4 Death at the Happiness Club

by Cecilia Peartree

  'As far as I can see, there was a shot fired, a neighbour reported it and the police came round and found bloodstains, and that's about it.'

  'For heaven's sake, man, you must know more than that!' exclaimed Jock. He took his pipe out of his pocket and examined it with a look of indignation. Jemima definitely wouldn't let him smoke in her house, and he couldn't very easily get up and go outside at the moment, although two crutches were propped against the end of the settee.

  'Amaryllis probably knows a bit more,' Christopher admitted, 'but she's round at the police station. I don't know why.'

  'This is ridiculous! The two of you make a good team. You should be pooling your resources.'

  'I'm not so sure about making a good team,' said Christopher. 'She has her own ideas about that. I was always last to be picked for teams at school, so there could be several other people ahead of me in the queue… Charlie Smith, for example.'

  'Charlie Smith? Hmph! You get in there and stake a claim before it's too late, that's my advice.'

  The idea of Jock McLean giving him romantic advice was so silly that Christopher started to laugh. He had to pretend he had seen something funny outside the window, then Jock insisted on struggling to his feet to see what it was, lurching into the coffee table and upsetting a couple of pot plants in the process.

  Christopher was picking up the debris when Dave came back.

  'Mind and be careful with that,' he said, glowering and looming over Christopher. 'It belonged to Jemima's granny.'

  'Her granny?' said Christopher. 'I didn't know pot plants ever lived that long.'

  'It's a Christmas cactus,' said Dave. 'Bursts out with pink flowers every so often.'

  A piece of the cactus came off in Christopher's fingers, and the spines dug into him. He tried to throw it under the table, but it overshot and landed at Jemima's feet as she brought in a tray of drinks.

  'What's that?' she said, peering down at her feet.

  'Sorry,' said Christopher. 'It slipped out of my hand.'

  Dave frowned at him censoriously, but obviously judged it best not to confess the whole thing to Jemima.

  'Have you boys solved the whole mystery then?' said Jemima, setting out the drinks on another coffee table.

  'It's so mysterious we don't even know what the mystery is,' said Christopher.

  'A gunshot… lots of blood… could be a murder,' said Jock. 'Is there anything in the paper?'

  'We shouldn't have to wait to see things in the paper,' said Christopher, knowing as he said it he was going to sound querulous but unable to stop himself.

  'It's better that way, dear,' said Jemima firmly. She returned to the kitchen and came back with another tray. It seemed to take forever for her to serve everyone, and then she found she had forgotten to get herself something, so Dave went off to make up her order.

  He brought the local paper back with him too.

  Jock, who had already wolfed down his venison and piccalilli sandwich, grabbed it and scanned the pages quickly.

  'Nothing there.' He flung in down on the floor. All the pages separated out and spread all over the space between him and Christopher, who temporarily abandoned his cheese sandwich to pick them up and reassemble the whole thing.

  'Wait a minute,' he said, staring at the bottom of a column. 'Look at this!'

  He held up the page. Three pairs of eyes peered at it.

  'I can't see it from over here,' said Dave reasonably.

  'You could if you gave in and got glasses,' said Jemima.

  'But you can't see it either,' he pointed out to her.

  'But these are different glasses,' she said. 'They're for family history work.'

  'Read it out, for God's sake,' growled Jock McLean.

  'Following an incident at the eastern end of Pitkirtly High Street on Friday, a spokesman for West Fife Constabulary issued a statement that police enquiries were ongoing.'

  There was a pause while everyone digested this.

  'They don't know what happened but they're trying to find out,' Christopher translated. 'So they're in the same boat as us.'

  'Not quite the same boat,' said Jock McLean. 'They've got witnesses, and forensics, and evidence.'

  'What about suspects, though?' said Christopher.

  'Well, has anybody seen the Frasers since this happened?' countered Jock. 'That Sean Fraser has a villainous look about him. The sisters aren't much better either. I never liked the look of any of them.'

  Since Jock almost never liked the look of anyone, this wasn't getting them anywhere. But his point about seeing the Frasers was a good one, Christopher decided.

