7 A Tasteful Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Do you know where Zak and Jock went for lunch?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know who Jock is.’

  Wait a minute. In the normal course of events Jock hardly ever set foot in the Cultural Centre. Not unless there was something going on that he didn’t want to miss because he thought it had the potential to turn out really disastrously.

  ‘What was Zak doing this morning?’ he asked the volunteer.

  ‘Well, he helped us tidy up a bit. He’s such a nice, helpful boy. Then he was at the computers with some old man. I don’t know what they were doing.’

  Christopher translated ‘some old man’ into ‘Jock McLean’ in his head. That was even more peculiar. Jock usually avoided computers like the plague, and had done ever since Jemima had tried to get him going on family tree research a couple of years before.

  Had Amaryllis somehow got at him too?

  He decided to go for a walk. He could take in the Queen of Scots in one sweep, and then go up the High Street to the café. Or should he do it the other way round? Charlie didn’t serve food, so unless they were thinking in terms of a liquid lunch.... It wasn’t impossible where Jock was concerned, but he had a feeling Zak was young and active enough to need solid food in the middle of the day.

  He went up to the café first.

  ‘You’ll never guess what!’ said Jock McLean from a table by the window.

  Christopher pushed his way between the tables, chairs and prams that crowded the place, and sat down opposite Jock.

  ‘Is Zak in here too?’

  ‘He’s ordering. You have to go up to the counter. You’ll need to be quick if you want something – he’s nearly at the front of the queue.’

  ‘I’ll wait till later,’ said Christopher, realising he was still queasy after the bus trip. ‘What won’t I guess? And have you seen Amaryllis today?’

  ‘No, but she rang me first thing. That’s why I’ve been on the computer with Zak.’

  Jock’s small pebble-hard eyes gleamed. Christopher hoped he hadn’t become addicted to the internet. It could happen within a very short time, although Jock had seemed more resistant than most.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do all that with it,’ said Jock. ‘Finding all those connections between people. Without them even knowing you’re looking for them. I’m glad I’ve never put my name to anything on there.’

  Christopher grasped at the tiny loose end Jock had left in one of his sentences. ‘Connections between...?’

  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ said Jock.

  ‘What?’

  Jock shook his head. ‘Who’d have thought Liam Johnstone would ever come in useful?’

  ‘What are you talking about exactly?’

  Zak banged a tray down on the table and started to unload it.

  ‘Bacon and egg roll, tea you could stand up a spoon in. Falafel sub. Peach and blackcurrant smoothie.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jock meekly.

  ‘Here’s your change,’ said Zak, frowning. ‘Did you want anything, Mr Wilson?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Christopher. ‘Jock was just telling me what you helped him to find out on the computer.’

  ‘Oh – yes. You’ll never guess, Mr Wilson...’

  ‘You’re right, I won’t,’ said Christopher. ‘Because I’m not planning to play any guessing games. One of you might as well just tell me.’

  ‘It’s that lad Ken,’ said Jock, before Zak could even open his mouth. ‘You know how he and Charlotte go around together a lot? Well....’

  Chapter 31 Amaryllis gets into trouble

  Amaryllis wished she hadn’t bothered ringing Christopher from the cupboard. It had turned out to be ludicrously easy to get out of there after all, and she had risked being overheard on the phone by one of her suspects. She shook her head as she pushed up the inside handle and emerged into an alcove in the library. Her skills were definitely not as sharp as they had been at one time. But perhaps that was just because she had given up going on proper missions. She wondered gloomily if the service would let her do one a year to keep her hand in. She doubted it somehow. They were probably all glad to have her out of their hair at last. It must have been annoying for the young ones with the technology at their fingertips to be continually made to look stupid by a middle-aged woman. She shuddered at the concept of middle age. But at least it was better than old age. While she had still been spying, she had never expected to last until then. Now she might have to face up to it one day.

  In this pessimistic frame of mind she made her way out of the building via the fire exit. It didn’t matter at this point if she set off an alarm or not. Setting it off might in fact cause enough confusion to conceal her pursuit of Charlotte.

  Just before taking refuge in the cupboard she had heard the girl speaking to someone behind a shelf in the library. They were planning, apparently, to rendezvous down by the harbour and do something. Amaryllis assumed it was something bad. As far as she could tell, almost everything Charlotte had done since she arrived in Pitkirtly had been bad. It was the attack on Giancarlo that rankled most with Amaryllis. After all, he was a friend – of sorts. More of a friend than Eric or Maria had been, that was for sure.

  It hadn’t been clear from inside the cupboard whether Charlotte’s accomplice was at the other end of a phone line or actually present in the library, and Amaryllis wasn’t going to try very hard to find out. She would concentrate on following the girl. The accomplice would have to be tracked down later – perhaps it would be safe to let the police tidy up that loose end. It would give them something useful to do.

