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

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘It seems quite likely he knows Madeleine anyway,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Maybe she’s visited the family a few times in the past – once she was out of prison, that is. Perhaps she even went into the garden centre. You haven’t seen her, have you, Ashley?’

  ‘Not that I know of. This is going to sound awful, but I don’t look at all the customers properly. I mean, they come in and bring things to the till, and I take the payments and so on, but I don’t really notice what they look like, unless we’re very quiet at the time or something unusual happens. I didn’t see the other picture you had, either. Keith wouldn’t show me.’

  ‘He’s such a spoilsport,’ said Amaryllis.

  Ashley laughed. ‘Yes, it seems like that sometimes. But he takes it all very seriously. And it’s quite sweet too – he wants to protect me from all the bad stuff he has to deal with. He hates me getting involved in any of his cases, even round the edges.’

  ‘That’s how it should be.’ Jemima nodded in approval. Ashley was far too young and pale and sensitive to be expected to pile in and help the police the way she and Dave and the others had done over the years. She didn’t blame Keith at all for trying to keep his girl-friend out of it.

  It wasn’t long before Christopher appeared, apologising unnecessarily to them for leaving work ten minutes earlier than he should have done. He was clutching a crumpled piece of paper.

  ‘I found this under the table. We must have dropped it. I’m not sure if it’s any use.’

  Despite his responsible job and experience of dealing with all sorts of tricky situations, Christopher did still on occasion revert to being quite unsure of himself. Jemima found this endearing. She suspected other people, and she was trying hard not to think of Amaryllis here, found it irritating.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Jemima.

  She smoothed out the creases, straightened her glasses and read through the text. ‘Hmm. Interesting. It’s a newspaper report about the arrival of the alpacas. There’s a photo, but it’s awfully blurry.’

  Christopher took it back for another look. Amaryllis peered over his shoulder.

  ‘They’re trying to hide behind the animals,’ she said. ‘It looks as if they didn’t want their picture taken... You’re right, Jemima. It is interesting.’

  ‘I don’t know why they had to get such noticeable animals if they didn’t want to be seen,’ said Christopher.

  ‘The alpacas arrived as an unexpected gift from a family member with an interest in alpaca rescue,’ said Amaryllis, reading aloud from the report. ‘Ha! A family member who wanted to draw attention to them, more like.’

  ‘So the alpacas may have been Trojan horses, then,’ said Jock. He and Dave laughed long and loud. Jemima gave them her most disapproving look. None of it was very funny.

  ‘I wonder if they just came home and found the alpacas on the door-step,’ said Amaryllis. ‘And the press waiting to catch their reaction. It probably wouldn’t have worked otherwise – they could just have sent the horse-box away when it delivered them.’

  ‘It was a bit of a gamble anyway,’ said Christopher. ‘What if they hadn’t got anywhere to put them? Or if they turned them loose somewhere to fend for themselves... Though I suppose they couldn’t do that if it had already got into the press. Everybody in Pitkirtly would know who they belonged to.’

  ‘And everybody would know where the Blyth-Sheridans were,’ said Amaryllis. ‘So much for their low profile... I wonder if they were hiding from something – or someone.’

  ‘Not very many people saw them, did they?’ said Jemima. ‘And they didn’t get into the papers very often. There were some birth announcements at one time, and then there were the planning applications, and the Pony Club thing, but that was a good while ago. You’d expect people like that to be in the papers all the time, and at local events.’

  ‘We don’t have local events in Pitkirtly,’ said Dave dismissively.

  ‘We had the Christmas events, and that craft fair, and the art exhibition,’ said Jemima. ‘You’d think posh people like that would be interested in art.’

  ‘They weren’t all that posh,’ said Jock McLean. ‘Quite a few people have those double-barrelled names nowadays.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’ve always been double-barrelled,’ said Amaryllis thoughtfully. ‘It’ll just be some inheritance thing.’

