Alasdair stood up and brushed off his trousers, then gave Jean a hand up. His expression was set, but she could swear she caught a sigh of decompression. Maybe he was glad Kettering had broken up the cheery little gathering before Alasdair told Roger just what he could do with his bones, the ones that made everything worthwhile.
Roger scrambled to his feet. “Hey, Peter, look, I found the rest of the Pitclachie Stone! There’s still time to get photos of it into the press release.”
“Well then, better and better!” Kettering stumbled to a halt, out of breath, face polished cherry-red. He glanced at Roger’s osteological booty, stared, then knelt down and probed the skull with a forefinger. “The photographs came out quite well, but I wanted to see for myself—these look to be . . .”
“Authentic?” Roger asked with a chortle of glee. “They’ll stand up to any test you want to throw at them, Peter. What a day for science!”
“I wasn’t meaning to suggest,” Peter hemmed and hawed, although he clearly was meaning to suggest, and was taking the precaution of checking out the situation himself. “Very impressive. Amazing story.”
Jean met Alasdair’s jaundiced eye. All the instrumentation in the world, but there’s a difference in actually seeing for yourself. The problem was, even seeing for yourself proved nothing.
Kettering stood up, his insectoid sunglasses still turned toward the bones. “The boat sails at half past seven. If you could come a bit early to assist with the display?”
“My reputation for getting lost in my work and running late precedes me, I see. No worries, Peter, I wouldn’t miss this for anything. My life’s work, vindicated! Soon as Inspector Cameron here gives the word, Brendan and I will get everything boxed up here and clean up for the cruise.” Suddenly Roger’s face pleated into his beard. “Geez, Tracy would have gotten such a charge out of this. She worked by my side all these years, contributed so much . . .”
Jean wondered what Jonathan would have thought, and decided it was better not to know. As far as Kettering was concerned, the upside of a Big Discovery trumped the downside of two Unfortunate Deaths, publicity-wise. She glanced at Alasdair.
All he said was, “Mr. Kettering, could you see your way clear to including a wee boy and his mum in the evening’s events? The lad’s a fan of Nessie. A future consumer.”
“Of course, Chief Inspector. Plenty of room. We’ve only invited sixty people—including Iris Mackintosh, of course, if we can lure her down from her ivory tower.” He brayed at his own joke, the glare off his teeth almost casting a shadow. “Miss Fairbairn, we’ll see you there with the other members of the fourth estate. And Chief Inspector, I know a fair number of your people will be there in their official capacities, but if you would care to be Starr’s honored guest—we’re having Hugh Munro and his band on the lounge deck, playing their own unique blend of traditional and modern tunes.”
“Thank you,” said Alasdair.
“You won’t mind my mentioning that the event is formal dress,” Kettering went on. “I’ll be dressed in the style of the country, myself. My first experience as a kilted Highlander, but I won’t be indulging in the same sort of undergarments that a proper Scotsman would be wearing. Or not wearing.” He bleated again.
Alasdair’s eyes were starting to cross. Jean kept her face hidden by continuing to make notes.
Roger shifted his vertebra from hand to hand like a gambler shaking luck into his dice. Unlike Alasdair, whose gambling consisted of counting the fall of the cards and playing the odds, Roger was the type who would risk everything on one throw. “Tracy would have loved Hugh. Great band. Heard them at the ceilidh Saturday night and enjoyed them so much I went back on Sunday for more. Takes your mind off, well, takes your mind off.”
“Yes, yes, of course, very brave of you to persevere. Most admirable,” said Kettering. “I’m afraid I made a bit of a fool of myself Saturday night, dancing and all—you just can’t keep your feet on the floor, now can you, when Hugh is playing?”
Yeah, Jean remembered, Hugh had said something about Kettering prancing around when he wasn’t ducking out to take a call.
“No way,” said Roger. “You remember that sequence of songs he did—oh, it must have been around midnight. The pop tunes, ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida,’ and the jigs and stuff in between. If you weren’t drunk when he started, you were drunk . . .”
An electronic trill made all three men go for their pockets. Kettering won the jackpot. “Starr Beverages promotion! Ah yes, I’ll be there straightaway.” And, slipping the phone back into his dangling jacket, “Must see to the catering. Good job for me, eh, catering, Kettering?” Exuding ghastly jollity, he cantered back down the path.
“See you tonight, Peter! You too, Jean. Inspector. Champagne’s on me!” Roger gathered up a camera, and what was probably a GPS unit, and what could just as well have been Captain Kirk’s tricorder, and descended into the trench, there to lavish his affections on the top half of the Pitclachie Stone.
