The Murder Hole Read online

  “Do you know where the rest of the Stone is?”

  “Vandalized and destroyed long since, I daresay.”

  “Your father found this part being used as the doorstep of the same cottage that’s now the Lodge? Why didn’t he set it up himself?”

  When Iris didn’t answer, Jean looked around. The woman stood with her hands on her hips, gazing between the tree trunks down the hillside past the island of house and garden—of modernity—toward the distant glint of water. Was that a certain queasiness in her expression? No. Her face was stern and cold, enigmatic as that of the Stone.

  “My father was the local representative of the Office of Works during the nineteen-twenties,” she finally replied. “He helped excavate Urquhart Castle. He was quite the scholar when it came to the archaeology and folklore of the area.”

  Instead of saying, I know, Jean waited.

  “He wrote that he found the Stone when he shifted and repaired a seventeenth-century cottage, yes. He believed these small stones . . .” Iris nudged one with her foot. “. . . are all that remains of an ancient cairn, which is why he left it here, I suppose. The Pictish cemetery of Garbeg is further up the hill. This might be related to it.”

  “I know he wrote about Garbeg,” Jean said, without adding, At least he only excavated one grave and left the rest to archaeological posterity. “I didn’t know he wrote about finding the Stone. Where? Not in Pictish Antiquities.”

  “No, not at all. In some of his personal papers.” Iris’s emphasis on the word “personal” was unmistakable.

  That Ambrose had personal papers was news to Jean, although she was hardly going to faint in amazement. “Have you ever thought of publishing some of his papers? His field notes would interest historians and archaeologists. The Museum of Scotland would love to know where he found that silver hoard, whether here at Pitclachie or at Urquhart or on the south side of the Loch. I’m sure my partner at Great Scot would make you an offer.”

  Iris took a hasty step away, no doubt realizing she’d said too much. “Very kind of her, but no.”

  “Perhaps I could just read a few of the papers while I’m here, then, and take notes.”

  “No,” said Iris again, biting off the word, and then, with a half-smile that could be interpreted as apology, “He was a much-maligned figure in these parts, Miss Fairbairn. Most unfairly. He had his eccentricities, yes, but was at heart a good man with no vices—he neither smoked nor drank to excess, for example. Feel free to look over the library in the house. Much of his collection of books and antiquities is there.”

  But not those intriguing personal papers. Was that what Iris meant by “the occasional old family possession” stored in the locked room in the cottage? The room that smelled of pipe tobacco—well, he could have given up smoking when his daughter was born.

  Feeling an itch in her palms, Jean murmured, “Thank you, I’ll do that.” She told herself to get a grip. By “papers,” Iris could mean anything from laundry lists to bank statements. A diary reading, “February 4, 1933. Today my daughter Iris was born” was possible. One reading “March 29, 1933. Today I killed my wife by pushing her down the stairs” or “May 2, 1933. Today I invented the Loch Ness monster” was much less likely.

  Whatever, Iris did not want those papers read, let alone published. Ambrose might be a historical figure of sorts, but not far enough in the past for family feelings to have dried up and blown away. In a country that ran to ghosties and ghoulies dating back millennia, seventy years or so was a mere blink of the eye. Jean had known all along she’d be reluctant to grill Iris about her father’s—personal, private, secret—matters. What she’d suspected all along was that once she reached the scene, curiosity would win out over reluctance.

  Iris walked to the gate and opened it, her extended hand directing Jean down the path toward the house. Obligingly, Jean moved out, but not without one last breath of the tang of pine and one last look at the Stone. How Roger intended to prove his theory that the symbols carved on it represented an early Nessie even her imagination couldn’t fathom.

  From the house came the gleeful shriek of a child, answered by a shouted maternal directive. Car doors slammed. “I’m sure the B&B is very popular, right here on the main tourist route,” said Jean.

  “That it is,” Iris replied, her steps steady on Jean’s heels. “Tourists can be a bane as well as a blessing, mind. We’re caught in a vicious circle. The visitors come, therefore need facilities, and the facilities then change for the worse the very thing the visitors have come to see. To say nothing of attracting even more visitors.”

