Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10)

by Cecilia Peartree

  Charlie was giving him a quizzical look. ‘What makes you think Amaryllis is in danger?’

  ‘She doesn’t usually tell me before she does something risky,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s only afterwards, when she can’t avoid it any longer.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Charlie.

  ‘It won’t be her that’s in danger,’ said Jock. ‘It’ll be somebody else – an unsuspecting bystander.’

  ‘OK,’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s do this methodically. I’ll take the alpaca farm, Jock can take the garden centre and Christopher takes the woods. Have you got your mobiles on you?’

  Christopher held his phone up. Jock mumbled something. It sounded like ‘Teacher’s pet’.

  Charlie sighed, and reached into his pocket. He threw something to Jock. ‘My spare mobile.’

  ‘You’ve got a spare mobile and you keep it charged up?’ squeaked Jock.

  ‘No, I just thought you might like to carry it around anyway,’ growled Charlie, and crossed the road to investigate the concealed entrance.

  Jock played with the phone buttons for a minute. ‘Do you want me to take the woods?’ he enquired.

  ‘No, of course not!’ said Christopher. ‘I can manage the woods. Easily. I’ll soon see there’s nothing in there.’

  ‘Nothing except big bad wolves and old women who live in gingerbread houses!’ called Jock after him as he turned on his heel and headed swiftly for the tall trees that were about to be swallowed up in the sea mist. Just as characters in fairy tales tended to be swallowed up by big bad wolves, he told himself, and then wished he hadn’t. Instead of being able to laugh at this ridiculous fantasy as he walked between two evil-looking trees, Christopher began to see faces in the gnarled trunks and to hear things rustle in the undergrowth like snakes coming for his legs. It was all very unpleasant. And not like him at all. Either he was under a spell or it wasn’t a good idea to do this sort of thing after a few pints of Old Pictish Brew.

  There was a banging sound somewhere in the world outside the wood. He gave a start, almost a jump. He told himself it was a door banging sharply closed in the wind, even although there was no wind. He had nothing to be scared of. It was all in his mind.

  There was a louder rustling in a shrub just ahead, close to one of the trees with a twisted, sneering face embedded in its trunk. Christopher took a step back.

  A head emerged from the bush.

  He very nearly screamed, before realising that the head wasn’t that of a cinematic monster, or a werewolf, or a wild man of the woods as his subconscious had tried to tell him, but that it was attached to an animal of rather mild appearance, with a comical expression and a long neck covered with non-threateningly fluffy hair.

  So this was what an alpaca looked like.

  But how did you catch one?

  Christopher glanced around to see if there was anything he could use as a lead. A piece of rope, or, failing that, a long creeper of the kind that was almost impossible to tear with your bare hands if it had wound itself round your forsythia, for instance, but that would probably not hold your weight if you tried to use it to abseil down the Forth Bridge and escape from the foreign spies who were after you.

  Now he knew for sure he had been spending too much time with Amaryllis.

  The alpaca sauntered towards him. Did they bite? How could he have avoided learning nothing whatsoever about them during years of formal education and the experience he had gained as an archivist and as director of the Cultural Centre?

  He stepped back again. Was it better to stand up to them or to run away as fast as you could?

  ‘Don’t move,’ said a woman’s voice behind him.

  He almost screamed out loud for the third time in five minutes.

  ‘I think I can catch him while you’re distracting him,’ she said. ‘Try and look as if you’re watching him.’

  Of course Christopher was watching the alpaca – in the same way an arachnophobe might watch a spider in the room, to make sure they knew where it was at all times.

  The animal came closer. And closer.

  Then there was a kind of scuffle, and the woman behind him said, ‘You can move now.’

  He half-turned and saw that the alpaca had a makeshift lasso round its neck, and a woman was clinging on to the other end of the rope.

  ‘Thanks,’ she added. ‘I’ve been trying to catch him all day... Jane Blyth-Sheridan.’

