The Christmas Puzzle (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 8)

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Did the police catch you?’ she whispered.

  ‘No,’ he whispered back. ‘How about you?’

  ‘I managed to get away by pretending to be with that funny old man with the wee white dog,’ she said, still in a low voice. ‘But I’m worried that Jason might have been trapped. You haven’t heard anything, have you?’

  So she really only saw him as a way of getting to Jason. That was a relief. He began to relax.

  ‘Have you tried asking Amaryllis?’ he said. ‘She usually knows everything that’s going on around here.’

  ‘I saw her at the Cultural Centre,’ said Tamara, ‘but I didn’t get the chance to ask her directly. From what she was saying, it sounded as if she thought he might have fallen into the hands of the police.’

  He was surprised by the sinister emphasis she gave the last few words. Did she have a particular reason to be wary of the police? He suddenly wished Amaryllis was here to interrogate the woman. He wasn’t at all confident of his power to dig up her secrets – and he was a bit worried that she might misinterpret any interest he showed in her.

  ‘Which way are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, just here and there. I’ve got to get the bus home soon to feed the cats, but I think I’ve just missed one, so I thought I’d browse about the town a bit.’

  ‘I’m going home to change,’ he said, hoping she would let go of his arm. She didn’t. He turned and started to walk in the direction of his house. Maybe she would let go once they got past the last of the shops.

  ‘So,’ he said, as they strolled further up the hill together, ‘how did you come to be interested in this FOOP thing?’

  ‘Friends of Old Pitkirtly?’

  ‘Yes. You don’t live around here, do you?’

  ‘No, but I think of Pitkirtly as my spiritual home,’ she said, waving her free arm and causing the edge of her long flowing sleeve to catch a passing shopper in the eye. ‘I’ve known Bruce for a while. We met at badminton in Valleyfield church hall, but we were both more interested in history than sport. When he started up the Friends, he asked if I’d like to join him.’

  Jock pushed aside the mental picture of Tamara in something long, flowing and purple on the badminton court, and concentrated on wheedling information out of her.

  ‘Have you lived in Pitkirtly before?’

  She hesitated before replying. ‘Yes, a good while ago. When my daughter was young.’

  ‘How old is she now?’

  ‘Oh – she isn’t – she died.’

  Jock didn’t know what to say to that, so he fell back on convention, something he usually avoided like the plague. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He hoped she didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t think he could keep up the platitudes for very long. She hesitated again.

  ‘Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to,’ he said hurriedly.

  ‘It’s all right – it was quite a long time ago… I don’t really think about it very often.’

  ‘Sorry to have reminded you,’ he said.

  Tamara shrugged her shoulders and fell silent. They walked along for a few minutes. They walked right past the end of Jock’s street, but he didn’t want to upset her by rushing off home as soon as she had shared this sad snippet of information with him. It wouldn’t do him any harm to retrace his steps a little way.

  Fortunately she spotted somebody else she knew before she had led him too far astray. She darted across the road to greet them, and Jock turned his steps towards home. He didn’t think the afternoon would bring anything as interesting as a boat trip, a shipwreck and a police chase and then two women after him, but you never knew. Maybe he should have a lie-down before going out again.

  Chapter 14 From the archives

  ‘Interesting,’ commented Bruce, staring at the flipchart pages that still adorned the walls of Christopher’s office. ‘Is she a detective or something? Ms Peebles, I mean.’

  ‘Something,’ said Christopher. ‘She does do some private investigations,’ he added as an afterthought, realising that his initial response might not have clarified things very much.

  ‘She doesn’t seem to have much evidence to go on. And the police are on the case, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’ Christopher nodded. He felt he should say more. ‘She just wants to give them a hand. Do some of the strategic thinking.’