  Alasdair Cameron had muttered about selling your own heritage. If not for tourists, though, Scotland would be in serious financial trouble. Jean asked, “Like the new Historic Scotland visitor center at the Castle?”

  “Hysterical Scotland.” Iris didn’t smile when she said that, so Jean suppressed her own. “Not wishing to be burdened by the facts, it ignored my environmental impact statements and destroyed the site in order to ‘improve’ it. The traffic has gone from bad to worse. Human beings can’t leave well alone, can they?”

  No, Jean thought, leaving well enough alone was harder for your average human being than losing that last five pounds. And she didn’t exclude herself from either. “I guess you’re not too happy with this Monster Madness stuff, then.”

  “This area has a great deal to offer the visitor without going on and on about chimerical creatures in the loch. Why, some pseudo-scientist or another has actually introduced American flatworms to the eco-system, brought in on their equipment. Shocking!”

  “Surely the flatworms were introduced by accident.”

  Muttering something about common sense preventing accidents, Iris opened the garden gate, ushered Jean through, then shut it with a resounding clang.

  “Maybe the explosion last night wasn’t an accident,” suggested Jean. “I hear Roger Dempsey received some threatening letters. Do you have any idea who could have sent them?”

  “Someone who wanted to stop his expedition, I expect. Considering Roger’s reputation, it could have been almost anyone. Although blowing up his boat does seem a bit—drastic.” Iris walked on toward the house, trailing her hand through the leaves and flowers crowding the path, leaving Jean to play catch-up yet again.

  “I hear one of his assistants is missing,” she said to Iris’s back.

  “A shame, that. But then, Roger has never hesitated to put others at risk in order to serve his own ambitions. I have nothing against educated amateurs, mind—I’m one myself—but the ones who don’t realize their limitations can do far more harm than good.”

  “He told me he’s going to search here at Pitclachie. I guess he means some sort of geophysical survey, not actually digging, not unless he finds something.”

  Iris made a sound that Jean interpreted as a thin, taut laugh, the sort of laugh that teetered uneasily between humor and a harsher emotion, although she couldn’t tell what that emotion was. Annoyance? Embarrassment? Perhaps even grief? Jean was beginning to suspect that something more than academic disagreement had soured Iris’s feelings toward Roger.

  Iris stepped up onto the terrace and spun around. Her pale gray eyes didn’t look at Jean so much as through her. “Please go back out to the Stone any time you wish. Just make sure the gate shuts properly, so that the sheep don’t get into the garden.”

  “Thank you.” It was time to slip gracefully out of the interview before she was forcibly ejected. “Can we talk again soon, perhaps this evening? I’d like to hear about your work with Scotland the Green. And your father’s archaeological work as well—I’m hoping to do something about the spirit of scientific inquiry running in the family.”

  Iris nodded at that. “Well then, yes, there are important matters that should be brought to the attention of the public, such as ATV damage in mountain passes. And some of my earlier work might be of interest—deforestation in Brazil, water conservation in India and the like. ”

  “
Great!” Jean heard another set of car doors slam. That must have been the Ducketts taking off for the day, unless Kirsty was running some errands.

  No, here came Kirsty around the corner of the house, her arms waving. “Aunt Iris!”

  Without another word to Jean, Iris strode away across the flagstones, bent her head close to Kirsty’s urgent murmur, and then vanished around the corner. Kirsty skipped briskly after her.

  Wondering what that was all about, Jean pulled out her notebook and jotted down first what Iris had said, and second what she had implied.

  No one would admit faster than Jean that there was a fine line, a very tense line, like quivering piano wire, between privacy and secrecy. She reminded herself that she was not an investigative reporter but a mild-mannered journalist after mild-mannered stories for a history and travel magazine. Still, she could try to make friends with Iris, hoping she’d talk about Ambrose and the Stone and, if she was lucky, Eileen’s disappearance.

