Chapter 17 Fencing with Icicles
Turning the corner into Merchantman Wynd where Amaryllis lived, the following afternoon, Christopher heard joyous, uninhibited laughter. As he got closer to her apartment building he saw them on the balcony. There were two of them and they seemed to be fencing in the confined space.
At first his heart thudded hard as he imagined someone had broken in and she was in the middle of a genuine, and desperate fight for survival, and then he realised they were both laughing as they wielded large chunks of icicle with considerable aplomb. When he was almost there, something shot past him and buried itself in a small snowdrift at the side of the path. He stared at it: it was the point of a large icicle, and it looked as sharp as he imagined the edge of a sword to be.
Amaryllis’s face appeared over the edge of the balcony, looking down at him.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Sorry to interrupt.’
‘We’ve finished now - first one to lose the point of their icicle has to get the drinks in at the Queen of Scots.’
He couldn’t help laughing in spite of his irritation. What was the point of icicles anyway?
A large fair-haired man filled a lot of the space in Amaryllis’s apartment. He extended a hand to Christopher.
‘I’m Jimbo Watts. Amaryllis and I met in Tibet a few years ago.’
‘Good,’ said Christopher. The familiar feeling of inadequacy started to creep over him. ‘What brings you to Pitkirtly?’
‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ said Jimbo pleasantly. ‘We’ve been assigned to look after coal supplies to Longannet - some sort of alert going on, I won’t bore you with the details. I meant to pop along and see Amaryllis before the snow started, but I didn’t get round to it. I’ve been on duty for three days, non-stop, and today I said to myself, why not borrow some skis and get on over to Pitkirtly. I thought she’d be going nuts, cooped up in this weather. But she tells me she’s been doing a bit of detective work on the side.’
‘Yes, that’s what she does,’ said Christopher, understanding now why there was a pair of skis downstairs in the lobby of the building. He was prepared to take an instant dislike to this large capable-looking man with the sun-tanned face and the air of general competence, but instead he rather liked the look of him. Maybe it was the sense that the man had nothing to hide. Or maybe that was an illusion.
He remembered that Mal was supposed to be a friend of Jimbo’s, and thought about the contrast between the two men. He hoped Jimbo wouldn’t try and talk Amaryllis into going on an epic quest, but it didn’t seem likely.
‘You’ve met Mal too, haven’t you?’ said Jimbo. ‘Back in the family home again. About time he settled down a bit.’
‘Settled down?’ said Christopher. He remembered telling himself on many occasions to stop asking these obvious questions, but his self-talk didn’t seem to have worked yet.
‘He’s been all over the place since he left the army. Seems to think he can carry on sorting things out in the world’s hot spots. I told him he should scale it down a bit.’
‘That sounds familiar,’ said Christopher with a sideways glance at Amaryllis.
‘But isn’t it admirable to keep on working on the bigger picture?’ she asked. ‘It’s all very well doing little bits of good here and there, but doesn’t somebody have to look at big things that really make a difference?’
Jimbo shrugged. ‘That’s for people wiser and more powerful than us. We’re just tiny cogs in the machine - if we don’t do it right, then the whole machine grinds to a halt.’
‘Yes, that’s all very well if you want to be part of a machine,’ argued Amaryllis. ‘But not everyone does.’
Jimbo looked puzzled. ‘Anyone who tries to maintain the peace is a part of the machine in some way. Maybe not a cog. Could be a motor or a drive-belt. A spark-plug, even?’
‘I think we’ve taken this metaphor as far as we can,’ said Amaryllis. ‘My knowledge of machines doesn’t really go much deeper.’
Christopher thought she was being falsely modest. He knew she was quite capable of fixing a car engine if she really wanted to. He hoped she wasn’t going to go all fluttery and feminine just because of this large fair-haired soldier with his round innocent blue eyes. Or to become nostalgic for the privations of Tibet or the adrenalin rush of North Korea.
‘Are you coming round to the pub with us?’ said Jimbo to Christopher.
‘Maybe,’ said Christopher.
‘He means yes,’ said Amaryllis, laughing. ‘There isn’t anything else to do here the day after Boxing Day in the snow.’
‘Except playing with icicles, I guess,’ said Jimbo. ‘Or we could go tobogganing if there’s a slope.’
‘Is there a slope?’ said Amaryllis. ‘This town is all slope and no level ground. I don’t have a sledge, though. Or even a tin tray.’
‘I might have one in the attic,’ said Christopher, surprising himself. He had never really taken to sledging after a bad experience with a tilting sledge and some brambles. But he remembered he and Caroline having rather a grand wooden sledge, which he didn’t recall throwing out. Unless she had taken it away with her for the kids.
So it was that after a few drinks at the Queen of Scots, where the landlord seemed to harbour no hard feelings about his Range Rover, they all headed back to Christopher’s, excavated the sledge from a pile of old carpet in the attic and then, as it started to get dark, they went up the hill in the park. So many people had been up there already that they had made the slope extremely slippery. Jimbo and Amaryllis seemed to enjoy it, but Christopher could only cope with one scary run down the hill. The main problem was that you had to stop or swerve abruptly before running into the fence. He wasn’t entirely successful in doing either of these things.
Eventually it was too dark for any of them to carry on. Jimbo said regretfully, ‘I suppose I’d better get on back. It’ll be my shift soon.’
‘Shouldn’t you have been sleeping in between shifts?’ said Christopher as they trudged back from the park pulling the sledge behind them like children - he was quite relieved that Amaryllis hadn’t wanted to sit on it and be pulled along.
‘Sleeping’s for wimps,’ said Jimbo, and grinned in almost exactly the same way Amaryllis did when he asked her a silly question.
He only paused long enough to pick up his skis from the lobby of the apartment building, then he was off.
‘Aren’t you going to put them on?’ said Christopher.
‘I might as well wait until I get to the top of the hill,’ he said.
They watched from the end of the cul de sac as he carried the skis up the road, showing no sign of tiredness or muscle pain, Christopher noted enviously. Just before he got to the top he stopped to put on the skis. Another man came along as he did so, slithering down the middle of the road from one icy patch to the next. He was weaving slightly as if drunk. He stared at Jimbo, held something out to him and spoke. They were much too far away to hear what was being said.
Jimbo straightened up after fastening both skis, and seemed to be replying. Something changed hands between them, or was that an illusion? The man came on down the road, but as he passed Christopher and Amaryllis, his step faltered, he gazed at them in apparent terror and he speeded up, causing him to slip even more often.
Staring after him, Christopher realised the man was limping badly at one side.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said out loud. ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before.’
‘Isn’t he that Big Issue salesman who hangs around outside the wool shop sometimes?’ said Amaryllis, turning to walk back along to her apartment building.
‘No - I think - wait a minute!’ he said again, raising his voice. ‘Stop! Come back!’
He set off after the other man at a run, but within a moment his feet had slid out from under him and he was lying flat on his back in the middle of the road.
Amaryllis’s face loomed into view above him, framed by the weird knitted scarf wit
h the long dangly bits that she had wrapped round her head.
‘Have you broken anything?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Christopher, testing out each limb in turn as he started to pull himself upright again. She reached a hand down to help him.
‘Haven’t you had enough playing in the snow for one day?’ she said.
Frozen in Crime Page 17
