The Murder Hole (42 page)

Noreen wiped her nose on the back of her hand
and sat up even straighter. Her face was pink, and not only from
the heat, Jean estimated. She was getting mad.

“And the boat explosion?”

Martin took off his glasses, mopped them
across his shirt, put them back on. Through them he peered molishly
up at Alasdair. “I don’t know anything about the boat explosion. I
was as surprised as everyone else. I’m sorry that chap Jonathan was
killed. I had nothing to do with it.”

“And Mrs. Dempsey’s death?”

“I didn’t do it. I swear. I was with Noreen
and the boy. We were asleep.”

“We weren’t asleep,” snapped Noreen. “I was
after talking to you, and you was snoring like an outboard engine.
Pretending to be asleep, so you wouldn’t have to talk to the likes
of me.”

“Noreen,” Martin protested, “not now . .
.”

“Then when, Marty? You didn’t kill Tracy, I
was with you, I’ll tell any policeman who asks that I was with you.
Because that’s the truth. You can ponce about, putting on airs,
sniffing around that woman—she’s dead, I’m sorry, but that bitch
had no right using you and you had no right letting her use you. If
you can’t act like an honest man for the child, then when can
you?”

“I did it for the boy, I wanted a better life
for him. I did it for us.”

Noreen came straight up out of the chair, her
quivering forefinger leveled at an impassive Alasdair. But she
wasn’t looking at him. Her red face was turned to Martin, who by
now was cowering on the windowsill like a crab next to a boiling
pot of water. “He’ll do you for murder, he will, and where’s us,
then, where’s us?”

Better off, Jean answered, playing judge and
jury. Martin might be only a sneak-thief and toady, not a murderer,
but by showing Elvis the wrong way to treat a spouse he was as
guilty of child-abuse as of wife-abuse.

In the sudden silence, Gunn’s pencil hitting
the page in an emphatic dot—the period at the end of Noreen’s
tirade—sounded like a gunshot. Alasdair pointed toward the door. In
one move, Gunn was up and down the hall.

Noreen spun around to Alasdair. “What are you
doing with us?”

“We’ll be taking Mr. Hall to Inverness for
the night, so he can make his statement. He’ll stay overnight in
the cells, but I’ve not yet decided whether to charge him with
anything. You’ll need to be making as statement as well. I’ll have
a W.P.C. drive you to the station here in Drumnadrochit and bring
you back again. Pop down the hall and have a word with Miss
Wotherspoon, if you like.”

“I don’t know what I like, not now,” Noreen
replied, but with an effort that made her entire body quiver, she
pulled herself together and popped down the hall.

Alasdair watched Martin, arms folded. Martin
watched his hands opening and shutting in his lap. Jean pushed her
notebook through the air like an oar through water, but produced
only a tentative zephyr on her warm face.

Just as Noreen reappeared, so did Gunn, two
constables, one male, one female, trooping at his heels.
Efficiently they gathered up their respective wards and walked them
away. Martin sidled along as though his ankles were manacled.
Noreen stepped out, chin jutting, ignoring her husband. The front
door slammed, leaving Jean, Alasdair, and the comatose Mandrake in
control of the field.

Alasdair wiped his forehead on his sleeve and
rotated his shoulders as though he’d been doing hard labor. Which
he had, Jean told herself. He might feel as though he was shoveling
out the Augean stables, but the case was well on its way to a
solution. Wasn’t it?

The heavy chair seemed to be sucking her
down. She peeled herself out of it and turned her back to the
window. Her damp blouse feel clammy against her skin. “Now
what?”

“They’ll stop in at the infirmary and have a
look for scratch or puncture wounds from the broken needle. But I
reckon Martin’s innocent. And Noreen as well, before you go asking
me about her.”

Jean smiled.
Who, me?

“It’s not worth the time and energy trying
him for stealing notepaper and the like. He’ll find himself with a
probationary sentence, and her with the phone number of social
services. There’s just one problem.”

“Our list of suspects is getting short. We’re
down to the Ducketts or some mysterious master criminal or passing
tramp, unsuspected by all, who just happened to be hanging out in
the top room of the tower. Or else someone’s got a false
alibi.”

The crinkle of deep thought tightening his
eyebrows, Alasdair strolled over to the window. Jean noticed the
slight creak and catch in his posture as he loosened his armor and
leaned on his sword. She could offer to massage his shoulders . . .
No. He wouldn’t want that, not here, not now.

