‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Jock.
‘The police might not think so. After all, they don’t know Tricia the way we do.’
Jock knew she was trying to wind him up, but he still found himself reacting to it. To conceal his increasing indignation, he drained the coffee, stood up and put the paper cup in Giancarlo’s bin. He stood looking over to the other side of the street for a moment.
‘We might have to investigate on our own,’ Amaryllis shouted over to him. ‘Just to spring her from jail.’
He turned back towards her.
‘I don’t want to hear any of this,’ said Charlie Smith.
As he disappeared along the road with the dog, Amaryllis looked after him sadly. ‘Charlie’s still a policeman at heart,’ she said.
‘He’s law-abiding,’ said Jock. ‘There’s a difference.’
'Don't say you're getting involved in another murder,' said Giancarlo reproachfully from behind him.
'I'm not,' said Jock. 'I can't help it if some pantomime character drops dead in front of me.'
'Mrs Laidlaw must be pretty upset,' said Giancarlo. Jock remembered the boy had once been friendly with Darren. He wasn't sure if the friendship had lasted through all the trials that life had subjected it to.
'She is,' he said. 'She still doesn't know if it was the bit of apple she gave him that did it.'
'I guess it could have been,' said Giancarlo. 'They showed the whole thing on the news last night... Funny, though. A couple of these TV people were down here on Saturday night.'
'Oh, yes?' said Amaryllis eagerly. Jock willed the boy to shut up. Encouragement was the last thing she needed. Give her half a chance and she'd be dragging them all into an unofficial investigation, which in his experience meant somebody would have to run through back gardens, scale lethal-looking fences and generally endanger their lives in the next little while. 'Did you recognise them?' she added.
Giancarlo came out from behind the counter and strolled over to face her. 'From the TV programme?'
'Yes.'
'I don't think so. But it was dark. One of them might have been....'
'Which one?' said Amaryllis.
'Well, I'm not sure, but one of them was doing a kind of comedy walk - a bit like Charlie Chaplin. And I wondered if he was a clown, and then I remembered.'
'Remembered what?'
Jock heard the increasing impatience in her voice. He shuddered as he pictured the kind of scene she might make if she didn't get anything useful out of him. But Giancarlo Petrelli must have met impatient women before. He slowed down the flow of words to a trickle and kept her waiting for his next utterance. He almost had a wicked gleam in his eyes, and yet Amaryllis hadn't yet risen up and smitten him. What was it about Italian men?
'We didn't go to the theatre very often when Vic and I were kids,' he said in a languid, reminiscent tone. 'But I remember once my Dad took us to the pantomime at Rosyth. It was Cinderella.'
Jock saw that Amaryllis's eyes were half-closed, as if she were listening to some favourite piece of music. Or maybe it was the expression a cat had as it dreamt of feasting on mice, voles and baby blackbirds.
'The man who played Buttons,' added Giancarlo. 'It could have been him.'
'Interesting,' murmured Amaryllis. 'Was it a woman who was with him?'
'Yes,' said Giancarlo. 'But I couldn't see her face or anything much about her. She was wearing some sort of cape.'
'How did you know it was a woman, then?' said Amaryllis.
'I know a woman when I see one,' said Giancarlo with an annoying little smile. 'Anyway, I heard her voice. She was telling the man off. Buttons.'
'What were they saying?' Amaryllis enquired.
Jock recognised the thrill of the chase in her voice, and realised it was too late to stop her. Charlie Smith would be disappointed, and no doubt Christopher would be cross, but once she got the scent of blood, so to speak, she wouldn't give up until she had gone in for the kill, as ferocious as a whole pack of hounds.
Giancarlo shrugged his shoulders. 'I didn't hear it all. But I think she was threatening him.'
'Blackmailing him?' said Amaryllis.
'That would be the wrong way round, surely,' said Jock. He tried not to flinch as Amaryllis turned hard blue eyes on him. 'Well, he was the one who ended up dead,' he added.
'Not necessarily,' she said. 'He might have eaten the apple that was meant for her.'
