7 A Tasteful Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘You might see if you can find out anything about Glasswearie, while you’re at it. I meant to ask my contact at GCHQ, only he seems to have gone underground. Or maybe he’s avoiding me.’

  ‘What’s Glasswearie?’

  ‘It’s the made-up place they were supposed to go to when Blair Atholl fell through. For Open Kitchen.’

  ‘Glasswearie,’ Jock repeated. He wasn’t confident about remembering the name, but he wanted to show willing. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Can you just run through what happened at Tricia’s again?’

  ‘Eric arrived. Tricia gave him the apple. Eric collapsed on the floor.’

  ‘Yes, I know all that,’ she said impatiently. ‘I need the details. Eric came in at the back door, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and he said something stupid to do with Buttons.’

  ‘Think about it. Did he just suddenly arrive at the door and come in straight away, or was there something else?’

  ‘He just came in – no, he didn’t! He came in once, and they weren’t ready for him, and he went out again.’

  ‘You told me that before. What did he say before he came back in again?’

  ‘What, you mean something like “I’ll just take a swig of doctored whisky from my hip flask” or “Give me a minute to get a bite of this prawn that’s weeks past its sell-by date”?’

  ‘Anything at all,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘He did say something like “give me a minute”,’ said Jock slowly, remembering. ‘There was something he wanted to do before he made his entrance. Something to do with the air in Pitkirtly. As if it wasn’t good enough for him.’

  ‘Yes? Use his inhaler? Take his medication?’

  ‘Lip balm!’ said Jock triumphantly. ‘He wanted to use his lip balm.’

  ‘Lip balm? That could be it! Jock, if I were there beside you instead of skulking around here, I might even kiss you!’

  Jock told himself to be thankful for small mercies.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone else what you’ve just told me,’ she added.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll wipe everything we’ve said in the last five minutes from my mind,’ he said. He was only exaggerating slightly. Nowadays he was finding more and more that recent conversations disappeared from his memory with alarming frequency.

  ‘Good. I wonder what happened to the lip balm,’ Amaryllis said thoughtfully. There was a pause before she continued. ‘Good. We’ll rendezvous at the Queen of Scots at fourteen hundred hours. If you’re there first, mine’s a half of Old Pictish Brew.’

  ‘Is there a code word?’

  ‘Get lost,’ she said.

  ‘Wait a minute – is get lost the code, or did you just tell me to go away?’ said Jock. But he was speaking to thin air. Amaryllis must have switched off her phone. She probably had meant him to get lost after all.

  Chapter 29 Jock and Zak go surfing

  Just as Jock was eating his breakfast Amaryllis rang back briefly to say Deirdre and Ken had left the hotel and were heading for the High Street to buy a paper. He wanted to ask how she knew whether they were buying one paper between them or not, but she rang off abruptly before he could go into that much detail.

  He didn’t have time to eat his last piece of toast. Oh, well, even spies probably had to make that kind of sacrifice.

  He wondered if Deirdre and Ken would patronise the local paper shop for their news-related requirements, or whether they might press on down to the supermarket, where they could get ready-made plastic-textured cheese sandwiches or pre-packed rubbery pasties as well. On balance he imagined they might just try the paper shop. They should come to it first anyway if they took the obvious route down from the hotel, which was in what the brochure called an elevated position above Pitkirtly with a panoramic view of the coastline, and what local people called ‘up the hill a bit’.

  He hung around outside the paper shop anyway, despite knowing that Jackie Whitmore’s father might come out and chase him away at any moment.

  Ten minutes after he got there, Deirdre and Ken came strolling down the hill. They had taken the obvious route.

  ‘Morning,’ said Jock, stepping out in front of them.

  ‘Hallo, Mr McLean,’ said Ken politely. He tried to walk round Jock, but Jock cunningly outwitted him by moving to stand in front of him no matter where he went.

  ‘Morning,’ said Deirdre, going into the paper shop. She emerged a few moments later while Jock and Ken were still trying to out-manoeuvre each other.