  Which was what Roger was doing with Jean. If there was a line between secrecy and privacy, there was also one between being friendly and exploiting that friendship. Iris’s chill cordiality seemed like a refreshing breeze after Roger’s—well, he hadn’t quite sunk to the level of smarm. Jean would rather go without a story than smarm Iris or anyone else.

  So far, though, she hadn’t learned much about Ambrose she didn’t already know. He’d been a teenager when he fell under Crowley’s spell, metaphorically speaking, just before Crowley left Scotland around 1900. Soon afterwards, Ambrose went up to Oxford and read history and archaeology, then shared his time between family in Britain and Crowley on the Continent. In 1914, unlike the blatantly anti-war Crowley, he went off to do his duty on the western front.

  After the war, Ambrose helped excavate Urquhart Castle, wrote florid prose about area antiquities and legends for various newspapers and magazines, married, and remodeled the family estate. While rarely or never seeing Crowley, Ambrose remained an admirer. By the 1930s, the old wizard had devolved from evildoer to laughing-stock. Ambrose probably wrote the justificative biography for just that reason—if your guru’s a joke, then so are you. Jean understood. One of the reasons she’d followed through with the lawsuit against the university was to protect her students’ reputations as well as her own.

  She tucked away her notebook, thinking that she could sure empathize—boy, could she empathize—with a policeman growing frustrated at not getting the whole story. Except that a policeman was usually justified in demanding the whole story and nothing but, and Jean wasn’t.

  An all-too-familiar male voice echoed harshly in the courtyard, a loud sarcastic voice that demanded rather than asked. Jean’s hackles bristled. Shit! The minute she saw D.C. Gunn on television, she should have known that the Northern Constabulary’s token troll, Detective Sergeant Andy Sawyer, was skulking around the area, too.

  It might have been amusing to hang around and see how long it took Iris to turn him into stone, except Jean had never found anything amusing in D.S. Sawyer. In a thoroughly undignified scuttle, she whisked around the far side of the cottage and gained her car without being accosted. But not without telling herself that if Sawyer and Gunn were on the scene, D.C.I. Cameron couldn’t be far behind.

  Chapter Nine

  Failing at her attempt to ignore the knot in her stomach—when it came to Alasdair Cameron, denial was growing increasingly futile—Jean stopped her car at the end of the drive. She’d have to make a right turn across both lanes, but traffic was moving slowly. Each car in turn came almost to a stop as rubberneckers looked at the blue-and-white police tape closing off the road down to the pier.

  There. She made it safely into the left-hand lane. Not that she had anywhere to go, other than away from Sawyer. She’d have to run Roger Dempsey down eventually, to get his view of what had happened and to ask him again about Iris, but. . . She’d check out the new Urquhart Castle visitor center. Hysterical Scotland aside, it deserved a few lines in any article about the area.

  She drove through the village at walking speed, easing her car past the bumpers of the media vans parked haphazardly along the road. Several people stood outside the police station, a small office annexed to the local constable’s home. More people thronged the souvenir shops, restaurants, and Tourist Information Center, where cars circled the jam-packed parking lot like sharks scenting gasoline in the water.

  Once past the road-clot, it took Jean only minutes to drive to the point of land crowned by the ruined castle. Its new parking lot was several times larger than the one she remembered, but was almost full. Iris had been right about the increased traffic, although surely some of these people had been lured in by the Festival . . . A camper with a German license plate was just pulling out. She nipped into the space.

  The moment she emerged from the car, her bag erupted in Mozart’s Rondo. Quelling her start, she dug out her cell phone and flipped it open. The screen read, Miranda Capaldi. Jean smiled. “You’re slow off the mark. The boat blew up last night.”

  “I didn’t hear ‘til now, did I?” returned Miranda. Her smooth voice was muffled by the wind blowing past Jean’s ear.

  She assumed the cell phone crouch, head tucked, her free hand covering her free ear. “Before you ask, I haven’t the foggiest notion what happened. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  “Oh aye, that you are,” said Miranda consolingly. “How are the articles getting on? Any joy from either Roger or Iris?”