  ‘All that land and the farm were in their family,’ said Jemima. ‘They were probably posh at one time. Compared to everybody else around here, anyway,’ she added. She tried not to sound too wistful. Her own ancestors, as she well knew, had been as humble as the next person’s. She had sometimes wanted to find a link to a family whose history had been well documented for centuries, but that was just laziness really. It would have saved her from doing all the work herself.

  But working on something you enjoyed didn’t kill you, she thought.

  Chapter 30 On the beach

  Christopher had been thinking about his encounter with the woman who had said she was Jane Blyth-Sheridan but who had turned out not to be. He knew he should have remembered more of what she said on that occasion. But you never expected to have to recall casual conversations like that in any detail, especially when they took place in the context of re-capturing stray alpacas. He knew she had told him something about the house being completely re-built and that she had mentioned the absent Madeleine, but that was about all really.

  Then there was Jemima’s insistence that she was also the woman they had seen with Mr Anderson on the beach near the doctor’s surgery. Christopher would have been hard pressed to find his way to the doctor’s if the need arose. He knew they had moved since his father was alive, when he had spent some hours on the phone trying to get them to pay attention. He hadn’t been able to locate them at all when he was having all that trouble with Caroline...

  ‘So that’s what we need to do next,’ he heard Amaryllis say.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  Amaryllis gave a theatrical groan. ‘I knew you weren’t listening,’ she said.

  ‘I was just going over things in my mind,’ he said. ‘Trying to get them straight.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.

  The door opened and Penelope Johnstone wandered in.

  She must have been surprised by the welcome she received, especially from Amaryllis, who seemed for a moment as if she might go and fling her arms round the woman.

  ‘Penelope!’ she cried. ‘We’ve been looking for you. Where have you been?’

  Penelope approached with caution, glancing round suspiciously. Her gaze homed in on the scones and she gave a tentative smile. ‘Scones! How lovely. I didn’t know Mr Smith had started doing these. Is there any jam?’

  ‘There’s strawberry and apricot,’ said Amaryllis. She stood up and pulled over an extra chair for Penelope. ‘Would you like a coffee? He’s got a new machine.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Penelope, sitting down with a thump. ‘I didn’t expect all this.’

  Christopher wondered what had brought her into the Queen of Scots at this time of day in the first place. She wasn’t a regular member of their little group, although not exactly unwelcome. He wondered how to ask her what she was doing here without somehow causing offence. But once she had placed her coffee order and buttered a scone, she volunteered the information herself.

  ‘I wondered if Jan might be in here,’ she told them. ‘I know she’s been helping out at the bar sometimes, and I can’t get any reply at the flat... I’ve been away for the weekend, up north. I brought her back some specialist wool to try out. In case she wants to stock it in the shop, you know.’

  ‘Specialist wool?’ said Jock McLean faintly.

  Jemima gave him a look. ‘There are all kinds of wool. You can get it from alpacas too, I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Penelope. ‘Phil Blyth-Sheridan was going to try and find a market for theirs.’

  There was a sudden hush.

  ‘Why were you looking for me, anyw
ay?’ Penelope continued cheerfully.

  Nobody seemed to want to reply.

  ‘Something’s happened,’ said Christopher at last.

  Penelope stared at him. He hoped she would guess exactly what had happened from his expression, but after a moment he realised she wasn’t going to do so. He explained the situation as concisely as he could. It wasn’t ideal to break the news of the deaths of two of her acquaintances – he wasn’t sure from what Amaryllis had told him whether they had been close friends or not - in the Queen of Scots with almost everybody she knew listening, but somebody had to tell her, and preferably before she read the headlines in the local paper.

  She was quiet for a few minutes after he had finished speaking. Then she sighed. ‘Oh, dear. I suppose it must have been the sister.’

  ‘The sister?’ said Amaryllis. ‘You mean Madeleine?’

  ‘They always did worry about her,’ said Penelope. ‘She got in with a bad crowd, I suppose. They didn’t talk about her much, but I did have a bit of a heart-to-heart with Jane at the gun club Christmas party a couple of years ago. I was a bit over-protective about Zak at the time...’

