Chapter Thirty-five
From her table on the terrace of the Visitor Center, Jean gazed down over Urquhart Castle and the loch beyond it, trying to think serene thoughts. A Scottish flag rose from the highest rampart, fluttering in the brisk, cool wind, its colors repeating the blue of the sky and the white of the occasional meringue-like cloud. The afternoon sun picked out the shape of each battered red stone, the swell of each pewter-blue wave, the bright paint of the boats that were transporting cargo, and carrying tourists, and searching for Roger Dempsey’s body.
Her thoughts were more dazed than calm. She felt the bone-chilling cold of the water, the brush against her leg, the men dragging her into the inflatable. She felt the warm blankets and the hot tea that had tingled in her fingertips and toes. She saw the ambulance, maybe the same one she’d seen Saturday night. This time Alasdair was sitting across from her, his face white, strained, closed, and Brendan was standing by the door wearing a blanket like a toga, Kirsty pressed against his side. She heard the worried voices, Hugh, Gunn, Iris, Noreen.
She saw her clothes making a teal puddle on the floor of the bathroom in the Lodge. And she saw herself tossing and turning all night without hearing a single ghostly noise. Perhaps Ambrose, Edith, and Eileen’s confession, teased from them by the critical mass of two watchers, had been good for their souls.
Jean saw the dawn creep across the loch, and heard her phone ringing again and again—Michael and Rebecca and Miranda, was she all right, was Alasdair all right? “Well then,” said Miranda, “if you throw yourself into Loch Ness of ill repute to save the man’s life, I’m thinking the pair of you, you’re an item.”
Jean did not disagree.
“Mind you, Peter Kettering is by way of making lemonade from the lemons you handed him—he’s auctioning off the rights to his eyewitness account of the entire weekend, let alone the stramash on the boat. Great Scot isn’t bidding.”
Jean heard her own voice saying, “Thank you.” And she saw the newspapers, her own body in black and white, looking like a drowned rat. But of the four people who had gone into the water last night, only one had drowned. Loch Ness had given up Jonathan Paisley’s body, but Jean doubted it would ever relinquish Roger Dempsey’s.
Breaking the surface of her own thoughts, she inhaled the fresh air, licked the crumbs of scone and jam from her lips, and drank deep of the rich, sweet, milky tea. Her backup pair of glasses steamed up. When they cleared, she could see Alasdair seated next to her, and Iris across the table. It was all over but the shouting, and neither of them was likely to shout.
Iris was caught in her own reverie, her knitting motionless in her gnarled hands, her weathered face turned to the far hills, still as a plaster death mask.
Alasdair gazed down at the castle his ancestors had sacked. His face may have blushed in Monday’s heat and light, but today his complexion was pallid, stretched tautly across the austerity of his cheekbones, and his eyes were the bleached blue of yesterday’s sky. He’d been up most of the night, and to Inverness and back today. What wasn’t over was the paperwork.
“Did you get everyone taken care of?” Jean asked.
“For the time being.” He shook himself very slightly, as though shrugging off cold water droplets. “We’ve sent Martin on his way with Noreen and Elvis. The lad, he’s saying he saw Nessie’s head and humps in the water while Roger was holding him up on the railing. That’s why he sat so still. I’m thinking he saw the wake of the boat.”
“One often sees strange wave effects on the loch,” said Iris, half to herself.
Jean felt the dark water closing over her head, and the black depths of the abyss beneath her, and again swam up through her own mind.
Alasdair’s gaze lingered on Jean for a long moment, curious and cautious at once. If his eyes were the mirror of his soul, then he was doing some heavy-duty soul-searching. “The Bouchards now,” he said, “they’ve finally owned that hitting you and Roger was less than an accident. Seems Roger was that horrified to learn Tracy blew up the boat, he let it slip to his collaborators, Charles and Sophie.”
Jean would say something about a fraternity of thieves, but there was no point. “They got to talking about it during their boozy dinner, and when they saw me walking with Roger, they thought I was Tracy and tried to frighten her into leaving. Or even take her out.”
“They meant no harm to Roger himself—he was looking out antiquities for them. But Tracy, she’d become a loose cannon. When she was killed later on that same night, they reckoned Roger to be the guilty party and tried to protect him without digging themselves any further into his hole.”