  “Only their party lines. Iris says Roger uses people to further his ambitions.”

  “That’s not shocking news. Either her saying it or it being true.”

  “Yeah, but still, she’s letting him do a ground survey of Pitclachie Farm. I hear he’s going on with it, boat or no boat. And did you hear that one of his assistants is missing?”

  “Aye, that was on the telly as well. Your old chum D.C. Gunn . . . No, don’t say it, he’s naught but a business acquaintance.”

  On the one hand, Jean thought, it was helpful that Miranda knew her so well. She didn’t have to dissimulate. On the other hand, it was annoying that Miranda knew her so well, because then she couldn’t even rationalize, let alone deny. “Iris is impossible to read. She’s like one of those books in her library, hide-bound.”

  “Ah, but you’re a grand researcher.”

  “Hah,” Jean returned. “She did tell me that Ambrose wrote about the Pitclachie Stone in his personal papers, but when I told her that Great Scot might consider a publishing deal, she turned me down. In fact, when I asked if I could just see them, she said that the papers are, well, personal. No dice.”

  “Ooh,” said Miranda. “You’d almost think she was hiding something.”

  “Just because she doesn’t want to fling open her family cupboard for public inspection doesn’t mean there’s a skeleton in it—literal or not. But you do get the impression she’s trying to protect Ambrose’s reputation, don’t you? Were they close? She said something about returning to Pitclachie at his death that made me wonder.”

  “She spent a good many years traveling and working in other parts of the world, aye, but I suppose they got on well enough. Mind the turning.”

  “What?”

  “I’m speaking to Duncan, sorry. We’re just arriving at the clubhouse, have a round scheduled for eleven.”

  “Have a good game, then. When I know anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  “I’m sure you will. Cheerio.” Miranda’s words were punctuated by background voices, probably all the caddies flocking forward. Duncan and Miranda had long ago noticed that good tips meant good service.

  Jean shut her phone, stowed it away, and blinked. For a moment she’d seen the manicured fairways of—where were they? Muirfield? Gleneagles? She, however, was at Loch Ness, if not up to her neck at least up to her waist in another set of mysterious circumstances, and not exactly struggling to break free.

  Below a low wall edged with shrubs, the ground fell away, rose again slightly to support the
shattered walls of the castle, and then plunged to the murky gray-blue water of the loch. Which was starting to get choppy, making even a passing barge rock and roll. The wind was freshening, its cool gusts tugging at Jean’s hair and jacket, and those big white fluffy clouds were now being jostled from the sky by darker, more serious ones.

  She made her way through the traffic to the mock turret that was the entrance to the Visitor Center. Paying a not-inconsiderable fee admitted her to its interior, where staircases led down to an educational display and movie, a gift shop, and a restaurant teeming with humankind—Scandinavians, Africans, Moslem women in their head scarves. While Jean wasn’t going to suggest joining hands and singing “Kumbaya,” she had to smile at how the myth mongers had succeeded in giving the ruined building universal appeal. An appeal that might have gone unnoticed if the castle hadn’t been situated on a major road, next to a loch with a vivid myth of its own.

  The Visitor Center was as much following the crowds as enticing them. The last time Jean had visited, she’d waited in line to use a spartan Portakabin toilet with a group of Japanese women, each of them ready with her antiseptic wipe. Still, Iris had a point about people destroying what they came to see. Historic Scotland had dug out the side of the hill to build this structure, demolishing God only knew what in the process. Some of the authenticity, for one thing. At least they hadn’t Disneyed the place up with audio-animatronic clansmen and a Nessie running back and forth on an underwater track.

  Mulling over issues of Theme Park Scotland, Jean exited past a terrace equipped with tables and chairs. The construction scars were covered with lush greenery, cut only by a path that slanted steeply downward. She took small steps, hoping she wouldn’t be swept away by a sudden avalanche of humanity, and punched a number on her phone.