  She held out her other hand rather regally. He wondered if she expected him to kiss it. Judging by her appearance, she might well be of a social class where that sort of thing went on. Pearls, a silky-looking cardigan, and even Christopher, with his well-known indifference to women’s appearance, couldn’t fail to notice she was wearing full make-up including lipstick.

  He shook her hand quickly and then took a step away from her.

  ‘And you are?’ she said, not imperiously but almost as if she were interested.

  ‘Christopher Wilson,’ he muttered. ‘Cultural Centre.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course!’ she cried. ‘I came down to a lecture there last autumn. The archive collections and how to use them. Fascinating.’

  The alpaca began to move away again, and she added, ‘Must get Algernon back in the stables for the night. They’re quite delicate, you know. Sometimes I wonder if I should take them south in the winter. Only of course the travel would upset them.’

  The alpaca, having had a taste of freedom, didn’t seem to want to get back in his stable, but after a while, to the sound of encouraging noises from Jane Blyth-Sheridan and some extra help on the rope from Christopher, they managed to emerge from the wood and cross the road.

  Jock was standing on the verge by Charlie’s car with a dazed expression on his face. There was no sign of Charlie.

  ‘It’s an alpaca,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Jock. ‘But something’s happened – in there.’

  He gestured towards the garden centre sign.

  ‘Where’s Charlie?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Come along – we’ve got to get Algernon inside before he makes another run for it,’ said Jane Blyth-Sheridan.

  ‘We’ll be back in a minute,’ said Christopher to Jock as he was towed away by the woman and the alpaca. ‘Just stay where you are.’

  ‘I’ll need to phone the police,’ mumbled Jock. ‘But I don’t know how to switch this thing on.’

  He was waving Charlie’s spare mobile around as if he imagined this might activate it.

  The police, thought Christopher as Jane Blyth-Sheridan took out some sort of remote control device and the heavy gates across the entrance to her property swung open. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go in there with her, but it probably wasn’t a matter for the police – yet.

  Chapter 4 Witness

  The hotel had fallen into disrepair since it had been empty. Amaryllis didn’t follow local news – except for a brief spell when she had been standing for West Fife Council – so she didn’t know whether it was expected to re-open as a hotel or whether the building would be demolished and luxury flats built. She wasn’t in a position to complain about this, since she lived in a luxury flat in a small block that had been built on the site of the town gaol, a historic structure that she knew certain people had tried quite hard to save from being knocked down. But that had all happened before she even arrived in Pitkirtly, so she felt no moral qualms about it.

  One of the doors round at the back was wide open, and someone had evidently been in trying to remove the fixtures and fittings. She saw that they had left an industrial scale kitchen sink half in and half out of the doorway, and an old toolbox lying on the ground just outside.

  On closer inspection she found it wasn’t such an old toolbox. It contained a workman-like set of screwdrivers and assorted cables, neatly coiled, on the top layer. She didn’t want to get distracted by this, otherwise she would have investigated the layer underneath too. For all she knew, the tools were for fixing car engines. She had never been able to su
mmon up much enthusiasm about the internal workings of engines. It was enough that they did more or less what they were designed to do.

  As she walked on past it, she reflected that in a place like Pitkirtly it probably wasn’t the case that rough sleepers, squatters or travellers had colonised the hotel and its grounds, although she wouldn’t put it past some of the local youths to come up here and experiment with drugs or sex, or just to ride motorbikes aimlessly round and round annoying the neighbours. On the other hand, the neighbours weren’t all that close by.

