Crime in the Community

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 11 The morning after the weird weekend

  Finding Big Dave and Mrs Stevenson ensconsed in the kitchen presiding over breakfast when you got up in the morning was enough to make anyone wish they had had a long lie. Much as Christopher liked both of them, he would never have dreamed of asking them to stay the night, and certainly not together, perish the thought squire. He wished people would stay in the pigeon holes where he had put them, and not hop around from one to another, bringing chaos and confusion in their wake. If only he could have assigned either Amaryllis or Simon to an appropriate pigeon-hole, he felt his life might have been quite a lot simpler at this point. But he just didn't think he had a suitable place to put them, since he had never met anyone like either of them, and had never even conjured them up in his imagination either.

  Christopher slid into a chair and with a fairly good grace accepted an offer of dark brown tea from Mrs Stevenson. He doubted if he had the energy even to brew himself a cup after a restless night during which he re-lived the bee buzzing past and the determined shove between the shoulders several times. And he kept thinking there were spots of blood dotted over his hands, his shirt, his face, the banisters, the bathroom mirror, even now on the table in front of him. He rubbed at an imaginary spot just in front of his tea cup.

  ‘There isn’t any blood,’ said Big Dave. ‘Who do you think you are? – Lady Macbeth?’

  He and Mrs Stevenson hadn’t shown any surprise at Christopher’s appearance the previous evening, and had helped him to decide to have a shower and put his clothes in the wash, not exactly bullying him into these decisions but not letting him do anything else. They had made him drink far too many cups of the extra strong tea, but with lots of sugar ‘for the shock’, and Big Dave had had to restrain Mrs Stevenson from personally supervising Christopher in the shower, a memory that made him cringe. He thought he might have to be eternally grateful to them, a burden he didn’t much want to bear.

  He noticed the parcel wasn't on the kitchen table.

  'Have you posted it already?' he commented casually. 'I didn't know the Post Office was open this early.'

  'We thought you'd taken it out to post,' said Mrs Stevenson – he didn’t think he would ever be able to think of her as Jemima, no matter how many times she followed him into the shower.

  'Has it gone?'

  Oddly, Christopher's first reaction to the disappearance of the parcel of money was one of jubilation: he wouldn't have to deal with the money or any of the repercussions himself, it was now officially someone else's problem. Unfortunately just as it lumbered out of the starting blocks, this first comforting reaction was overtaken by a different, altogether more alarming one. What if Amaryllis had taken the parcel? No, rephrase that: Amaryllis must have taken the parcel. It was just the kind of thing she would do, entering the house in the middle of the night by the secret entrance, the location of which Christopher still couldn't quite pin down, and stealing the wrapped up wads of cash from right under their noses. She was probably on the way to the airport right now to fly off somewhere exotic and do something indescribably evil with the money.

  No, wait a minute. She had probably been stopped on her way to the airport by a secret government organisation of which only two people in the country were aware, and taken to an abandoned mineshaft somewhere to moulder away until -

  No. Wait another minute. Amaryllis had obviously swanned off with the money - not to do something dreadful, but to live in luxury for the rest of her life in a secret hiding place where nobody could track her down again. For at least two minutes Christopher could feel nothing apart from envy. He wasn't bothered one way or another about the luxury, but not being tracked down sounded like an extremely attractive option.

  Being tracked down... excavating a little among all the envy he discovered a tiny sensation of disquiet. What if she had shared the secret of the parcel with Simon Fairfax and was even now in the shiny black car on her way to the abandoned mineshaft? Christopher's conscience was rather overdeveloped, possibly as a result of always having had to look after a younger and more unruly sibling. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to shrug this off and ignore the danger Amaryllis had placed herself in, which he had to admit was partly as a result of his careless attitude to the parcel of money from the start. He should either have handed it over to the police when they had searched the house - although he had secretly enjoyed the suspense of wondering if they would stumble on it themselves - or, failing that, he should have tried to use one of these bank night safes he had often seen but didn't really understand, or even gone to the bus station and put the parcel in a locker - if the lockers were still open, which knowing bus stations and the facilities therein, they probably weren't. Anyway, it was too late to start worrying about bus stations now.

  On the other hand, he could at least see if Amaryllis was all right. Sighing at the idea of skipping breakfast - especially as Big Dave and Mrs Stevenson had pushed the boat out and cooked the dodgy-looking kippers they had found at the back of the freezer - he slurped his tea and set out to save her. Or not, as the case might be.

  He wished, as he hurried back along the road and down the street leading to the harbour, then round the corner to Merchantman Wynd with its odd associations, that he had been modern enough to exchange mobile numbers with the woman. It would have saved quite a bit of leg work. It would be interesting to see, though, the next time he summoned up the interest to step on the bathroom scales, if all this exercise had kept his weight down, or if that would be counterbalanced by the increased intake of fish and chips. Christopher wasn't really too bothered either way.

  Where was her flat again? Everything looked different in daylight. He wondered if he had dreamed seeing her the night before? No, he hadn't, because there she was again, sitting on the balcony of the uncharacteristically upmarket little block of apartments. The windows at the other side of the building must have a great view across the Forth on a clear day. Even a misty day would have its own charms, he supposed. This Monday morning the weather was neither one thing nor the other - lots of greyish-white clouds about, no rain yet, no sign of blue sky.

  'Amaryllis!' he called as softly as possible, so as not to attract attention.

  She didn't look up from her newspaper. He tried again. When she still didn't move, Christopher had a couple of very scary moments, imagining that Simon Fairfax, or indeed one of the other dangerous people who had suddenly appeared in Pitkirtly, had killed her and left her propped up in the corner of the balcony with a coffee cup in her hand.