“All this being the sort of thing that seems logical when you’re drunk.” Jean refilled Alasdair’s cup, and her own, and offered the teapot to Iris.
“Thank you, no,” she said, and leaned forward slightly, peering down over the terrace railing.
Jean followed the direction of her gaze. Ah, Kirsty and Brendan came strolling out of the castle and stopped on the drawbridge to embrace and nuzzle. Kids today, she thought. Or any day. Damn the emotional torpedoes, full steam ahead. But then, Brendan was the sole survivor of the Water Horse Expedition. He deserved a little consolation. And he was going to have go home to the U.S. At least she and Alasdair lived in the same country, separated by only one hundred fifty miles of motorway. They could meet for tea at some halfway point.
Meeting halfway. They were already working on that. Distance could fan a large flame or extinguish a small one.
Briskly Iris turned her sweater-in-progress around and started another row. “Have you sent Jonathan’s and Tracy’s bodies on to their families? I assume Tracy has family beyond—Roger.”
“Jonathan’s gone back to his people in England, aye. Tracy will be another day or so, the mills of the judiciary grinding right slowly.”
“The Ducketts stopped in at Pitclachie to get their things,” Iris said. “They’re away home.”
“Maybe the publicity will wring some money out of Omnium for their grandkids,” Jean suggested. “A one-time settlement or something. I just hope they’re not blaming themselves for Jonathan’s death.”
“I expect they will do. That path paved with good intentions and all. Even so, they’re not as culpable in Jonathan’s death as I am in Roger’s. I overestimated his hold on sanity. I pushed him over the edge. Literally, in your case, Chief Inspector.”
“You can’t be blamed for telling the truth,” Alasdair told her.
“I didn’t tell the truth, not in time.” Iris turned to him, her voice astringent, her eyes like steel. “He was blackmailing me, you know that. You know about my father’s autobiography.”
Jean nodded. So did Alasdair.
“I finally decided that Roger should not be allowed to go on, no matter the cost to me. So I denounced him. And, selfishly, I hoped that if he turned about and denounced me, the witnesses would believe his denunciation came from the same source as his identification of the bones.”
“But his copy of the book . . .” Jean began.
“Was incomplete. So Kirsty told me, this morning, Brendan having told her.” Iris looked down again at the young couple.
Jean saw no need to tell Iris that she and Alasdair could have told her the same thing, yesterday, if only she’d come down from her tower. It wouldn’t have made any difference in the end. “Brendan never knew what Roger’s hold over you was.”
“His hold over you being Edith Fraser,” added Alasdair.
“In part, yes.” Iris secured her knitting, then reached for her basket. She pulled out the old biography of Crowley, now wrapped in a clear plastic book bag, and handed it to Jean. “This is yours.”
“No, it’s not. It was stolen from your cottage.”
“No matter. It’s no more than a curiosity, a confirmation of poor Edith’s existence. Of my mother’s existence, but I suppose you’ve twigged that as well.” Her keen eyes looked from face to face with more challenge than embarrassment.
“
The bones in the passage grave,” Alasdair said, “they’re . . .”
“Edith’s. Yes. I knew once Roger exposed the tomb, he’d turn them up. And yet there were other secrets that needed protecting—or so I thought. But in the end, it’s like this book. If I’d only kept it out in the open air all this time, it would never have taken on such a bad smell.”
Jean tucked the book into her bag and met Alasdair’s eye. Here it comes.
From her basket Iris drew out two more objects, a tiny velvet jeweler’s box and a leather-bound book. The Decameron, by Boccaccio, Mandrake Press edition.
She opened it. Inside nested a simple cardboard-bound book, smaller and thinner than its protective covering. My Life, by Ambrose Mackintosh of Pitclachie. Entire and complete. “He wrote his—confession, if you will—in nineteen-forty-six, and had two copies printed by a printer he had patronized during his association with Mandrake Press. One was for me when I came of age in nineteen-fifty-four. The other was for Aleister Crowley. Crowley must have torn out the last chapter of his book. Perhaps his monstrous ego couldn’t bear, at the end of his life, to have his disciple at last condemn his behavior. All the occult folderol, and what finally drew Ambrose’s censure was Crowley’s treatment of his women and his children. My father was in so many ways a traditional old gentleman.”