  He didn’t entirely feel this expressed Amaryllis’s contribution to local detection, but he didn’t want to engage with Bruce. The man was only in his office at all because he had tricked his way in. Or at least he had said he was interested in Christopher’s work on the McCallum letters. The McCallums had been a large local family who wrote to each other at length throughout the eighteen-eighties, recording the events and trivia of their lives for the benefit of sisters and cousins who had moved as far afield as Kirkcaldy in some cases. Rather unfortunately, in Christopher’s view, there were still a few McCallums around Pitkirtly, and a woman from one of the local branches of the family had decided to collect as many letters as she could track down and to present them to the Cultural Centre with a great flourish in a small ceremony orchestrated by Jemima and her fellow family historians.

  Every so often, when Christopher wanted to shut himself in his room and brood or think, he would tell people he was working on the McCallum letters. So far he had worked on three of them, fallen asleep over one and frittered away some time wondering if anybody would notice if they accidentally fell into a fire and were destroyed. The main drawback with that was that there wasn’t a fire in the Cultural Centre for them to fall into, and the nearest place he knew of which still had an open fire was the Queen of Scots, which was a bit too public for a discreet accident to take place. With Christopher’s luck, Jemima would plunge her hand in to save the letters, thereby giving herself first-degree burns and inciting Dave to kill him.

  Bruce, despite his professed interest in the letters, only seemed to want to look at Amaryllis’s messy flipcharts, which had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

  ‘Do you have a marker pen I could borrow for a minute?’ said Bruce suddenly, homing in on one particular page and frowning at something in the middle of it.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s – what do you need it for?’

  Christopher paused with his hand halfway across the desk towards the pen.

  ‘Hyphen,’ said Bruce. ‘There should be a hyphen here. In between self and harm.’

  ‘All right,’ said Christopher grudgingly. He held out the marker pen. ‘Go ahead.’

  But once Bruce got hold of the pen, the power vested in it seemed to go straight to his head. He underlined some phrases, he crossed out a word here and added one there... Amaryllis would have been extremely irritated if she had seen him. She would be angry the next time she came in here. She might even think Christopher himself had been through the pages, correcting her grammar and adjusting the wording.

  He already knew that an angry Amaryllis was a dangerous Amaryllis.

  ‘Bruce,’ he said a few moments later. ‘I think you’d better stop that now. Give me the pen back.’

  ‘All right, take it!’ said Bruce, flinging it on the desk. It rolled off the edge, and its momentum carried it across the room and under the bookcase.

  Christopher gritted his teeth.

  ‘I’ll go in a minute,’ said Bruce, backing away slightly. ‘I just thought I’d offer to give you a hand with the McCallum stuff. I’ve got plenty of time to spare and you seem to be so busy.’

  ‘The McCallum stuff,’ said Christopher. He got up from his chair, pushing it back quickly. It made a horrible scraping noise as it moved backwards across the uncarpeted section of the floor, probably damaging the laminate and making it inevitable that the wrath of the cleaner would descend on him sooner or later. He strode purposefully over to the filing cabinet and wrenched the middle drawer open with so much force that the cabinet rocked. Half the drawer was occupied by the letters in their special archival pockets. He pulled them all out, returne
d to his desk and flung them down. Bruce had retreated further to what he probably imagined was a safe distance. ‘There it is,’ said Christopher. He almost added ‘Do your worst with it’, but the archivist in him wouldn’t let the words escape.

  ‘Maybe not right now,’ said Bruce.

  ‘Here, have a look,’ said Christopher, picking up one of the archival pockets and emptying it on to the desk. The letters, still in their envelopes, had an oddly uniform appearance although an initial sift through had revealed that they had been written by various correspondents. He removed one from its envelope and unfolded it, starting to read immediately without waiting for any reaction from Bruce. ‘Dear Sissy, hope you are well. I am the same but George had a summer cold last week. The cat went missing last night but returned in the morning. He had caught three mice which we found on the doorstep.... What do you think? There’s some scope for cataloguing the detail. References to cats, construction of a family tree....’

  ‘I’ll leave it for now,’ said Bruce, by now almost at the door on his way out.