She stepped up beside him, to see that he was
looking at Roger and Brendan, back at work on the hillside, sorting
their bones. And sorting the Bouchard’s objets de dirt, too,
because Charles and Sophie themselves were being conducted toward
the parking area by three constables.

Their voices drifted down the heavy air, a
duet of protests in both French and English. Jean caught something
about consulates and embassies and the European Union. Like that
was going to do them any good. If nothing else, they’d find
themselves on the fast track back to France and their shop . . .
Their shop. Their job lot of goods from a London estate sale, that
just happened to include a Pictish silver chain. Their inventory of
antiquities and old books.

“I bet Tracy bought a copy of Ambrose’s
autobiography from the Bouchards. That’s how they got involved in
all of this—they wanted first dibs on any more Pictish treasure,
especially since they have a certain lack of concern when it comes
to provenance. Or so Miranda says.”

Alasdair glanced around, the crinkle giving
way to a glint of silver in his eyes. “We were thinking the
Dempseys were our organizing principle, but . . .”

“It all goes back to Ambrose, with his
antiquities and his books and his mania for the occult and Nessie.”
Jean whirled around so fast she almost lost her balance. Alasdair
grabbed her arm but she hardly felt his grasp, shaking it off and
rushing toward the dark corner of the shelving. She knelt down and
with her fingertip traced along the rank of books until she came to
the ones she remembered. “Look—there were three books from Crowley
and Ambrose’s Mandrake Press here on Saturday. Now there are only
two, Crowley’s book and the Lawrence. But the Boccaccio is
gone.”

Alasdair leaned over her shoulder, so close
she could feel the warmth of his body, venting now that he’d set
his cool persona aside. “Eh?”

She eased the two books from the shelf and
then apart—the heat made their bindings almost sticky—and leafed
through them. They were as advertised. “What if the Boccaccio, the
Decameron
. . .”

“The what?”

Oh
. She laughed. “It’s a book of one
hundred medieval Italian stories, lots of fighting, sex, and magic,
the sort of thing that wouldn’t have gone over well in the
thirties. Like these.” She shoved the Lawrence and the Crowley back
onto the shelf, making sure they were aligned properly. “The name’s
from the Latin root for ten, you know, like decimal or Decalogue.
Nothing to do with your family. Just an alphabetical coincidence,
if a pretty good one.”

“The Camerons have done as much fighting and
all over the years as any medieval Italians,” said Alasdair, not
apologetically. “You’re thinking that’s the book Iris told Kirsty
to hide?”

“She couldn’t speak plainly in front of your
people, so she just said the book Ambrose wrote. And Kirsty saw the
book from the lumber room sitting outside the Lodge and thought
that was it. I mean, it was mine, it was under threat, right?”

“Right. But Ambrose didn’t write . . . Ah,
that’s what you’re on about. You can’t judge a book by its
cover.”

“No way. Just because it says Boccaccio on
the spine doesn’t mean the
Decameron
’s inside the binding.”
Jean stood up, trying to brush the dust from her hands but making
little pills of it instead. “When Iris came back from Inverness,
she squirreled the real book away somewhere. No more of this
purloined letter, hide-in-plain-sight business.”

“Like as not Martin was just reading the
titles. If he’d pulled every single book from the shelf, he’d be
working yet.”

“Exactly.”

Alasdair walked across the room to the desk
and rolled up the cover. There was
Realm of the Beast
in its
tacky plastic bag. “And this bittie red herring is still here.”

Mandrake’s nose wrinkled. He stirred, stood
up, stretched, and trotted toward the enticing odor.

“Smells like corpse of herring with a funeral
wreath.” Jean trotted to the desk, too, and rescued Kirsty’s
knitting project from the chair just as Mandrake leaped up onto it.
“This book was never hidden. It was discarded along with a bunch of
other useless items.”

Alasdair picked up his jacket and eased it
on, smoothed his lapels and snugged his tie against his throat.
“Useless items? Yon photo of Ambrose and Eileen is here on the
desk, but their wedding photo and Eileen’s portrait are both in the
lumber room.”