Iris stroked the book, as though by touching it she could stroke Ambrose’s hand, no matter how stained. “When Crowley died in nineteen-forty-seven, his possessions, including one of Ambrose’s Pictish silver chains, were dispersed.”
“It’s Crowley’s copy that Roger and Tracy bought from the Bouchards,” said Jean. “And Charles had the chain, too.”
“That’s the way of it, yes.” Iris opened the jeweler’s box. The polished silver, marcasite, and Czech glass of the earring inside flashed like a beacon. “Eileen gave these earrings to Edith. When she died so terribly and suddenly, Eileen helped Ambrose to dispose of her—she was never properly buried, was she? Edith had long hair. They didn’t realize she was wearing the earrings until they found one on the floor of the study, dislodged by her fall.”
“They concealed the death for you, did they?” asked Alasdair.
“Yes. They had put it about that Eileen was expecting, that Edith was there only as a companion. No one was in attendance when I was born save the maid and the local doctor, who was a temporary locum and had never met Mrs. Mackintosh. They made a gamble, but it succeeded. And then fell to pieces with Edith’s death soon after.”
“They weren’t able to have a child themselves,” said Jean.
The corners of Iris’s pale lips turned up in something that wasn’t quite humor. “Ambrose never explicitly said so. Just as he never explicitly defined his relationship with Crowley. Even when he spoke of it to me, on his deathbed, he employed circumlocutions that would be laughable in today’s rather overly frank world.”
Not all of us, Jean thought with a glance at Alasdair, think strewing your guts in public is a good thing.
“I believe,” Iris went on, “that Crowley was the love of his life. If that was the love that dare not speak its name, so be it. When Ambrose felt obliged to marry, he agreed to what was virtually an arranged match. The years passed, and Ambrose and Eileen led increasingly separate lives, quarreling over money and friends. Then Crowley cast off yet another mistress, a local woman, the sister of the mason working to restore the cottage. Edith Fraser. She was pregnant. Eileen wanted a child and Ambrose needed an heir. The three of them struck a bargain.”
“Hang on,” said Alasdair. “Edith was pregnant when she came to Pitclachie?”
Iris looked into his face, then into Jean’s, sparing herself nothing. “Ambrose was my father. He cared for me. We were estranged for a time, after I came of age and read his book, but . . . Well. We made our peace before his death. And yes, Miss Fairbairn, Chief Inspector Cameron, it’s not only the truth about Edith’s death that is in last chapter of the book, but of her life. The truth that I thought needed concealing. The identity of my genetic father, Aleister Crowley.”
Whoa, Jean thought, and caught the flicker in Alasdair’s eye. So much for biological determinism. “What happened to Eileen?” she asked softly.
“Edith’s death convinced her to cut her losses and start over. She was still a young woman, mind. She returned to the United States and obtained a divorce on grounds of non-consummation—whether truthfully or not, I can’t say. She re-married, and died surrounded by her children and grandchildren in nineteen-eighty-five.”
Jean knew Alasdair was hearing Edith’s ghostly voice: You dinna care, not for her, not for me, only for him, the Devil take him and good luck to them both! And, A divorce, I’m thinking, there’s grounds right enough.
“You’ve met Eileen, then?” he asked.
“Yes. She told me that after Edith’s death she’d had enough. But she and Ambrose knew that a public divorce would have brought out my true parentage. Therefore, they arranged for her to simply disappear, an assumed suicide. They never suspected he would be charged with her murder. But the scarf she had wrapped about Edith’s poor wounded head blew away in the wind, and was found. Eileen would have reappeared to save Ambrose from the hangman, but, in the event, that was not necessary.” Iris looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “The maid, by the by, accepted a considerable settlement for her silence and emigrated to Australia. We exchanged letters before her death.”
Kirsty and Brendan were ambling up the sidewalk toward them, Jean saw. They lived in a different world than Ambrose’s. The only thing constant in life was change, yes, and yet the more things changed . . .
“My father, Ambrose,” said Iris, “was at heart an intelligent, imaginative man who wanted something beyond the life he had been given. And yet he risked everything to protect me, to provide for me. He took care to have a will written that left Pitclachie to me. Full stop. That I am not biologically related to him makes no matter.”