  ‘What on earth are you two doing?’

  ‘I just want to get past,’ complained Ken. ‘I need to get some stuff out of the Cultural Centre.’

  ‘Have the police given us the OK?’ said Deirdre, reading the front page of the local paper. There was a massive headline which said ‘Second TV star slain’. ‘It’s a bit of a stretch calling Maria a TV star, don’t you think?’ she added.

  ‘Simpler than calling her a worthless hanger-on,’ said Ken. ‘And less likely to attract Oscar’s lawyers.’

  ‘Where’s Charlotte this morning, then?’ asked Jock brightly.

  ‘Oh, she’s still on the phone up at the hotel,’ said Ken, sidestepping round Jock and running off down the hill. He reached the jeweller’s shop at the foot of the High Street quite quickly and disappeared round the corner by the supermarket.

  ‘What do you want to know about Charlotte for?’ said Deirdre.

  ‘Oh, no reason,’ said Jock. ‘Well, I was just wondering if she had any family here. There’s something familiar about her looks.’

  Deirdre pursed her lips, gazing at the newspaper. ‘They haven’t bothered to get their facts straight at all. Very sloppy reporting... No, I think she’s from West Lothian.’

  ‘Are you sure? She looks a lot like the McLaren family who used to live in Haggs Gardens, only I think they moved away about ten years ago. She isn’t a McLaren, is she?’

  Jock was proud of himself for concocting this complete fiction on the spur of the moment.

  ‘No, her name’s Campbell.’

  ‘Campbells, eh? That’s funny. I did know a Bill Campbell once, but I think he was from over in the west somewhere – Lochgilphead, maybe it was. He was keen on fishing.’

  Now that he had started, the lies were tumbling out one after the other. Fortunately Deirdre had had enough of listening to this nonsense, even if he hadn’t quite finished with his ramblings.

  ‘Is there a cafe around here?’ she said absently. ‘I need to read the inside pages to find out what they’re saying about us, in case we need to consult lawyers about anything.’

  Jock steered her towards the cafe a little further down the street and left her there while he progressed on to the Cultural Centre to carry out the next part of the operation.

  He had to fight his way through the assembled Pitkirtly media, consisting of two reporters, one of whom was taking pictures of the front door on his mobile phone, to get in. Once inside he discovered that Christopher had been summoned to West Fife Council headquarters to account for what had happened since Saturday. Zak seemed to think he would be there for most of the day.

  ‘He’s in real trouble this time. Mr Hargreaves thinks it’s all his fault. Everything from the accident with the apple to the two murders. It’s not fair, though, is it, Mr McLean?’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ said Jock, although if his years in teaching had taught him one thing, it was that you couldn’t trust the Council as far as you could throw them. ‘And if it isn’t and he gets fired, you can always march up and down the High Street with placards.’

  ‘Great idea!’ said Zak. ‘You can join in if you like.’

  Jock had never joined in with anything like that in his life, and he wasn’t planning to start now, but he didn’t tell Zak that. Instead he requested help with the computers, claiming not to know anything in the hope Zak would do it all for him.

  In the end he genuinely did need help. It would have been much easier if Charlotte had had a less common surname, someth
ing like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. But he hadn’t a clue how to find information about people, and after he had wrestled with the problem for half an hour, Zak achieved results almost immediately using social media.

  ‘You see, this is why people really shouldn’t put so much personal information online,’ he said censoriously as they looked at Charlotte’s profile on something called LinkedIn, where she had recorded her professional background and qualifications, and where she was linked to 15,670 people who mostly seemed to work in the media. Jock tried to imagine knowing as many people as that, but his mind boggled once he got past ten.

  ‘We can definitely work with this,’ said Zak. ‘We can look for some of her connections and see if they mention her name in any useful contexts. Maybe find a Facebook or Twitter page. See if she’s got any friends in common with me.’