  She glanced up.

  'Christopher!'

  He couldn't tell whether she was pleased to see him or not.

  'I'm still not offering to take you to Tunisia as a white slave,' she said with a grin.

  'Morocco.'

  'Do you want to come up? Or will I come down?'

  'Have you got the parcel?' said Christopher urgently.

  'The what?'

  'The parcel!' He was about to elaborate when he noticed that one of the neighbours had appeared on an adjoining balcony, watering-can at the ready, obviously intent on listening to the conversation while pretending to water his hanging baskets. ‘Too obvious, idiot,' muttered Christopher. He didn't usually mutter to himself quite so much, or call people idiots for that matter, but circumstances had driven him to it.

  'Go to the front door and I'll buzz you in,' she said, surreptitiously pointing at the man with the watering-can.

  Christopher had been right: the view from the front room was amazing. You could even see the Forth Bridges if you craned your neck in the right direction. Looking the other way, the familiar shapes of Longannet Power Station and the Grangemouth oil refinery were far enough away to enhance the landscape rather than being blots on it.

  The apartment was fairly empty and basic. He guessed that she didn't want it to reveal anything about her personality.

  ‘So – are you going to tell me about last night?’ said Amaryllis, coming in from the balcony and
leaning on the living room door frame.

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘No need to put on that innocent expression for me, Christopher Wilson,’ she said, and he saw the primary school teacher in her for the first time. ‘Shots fired in one of those boring street further down the town - and then you come casually round the corner spattered with blood and - ‘

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I know shots when I hear them,’ she said. ‘And I saw you. You were out of it. Something bad happened. You thought you needed me but you didn’t. You needed to go straight home and get Jemima Stevenson to make you ten cups of tea with sugar.’

  ‘Are you psychic or what?’ snapped Christopher. He suddenly found his legs weren’t supporting him very effectively. He glanced round wildly for somewhere to sit down. Amaryllis took a step away from the door frame and pushed a wooden chair towards him. He grabbed it, held it still to make sure it wouldn’t slide out from under him, and sank into it.

  ‘Or what,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’m not psychic, I just have more experience than most people of tricky situations that involve guns, so I know shots when I hear them. I know the after-effects and the glazed look innocent bystanders get when they survive something like that… I’m not proud of it. It’s just what’s happened in my life.’

  He stared at her. ‘What does it all mean? Why is it happening here? Those things don’t happen in Pitkirtly.’

  ‘I don’t know yet… Did you see anybody you recognised?’

  ‘Only Simon Fairfax, but that was afterwards. He wasn’t involved in it.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I can’t be. You know that!’ He couldn’t help a note of exasperation entering his voice. She should know by now that he was just an innocent bystander in all this.

  'So what's this about a parcel?' said Amaryllis coolly and calmly.

  'The parcel with - you know what - in it.'

  'Parcel? Oh - the fish and chips!'

  'We decided it would be best to re-wrap it and post it to the police anonymously,' he said, feeling obscurely proud of this simple little plan.

  'Yes, that sounds like the kind of thing you would do,' she replied, squashing the pride completely flat.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, it's a good idea but what about fingerprints? and DNA?'

  'The kids said that too.... We wore gloves.'

  'Hmm,' said Amaryllis.

  'So - have you got it?'

  'Who - me?'

  'Yes, of course you. Who else would sneak into the house and take it in the middle of the night without so much as a by-your-leave?'

  'I don't know,' said Amaryllis. 'But it definitely wasn't me. Are you absolutely sure it isn't still in the house?'

  He thought about it.

  'Big Dave and Mrs Stevenson haven't seen it. And the kids didn't say anything.'

  'Didn't say anything?' she said sceptically. 'Isn't that a bit suspicious?'

  'Not really. They don't say a lot normally. Well, except for Marina arguing with Caroline, that is.'

  'Is there anything you're not telling me about this parcel?' she demanded suddenly, after searching his face with those grey-blue eyes, hard as marbles and almost as swirly.

  'No - um, yes,' he said. Her denial rang true - not that he was the best person to detect lies, in fact quite the contrary. 'Simon Fairfax.'

  'Simon Fairfax gave you the parcel?'

  'No, a different man gave me it. He might have been American, but I’m no good at accents. It was Simon Fairfax who told me it was bugged.'

  'Bugged?'

  'Yes, you know, with bugs - the kind of thing the security service uses. For tracking.'

  'Tracking... ‘ She laughed.

  'So you definitely haven't got it?'

  'Definitely not. Wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole. Simon Fairfax must be slipping.'

  For a moment those eyes looked into the middle distance at something he didn't want to know about, and then they re-focussed on him. She was smiling rather unpleasantly.

  'We could try turning it back on him, of course,' she said slowly.

  'What do you mean?'

  'We could bug this other man. The American. And I mean really bug him. He'd be furious.'

  'But how - ?'

  Christopher felt as if he was trapped in an odd and slightly surreal game where he could only ask questions - and only silly ones at that - and Amaryllis would never give him a straight answer, but he was supposed to work out what was going on. It was like going to the cinema with the Delphic Oracle.

  She went to a desk in the corner of the living-room and unlocked a drawer. He half-expected her to bring out a Colt 45 or similar weapon; he was convinced she must have worked in the police - maybe even Special Branch if it still existed - or possibly still did. He hoped it was nothing more sinister than that.

  She brought out a very slim envelope, which she put in her handbag.

  'Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies,' she said to Christopher cryptically. 'Let's go.'