For a moment Jean basked in the dazzling light of her bright idea. Then she told herself that that idea sure opened a can of worms—or miniature Nessies, as the case might be. Not least being the question of why, of all the ancient and possibly treasure-bearing sites in Scotland, had Dempsey come here to Pitclachie, where he was not welcome? Because of the cryptic message on the Stone, which he chose to interpret as proof of an ancient Nessie tradition? But how did that tie in with treasure of the silver and bronze variety? Because Ambrose had written about ancient Pictish ceremonies and had also turned up an ancient Pictish hoard?
What her idea didn’t open was any insight into who blew up the boat and caused Jonathan’s death, not to mention who wrote the anonymous letters. But still she needed to tell Alasdair. He wouldn’t laugh at her for free-associating. He knew that evidence could be more slippery than the Loch Ness monster, and as likely to be caught between the rock and the hard place of seeing and believing.
Exhaling through pursed lips, Jean looked on suspiciously as Roger and Brendan trudged across the field, much as ancient Picts must have done with oxen dragging a wooden plow. Beyond them the pines swayed, concealing the Stone, and clouds spilled like wisps of smoke over the mountaintop.
And here came the Bouchards out of the glade, closing the gate behind them. Charles strolled over to Roger and Brendan. Roger stopped in his tracks, forcing Brendan to stop too. The younger man stood flexing his arms and hands while Charles and Roger gesticulated so broadly they might have been mimes, communicating in symbols rather than words. Digging, Jean interpreted. Structures. People walking. Caverns—or graves, maybe? The creature dog-paddling through the loch. Sophie waited on the path, glancing at her watch.
Then, with a tally-ho gesture, Charles led his wife on toward the house and clean clothes, food, and drink. The day had grown so dark the lighted window of the library probably beckoned invitingly . . . Sophie looked right at Jean and waved. She waved back, less at Sophie than at her own ghostly reflection in the glass.
The front door opened and shut. Footsteps climbed the staircase. Another door slammed and floorboards squeaked. Jean turned to Kirsty. “What are Roger and Brendan looking for?”
“Herself. Nessie, or so Brendan’s telling me.” Kirsty frowned down at her knitting. “Bones, I reckon.”
“Funny,” Jean said, “that Iris would let Roger search here at Pitclachie. There doesn’t seem to be much love lost between them. She objects to his methods, I gather. Or is there more to it than that?”
“There’s something from the past.”
“His past or her past?”
Kirsty’s lips moved, counting her stitches. Maybe she’d said all she was going to say to a presumptuous stranger. Maybe she had nothing else to offer.
Jean drifted toward one of the shelves. Tilting her head to read the titles, she inspected the books with all the delectation of a gourmet at a wine-tasting. She had learned long ago how to separate the sheep from the goats among her house-guests. There were the people who abandoned conversation and went through her bookcases, and there were the people who seemed to regard them as so much wallpaper. So far she’d had the good taste, or the good luck, to never host anyone who asked accusingly, “Have you read all of those?” as though reading was the sort of private function you had to wash your hands after doing.
Lining the shelves were books ranging from leather-bound classics to academic tomes to a vast collection of Nessie-ology to popular novels of all eras down to the present . . . Good heavens! That looked like a 1937 first edition of The Hobbit, a very valuable book indeed.
“A librarian stopped here in May,” said Kirsty.
Jean looked up. That’s right, she was pumping the girl for information. “Yes?”
“She worked at the Library of Congress in Washington D. C. Name of Sirikanya—isn’t that pretty? Originally from Thailand, she was saying. You should have seen her the day she came running in to read the Nessie books, over the moon, sure she’d seen the monster in the loch! She was telling Aunt Iris she had some right valuable books and should be finding herself a proper expert.”
Scanning the shelves again, this time critically rather than curiously, Jean noted not the books themselves but the gaps where ones had been removed. “I doubt, er, suspect that Iris knows exactly what she has here. Has she ever done business with the rare-book dealer from Fort Augustus, the one who’s at the Festival?”
“Gordon Fraser, is it? Now there’s a pillock. We were at the shops in Fort Augustus not a month since when Aunt Iris saw a cookbook in his window and stopped in to buy it, and here’s him taking her money like it’s cursed and showing us both the door before we could so much as look about.”
Jean’s ears perked up like the cat’s. “I was talking to Fraser at the Festival. He seemed uneasy about Ambrose’s relationship with Aleister Crowley. And, I assume, the, er, mystery about Ambrose and Eileen.”