  ‘With you? Why should she have friends in common with you?’ demanded Jock. Zak gave him the kind of look he had noticed young people tended to give him lately.

  ‘They’re not really friends in the way you might understand them,’ he explained gently. ‘They’re more like acquaintances. Or friends of friends. People in the same vague social groupings.’

  ‘Vague social groupings, eh?’ said Jock. ‘Something like people who teach in the same school.’

  ‘Yes, but wider than that,’ said Zak, in an encouraging ‘I think he’s got it at last, thank God’ kind of way. ‘More like people who teach anywhere in Scotland. Or in some cases, anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jock. ‘So it might be people who have once visited Pitkirtly. Or have some connection with the place.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Zak.

  ‘Is this the same as the six degrees of separation?’ said Jock. ‘Or the fifteen minutes of fame?’

  ‘Mmm – maybe.’

  Zak willingly set about the task of finding a link with Charlotte. It took him approximately four minutes, and one of these was spent re-booting the computer because Jock had accidentally leaned on the CTL, Alt, Num Lock and F7 keys at the same time and caused it to crash.

  It turned out that Zak’s father had gone to the same school as Charlotte. Jock felt a bit guilty at this point because he thought Zak might be upset by having to look at pictures of his father, but there was no outward sign of that. On the contrary, Zak seemed to be mildly amused by the class photos on the site he had found.

  Then there was another stroke of luck. Zak’s father turned out to have been in the same class as somebody called Bob Campbell. With a bit more surfing – Jock wasn’t sure if this was the correct term any more, but he didn’t want to ask – Zak established that Bob was indeed Charlotte’s father, that he had once been a media tycoon and that he had gone to prison a few years before for hacking into police emails, though Zak said Bob probably hadn’t done it himself because he didn’t look as clever as all that.

  ‘Wow!’ exclaimed Zak, sitting back after an hour or so in all. ‘That was intense.’

  ‘A media tycoon,’ said Jock. ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘Well, in his case it looks as if he owned a television station. The Fife local one. And the production company that makes Open Kitchen. I don’t think he can still own either of them if he’s in jail, but maybe his family....’

  ‘You mean Charlotte? She owns the television station and the production company?’

  ‘She doesn’t act as if she did,’ said Zak thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s her mum. Or her brother.’

  ‘Does she have a brother?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Zak. ‘I think there’s more to be found out, though.’

  ‘Do you think I should report back to Amaryllis now?’

  ‘Leave it for now. We’ll have another go after I’ve checked there isn’t anybody waiting to go round the Folk Museum. It’s my turn to give visitors a guided tour. But you never get anybody on a Tuesday.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know. People don’t seem to come out until the end of the week. Specially in the autumn and winter. It’s a form of hibernation, I suppose.’

  Jock puzzled over this while Zak went out to the foyer.

  When he came back they struck gold.

  Chapter 30 Christopher’s return

  After a while Christopher just sat there and let the Deputy Head of Culture’s words wash over him. He knew the other man was in the grip of some strong emotion, and in his experience this would burn itself out within a certain length of time – a day or two, a week or two, a year or two. There was absolutely no point in arguing.

  He relaxed once he had come to this conclusion. There was something rather restful about sitting on the uncomfortable chair in front of Mr Hargreaves’ desk, and he even found himself looking for a convenient place to put his feet up. It was too much to hope that he would actually drop off to sleep, but there was no harm in daydreaming.

  So when the other man said, ‘That’s agreed, then. You’ll take this strategy forward,’ Christopher was slightly baffled.

  ‘You’d better email me with the details so that I can give it my in-depth attention when I get back to my desk,’ he suggested cunningly.

  ‘I’ll ask my secretary to send you a note,’ said Mr Hargreaves. ‘Just a few bullet points.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Christopher, getting to his feet. ‘I’d better go now. The buses are only once an hour at this time of day.’