  She headed over to the fence that separated the hotel grounds from the alpaca farm. It was a sturdy structure with barbed wire laced along the horizontal struts at regular intervals. She doubted if it was electrified. But there was also a thick hedge of some prickly shrub just behind the fence. She looked ruefully down at her thin summer fleece – Amaryllis wouldn’t have dreamed of going out in a T-shirt and shorts, whatever the weather, but she had found a lightweight black fleecy jacket in the sales, while helping Jemima to get a new fawn cardigan to replace her old fawn cardigan, and bought it immediately. The sales assistant had tried to put her off it, claiming it wasn’t a summer colour and had been left on sale accidentally when it should have been stored away, ready for the dark days of autumn and winter, but Amaryllis had told her it was for a secret spying mission and that had done the trick. On her way out of the shop she had seen the girl whispering to the next assistant along, and then they had given her identical hard stares.

  It was all part of the fun.

  Amaryllis followed the fence round. She was hoping to find a weak spot.

  There wasn’t a weak spot. However, she got into the garden that backed on to the alpaca farm quite easily, as it was bounded on the hotel grounds side by nothing more than a rustic wooden fence and some artistically arranged shrubs and small trees. Evidently the occupants of the low ranch style house either had nothing to hide or they were confident of their security in other ways. The two large dogs that appeared from nowhere while she was examining the back fence probably formed part of their defences, and she didn’t wait around to find out what other arrangements they had made. She hopped over the rustic fence at the other side of their grounds and found herself back at the garden centre.

  This time there were two large greenhouses between her and the display area where Dave had been taken ill.

  She couldn’t see much chance of getting into the alpaca farm from here either.

  It seemed odd that the alpaca had escaped at all when the fences were so high and so sturdy. Someone must have been very careless, or alternatively very determined the animal should leave. Were there any animal rights campaigners in Pitkirtly? Amaryllis thought there probably weren’t. Perhaps someone had been trying to steal the animal. Perhaps...

  ‘You have two minutes to show yourself. Come out with your hands up.’

  Amaryllis didn’t often experience the feeling of having jumped out of her skin, but on this occasion the voice that boomed at her, apparently from nowhere, had that effect.

  She wasn’t frightened to the extent of being stupid, though, so she crept round the corner of one of the greenhouses and tried the door. She would feel happier under cover, and the greenhouse looked well enough built to stand up to attack from anything short of a tank assault. It was almost unthinkable that the garden centre owner had a tank stashed away among the ride-on mowers and assorted machines for trimming lawn edges.

  The handle turned and she was inside, crouching behind the staging. There were plants growing densely on the floor under it as well as on top, and she saw another door at the far end. So far, so good.

  ‘I know you’re in there. Come out now – it’s your last chance.’

  He must be speaking through a megaphone. Or maybe he was in the shop area and there were speakers out here. His voice reverberated across the whole site.

  A pause. She crawled along to the other end of the greenhouse. At least that might confuse him a bit. She reached up and tried the door. Damn! It seemed to be locked.

  ‘I’ve got a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it. I’ve had enough of all this harassment.’

  That part was a bit strange. Amaryllis could understand him being cross with someone who had made their way into the place after hours and who might be intent on causing damage, but her intrusion couldn’t be described as harassment by any stretch of the imagination.

  There was a bang, another one and a strangled cry, and silence.

  It seemed so artificial and contrived that Amaryllis wondered for a moment if someone nearby had inadvertently turned up the volume on their television and let the latest murder mystery or thriller action boom out over surrounding area.

  She crawled back to the door she had come in at, and peered round it. She waited a few moments and then scurried to the shelter of the second greenhouse, from where she had a view of part of the garden centre display area. There was something lying on the ground – she couldn’t quite see what it was.

  Then, incongruously, Jock McLean appeared round the corner from the direction of the car park, shoes crunching on the gravel, and stood irresolute on the paving, staring downwards.

  Amaryllis didn’t know whether to shout at him to get out of the way. Wouldn’t that just attract unwanted attention from whoever had fired the gun, if it was a gun? Would they come back and shoot down Jock? She shuddered, rose to her feet and flung herself forward into the display area, by which time Jock had turned away and was retreating fast and didn’t see her.

  Apart from the fact that there was a man lying there on the paving stones near the petunias and quite likely bleeding to death, everything seemed perfectly normal.