  'Either they're in custody or they've gone,' said Dave. 'There's been no sign of them in town.'

  'And Maisie Sue didn't see them when she went up to the Happiness Club,' added Jemima.

  'They've maybe all shot each other in a multiple suicide, and the police know that but aren't telling,' said Jock.

  'But if they'd done that, Maisie Sue would have seen the bodies in the office, and there wasn't even any blood when she was there,' Jemima persisted.

  ‘According to her,’ said Jock darkly. ‘We can’t take Maisie Sue’s word for it. She’s got her own problems. Maybe she just went berserk with a gun in there and mowed them all down herself.’

  ‘And what did she do with the bodies?’ said Dave scornfully. ‘She bumped into Penelope on the way down the road – that wouldn’t have given her very long to dispose of three bodies, would it?’

  ‘There’s Penelope too,’ said Jock. ‘I wouldn’t trust her as far as I would throw her.’

  ‘Aye, and that wouldn’t be very far,’ said Dave. ‘She’s a well-built woman.’

  ‘You could move a body easily enough if you had a car,’ said Jemima, sipping daintily from her tea-cup. ‘Didn’t she say there were some white vans in the yard behind the Happiness Club?’

  ‘And a Porsche,’ said Dave, sheer envy apparent in his tone. Christopher doubted if he would want to trade in his scary pick-up truck, though, even for a Porsche. ‘But you wouldn’t want to spoil the upholstery moving a body in that, though.’

  ‘You might if you were desperate,’ said Christopher, realising it was time he added something to the discussion instead of just sitting there as if he were watching Wimbledon on television, his head going from side to side as the subject was batted backwards and forwards. He wished Amaryllis would hurry up and appear, the way she always did in the end. He didn’t like the idea of her spending all that time with ‘Charlie’ Smith, even if she had spent hours in the past trying to find new ways of annoying him and had once compared him to a moth-eaten blood-hound. Amaryllis would almost certainly know what they could do to find out more. Although in some ways it was more relaxing being on the outside of an investigation than in the middle, as had happened before.

  The door-bell rang and made them all jump.

  'What if it's the police?' said Dave, looking guilty.

  'What's wrong?' said Christopher, mystified. 'What have you got to worry about?'

  'Ah, there's always something,' said Dave as Jemima got up to go to the door. 'If there isn't anything, they make something up.'

  'It's the police,' Jemima announced. 'They want to speak to Jock.'

  'We'd like a word with Mr McLean in private if that's possible,' said the large policeman in the doorway. He stared at them all with equal amounts of suspicion. Christopher began to understand Dave's viewpoint. In contrast to Mr Smith, who looked and behaved as if he was spectacularly incompetent and was therefore more or less normal in Christopher's eyes, this man had the expression of someone who had seen it all before, knew and disapproved of all the evil hidden in his fellow human's hearts inside out, and wouldn't believe a word anyone said unless they had a letter signed by their mother to back it up.

  'Inspector Forrester, West Fife Constabulary,' added the policeman, waiting for Jemima, Dave and Christopher to move. 'This won't take long, Mr McLean. I can see you're not a hundred per cent.'

&n
bsp; That was perceptive of him, considering Jock was lying on the settee with one leg in plaster. What percentage did that make? Seventy?

  Jemima shooed him and Dave into the kitchen at that point. Christopher wondered what Amaryllis would have done. She would at the very least have had a listening device of some kind concealed on her person, and been able to eavesdrop on the interview. But more likely, she would have hidden behind the curtains and listened in the old-fashioned low-tech way.

  They sat down, arranging themselves round the kitchen table where Jemima had once initiated Dave and Christopher into the mysteries of tablet making.

  Christopher found he was still holding the local paper. He began to leaf through the pages absent-mindedly without really paying attention.

  'Can I see that page again, Christopher?' said Jemima suddenly, apparently reading upside-down.

  'Have the whole thing if you like.' He passed it over the table to her. She grabbed it eagerly and scanned a page which was composed entirely of adverts for local services. Maybe she was looking for a plumber.