Alasdair jerked his head toward Pitclachie House. Jean walked beside him in silence until they were past the first gate and into the moist shade of the garden, where they were bushwhacked by a cloud of midges. They hurried the rest of the way into the courtyard of the house. Only then did Alasdair stop, and after a searching look up, down, and sideways had ascertained no one was watching—even Iris’s window was now vacant—he closed his eyes and let his shoulders sag.
Jean felt as though she’d been dragged through two barbed-wire fences, and she hadn’t been doing half the work he had. She applied her right hand to his left shoulder and allowed herself to both massage and appreciate the firm musculature concealed beneath his shirt. “Bonus points for remembering Elvis. How about one of those nice cups of tea for yourself?”
For five seconds he leaned into her touch, then opened his eyes and withdrew. With a nod of thanks, he said, “A wee dram wouldn’t come amiss, but I’ll not be getting that ‘til after the cruise. If then. We’ve gone through our list of suspects, and we’ve come to a dead end.”
“But you have your eye on Roger.”
“When a wife is killed, your first suspicion falls on the husband. And the other way round. He wasn’t half angry with her Saturday night. I reckon she cut him off at the knees right and proper when she told him she’d destroyed the boat.”
“He was mad, all right. Angry. However . . .”
“He was at the ceilidh while Tracy was being pushed out the window. A fact he took a right bit of care pointing out just now.”
“No kidding. He sure did give you the charm offensive. The well-meaning but slightly goofy inventor going happy-go-luckily about his business, while his wife machiavellies behind his back.”
“Owned up to quite a bit, he did, though you’ll never convince me he didn’t know that submersible was on board, partially disassembled or not.”
“I bet he was going to dump it in the deepest part of the loch. Which would have been a lot better than Tracy’s blowing it up, but like he said, Tracy was over the top.”
“And wanted to show him up, I reckon. Feeling unappreciated and all.” Alasdair wiped his forehead. “In any event, he shopped Tracy and Martin good and proper, and suggested the Ducketts murdered Tracy. Everyone’s guilty but him.”
“And the Bouchards. They were working with him while Martin worked with Tracy. I’m surprised they didn’t all collide in the hallway outside my door—well,” Jean amended, “the Bouchards had the Lodge all to themselves for several days. I thought somebody had picked the lock of the lumber room. And here I was thinking they’d moved into the house because they’d sensed the ghosts.”
“No, they’ve not got the personality to sense ghosts.”
Ghost-sensors tending to be nervous and intense. “I wouldn’t think they have the personality to run people down with their car, either, but . . . Funny how Roger went off to the ceilidh that night when he was hurt worse than I was, and I was aching all over. No way could I have gone dancing. Maybe he couldn’t stand being in the same hotel room with—no, Tracy wasn’t there.”
“She was sneaking about Pitclachie, looking out a complete copy of that book, using the keys Martin copied for her.”
“Yeah, she was wearing sneakers when she died because she was sneaking. And since she was a sneaky person, she thought I was, too. If it weren’t such a tragedy it would be a farce.”
“These things usually are,” said Alasdair, so blandly Jean suspected he was covering bleakness.
She looked discreetly away. There was the garden constable pacing along the path. He must be using bug repellent for after-shave. And Mandrake the cat was ambling across the terrace, his coat of many colors flicking in and out of shadow like a jaguar on the prowl. “Roger would probably turn the Bouchards in, if he could. As for vice versa, I know Hugh saw them at the ceilidh, but did the Bouchards ever say in so many words they saw Roger?”
Alasdair scowled so fiercely his eyebrows met at the bridge of his nose. “No matter—Andy Sawyer saw him there.”
“Oh. Yeah. He did.” The egregious Sawyer, whose work Alasdair now had to do along with his own.
“I’ll get onto him, get the details,” he said, discarding his scowl as useless distraction. “We might be obliged to interview all the people who were there, work out a timetable or the like.”
“Hugh said the place was heaving. I bet the bar was packed, too. It would take a long time to find everyone, let along talk to them. And meanwhile Roger’s congratulating himself for pulling everything, including Nessie, out of the fire. Or the water, as the case may be.”
“Oh aye. Best I can do now is go back to the station and have a look at everyone’s statements and the trace evidence reports, perhaps I’ve missed something.”
If he had had a warhorse, he’d be getting Jean to winch him back onto it. “Do you need me to drive you back?” she asked.
“I’ll cadge a ride from the constable at the end of the drive, thank you kindly.”
“Okay then. I’ll go put on my glad rags for tonight. Of course, with all the men in kilts, no one’s going to notice me.”
“I’d not be so sure of that.” One corner of his mouth thawed enough to crimp into a wry half-smile.
“You don’t have time to get your own kilt from Inverness, though.”
“I’ll borrow Hamish’s, we’re much the same size. The runts of the Cameron litter, I’m thinking, though I doubt our ancestors were the giants among men that legend paints them.”