“Yeah.” There was something about that . . .
Jean wrapped the half-finished scarf around the ball of yarn and
the needles, set it inside the maw of the desk, and closed the lid.
Kirsty, the beginner, was knitting the scarf in a basic garter
stitch, the building block of more complex patterns. But even an
old pro like Jean herself could miscount a complex pattern.
Accidentally moving the sequence of stitches over by just one place
would leave a fault line cutting across the design.
Moving your
assumptions over just one place
. . . She looked up, meeting
the eyes of her colleague, another old pro.

“What now?” he asked.

“The ghosts on the staircase last night. Even
when she was standing on the step below Ambrose, the top of Edith’s
head came to Ambrose’s nose. She was almost as tall as he was.”

“Never mind the ghosts, her skeleton measured
a good five foot ten. No surprise that Gordon Fraser’s well over
six foot.”

“How tall is Iris, would you say?”

“Two inches taller than I am myself, five
foot ten as well. . .” Comprehension swept over his face, his
eyebrows shooting up to his hairline, his lips pursing in a
reverent, “Bloody hell.”

“Everyone’s been assuming that Ambrose killed
Eileen. Even when we found out that it was Edith he killed—we know
it was an accident, but we’ll never be able to prove that—we were
still assuming that Eileen was Iris’s mother. But she couldn’t have
been more than five feet tall.”

Alasdair’s forefinger indicated caution.
“That’s circumstantial evidence. Eileen’s family might could have
been tall. And how . . .”

“Women wore loose dresses in those days, not
like that outfit Kirsty’s wearing. And most births were still at
home. How many people would know it was Edith who had the baby, not
Eileen? Not if they were all in it together, and bought off the
maid and everything. We’ve been assuming there was a rivalry
between the women. What if they were working together? What if
Edith was wearing Eileen’s earrings because Eileen gave them to
her? Maybe it was Eileen who fled, to America, down the road, I
don’t know where she went. The point is, either she died, too, or
she ran away. And if she ran away, why didn’t she take her baby?
Because the baby wasn’t hers, that’s why.” Jean threw her hands out
to her sides.
Ta da!

Alasdair tilted his head, trying to roll all
those little ball bearings of words into the proper holes.
“Wouldn’t be the first time the wife adopted the mistress’s
child.”

“Iris must know the truth is in the
autobiography, or she wouldn’t be hiding it. And she wouldn’t have
given in to Roger’s demands if he hadn’t approached her with the
truth—she’d have given him some equivalent of publish and be
damned. But if Roger and Tracy knew Edith was dead, why risk
telling Fraser she wasn’t? And why did Tracy have Martin looking
for another copy of the book?”

“It might be that Roger’s copy of the
autobiography is missing out some pages. They based the blackmail
and Fraser’s scam on the incomplete story, and were looking out
another copy because they’re still searching for where Ambrose
found his treasure.”

“But Iris thinks Roger’s copy is complete!
Bingo!”

As if punctuating her words—
we have a
winner, folks!
—Alasdair’s phone rang. His face still a little
askew, he answered and listened intently to the voice emanating
from the tiny speaker.

Mandrake settled down on the chair and
yawned. Jean scratched his ears, his fur soft and warm beneath her
hand. Funny, her theory about Edith and Iris had sounded perfectly
reasonable while she was articulating it, but now . . . Well,
Alasdair was probably right about the Dempseys basing their scheme
on an incomplete book. And if the phone hadn’t rung, he’d have
pointed out that like Nessie, Iris’s parentage was none of his
concern. Or was his concern only peripherally, in that it provided
motive and machination.

“Bring one of them round the terrace
overlooking the loch,” he said, and switched off his phone. “We’ve
got the Ducketts back again. Fancy another spin on the Pitclachie
carousel?”

“You’re not kicking me off the merry-go-round
now.” Jean followed Alasdair out onto the terrace and around to the
shady side of the house, where the air seemed somewhat thinner and
fresher.

He kept on walking, pacing up and down. Jean
sat and then lay back on a chaise lounge, breathing in the scents
of asphalt and roses, listening to Kirsty’s voice and Elvis’s laugh
through the kitchen window. From here she had seen the boat
explode, not three days ago. Now another, larger boat rode the
turbid waves of the Bay. The reddish stone tower of Urquhart Castle
stood up against the gray-green smudge of the far shore. The sky
was no longer bright blue, but bleached by the haze.