“Oh aye,” Kirsty said with a bored sigh and beseeching look upward. “That verdict of Not Proven went down right badly in these parts. My folk were away to Glasgow, putting the past behind them and all.”
And convincing you that imagination was a bad thing, thought Jean, people having a tendency to throw babies out with tubs of bathwater. She pointed toward three books tucked away in the darkest corner of the room. Two of their spines displayed the names Lawrence and Boccaccio, the third . . . “I see Iris has a copy of Crowley’s own Moonchild. Plus a couple of other popularly unpalatable books from Mandrake Press. There’s a really obscure and short-lived publisher.”
Kirsty looked up. “Mandrake Press, is it? That’s the cat’s name, Mandrake. Here’s me, thinking he was named for the screaming plants in Harry Potter. Not that Aunt Iris has time for fanciful stories such as that.”
The calico cat opened an eye, partly acknowledging the name, mostly not caring less.
“The press was named for the plant, I bet, which has all sorts of magical properties and is toxic to boot. If that’s the cat’s name, it sounds like Iris has some sense of humor about her past.” The elephant of “the past” had been lying in the middle of the room all this time. It was time to goad its massive rump. “The question, and I’m sure the police asked you this, is whether Iris has enemies from her past. Or present, for that matter. Someone who could have sent those anonymous letters, trying to . . .”
“Bloody hell,” said Kirsty. “I dropped a stitch two rows back. They’ll want unraveling.”
“I’ll show you how to pick it up.” Jean hurried across the room and took the needles with their pendant scarf from Kirsty’s hands. While the interruption might have occurred conveniently before she finished her question, Jean saw that the dropped stitch was only too real. “Do you have a crochet hook? Or a bobby pin—a hair clip—would do.”
Kirsty reached to the hair piled on her head and pulled out a pin. Sitting down in the desk chair, Jean used the pin to pick up and interlock each errant stitch in turn. She added the last loop of yarn to the row of stitches already on the needles and handed everything back to Kirsty. “See? Like most things, it’s not hard once you know how to do it.”
“Thank you kindly.”
“Glad to help. Did Iris teach you to knit?”
“That she did. Told me if I kept my hands busy I’d not be biting my nails.” Kirsty waggled her pristine fingertips. “Knitting’s not so naff a business as it was a few years back, now it’s right trendy.”
“I’ve been knitting since I was a girl. I’m glad to see it’s respectable again. It’s a metaphor for life, really. Stitches can be too tight, too loose, or just right. Patterns can be plain or intricate. You can use up all your yarn and not be able to find the same color or texture. You can tie yourself into a knot and have to start over. You can notice that you made a mistake several rows earlier, but it’s not a simple dropped stitch—if you, like, cable front to back instead of back to front, you have to cut or unravel, but either way it’s a nuisance and you can dump a bunch of stitches before you’re done.”
Kirsty was staring, the needles stationary in her hands, her expression compounded of confusion and caution.
Yes, it was a rare mind that appreciated free-association. Jean glanced again at the photo, where Eileen looked as though she was a bit out of her depth and resentful of finding herself there. Jean couldn’t help Eileen, but she could take pity on Kirsty and cut to the chase already. “If you need help with anything else, just ask. With the explosion and the police taking Iris away, your schedule’s really been disrupted.”
“What I’m needing is Aunt Iris back.” Taking a deep breath, Kirsty set her chin and sat up straighter. “You say you’re chums with this Cameron chap. Can you tell me, then, why they took Aunt Iris away? What was she telling them, that they’d suspect her of blowing up boats?”
It was Jean’s turn to stare, jaw slack, possible responses doing a Keystone Kops routine in her mind. Would she be exceeding her brief if she told Kirsty about Iris’s confession? No. “Iris was seen puttering about the bay Thursday evening, during Roger’s ITN interview.”
“She’s after doing that every few days, checking her flatworm traps. Keeps a power boat at the pier.”
“That’s as may be,” Jean began, and realized she sounded like Alasdair. “Maybe so, but she also confessed to sending the anonymous letters to Roger Dempsey. I know she doesn’t care for him, but does threatening him seem any more likely to you than it does to me?”
“She confessed to . . ?” A flush started in Kirsty’s cheeks and bloomed outward. With deliberate if jerky movements she finished the row of stitches and dropped her knitting into her lap, so that the scarf and the ball of yarn made a puddle the same color as her face. Then the sudden flow of crimson ebbed so completely from her complexion that even in the lamplight she seemed ghostly pale and cold. A strand of hair dangled beside her face, limp as seaweed.