'How could it have been meant for her?' said Jock. ‘She might not even have been there, for all we know.’
'Or perhaps it wasn't the apple at all,' said Amaryllis impatiently. 'It was something else he ate on the way round that he had meant to feed to her to stop her blackmailing him.'
'It didn't sound like blackmail,' said Giancarlo.
'I'm just tossing ideas around here,' said Amaryllis. 'I don't really expect to solve the case instantly. Doing it before the police do will be good enough for me.'
'Oh, it's a case now, is it?' said Jock. He couldn't resist it. 'Do you have a client lined up?'
'I don't know yet,' said Amaryllis. She glared at him. 'Your friend Tricia looks like a prime candidate at the moment.'
'They haven't arrested her though,' said Jock. Just as he finished the sentence, his mobile phone, a recent acquisition, buzzed in his jacket pocket. Please don't let this be dramatically ironic, he said to himself as he took it out and tried to find the right button to press. 'Hello! Hello?'
'Is anybody there?' intoned Amaryllis in a quavery voice. He moved away from her, towards the harbour.
'It's Mum,' said Darren's voice. It was quavery too. 'They've taken her away.'
Chapter 16 A Client for Amaryllis
Amaryllis wanted to go round to the police station right away, burst in and announce they had arrested the wrong person and it was a travesty of justice. She was deterred from doing this only by the fact that she didn't have anything at all to back it up apart from the instinctive knowledge that Tricia would never knowingly harm another living thing.
Instead, she wrested Jock’s phone from his hand, arranged to meet Darren at Christopher's house, and set off in that direction herself. Jock McLean, grumbling about the speed she walked at, about the fact that she was getting him more involved than he wanted to be, and about his prediction that Christopher would have gone out to work by now, followed her. Despite all that, she knew he was deeply worried about Tricia Laidlaw. In fact the more he grumbled, the more concerned she knew he was.
It seemed that Maisie Sue was also helping with police enquiries, although as far as Amaryllis could work out, her part in events had fallen into the category of collateral damage.
Penelope answered the door at Christopher's house. She still wore the apron she had sported the day before for 'Open Kitchen'.
For just an instant Amaryllis considered the possibility that Penelope was trying to worm her way into Christopher's affections by staying on in his house, but it was easy to dismiss that idea. Deirdre, on the other hand...
She pushed her petty jealousy aside.
'Has Christopher gone out yet? I need to speak to him.'
'What's wrong?' said Penelope. Her gaze travelled past Amaryllis and skimmed over Jock, fastening on Darren, who was just coming in at the garden gate. She gave a little gasp. ‘Has something happened to Tricia?'
'She's been arrested,' said Amaryllis.
'Oh no! Surely not!’ said Penelope. She held the door open. 'Come in... Come in. The men are having their breakfast. I always believe in giving a man a good breakfast before he goes out to face the day.'
Amaryllis counted to twenty. She couldn't believe how old-fashioned Penelope was.
'What about women?' said Jock as he entered Christopher's hallway. 'Don't they need a good breakfast too?'
'Yes, of course,' said Penelope hastily. 'I'm the last person to deny anybody a good breakfast, regardless of gender. Why don't I put some more bacon on?'
She patted Darren's shoulder as he went past. He flinched.
/>
'Now, Darren, you know you can always talk to Zak and me about things,' she said, and bustled past the others in to the kitchen. Zak and Christopher were sitting at the table. Christopher looked up at the intruders with no enthusiasm.
‘Tricia’s been arrested,’ said Amaryllis.
Christopher looked down at his plate of bacon and eggs. ‘I thought that might happen,’ he said.
‘We’ll have to get her out,’ said Amaryllis.
‘Those cells in the police station are no place for a woman,’ said Jock.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Penelope, taking a packet of bacon out of the fridge. ‘They’re not so bad. Keith Burnet makes a good cup of coffee.’
Amaryllis stared at Penelope. She had forgotten until that moment that the woman had recent personal experience of being in the rather flexible custody of the police in Pitkirtly. It was such an unlikely thing to have happened that she realised she had almost expunged it from her memory.