  'Look, Dave!' she said, pausing halfway down the page. 'Steam trains. They're bringing one here soon. Look what it says there.'

  Dave looked obediently, nodded and said gruffly, 'Interesting.'

  'What's that?' said Christopher.

  'Oh, that would be telling,' said Jemima, tearing off the lower half of the page, folding it neatly and getting up to put it away in a drawer.

  'Do they really use the track for trains?' said Christopher. 'I didn't think there were any left.'

  'Of course there are. They take coal to the power station at Longannet,' said Jemima. I don't expect they'll be doing that forever though.'

  'Nothing lasts forever,' said Dave. He glanced up and caught Jemima's eye and smiled at her. 'Well - not many things.'

  It was probably the closest Dave would ever come to a declaration of undying love, mused Christopher. A curiously melancholy feeling crept over him, but it resisted analysis. Surely it wasn't envy - he had never really fancied Jemima Stevenson, or Dave, for that matter - but maybe it was a kind of poignant wish for someone to feel like that about him.

  Not that it would make any difference to anything, he told himself. He was sure he had once read in one of Caroline's self-help books that you shouldn't rely on someone else to make you happy. Which made the Happiness Club a bit of a con trick, of course.

  Something nagged at his mind - an odd memory, or a thought that had passed by too quickly to be corralled and dissected. Hadn't Maisie Sue told him something that might be significant? But in what context? And what was it anyway?

  Before he had time to remember, he saw a movement at the kitchen window, and the shape there resolved itself into Amaryllis's face looking in. Her dark red hair stood right up on end as it often did when she was on the trail of something or someone. She made a signal with one hand. What on earth did it mean?

  'Amaryllis. At the kitchen window.' He was replying to Jemima's unasked question about why he had been making funny faces. She got up and opened the window.

  'Are the police still here?' Amaryllis asked. She had Zak sheltering behind her.

  'There's an Inspector Forrester in the living-room. But it's all right, he's only talking to Jock,' said Jemima.

  Amaryllis shuddered theatrically. 'He's the worst of the lot.'

  'You'd better come in here in case they see you on their way out,' said Jemima, opening the window a bit wider. Amaryllis clambered through and turned back to help Zak.

  'Tell me you're not on the run,' said Christopher.

  'Not exactly,' she said.

  'Would you like a cup of tea?' said Jemima hospitably.

  'Coffee for me,' said Amaryllis. 'What about you, Zak?'

  'Got any juice?' said Zak.

  'When you say not exactly, what does that mean - exactly?' said Christopher.

  'We kind of left the police station in a bit of a hurry,' she replied, glancing at Zak, her co-conspirator in this case. Christopher was just pleased it wasn't him, for once.

  'Does Inspector Forrester know that?' he asked.

  'Oh, stop harassing the poor lass,' said Dave suddenly. 'Sometimes I wonder whose side you're on.'

  'Amaryllis's side, of course,' said Christopher. 'I just don't want her getting into trouble.'

  'But that's what she does,' said Dave. 'You've just got to live with that.'

  'If they come in here,' said Jemima, 'you can hide in the old larder - look, this door here.' She opened the door to a horrible little room with a stone floor and one tiny window high up on the wall. If anyone but Jemima had owned this house, Christopher thought, they would have had it converted to a utility room, or had the wall knocked down and extended the kitchen. He knew he was only thinking about interior design to avoid working out whose side he was on. He wrenched his mind back to the current situation.

  Amaryllis studied the small room with a nervous expression on her face. Christopher knew she was looking for spiders or signs of their presence, but he wasn't about to reveal her phobia to everyone else, so he kept quiet. He knew she would prefer him not to mention the 's' word anyway.

  'So what happened to you?' he asked, in an effort to stop himself from mentioning spiders or appearing in any way censorious. 'What were you doing at the police station in the first place?'

  'It's a long story,' said Amaryllis, sticking close to the open door of the larder but with many a sideways glance into the dim space. 'But we were planning to go round there this morning to turn in Zak's father. And a gun he said wasn't his. Only they decided to raid the motor caravan in the middle of the night instead, so we didn't even get the chance to be good citizens.'

