Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

He laughed politely. “There is, if you’re in the mood for exploring, a rather splendid stone circle over to the west, near the edge of the cliffs—do please be careful!—and magnificent views of Hoy and Flota, the islands, you know.”

Dehan drained her cup. “Sounds just about perfect.”

We stepped out through the French windows in the drawing room onto the ancient stone terrace. All traces of the threatened storm seemed to have disappeared, except the close, humid warmth. The sky was an intense, rich blue. There were no clouds, and swallows circled and swooped around the house like World War Two Spitfires in the Battle of Britain.

Dehan pointed and we moved down the broad steps, touched with green here and there where lichen and moss grew in the cracks between the stones, and started across the lawn toward a gap in the hedgerow that grew where the wall had crumbled, at some distant point in time.

We squeezed through the gap and found ourselves on a broad expanse of grassland that waved and swayed gently in the northerly breeze. In the distance we could see the dark blue of the ocean, hazy with morning mist, and just visible through that haze was the low, dark form of the Isle of Hoy, as Charles had said. I nodded in that direction.

“That’s west. Let’s go see those stones.”

The grass was deep, up to our knees, and beneath it the ground was uneven, with thick clumps of moss, small rocks and depressions. We picked our way slowly, and in the humid heat we were soon perspiring. Aside from the occasional lazy bumblebee, it was very quiet. Dehan looked down as she walked and thrust her hands in her back pockets. I had a hunch what was coming.

“Eliminate the impossible,” she said, “and whatever is left is the truth.”

“That’s what the man said.”

“So, in the case of Old Man Gordon, what’s impossible is that he was murdered.” She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. “Right?”

“The trick, my dear Dehan, is to know what is impossible. You might equally argue that it is impossible for him to have committed suicide. In this case, Holmes’ adage helps us naught.”

She grunted. We had reached a small rise and I stopped to look at the view. It was vast. Now I could see small, dense mountains of dark cloud above the mist on the northern rim of the world. The storm had not gone away, it had merely backed up for a good charge. I inhaled a deep breath, savoring the rich smell of sweet grasses, lavender and ozone.

Dehan turned to watch me, squinting in the bright sunlight. “So we can say, he must have been murdered because it is impossible that he shot himself at that angle, and also that he didn’t get powder burns or GSR; or, it is impossible that he was murdered because there is no way that anybody could have been inside the room and left, leaving everything locked from the inside. So, it is impossible to eliminate the impossible, because everything is impossible.”

“Precisely.”

I stepped down from the small mound and we kept walking.

“So, given that we have two incompatible impossibilities, which one do we eliminate?”

“Well, as I said, Little Grasshopper, in this case Holmes’ adage doesn’t help us. We need to do it the other way around. Here we are faced with two apparent impossibilities. So what we need to do is not eliminate the impossible, but include the possible.”

That silenced her for about five minutes, during which I spotted, about three hundred yards away, the circle of standing stones. It was weird enough to send a small army of frozen ants crawling up my arms and up my back.

They stood maybe three hundred yards from the edge of the cliff. There were twelve of them, tall, maybe fourteen feet high, slender and irregular in shape, slightly pointed and smoky gray, patched here and there with dark green and black lichen. I paused to stare at them. Dehan stopped too.

“They look like twelve druids turned to stone.”

“They are at least five thousand years old. Who the hell put them there, Dehan? And what for?”

“They are so remote, Stone…” She turned to smile at me, aware of the odd synchronicity, but unable to put it into words. “We’ll never know, and even if we found out, it probably wouldn’t make any sense to us. That’s a true mystery.” She turned back to the stones. “In a situation like that, how do you eliminate the impossible?”

I nodded. “Each one of those stones must weight twenty or thirty tons. I wonder where they brought them from, and how.”

She grinned. “You’re not going to go all Mulder and Scully on my ass again, are you, Stone? It was built by aliens who used magnetic stone power.” She came up to me laughing on unsteady feet and flung her arms around me. “You got some magnetic Stone power, big guy!”

We moved on and slowly the ground leveled off and became flatter, and we began to hear an eerie moan where the breeze played among the megaliths. We moved in among them and Dehan touched them with her hands, as though she might be able to absorb their secrets somehow through her open palms.

“These are your ancestors,” she said suddenly.

“I am not literally descended from stones, Dehan.”

“You know what I mean.” She turned to face me. “Your ancestors did this. You have an actual, physical connection with the men who made these circles. If not this particular one, another one in these islands. He knew how, he knew why and what for, and his genetic code is in your blood. That’s pretty deep, Stone.”

I nodded. “And Old Man Gordon felt that with a passion.”

She leaned her back against the