  Christopher read relentlessly on. ‘A funny thing happened last week. Mrs Greig from along the road went out one morning and didn’t come back. The police were round all the neighbours. There’s been no sign of her... Jean’s Jack Russell caught a rat at the allotments. I hope it wasn’t carrying the bubonic plague... See you later, then, Bruce.’

  He glanced casually at the date on that last letter. It had been written less than twenty years before.

  Bruce had gone. Mission accomplished. He put the letter down on his desk and started to return the batch to its pocket. Mrs Greig from along the road. He had no doubt that if he read the next few letters in the sequence he would come to a report that Mrs Greig had been called away urgently to visit her sister in West Wemyss, or that she had left her husband and run off to North Berwick with a toy boy, or that she had met with an accident and had been taken to hospital.

  He put the whole thing back in the drawer and closed it carefully. He sat down at his desk. It was only then that he wondered if he had gone too far. It wasn’t like him to show any sign of impatience with visitors to the Cultural Centre, even when they drove him very nearly to the end of his tether, as sometimes happened. Was he suffering from stress? He didn’t really believe in stress, but maybe that didn’t make any difference. Amaryllis hadn’t appeared to notice anything wrong earlier. He knew she wouldn’t hesitate to point it out if he were unusually grumpy or anything. Did he need a holiday? Thinking back to the last couple of times he had taken anything resembling a holiday, he shuddered. A stay in a caravan along the coast which ended in a police chase and a humiliating rescue from a cliff. A walk along the Fife Coastal Path with Caroline, resulting in a lifetime ban from at least one of the campsites they had visited. If he had been going to be stressed, either of those should have done it. No, holidays were just recipes for exhaustion and mental turmoil. What he needed was a drink.

  Still surprised by how simply he could pull himself back from the brink, he found himself at around lunch-time, standing at the bar in the Queen of Scots, ordering a pint of Old Pictish Brew.

  ‘You’re in early today,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Christopher. He took his pint and paused. ‘I think I need a holiday.’ He waited for Charlie to say something reassuring, gave up waiting and added, ‘I’ve been feeling a bit tired.’

  Charlie looked up from pulling the next pint and stared at him assessingly for a moment. ‘You look all right to me.’

  ‘I shouted at Bruce from FOOP today,’ said Christopher.

  Charlie laughed. ‘Do you think there’s anybody in Pitkirtly who hasn’t shouted at Bruce from FOOP at some time or another? And what sort of stupid name is that for an organisation, anyway?’

  ‘But it was unprofessional,’ Christopher insisted.

  ‘It was human,’ said Charlie. He took the pint along to another customer and returned. ‘What makes you think you’ve got to be perfect?’

  ‘I don’t!’ said Christopher. ‘I just have standards to maintain. At work.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t even really shout,’ said Charlie.

  ‘I banged a drawer. In the filing cabinet.’

  Charlie tutted. ‘I’m surprised at you!’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘If I were you I’d have trapped his head in it first.’

  Christopher smiled reluctantly.

  ‘What is this – a confessional?’ said Amaryllis from behind Christopher. ‘Mine’s a dram of Glenfisk, please, Charlie.’

  ‘You can’t go out there as an elf smelling of whisky,’ said Charlie, going to fetch the drink anyway.

  ‘There’s no other way of getting me out there as an elf,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Not today, anyway. I need some sustenance. I’ve been up since before dawn and I’ve just had an unsettling encounter with Jason Penrose at the police station.’

  ‘So he was there?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Yes, but not for the reason everyone’s been imagining,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘If you need sustenance, you should have had something to eat before you have whisky,’ said Jemima sternly from behind them all. ‘I’ve got a ham sandwich in my bag if you want that. In case David gets hungry on the way up the road.’

  Charlie glared. ‘You’re not supposed to bring your own food in here.’

  ‘But if she eats it just over by the window it doesn’t count, does it?’ said Jemima. ‘We could open the window and she could lean out...’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Charlie. ‘Let her eat it wherever she wants.’ He turned his attention back to Amaryllis. ‘And talking of confessionals... what have you done with my boat?’