Once again, Jean thought of drowned Ophelia, a pawn in the designs of others. More steps clumped slowly, almost stealthily, across the ceiling, accompanied by the sound of trickling water. Mandrake stretched and began to groom his already sleek fur. Finally Jean asked gently, “Kirsty, what’s going on here? Do you think Iris sent the letters?”
“No, she couldna have done, it’s not like her. But I dinna know, do I? She’s come over all strange since the Water Horse folk arrived. She’s always been one to get on with what needs doing, but now, no, she’s sitting up the tower instead of washing dishes and the like.”
“What’s at the top of the tower?”
“A room. All dust and cobwebs. Iris locks it up, disna allow the guests there, but then, there’s nothing there worth doing.”
“Except looking out at the loch?” Jean hazarded. “And, the last few days, at the Water Horse boat?”
This time it was Kirsty’s gaze that strayed to the framed photo and then back to Jean’s face, where it clung. Any port in a storm, it seemed. “She used to tell you straight out what she’s thinking, but not now, no, she’s after keeping something back”
“She’s pretty straightforward about her feelings for Roger. And she didn’t mince words about not wanting you to see Brendan any more. Sorry,” Jean added to the flash in Kirsty’s eyes, “I was on the terrace this morning and overheard you talking to her.”
“So did half the town, I’m thinking. Oh aye, she’s dead set against Brendan, for no more reason than that he’s working with Roger, so far as I can tell. As for why she’s taken against Roger, that’s a question she’ll not be answering.”
“The answer lies in the past,” Jean said half to herself, and, louder, “As for the present, I heard you identified a corkscrew the police found in the wreckage of the boat. It must have been taken from here recently—there wasn’t one on the drinks table last night.”
“Iris forgot it when she made up the table, did she? Like I was saying, she’s not herself.” Kirsty shook her head. “The corkscrew the polis showed me, now, that was never on the drinks table. It went missing from the desk here a couple of months ago.”
That was interesting. “Do you think someone’s trying to frame Iris for blowing up the Water Horse boat, not to mention for writing those letters?”
“So it seems.” Kirsty turned the knitting over and over in her lap, inspecting it carefully but not actually making any stitches. The twin spikes of the needles chimed together.
Funny, Jean thought, every time the subject of the letters came up, Kirsty ducked and covered. That might be something worth exploring, but then, there was a lot else to explore, too. “What about Brendan? You went to the Tourist Authority dinner with him last night. You were with him when the boat exploded.”
“Oh aye, that I was.”
“I know how Iris felt about your going with him. But how did Roger and Tracy feel?”
“The trout, Tracy, asked right sharpish where Jonathan was, why Brendan was there instead. She never took any notice of me. Roger now, he seemed right pleased to see me. Thought he was putting one over on Iris, most likely.”
Jean’s ears pricked again. “So Jonathan was supposed to be at the dinner.”
“He was that, aye. Tracy, she wanted the Brits front and center for the Brit press, didn’t she? But Jonathan told Brendan he couldn’t be bothered with a posh dinner. Brendan swapped with him so as to take me out.” Some of the color seeped back into Kirsty’s face at that.
“Was Brendan supposed to have stayed on the boat?”
“No, he’d been told to drive to Inverness. The post needed collecting.”
“But Jonathan wasn’t driving to Inverness, he was on the boat. Why?”
“If he’d told anyone you’d not be asking me, would you?” Kirsty returned, cutting Jean no slack for a rhetorical question. “Brendan, now, he reckons Jonathan was a spy. Industrial espionage. He sneaked onto the boat to take photos of the submersible he might could sell to another company.”
Jean sat up straight, wondering if she was hearing more tumblers falling into place or simply the clatter of scattershots, taken at random. “Photos of one of the ROVs, you mean?”
“Brendan said submersible. Close to being the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Close, yes. Why does he think Jonathan was a spy?”
“He was asking too many questions and prying about in areas that weren’t his affair.”
“If asking questions and prying is enough to make someone suspicious of you, then I should have been carried off by the police long ago!”
A dry, almost sarcastic laugh escaped Kirsty’s lips. “But you’re a reporter, and you’re working with the polis, aren’t you now? Jonathan wasn’t a reporter, he was a computer . . .”
A sudden thudding sound cut Kirsty off in mid-sentence and made both women sit back abruptly, like conspirators interrupted at their plotting.