Or was the fact that she had forgotten yet another sign of galloping old age?
Jock slumped down at the kitchen table next to Christopher. Darren pulled a chair over so that he could sit next to Zak.
‘All right, mate?’ said Zak. Darren nodded unconvincingly.
‘Hadn’t you better let Rosie know you won’t be at work today?’ said Penelope to Darren. ‘Unless you’d rather just go up to the cattery anyway – sometimes work can take your mind off things.’
Sometimes work might do the opposite, Amaryllis reflected, glancing at Christopher, who was prodding unhappily at a congealed fried egg. She thought he had probably seen more than enough of his workplace over the weekend. Not to mention Deirdre. Oh, please don’t mention Deirdre.
‘We met Giancarlo down by the harbour,’ she said brightly. ‘He’s grown up very nicely. Of course I never could resist Italian men.’
Too late she understood that this train of thought had been connected inexorably to the previous one about Deirdre. But as attempts to make a man jealous went, this one was just pathetic. She briefly considered, and rapidly discarded, the idea of leaping on Jock McLean and ravishing him, but it was too bizarre an idea for now. She would save it for an even direr emergency.
‘Oh really, Amaryllis,’ said Penelope, stepping back from the cooker to avoid bacon splatters. ‘That’s just cradle-snatching.’
‘It was only a joke,’ muttered Amaryllis. ‘Can I make some toast?’
‘It’s all right, dear,’ said Penelope. ‘I’m just going to do that. How many slices, Christopher?’
‘I don’t want any, thanks, Penelope. I’d better get going. I’ve got to try and pacify the librarians before we open up. I think some books were mis-shelved when we tidied up yesterday.’
‘That’s the least of your worries, Mr Wilson,’ said Zak. ‘Mrs McPherson doesn’t know about the hole in the quilt yet.’
Penelope gasped in horror. ‘A hole in the quilt? Maisie Sue’s going to be very cross.’
‘No, she’s not,’ said Darren with confidence. ‘Mrs McPherson’s round at the police station too. Helping with their enquiries.’
‘Of course,’ said Jock. ‘I’d forgotten she was there too.’
Somehow, thought Amaryllis, Maisie Sue had gone from being the odd one out, square peg in a round hole, the stranger in their midst, to someone who was so much part of the fabric of their lives that they had almost ceased to notice her. She wondered if she too had reached that stage. Maybe that helped to explain why Christopher had been paying so much attention to his ex-wife.
She resolved immediately to do something so outrageous that they would no longer be able to ignore her. Running over Deirdre’s megaphone had just been childish and silly. A grand gesture was required here.
‘Hey!’ said Zak. ‘Maybe we can fix the quilt before she sees it.’
That wasn’t the kind of gesture Amaryllis had in mind. Apart from anything else, she suspected her quilting skills were at around the same level as her knitting – that of a slightly backward beginner. ‘We need Jan,’ she said. ‘She could do that.’
‘Good idea,’ said Christopher, and she was pathetically grateful for this small sign of approval.
Amaryllis didn’t like being pathetic. She would prefer people to view her with admiration and perhaps a touch of fear. She got up from the table without waiting for the toast.
Christopher got up too and put on his jacket in the hall. She found herself walking down the path with him. At the gate, he turned and stared at her. ‘You’re not going to blow up the police station, are you?’
‘Of course not!’ she snapped. ‘Where on earth would I get the explosives now I’ve left the service?’
‘That’s all that’s stopping you, is it?’
‘No! Innocent people could be harmed. I quite like Keith Burnet. And the sergeant – is he still there?’
‘That’s all right then.’
They walked along the street together for a little way, then there were running footsteps behind them and Zak called, ‘Wait for me, Mr Wilson!’
‘See you later,’ said Amaryllis, and walked off in the direction she knew he wouldn’t be going in, because it led to a strip of woodland with a very old notice warning off trespassers. And anyway, it was in the opposite direction from the Cultural Centre. She hoped he would start worrying about what she might be planning to do there.
She herself didn’t yet know, which was extremely annoying.