  Over-protective was one way of putting it, thought Christopher grimly, remembering the havoc Zak and his group of friends had caused in those days. Not to mention Zak’s father Liam.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Penelope, after a pause during which it was evident from the faraway expression in her eyes that she had been looking into the dimness of the past, ‘Jane told me that was nothing compared to what they had been through with Madeleine. Honestly, you’d think a girl would be less trouble.’

  ‘She wasn’t their daughter, though, was she?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Oh, no, of course not. She was Phil’s younger sister. But quite different from him. He would never have – anyway, best not to go into it now.’

  Christopher could see that Amaryllis was longing to prompt Penelope to go into it. He cleared his throat to step in.

  ‘We’ve found the newspaper reports online,’ said Jemima with uncharacteristic bluntness. ‘Is it right that she killed somebody?’

  ‘Well, not exactly... Well, yes, I suppose strictly speaking... It was an accident. Or at least that’s what the police and the courts decided. He got in her way. And she hit him with a wok.’

  ‘A wok?’ said Christopher, startled. He couldn’t imagine anybody in Pitkirtly admitting to owning a wok. Apart from possibly the staff at the Golden Peach.

  ‘It made quite a mess, I believe,’ said Penelope, lowering her voice. ‘Then there was the baby.’

  ‘Baby?’ said Christopher before he could tell himself not to ask any more silly questions.

  ‘Madeleine had a baby?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘That happened earlier, of course. While she was still at school.’

  ‘What happened to the baby?’ said Amaryllis. She had got up from the chair in her excitement and was standing over Penelope. ‘Was it a girl or a boy?’

  Penelope became flustered, not surprisingly. ‘I don’t know, dear. I never quite heard the whole story. I had to leave the party to get Liam home – he got himself into a bit of a state, I’m afraid. At one point it seemed that it might end in a duel, they got themselves so over-excited...He said there was something wrong with the whisky, but it was really because he’d taken a wee bit too much. Because we were all celebrating, that was. He didn’t really drink a lot normally.’

  Christopher had never said ‘Yeah, right’ in his life but he came very close to it at that moment. Instead he enquired, as casually as he could manage, ‘A duel?’

  ‘Oh, with targets,’ said Penelope, waving a hand as if to brush it all aside. ‘They used to settle all their arguments that way.’

  ‘A baby,’ said Amaryllis. She began to pace backwards and forwards. ‘I suppose he’d be about twenty now. Has he ever lived in Pitkirtly?’

  ‘I really don’t know any more than I’ve told you, dear,’ said Penelope.

  Before Amaryllis could move on to the serious interrogation techniques that were doubtless part of her armoury, a diversion occurred.

  Keith Burnet burst into the bar, chest heaving as if he had been running fast. Maybe it was just a coincidence that sirens were audible in the background at that moment.

  ‘Funny time to go jogging,’ said Jock.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Ashley, getting up and going over to him.

  ‘Good,’ gasped Keith, letting her put her arms round him, although surely it couldn’t have helped with his breathing. ‘You’re all still here. That makes things a bit simpler.’

  ‘What things?’ said Christopher. He had a dark, cold feeling of impending doom somewhere in his stomach or thereabouts.

  ‘For a start,’ said Keith, ‘it means you’re all still alive.’

  There was a gasp from several people.

  ‘And then,’ he continued, ‘it means none of you had anything to do with this. You’ve all given each other alibis.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Jemima.

  ‘Sit down for a minute,’ Charlie told him. ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’

  ‘Remember I’m on duty.’

  ‘I’ve got a new coffee machine. I got it off Mrs Petrelli.’

  The rest of them looked at each other. Amaryllis was the first to speak. ‘Mrs Petrelli? Why didn’t you tell me that?’

  Keith slumped in a chair. ‘Never mind the coffee machine. We had a call from a member of the public just after I left here – Mr Anderson’s been found on the beach.’

  Ashley gave a little squeak. ‘He isn’t...?’

  Keith shook his head wearily. ‘Not dead. But he’s obviously been attacked. He was lying on the beach unconscious, below the high-water-mark, with the tide coming in. If it isn’t attempted murder, I don’t know what it is.’