  She hurried over to him, intent on trying to stop the bleeding. Presumably Jock had gone for help, although it would take a little while for any help to arrive. They couldn’t rely on the ambulance turning up in a timely way twice in the same day.

  It was too late to stop the flow of blood from the large wound in the man’s shoulder. She saw that almost at once. In fact there was hardly any visible blood at all. It must have stopped a while ago. Had he been moved after being shot? There hadn’t been any time for that before Jock’s arrival. Amaryllis was still frowning over this when the first reinforcements arrived. It was only Charlie Smith and an obviously reluctant Jock McLean, but they were better than nothing.

  ‘Keith Burnet’s on his way,’ said Charlie. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were there,’ said Jock accusingly. He had gone a bit pale, as almost anyone would after the kind of discovery he had made.

  ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ said Charlie, leaning down towards the man, though from a distance, and staring intently at him.

  ‘Yes, in fact...’ Amaryllis paused. She hadn’t yet got her thoughts in order, and she was oddly reluctant to make an idiot of herself in front of Charlie over this. It was unusual for her not to feel as if she were in control of the situation, even when she wasn’t.

  ‘What?’ Charlie straightened up and turned to her.

  ‘I was here all the time,’ she said slowly. ‘I heard the shot being fired, and yet...’

  ‘What is it?’ said Charlie.

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work. But I’d better wait and tell Keith.’

  She had almost forgotten, and she suspected Charlie had forgotten too, that he wasn’t a police officer any more. It must have been hard for him not to get involved now that he was on the scene of a very obvious crime.

  ‘Do you know him at all?’ asked Charlie now, gesturing to the dead man.

  ‘No,’ said Amaryllis. At least that was something definite.

  ‘Never seen him before,’ said Jock.

  ‘We’d better secure the scene,’ said Charlie. ‘As best we can.’

  ‘Difficult,’ said Amaryllis. ‘It’s easy enough to get into the site from that way.’ She indicated the way she had arrived. ‘You just have to climb over from the next garden. There are dogs, though... I couldn’t ge
t into the alpaca farm after all. Solid fences all round. With barbed wire. And a hedge of something or other.’

  ‘I couldn’t get in either,’ said Charlie. ‘I tried the gate and then I went down the road a bit and just inside the hotel grounds to suss out the fence, then I came back up and bumped into Jock. There might have been a shot, but I couldn’t hear anything much above the mowing. Those people around here certainly like to keep their lawns well under control...The hedge is probably berberis, by the way,’ he added.

  Amaryllis shook her head in disbelief. ‘First the forsythia, now this. I can’t believe you picked up all the garden language in the police.’

  ‘You’d be surprised what I picked up,’ he said.

  ‘Christopher’s managed to get into the alpaca place,’ Jock interrupted. ‘He’s there now.’

  ‘How did he do that?’ said Amaryllis. ‘No, don’t tell me – he charmed his way in. I could never get the hang of that.’

  Jock laughed. ‘He was being towed along by an alpaca last time I looked. If that’s got anything to do with charm... Oh, and there was a woman too.’

  ‘Of course there was,’ said Amaryllis. She glared at Jock. ‘Did you hear the shot, or was it muffled by the cry of a lonely owl?’

  ‘An owl?’ said Jock. ‘Of course I heard the shot. I was going to turn back but I heard voices as well, and I thought they must be doing target shooting or something.’

  ‘Voices?’

  ‘Well, a voice. I couldn’t hear what he was saying though.’

  ‘I heard it,’ said Amaryllis grimly.

  They had moved away from the man on the ground. It seemed wrong not to cover him up, but Amaryllis was well aware that they mustn’t do that. Charlie would have stopped them in any case. She hoped the police wouldn’t be too long.

  ‘What’s Dave’s car doing out there?’ said Charlie suddenly. ‘We should really get it moved. It could be vulnerable, on the edge of town here.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I’ve got the keys.’