  ‘What do you need a boat for anyway, Amaryllis?’ demanded Dave, who had materialised alongside Jemima. He could move quietly for a large man when he wanted to. ‘You don’t have the time to go fishing, do you? What with all your other interests. Not to mention being an elf.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take much time,’ said Amaryllis. ‘After all, the harbour’s just along there a bit.’

  ‘But you can’t just walk out your front door and jump in the boat and go,’ said Dave. ‘There’s things to organise. Charlie can’t get away just any time... But if you ever need me to mind the bar for you while you do that, Charlie, just let me know.’

  ‘Don’t encourage him,’ murmured Jemima. ‘He’d spend all his time in here if he could.’

  Under cover of the burgeoning argument, Christopher noticed Amaryllis pick up her glass from the bar and take it over to the table where Charlie’s dog had already settled down in anticipation of their arrival. There was an unspoken agreement that if the man from the brewery paid an unannounced visit, they would shield the dog with their bodies, smuggle him off the premises or do whatever else it took to hide him from view.

  Christopher followed her over to the table with his pint. ‘Have you been over to salvage the boat yet?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance,’ said Amaryllis. ‘The police are still working out there, as far as I know.’

  ‘And what’s all this about Jason Penrose? Have you been stalking him?’

  ‘Oh, please!’ said Amaryllis. ‘I don’t stalk people. Not since I had that restraining order put on me back in Warsaw, anyway. I just happened to be round at the police station and I just happened to bump into him.’

  ‘What was he doing there? Has he been arrested?’

  ‘No. He was doing an archaeological dig.’

  Christopher choked on his beer. He was still spluttering when Jemima and Dave arrived at the table. Dave patted him on the back a bit too heartily, and he had almost collapsed under the table by the time Amaryllis pulled him upright again.

  ‘Who was doing an archaeological dig?’ said Jemima.

  ‘Jason,’ said Amaryllis. ‘In the garden behind the police station. He thinks he’s found a Roman mosaic there.’

  ‘Roman mosaic?’ said Christopher, his voice rising as
disbelief mingled with indignation. ‘He’s more likely to find the lost valley of the dinosaurs.’

  Jemima frowned. ‘There’s no evidence of the Romans anywhere near Pitkirtly, is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Christopher firmly. ‘Otherwise Maisie Sue would have incorporated them in her local history quilt.’

  ‘That isn’t exactly evidence, though, is it?’ said Amaryllis. ‘What sort of research do you think Maisie Sue has done to prove there weren’t any Romans here?’

  ‘It isn’t a case of proving there weren’t Romans,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s that there’s no reason at all to think there were any.’

  ‘I haven’t come across any references to them in the Cultural Centre archives,’ said Jemima, nodding sagely. ‘That’s enough for me.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ began Christopher. ‘About the McCallum letters…’

  ‘There’s a woman over there waving at you,’ Dave interrupted. ‘By the door.’

  Christopher glanced over to the other side of the room. He didn’t recognise the woman who was waving, but he supposed he should go and speak to her anyway. He was just heaving himself to his feet in a martyred kind of way when Amaryllis looked round and said, ‘Oh, there’s Elizabeth. I’d better go.’

  She drained the dram faster than anybody should be allowed to drink whisky, but without any coughing and spluttering, and marched briskly away from the table.

  In the lull in the conversation, they heard the woman’s voice saying plaintively, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Jock McLean, have you? You’re both meant to be in costume by now, and he hasn’t turned up.’

  Dave laughed. ‘Another of our Santas is missing. Jock McLean must’ve had enough of it. Don’t blame him.’

  ‘I don’t know what made him agree to it in the first place,’ said Jemima.

  ‘Amaryllis,’ said Christopher.

  They sat round the table gloomily staring into their drinks. Christopher felt cheered by the utter predictability of the scene.