through the door he’d buckled on his armor, closed his visor, and raised his shield.

  Elvis was trying to entice Mandrake with a scrap of paper. The cat, lying stretched out like a fur stole on the cool stone of the hearth, was snubbing him as only a cat could snub. Pulling a long, flat, colorful box off a lower shelf, Kirsty said brightly to the child, “Fancy a game of Snakes and Ladders? We’ll set up on the kitchen table, and the winner gets an ice cream.”