No, Jean thought, it doesn’t.
“He was a bit cracked, yes. When he saw the remains of the shark, he thought they came from the loch, and then, half-crazed with guilt after the events of nineteen-thirty-three, he imagined he saw the creature still living there. Even after he lost his faith in Crowley as a man, still he believed in him as a mage. It comforted my father to think that there is another side of life, one that we cannot see but is there for us nevertheless. He turned to the occult. I, on the other hand, turned to science.”
“And Gordon Fraser?” asked Alasdair.
“The Dempseys had no call involving him. It’s as well they did, though, as it spurred me to visit him and own the truth. I hope that in time Edith’s bones will be released as well, Chief Inspector, so that her family can take her back, and see her through to the other side of their own beliefs.”
How carefully, Jean thought, had Fraser phrased his answers, so as not to betray his cousin Iris.
“The greatest irony of all is that nowhere in my father’s book did he reveal where he discovered his hoard of Pictish treasure. Nor did he ever tell me. The treasures of this earth, they weren’t important to him. They were only a means to an end.” Iris picked up her knitting, finished the row, rolled up the half-completed sweater and stowed it in her basket.
Jean remembered the oversized cardigan Eileen’s ghost was wearing. Perhaps Edith had knitted it for herself and then given it to her friend and protector. Did Iris know the Lodge was—had been—haunted by Ambrose’s memories, and by his guilt? If she did, fine. If she didn’t, well then, that didn’t matter either.
Iris set the basket on her arm and rose from her chair. “Do what you wish with what I’ve told you, Chief Inspector.”
Alasdair stood up as well. “It’s none of my business, Miss Mackintosh. None at all.”
Her narrow lips curved up in a smile.
“Thank you for the tea,” Jean said, getting to her feet. “And for paying our admissions to the Visitor Center.”
“I know when I am confronted
with a fait accompli,” said Iris, with the slightest of twinkles in her eye. “Making my peace with Hysterical Scotland seems minor enough, considering.”
“Considering,” said Alasdair.
“Well then, I must be getting on. The bookings for the week are in complete disarray, and my niece has had to do more than her share of the work.”
“So I have,” said Kirsty, walking up the steps onto the terrace with Brendan close beside her. Her determined grimace took in Jean and Alasdair both. “I’m sorry about the aggro with the letters, the, ah, poltergeist story and all. I should have spoken up. But I’m that tired of people teasing me for being a bit—spooky.”
“That’s quite understandable.” One corner of Alasdair’s mouth tucked in a very private smile.
Everything was understandable, added Jean. Not always excusable, but understandable. She turned to Iris. “You’ll be hearing from the Museum of Scotland about the passage grave and the top half of the Stone.”
“Yes, now that the multitudes have trodden over it, it’s past time to have the archaeologists in for a proper excavation. Brendan, if you’d fancy participating . . .”
Brendan, yet another of Iris’s faits accompli, shook his head. “Thank you, but I’m a diver. I think Roger only hired me for protective coloring. It’s really, well . . .” His voice died away.
Everyone stood for a long moment with faces averted. But if Roger Dempsey left a ghost, it wasn’t walking here.
At last Iris pulled herself to attention and shooed Kirsty and Brendan toward the exit. “Miss Fairbairn, if you’d still fancy an interview, feel free to ring me. Until then, good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” Jean called to them all, and looked at Alasdair.
He was watching her. She might once have thought that his expression was cool and correct, but now she saw it for what it was, a mask. Thick as a glacier, but still a mask. She said, “Let’s walk down to the castle.”
Silently they walked down to the castle and through the entrance tunnel, along with tourists for whom modern Scotland was little more than a theme park built on the calcified remains of history. How many of them, Jean wondered, had the knowledge and the will to thread the labyrinth of myth? And yet they still wanted to see for themselves. Mankind needed mystery to blunt the edges of reality and demonstrate its limits. Like Ambrose and his passion for Crowley, and the upper room where he had enacted his self-conscious, self-created rites. Like Jean herself, taking up residence at the intersection of fantasy and reality.
The Murder Hole Page 36
