Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 19 Arrest

  ‘She’s up to something,’ said Charlie to Keith Burnett as soon as they left Amaryllis at the war memorial gardens.

  ‘She was just standing there,’ said Keith. ‘Sir.’

  ‘She’s never just standing,’ said Charlie. ‘Why did she suddenly vanish down that lane and then turn up again at the top of the street?’

  ‘Maybe she saw us watching her,’ suggested Keith.

  ‘She’s playing games with us again,’ said Charlie gloomily. ‘Just when I thought she’d grown out of it.’

  ‘But what for, sir?’ said Keith.

  They were still debating this when they arrived back at the police station. Oh the joys, thought Charlie, taking his coat off again, and sitting down to unfasten his boots, which he needed to put under the radiator if he had any chance of being able to wear them again the following day. Maybe there would be a thaw in the night and the snow would disappear as if by magic, and he could get home and sleep in a proper bed. Inspector Forrester would be back from Cuba in a few days’ time, too. Then he would move on from this whole bleak mid-winter thing and get it into perspective. At the moment everything that happened seemed unreal and out of this world, with different rules applying and the focus on survival.

  He was disappointed to find the next morning when he looked out the window after very little sleep, that the snow was still there. It hadn’t got any worse, and in a few random places it even looked a little less white. But on closer examination one of the random places was where the police Land Rover seemed to have developed an oil leak, and another was where Sergeant McDonald liked to empty out the tea-leaves from the pot.

  Perhaps if Sergeant McDonald kept doing that he could melt enough snow to clear the roads, but it might take a while.

  They had no excuse for keeping the police station closed to visitors today, since despite the weather they knew it would be a normal working day in Pitkirtly. Theoretically the previous day should have been normal too, but the people of the town weren’t daft, and like the local wildlife they knew instinctively when it was time to hibernate. There had been very little new crime because of this, apart from a domestic disturbance which had turned out to centre on someone having to eat sprouts for the fourth time in three days. Sergeant McDonald had cautioned the teenager who had thrown his plate out of the window and smashed someone’s garden gnome, and then everyone had gone back to sleep.

  They still had to deal with the ongoing armed robbery investigation, of course. Fortunately the news from the hospital was good, so it hadn’t yet turned into a murder case. Charlie Smith was very pleased by that. It increased his chances of seeing his little house in Dunfermline again before New Year, although that outcome wasn’t by any means certain yet.

  He was about to send Karen Whitefield out with Keith for a while interviewing witnesses - his boots were still steaming gently under the radiator, and he was reluctant to put them on yet - when Sergeant McDonald came into his office.

  ‘We’ve had a complaint,’ he said, smug in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be the one who had to go out in the snow and check it out, since he was needed on the front desk now that the place was open again.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Charlie.

  ‘You know that man who’s been hanging around? The one with the dog. Mrs Petrelli’s been in about him.’

  ‘And?’ said Charlie. He wished the sergeant didn’t need so much prompting. He made such a meal of everything.

  ‘He was at the restaurant again last night. Hassling people for money. When he got some he came in for a poke of chips. She said the smell was putting the other customers off.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Charlie. ‘Does she think we’ve got nothing better to do than -?’

  ‘Yes, whatever, sir. She wants us to warn him off, move him on somewhere else. Isn’t there some sort of shelter in Rosyth?’

  ‘We can’t send him along there in this weather. He’d freeze to death before he got past Pitkirtly Island. Even if he made it that far. There’s a big drift down on that lower causeway.’

  ‘If the buses started running…,’said the sergeant doubtfully.

  ‘Don’t hold your breath, sergeant,’ said Charlie. He heaved a sigh. It looked as if Karen and Keith weren’t going to be the only ones trekking through the snow. ‘Where was he last seen?’

  ‘Up by the war memorial gardens, sir.’

  ‘Aha!’ said Charlie. ‘The plot thickens.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Amaryllis Peebles was hanging about there last night too. I knew she was up to something.’

  ‘Do you want me to send Keith out?’

  ‘No, I want him and Karen to carry on interviewing the witnesses in the armed robbery case. We’ve only got about halfway down the list. I’ll go and look for this dosser of yours.’