Chapter 17 Usually the wife
Zak talked incessantly about the case on the way down the High Street. Either he had been secretly reading detective stories or he had spent more time with Amaryllis than Christopher was aware of. He seemed to think of it as a classical detective mystery.
‘They usually suspect the wife, don’t they?’ he said. ‘Only I suppose Mrs McLaughlin had a cast-iron alibi, being live on air all the time.’
‘Mmm,’ said Christopher, clenching his fists inside his jacket pockets. He didn’t really want to punch Zak, who was a pleasant young man now that he had outgrown his gangster phase, and who had never deserved to have Liam Johnstone as a father, but he found all this very irritating.
‘But then it might be the person we least suspect,’ said Zak. ‘And that would be Deirdre or Oscar, wouldn’t it? And if he was poisoned...’
‘We don’t even know if he was yet,’ said Christopher.
‘But if they’ve arrested Darren’s Mum and Mrs McPherson,’ said Zak, ‘they must think he was.’
‘If he was poisoned,’ said Christopher, ‘then it could have happened at Jemima’s or – um – somewhere else. It could have been a slow-acting poison.’
He could have kicked himself for joining in with Zak’s game. He had only just managed to avoid saying it might have been Penelope who did the poisoning. The last thing these two needed was to get into the clutches of the police again.
‘You mean it could have been Mum who did it?’ said Zak, wide-eyed. ‘I never thought of that.’
‘That isn’t what I meant,’ said Christopher. ‘But just think about it. If you start speculating like this then it could lead anywhere. Even somewhere that you don’t like.’
‘Amaryllis is always speculating about things,’ said Zak.
‘That doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do!’ snapped Christopher.
He was even more irritated when, as they approached the Cultural Centre across the car park, a big dark car drew up and disgorged Deirdre and Oscar, now apparently inseparable. Why hadn’t they left Pitkirtly yet? He supposed the police had told them not to.
‘Morning,’ he said, trying not to sound over-enthusiastic. They probably hadn’t come to help clear up.
‘Have you got the keys?’ said Oscar abruptly.
‘The keys?’
‘For the building. We need to get our equipment out of there.’
‘You’re leaving, are you?’
Oscar glared at him. ‘We’re not allowed to leave town, as you well know. But we can load up th
e van while we’re waiting. Ken’s coming down in a while. And Maria,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.
Christopher wondered how Maria felt about Deirdre and Oscar spending time together. Then he wondered why he was wondering. It wasn’t like him to speculate about people’s relationships. But he reasoned that it was only natural for him to feel some interest in what Deirdre was doing these days. The fact that he hadn’t had any interest in her for years made him feel obscurely guilty now.
‘Where’s Charlotte?’ said Deirdre.
‘Oh, I think she’s back at the hotel, packing. She says she wants to get out of this place as quickly as possible... She’s still freaked out by what happened to Eric.’
‘How do you think I feel?’ said Deirdre.
‘Yes, I know, but Charlotte’s so much younger....’ Oscar’s voice tailed off as the expression on Deirdre’s face hardened. Christopher remembered that transition well. It used to signal the end of negotiations and the start of throwing things. But maybe, he told himself, Deirdre had grown up since then.
They had been walking towards the Cultural Centre as they spoke, and now they were at the front door. One of the librarians, Catriona, was already waiting to get in. Damn, no chance now to clear up before they all arrived. No doubt she had done this on purpose to try and catch him out.
Christopher got out the keys as calmly as he could – only dropping them twice – and opened up the big doors.
‘Goodness,’ said Catriona, peering in. ‘I didn’t know you’d changed everything round over the weekend.’
‘Yes, well...,’ Christopher began.
‘Some of the books might be in the wrong places,’ Zak interrupted. ‘Just a few. I can help you get sorted out if you want, before the others get here.’
‘It’s better if it gets done by somebody who knows where everything goes,’ said the librarian, walking forward into the foyer and down the corridor. She glanced towards the office, ‘Oh, dear, Mr Wilson, you’ve got your work cut out in there.’
She walked on towards the library, switching lights on as she went.
7 A Tasteful Crime Page 10