“Who is?” she replied with a smile, not so much at the joke as at Alasdair being able to make one at this fraught moment, and tore the relevant pages from her notebook. “Here you go.”
He folded her notes into his pocket. The other corner of his mouth melted, drawing his lips up into a full smile. “Half past seven, then.”
“See you later,” she called to his retreating back.
With a smooth pirouette, he turned around, blew her a kiss, and went on his way—toward Noreen Hall, who was climbing out of a police car in the parking area like someone climbing out of a sickbed. With a hold-that-bus gesture to the car, Alasdair spoke to Noreen. Her desolate expression cracked and flowed away, revealing an actual smile. “Thank you, thank you. Elvis, I’ll tell Elvis, shall I . . .” She ran across the courtyard and into the house.
Smiling and digging in her bag for the key—it was at the bottom, of course—Jean started toward the door of the Lodge. Just as she put the key in the lock, her cell phone rang, sending her back into the bag. “Hello?”
“Hiya,” said a male voice. “Here I am.”
Her brain spun without traction. She knew who it was, who was . . . Oh. Brad. “Hi. Where are you supposed to be?”
“You asked me to call you back,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Nancy Drew and the case of the sinking submersible, right?”
“Oh yeah. Sorry. Things have been happening here.”
“No shit. Tracy Dempsey bit the dust. Has Dudley Do-Right caught the killer yet?”
Jean gritted her teeth and resisted drop-kicking the phone. “About the submersible . . .”
“The guy who was killed was named Christopher Peretti. His wife was Melissa Duckett—must be her maiden name, huh?––and they had three kids. Does that help?”
“Yes it does.”
“I wrote it down, so I’d remember. Bet you thought I’d forget. Anything else I can do to—what do they say there, assist the police in their inquiries?”
It could have been worse. He could have called while she and Alasdair . . . She had to be mature about this. “I’ll let you know. Thanks for checking it out for me. Gotta run now. Bye.”
“Bye,” said his voice from the speaker as she squashed End. Independent, disinterested confirmation of the Ducketts’ story was a help. It was her own prejudice that made Brad seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Or a pound short.
Speaking of pounds, eight infant pounds to be exact, she walked into the stuffy Lodge and called the Campbell-Reid’s flat. She got the voice mail, and duly left her message. “Hi, it’s Jean. I wanted to let you know that Roger’s assistant uncovered the rest of the Pitclachie Stone. Thanks to your I.D. of the mason, we’ve got the full story and are making progress on the case . . .” From her lips to the ears of Justice, she added silently, never mind that intrepid we. “I’m cruising the loch tonight, so I’ll call y’all back tomorrow. Give my love to the baby.”
She closed the phone and noticed the time on its face. Five-thirty. Time flies when you’re shoulder-to-shoulder with Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a mountain. But Miranda should still be in the office.
She was, and answered the phone herself. “Ah, Jean. You’ve not been abducted the day, then.”
“Not by aliens, anyway.” By a certain detective chief inspector, but she’d save that until Miranda wormed it out of her with a third degree beyond even Alasdair’s capabilities.
“Getting forwarder on the case, are you?”
“More or less. Roger’s assistant turned up the missing half of the Pitclachie Stone, so at least the Museum’s going to come out ahead. How are things at the office?”
“Hardly had time to look over this month’s print run, the phone’s been going all day long with folk asking for advice.”
“You should hang out a second shingle—Dear Aunt Miranda.”
“Not that sort of advice. Names for boards of directors and the like. Protect and Survive is looking out a security chief for overseeing historical properties, the National Portrait Gallery is looking out a curator for sharing an exhibition with the Met in New York . . . There goes my other line. Sorry, Jean. We’ll have us a good blether when you get back, all right?”
“All right. Take care.” Jean switched off again and thought, Get back? Could she ever get back? And she didn’t mean to her flat in Edinburgh and her office above the Royal Mile.
She looked out through the open doorway of the Lodge to see Mandrake poised on the terrace wall. Was he watching Eileen’s ghost? No, the hair wasn’t standing up on his back. And even when Jean herself stepped to the door, she sensed nothing except the warm humid air, like Alasdair’s breath on her cheek teasing her with possibilities.
A bird erupted from the shrubbery and the cat sat back with a shrug. Just sightseeing. Nothing serious.
Would there in time be another ghost walking at Pitclachie? Jean wondered. She went to her kitchen, got a paring knife, then cut a bouquet of red roses from the garden. Mandrake watched curiously as she laid them on the flagstone carved with the symbol of the water horse.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. But if Tracy had ever felt Lady Macbeth’s remorse, Jean had no way of knowing. What she did know was that Tracy’s killer was coming close to getting away with murder.