  ‘Should you be going on your own, sir?’

  ‘There isn’t anybody else. I’ll be all right. If he turns nasty I’ll radio in. But they’re usually harmless enough, whatever Mrs Petrelli thinks.’

  There was no sign of anyone sleeping rough in the shelter behind the war memorial; the lingering smell of chips couldn’t necessarily be attributed to the homeless man. Charlie stopped and considered where to look next. He thought some of the householders in the old fishermen’s cottages behind the High Street tended to leave their garden huts unlocked, despite warnings from the police about the dangers of this. Maybe this man had found shelter somewhere there. But there must be around fifteen huts in all, and he didn’t fancy spending time searching them all.

  He would have walked down to the new houses behind the railway line, only he had a feeling they were all now either occupied or just about to be occupied as soon as the economy stuttered back into life. Where else was there? He hoped to goodness Amaryllis hadn’t felt sorry for the man and taken him home with her. It was just the kind of weird thing she would do - and indeed had done in the past. Should he go and have a word with her, or would she just talk him round in circles as she usually did?

  While he hesitated, stamping his feet to keep the circulation going, he glimpsed a man with a dog crossing the road further down the High Street, near the wool shop.

  He strode off downhill, feeling his feet slip sideways occasionally but always managing to stay upright.

  By the time he reached the wool shop he had lost sight of the man again. Jemima and Dave Douglas were coming out of the shop, Jemima clutching a bag in her woolly-gloved hand. Dave had his arm round Jemima’s waist, which must have helped to keep them both on their feet.

  ‘Morning, Mr Smith,’ said Dave with a beam. He didn’t appear to have suffered any ill-effects from his adventure on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Thanks for going out to look for David, Mr Smith,’ said Jemima. ‘I wasn’t looking forward to Christmas on my own.’

  ‘No problem, Mrs Douglas. What have you got there?’ asked Charlie politely. Even if those two were friends of Amaryllis’s, he could still treat them like normal members of the public, as long as Dave wasn’t getting into silly scrapes, that was.

  ‘Oh, just some beads,’ said Jemima. ‘I’m making a beaded case for David’s phone, to remind him to take it with him the next time.’

  ‘I sincerely hope there won’t be a next time,’ said Charlie. ‘Good idea, though. How do you learn to do something like that?’

  ‘I just look for instructions online,’ said Jemima. ‘There are a few Pinterest boards where people pin them, and then I’m in a Facebook group that specialises in craft techniques. We’ve all tried quilling and tatting and we’re going to have a go at stamping next week. Of course,’ she added modestly, ‘I’ve tried that out myself in my scrapbook, but I’m hoping to get a few tips about how to make it work better with special inks.’

  Charlie’s brain started to glaze over, and even Dave had the beginnings of a hunted look.

  ‘I mustn’t keep you standing around in the cold,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right, we’re
going to the café now for a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t usually go in the café but we’ve been stuck in the house and it’s nice to get out for a while.’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Would you like to join us, Mr Smith?’ said Dave. ‘You look as if you could do with something yourself.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, thanks,’ Charlie started to say, and then he glanced down towards the café, which was further on down the street, and saw a man and a dog going in the door. ‘Or maybe I will.’

  It was dim and warm inside the café, a perfect spot to hibernate or to sit out a major blizzard, and Charlie caught himself half-hoping for more snow so that he could justify remaining there and not having to return to the police station, which he had started to think of as his prison.

  He stood there staring round. The man and the dog had sat down at a small table, where the man was studying a menu, but to judge by the expression on the face of the waitress as she approached them, they wouldn’t be there for very long. Charlie doubted very much if the café owners welcomed dogs, even the quiet kind, worn down by life, who lay peacefully under the table and waited for the next bad thing to happen.

  ‘Are you going to sit down, Mr Smith?’ said Jemima. ‘They do a special offer in the mornings - a pot of tea and a scone for one pound fifty. You get jam as well.’

  Charlie sat down, but immediately jumped to his feet again when he heard a man’s voice raised above the general murmur of conversations about jam and debates about the merits of different kinds of tea.