  The coffee machine hissed and whirred in the background as they all fell silent for a few minutes. The dark, cold feeling in Christopher’s stomach started to spread all round his body. He shivered.

  ‘There’s an awful draught from somewhere,’ said Jemima. ‘Did the door swing open again behind you, Sergeant Burnet?’

  ‘There’s a window open round at the front,’ called Charlie, manipulating the coffee machine as if he had been doing it for years. Wait a minute, wasn’t that the machine Giancarlo had used in the kiosk? Christopher hoped Amaryllis wouldn’t notice and get upset by the implication that the boy wouldn’t be coming back from America. Of course, it would be better if he didn’t. It would be hard for Amaryllis to keep up the ridiculous crush she had on him with the Atlantic between them. Or would it?

  He met Amaryllis’s eyes suddenly and blushed.

  She probably could read his thoughts. Even if she didn’t have some sort of natural ability to do so, she undoubtedly had access to advanced thought-reading equipment and could possibly even read them retrospectively after she had gone home that evening.

  ‘We might need to use the bar as an incident room,’ said Keith to Charlie. ‘Just while we establish whether there are any witnesses.’

  Charlie put the cup of coffee down on the table carefully. It was a cappuccino, and there was a lot of froth on top.

  ‘You never offered me a cappuccino,’ Amaryllis complained.

  ‘Presumably you’d have wanted a double espresso anyway,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ll get you one now if you like.’

  ‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’ Amaryllis simmered down again. She looked at Keith. ‘Has he gone to hospital?’

  ‘Yes – we managed to get an ambulance almost right away. They happened to be coming back from a hoax call in Kincardine. So, no problems with traffic jams on the motorway, thank God.’

  ‘Is he going to recover?’ asked Jemima, solicitous of people’s welfare as ever, even when she had no reason to be.

  ‘They think so. He’ll have a bit of a headache though.’ Keith took a long slurp of his cappuccino, or at least of the froth from the top. ‘How long have you been in here?’

  ‘A
bout an hour, or just over that,’ said Dave.

  ‘I was the last one here,’ said Christopher. ‘I had to finish something off at work.’ He suddenly became conscious of the timeline charts and the other bits and pieces on the table. He couldn’t decide whether to sweep them all together and shove them on the floor, or to spill something on the timeline, or lean on it in such a way that Keith couldn’t read it. In the end he did nothing – which he knew from experience was often the best option.

  In any case Keith didn’t show any interest in what was on the table. He looked as if he might still be seeing Mr Anderson’s battered body in his mind’s eye.

  ‘Do you think there was just one attacker or more?’ Amaryllis enquired.

  ‘Sssh now, Amaryllis – he doesn’t want to talk about it,’ Jemima murmured.

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Douglas. It will be public knowledge before too long,’ said Keith. ‘There were signs of quite a prolonged scuffle down on the beach. Could have been two or three people involved,’ he told Amaryllis.

  ‘A gang again?’ said Christopher, remembering the men from Cowdenbeath.

  ‘There’s been no gang activity here yet over the summer,’ said Keith. ‘It’s all moved to the far side of the bridges. Burntisland, Kirkcaldy. I think we’ve seen them off for a bit.’

  Dave shook his head. ‘They’ll be back.’

  ‘We’ll be waiting for them,’ said Keith.

  It all sounded too much like the Wild West for Christopher’s liking. He tried not to picture Amaryllis meeting the gang leader in Pitkirtly High Street in a kind of High Noon re-enactment.

  As if in tune with his thoughts, which was a very disturbing idea in itself, Jock McLean hummed a few bars of the song from the film. Keith frowned at him.

  ‘Did anyone see anything?’ persisted Amaryllis.

  ‘We haven’t had the chance to ask people to come forward yet,’ said Keith. ‘We’ll be mentioning that in the local paper when the story gets in there.’ His gaze fell on the items on the table. ‘What have you got here, anyway?’

  Chapter 31 Amaryllis and her imagination