Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 25 Normal or what?

  They were all going home. A mini-bus full of officers from other stations had arrived, not far behind the snow-plough, and in the continuing absence of Inspector Forrester Charlie Smith had to hand over to Inspector Farmer from somewhere just along the coast, who had spent Christmas trapped at home with his family and was now eager to get back to work. He claimed to be disappointed to have been sent, even temporarily, to a backwater like Pitkirtly, but Charlie didn’t think he would feel like that for long, not with all this mayhem going on.

  It didn’t often happen that they handed over to a whole new shift like this, but the little Pitkirtly team had been working solidly for days instead of relieving each other every so often, and they were all due to spend at least a couple of days sleeping and, allegedly, being with their families. It was frustrating to be off the case - off both the cases - especially after the discovery of the golden peacock, but it did make sense.

  Despite seeing the sense of it, Charlie was still last aboard the mini-bus for his journey home. There were two reasons for this: one was that he kept remembering more things he had to pass on to Inspector Farmer, and dashing back into the building to tell him, and the other was that he insisted on taking the dog with him and the consensus of opinion on the bus was that they didn’t want that smelly old mutt in with them. In the end he had to pull rank to get the driver to agree to having the dog on board. Even then Charlie had to sit segregated from everyone else. Not that there were many once the new shift had decanted at Pitkirtly.

  Sergeant McDonald stayed at the police station as part of the hand-over, and Karen Whitefield lived within walking distance of the station so she had been going home every night anyway, and that just left Charlie, Constable Burnett and the officer driving the bus, who seemed determined to demonstrate everything he had ever learned about skid control at police driving school.

  They didn’t talk to each other as they might have done if they hadn’t all been completely exhausted. In fact, as they slipped and slid along the main road Charlie found his eyes closing, despite his churning thoughts and, as the journey progressed, churning stomach. The dog was already asleep, resting its head on his still damp boots. His last waking thought was that he hoped he would have time to dry them out thoroughly, putting newspaper inside them to soak up the last of the moisture, before having to wear them again. Nothing was quite as disheartening as wet feet, in his experience.

  He woke with a start to find the mini-bus had stopped right outside his house and the driver was waiting with exaggerated patience for him to wake up and get off. His head was full of sleep, the inside of his mouth felt as if it had been sandpapered, and he had cramp in one of his legs. The dog, in contrast, bounced into life as soon as it woke up, pulled at the lead as they climbed down from the mini-bus, and started barking at the driver when he gave Charlie a hand with his bag.

  ‘Sleep well.’

  Was it Charlie’s imagination or was there something scornful in the man’s manner? Oh well, why bother? The next time he wouldn’t leave his car at home and get the bus to work just because of a sprinkling of snow. If he’d had his car with him he could have left Pitkirtly before all this kicked off.

  As he walked up his garden path, he shook his head, knowing that he wouldn’t have left once the armed robbery had happened. He couldn’t have abandoned his junior colleagues to deal with that and then the murder. He glanced down at the dog. It didn’t show any signs of grief or post-traumatic stress. But then, life on the streets couldn’t have been a picnic for a dog. He wondered where it had come from originally, since he didn’t think most dogs these days started out by living rough. Did it remember the security of having a roof over its head and two meals a day, come rain or shine? Or did dogs have memories a bit like goldfish?

  As he opened the front door and then took the dog through to the back and let it out in the garden, he realized what these weird thoughts meant. They were a sign of serious sleep deprivation. He needed to catch up, and soon, before he went and did something unbelievably stupid, such as drinking himself into a coma. Although that was tempting in some ways, Charlie didn’t really believe in giving into that kind of impulse, mainly because he was old enough to know how much he would regret it the next day.

  He found an old soup bowl and filled it with water for the dog, found a few sausages in the fridge and cooked them. When they were ready he divided them out, called the dog in from the garden, put the kettle on to make a cup of tea, and sat down in the living-room for a few minutes.

  When he woke up it was dark, but there was an eerie pale light outside in the street. He groaned as he stood up and looked out. It was snowing again. The dog, who had been sitting on his feet again, ran to the back door and whined to go out, then stood by the open door wondering if it really wanted to. Charlie left it to make up its mind, allowing flakes to whirl in and out again randomly, some of them falling on the laminate floor and melting there. He’d better try not to slip on the wet patches. That would be the last straw, spending New Year in hospital. And what would happen to the dog then? It would definitely be on the fast track to nowhere.

  Annoyingly, he was worrying about work. He glanced at his watch. Four o’clock. Had they got anywhere with the golden peacock? Had they dispatched the homeless man’s body safely to the police morgue for the post-mortem, or was it still lying at the undertaker’s in Pitkirtly where he’d arranged to put it? Was there anybody in forensics to do the analyses that would be needed?

  He decided to call in and see how things were going, then changed his mind before he had even picked up the phone. They wouldn’t want to be bothered with phone calls from him when they were in the middle of two enquiries. He wondered how they would get on if they decided to re-interview Amaryllis and Christopher. But there should be no reason to do that unless something new and urgent cropped up in connection with the murder investigation. Anything else could keep until the usual team were back in a few days’ time. Charlie had volunteered to work over New Year as well as Christmas. Both festivals tended to be fairly low-key in Pitkirtly, only of course this year was already looking a bit different. With the snow there wouldn’t be so many people getting drunk and disorderly, and that was just fine by him.

  The flakes whirled faster and faster, and soon there was practically a full-scale blizzard blowing in through the back door. He noticed the dog had gone out, and now there was no sign of it.

  He called, ‘Here, boy!’

  He whistled.

  He remembered the homeless man calling it ‘Buzz’ and reluctantly shouted the name into the snowstorm.

  He considered whether the dog could have got out of the garden somehow. He thought the fence was fairly secure; as a police officer Charlie looked after his fences and gates well, knowing that opportunist crime was rife and many casual burglars would be deterred even by having to open a gate.

  In the end he put on some shoes - not the wet boots, he wasn’t completely insane yet - and went out to look for the dog. He found it curled up in the lee of the garden hut on a piece of plastic sheeting he sometimes used to transport clippings to the tip. Of course, that would be the kind of spot where it was accustomed to sleeping. It looked up at him pathetically.

  ‘No, I’m not giving you any money for drink,’ he said to it. He dragged it bodily into the house and found a blanket for it to sit on, under the radiator in the hall.

  If the snow got worse again, he might not be able to get back into work for days. Charlie Smith smiled to himself and fetched a bottle of whisky and a glass from the kitchen cupboard. No phone calls, no compulsion to help homeless men and their dogs, no more microwave turkey dinners. This was the life.

  It still felt like the middle of the night, although he saw that a grey light had sneaked through the gap in the curtains, when the phone rang, paused and rang again until he groaned, reached over and picked it up. The dog, lying next to him, stretched sleepily. When had he agreed to let the dog sleep on his b
ed?

  ‘Charlie Smith.’

  ‘Good. We were hoping to catch you,’ said Inspector Farmer’s annoyingly wide-awake voice. ‘There’s something you can do today… It’s about this golden peacock of yours.’