  ‘He’s as clean as anyone here - cleaner, if anything. He isn’t doing any harm. Can’t you just leave him be?’

  Then, predictably, the waitress said something about health regulations and it being more than her job was worth…Charlie wasn’t one for riding a coach and horses through regulations, but even he felt indignant on behalf of the dog. The man scraped his chair back noisily, put on the large parka he had hung on the back of his chair, said ‘Come on, Buzz, we’re not wanted here,’ and pushed the café door so hard that the open and closed sign rattled on its hook as he left.

  Charlie went after them, pursued by faint cries from Jemima about butter and margarine.

  The man set off down the High Street at a fair speed, considering the conditions, then he seemed to become aware of Charlie’s footsteps behind him and walked even faster. Now he was dragging the reluctant dog along, its paws sliding on the ice.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ called Charlie. ‘I just want a word with you -’

  His strides were longer than the other man’s and he didn’t have a reluctant dog to slow him down either. He caught up with them down near the supermarket, which was busy for a week-day, having not long re-opened. He clamped his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I need to speak to you - nothing to worry about.’

  The man glanced at him, a scornful expression spreading over his face. ‘Oh, yes?’

  Charlie had been planning to take the man and dog up to the police station to have a chat, but now he rapidly decided he wouldn’t get any sensible answers if he did so. Better to talk on neutral territory.

  ‘Come on, we’ll go round to the Queen of Scots. They don’t mind dogs, as far as I know.’

  He looked at his watch. ‘They’re usually just about open at this time. Come on, we can get a coffee in there if you don’t want a drink.’

  They trudged on round the corner and towards the Queen of Scots. Charlie hoped nobody he knew would be in there at this time of day. But with Jock McLean away, Christopher and Amaryllis were a bit less likely to be there.

  ‘Nice parka,’ he commented idly. ‘I suppose that keeps the cold out a bit.’

  ‘Has she complained? She gave it to me - I didn’t take it.’

  ‘Um - nobody’s complained. Except Mrs Petrelli at the restaurant. She doesn’t like you hanging around.’

  He was sorry this topic had cropped up before they even got to the pub.

  ‘It wasn’t her,’ muttered the man. He huddled into the parka a bit more, pulling the collar up almost to his ears. He could do with some warmer gloves, thought Charlie, and definitely a hat too. Not that he was about to donate his, which in any case belonged to the West Fife police force.

  They ordered coffee at the Queen of Scots, and the landlord didn’t say anything about the dog, which stretched out on the floor by the radiator as if it had been doing it for years.

  ‘So what do you want?’ said the man.

  ‘This complaint from Mrs Petrelli makes things a bit awkward - it means we can’t just ignore you sleeping rough around town. Have you really got nowhere you could go?’

  ‘Somebody said there’s a place in Rosyth,’ said the man. ‘Only that’s a bit out of reach at the moment.’

  ‘Do you know anybody here in Pitkirtly?’

  The man looked suddenly evasive. ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What made you come here then?’

  ‘Dunno. It seemed like a nice place. I was on my way somewhere else when the snowstorm started. Somewhere nearby.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  The man slurped his coffee. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I’d better be going now.’

  On a hunch, Charlie said suddenly, ‘Did you see the armed robbery that took place on Christmas Eve? Round the corner, at the jeweller’s shop near the supermarket?’

  ‘You can’t pin that on me,’ said the man. Oddly, he seemed over-confident, as if he knew something Charlie and the police didn’t know.

  ‘Would you like to help us with our enquiries?’ Charlie had a brainwave. ‘Until the roads re-open, that is?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking three meals a day and a roof over your head. You won’t get a better offer.’

  ‘What about the dog? I’m not going anywhere without him.’

  ‘OK, and the dog.’

  Charlie had plenty of time to wonder if he was doing the right thing as they trekked back up through the town. It had seemed sensible enough in the Queen of Scots - as did many far-fetched ideas - but in the cold bright light of day he started to get an uneasy feeling about it. Still, the snow might be gone any day now. Then he could turn out the man and his dog on to the streets again with a clear conscience.

  He popped into the pet shop on the way, and bought a misshapen dog chew that they were selling at a reduced price.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, presenting it to the dog.