  He could have sworn the man deliberately delayed him so that he just missed a Pitkirtly bus and had to buy some soggy sandwiches for lunch at the bus station. To make up for that, he bought a muffin too, and then found it tasted like sawdust and had to throw it in a litter bin, the search for which in turn almost made him miss the next bus.

  This helped to account for him not being in a very receptive mood when Amaryllis phoned.

  ‘Are you still at West Fife Council’s secret bunker?’ she said without any preamble.

  ‘Just left there. How may I help you?’

  She sighed. ‘Brain-washing. It’s so easily done, so hard to undo. You sound like one of these drones on the council tax helpline.’

  ‘I didn’t even know there was a council tax helpline.’

  ‘Where are you, anyway? There’s a lot of static on the line.’

  ‘I’m on the bus,’ he said, as quietly as possible. Annoyingly, she pretended not to hear this, and made him repeat it more and more loudly until three of his fellow-passengers had glared at him and one had even told him to shut up.

  ‘Where are you, anyway?’ he asked once this silliness was out of the way.

  ‘Me? Oh, I’m doing surveillance.’

  ‘Who are you doing it on?’ he said, hoping against hope she had just selected some hapless Pitkirtly resident at random to keep her hand in, and not somebody connected with this latest sequence of catastrophic events. He was in enough trouble already without being sucked into some sort of vigilante operation.

  ‘It’s Charlotte,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’m hiding in a cupboard in the Cultural Centre. I only phoned so you could come and get me out if I get stuck.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ he exclaimed, attracting more glares. ‘Just get out of there right away and I’ll meet you at the bus stop by the Queen of Scots in half an hour.’

  He pressed the button he hoped would cut her off. It had a red line on it, so he thought it was probably meant for cancelling or the equivalent.

  He sat fuming for the next half hour as the bus trundled at its own speed, which wasn’t very fast, round all the villages between the Council offices and the Queen of Scots in Pitkirtly. He hoped against hope that Amaryllis would be there to meet him at the bus stop, but he had a very bad feeling about all this. Why was she tailing Charlotte in the first place? What did it have to do with anything? Presumably she must suspect the girl of something. With a lurch of his heart – or possibly his stomach, as the bus had just gone round a corner too fast, come bumper to bumper with another bus and was having to reverse back round the corner a
nd uphill at the same time, a task which previous experience had shown was too demanding for many of the bus drivers on this route – Christopher remembered what had happened that time with Victoria.

  Amaryllis wasn’t at the bus stop. But the good news was that he didn’t find her in a cupboard in the Cultural Centre either. In fact the building was more or less free of the usual suspects. Of the staff, only the library volunteer, one of the librarians and the Folk Museum curator were around. Maisie Sue was in the Folk Museum lamenting the recent damage to the quilt. He had just missed Zak and Jock McLean, who evidently had gone out to lunch together. That was a first.

  ‘Have you seen Amaryllis?’ he asked the library volunteer. She frowned as if thinking hard. ‘Slim, reddish hair, hyperactive,’ he added. He couldn’t think of any other appropriate adjectives. She was so much just herself that he had never really had to describe her.

  ‘Oh, yes, that Amaryllis,’ said the volunteer, as if there were lots of them about. ‘She was sort of skulking around, about an hour ago, but I saw her out at the back by the bins after that. I think she went off with that woman from the television.’

  ‘Woman from the television? Charlotte? Deirdre?’

  He almost added ‘Maria’ and then remembered that Amaryllis couldn’t have gone off with Maria. Why had Maria’s murder failed to stick in his mind as Eric’s had? Was he growing hardened to murder? Had he turned into one of these people without feelings who saw everything that happened through the cold unrelenting lens of rationality?

  The volunteer shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It was definitely one of them.’

  ‘And what was Jock McLean doing in here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the volunteer. Her face drooped with the burden of being unhelpful. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she enquired, brightening up a little.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  He was almost as sure as he could be that Amaryllis would be all right, no matter what she was up to. But he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging feeling that she must have needed him in some way, or she wouldn’t have phoned while he was on the bus.