  'It wasn't exactly -.' muttered Zak.

  'Well, near enough.' She narrated the events leading to the police raid, racing through the hours she and Zak had spent together, and skimming over some of the details. Christopher hoped this was because they were too mundane and boring to be of interest, and not for the opposite reason.

  'So we planned just to persuade Liam Johnstone to go into the police station and then ask if Zak could see Penelope,' she concluded, 'but after the raid it all went a bit pear-shaped. They decided we might be able to help with their enquiries too, and they took us to separate interview rooms and started grilling us - didn't they, Zak?'

  Zak nodded silently.

  'Zak got Mr Smith and I got Inspector Forrester. Then they swapped. It was almost as if they were trying to catch us out on inconsistencies. And I tried to get them to tell me if there was a victim, and whether it was a man or a woman - they can tell that from blood, if there is some. But they wouldn't tell us anything, not even if we were actually suspects or not. I kept telling them we were just innocent bystanders, but they didn't seem to grasp that. Idiots!'

  'Well, you can hardly blame them for that, can you?' said Christopher. 'I mean, you haven't always been a completely innocent bystander.'

  She glared at him. 'I've always been on the side of truth and human rights.'

  Yes, but not always on the right side of the law. Christopher formed the sentence in his mind but he knew better than to speak it out loud. In any case, they heard Inspector Forrester in the hall.

  'Mrs Stevenson?'

  Amaryllis shot into the larder backwards, and immediately opened her mouth to scream as a large spider, possibly disturbed by the movement of air, abseiled into view in front of her. Christopher saw the danger and acted with uncharacteristic speed. Just as the kitchen door opened from the other side, he squeezed into the larder through the gap where Jemima was just closing the door, took a couple of steps, got hold of the retreating Amaryllis and jammed her face into his chest to muffle the scream. She started to struggle. He fought back panic. This was the first time he had ever been this close to her in all the time he had known her.

  'Sssh,' he whispered. 'If you scream, Inspector Forrester will hear you. Close your eyes and pretend there isn't any spider.'

  Zak, who had nipped into the
larder right behind Christopher, didn't help by breathing, 'Wow, that's a massive one.'

  They stood there for a few moments. Amaryllis stopped struggling; Christopher hoped he hadn’t suffocated her in his jumper. Never having held her like this before, he was surprised to find she wasn’t constructed from wire and electricity. She did have a few soft spots, which he was just starting to appreciate when the larder door swung open again.

  ‘All clear,’ said Jemima, and then, ‘My goodness me!’ as Zak got out of the way and she registered the scene in front of her.

  Amaryllis finally clawed her way out of Christopher’s grasp, without even giving him an electric shock, and rushed over to the other side of the kitchen table, putting a safe distance between them. Dave was laughing.

  ‘There was a spider,’ Christopher explained, breaking his vow in the interests of saving them both from embarrassment. It didn’t entirely work.

  ‘It’s the Happiness Club,’ chortled Dave. ‘It’s cast its romantic spell all over the town.’

  ‘Has Inspector Forrester definitely gone?’ said Amaryllis, ignoring this. ‘We’d better find out what he said to Jock. It might be another piece of the puzzle.’

  ‘I don’t think my larder’s been used as a love-nest before,’ said Jemima as they followed Amaryllis into the other room.

  ‘It still hasn’t, believe me,’ said Christopher.

  Jock McLean was indignant about his talk with Inspector Forrester.

  ‘You’d think I’d done something wrong! I’m the victim here. He just had to look at my leg to see that.’

  ‘What did he think you’d done wrong?’ said Christopher.

  ‘He more or less accused me of conspiring to blow up the boat for the insurance money.’

  ‘Conspiring? Who with?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jock, puzzled. ‘The boat didn’t belong to Sean Fraser; it was just some trip boat he hired. So he wouldn’t come in for any insurance payout. The man in charge of it was nowhere near it at the time it blew up either. He’d gone on ahead to the abbey.’