  Disregarding Christopher’s instructions to meet him at the bus stop, which in any case she knew he would be very surprised if she complied with, she used her tried and tested techniques to tail Charlotte from the Cultural Centre and across the car park. Sauntering unconcernedly was one of them. Whisking herself out of sight behind a delivery van was another. Charlotte showed no sign she was aware of Amaryllis’s presence. She set a brisk pace, heading round the corner by the supermarket and up the High Street a little way before plunging back down into the narrow cobbled wynds which intersected the group of former fishermen’s cottages, some of which, Amaryllis had noticed recently, were now in use as weekend and holiday homes and had been renovated with varying degrees of success. She hoped fervently Pitkirtly wouldn’t become a magnet for holiday-makers. One of the reasons she liked living there was the bleak, unpromising authenticity of the place. If people started adding on bijou balconies overlooking the sea, and keeping pots of geraniums on them, the natives might as well move out.

  It was unusual, or at least it had been in the past, for Amaryllis to get distracted by inner monologues while in the middle of an operation. Perhaps it was just too easy to follow Charlotte. She didn’t want to think about the alternative, that she had lost her edge altogether and would never regain it.

  Whatever the cause, she suddenly found herself standing alone on the cobbled street wondering where the hell Charlotte had gone.

  There weren’t very many options.

  Amaryllis ran down to the foot of the narrow wynd and looked in both directions along the river front. There was a strong breeze blowing in from the water, which had apparently discouraged most other people from walking along there this afternoon, but one or two were marching with dour determination, as if showing enjoyment in the healthy exercise would be a sign of weakness.

  She turned abruptly and almost collided with someone else.

  ‘Oh, it’s you!’

  ‘Hi,’ said Ken, looking down at her enigmatically. She hadn’t really noticed before how tall he was and how blue his eyes were. In fact, she hadn’t noticed much about him at all. He tended to fade into the background, so that you forgot he was there. Or if you did notice him, it was in conjunction with Charlotte, so he became part of ‘Charlotte and Ken’ instead of just being ‘Ken’.

  She started to push past him, but he held on to her arm.

  ‘Have you seen Charl
otte?’ she asked. ‘I was just about to catch up with her for a chat when she disappeared.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you don’t know for sure one way or another?’ said Amaryllis, slightly baffled by the way he was clutching at her arm. She didn’t want to start an unseemly struggle, but he was holding it a little too tightly to be casual. She slid her mobile phone out of her pocket and held it in one hand. She knew the feeling of being able to summon help at a moment’s notice was an illusion, but she found it rather a comforting one. Of course, if she had to try and convince Christopher to come to her rescue it could all take some time.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean I don’t think you were about to talk to her.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Amaryllis, and was struck immediately by the incongruous thought that she should probably run away from him as fast as she could, back up to the High Street where there were plenty of people around, or even into the gardens of the old fishermen’s cottages where, she knew from previous experience, it was possible to shake off the most determined pursuer.

  The thought turned out to be not as incongruous as she had first imagined.

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ he said, his grip on her arm tightening even more. She swung her free hand round to hit him in the face, but he laughed and shrugged off the blow. She found herself being overpowered by his superior strength. He pinioned both arms behind her and forced her to walk along just in front of him like that, towards the river front road where she noticed a van drawing up right on the corner.

  There was something wrong here. He shouldn’t have been able to do that. He didn’t even have a weapon trained on her, as far as she could tell.

  She tried using her legs. Her best karate kick bounced off him with no apparent effect.

  She let herself go limp. He dragged her upright, half-carrying her along. She decided to go along with this farce for a while and see where it led. It wasn’t a decision she liked making, but sometimes you had to know when to accept the inevitable in the hope that an opportunity would arise...

  She was conscious of a sharp pain at the back of her head, and as everything went black Amaryllis’s last waking thought was one of self-reproach. Why had she let herself degenerate into this state of unpreparedness?

  Chapter 32 The revelations of Zak and Jock

  Christopher stared at Jock with a feeling approaching awe. Jock smiled smugly. He seemed to be luxuriating in his technological superiority.

  ‘So you found out about Charlotte and Ken from the internet?’

  ‘Zak helped,’ said Jock, with an air of modesty that Christopher found extremely false. ‘It turned out that his Dad was at school with theirs... You see, schools can come in useful sometimes.’

  ‘So can the internet,’ said Zak, biting into his falafel sub with apparent relish. Christopher spared it a glance, and shuddered. How could anyone enjoy eating something that looked a bit like colossal rabbit droppings coated with gravel? Giving it a fancy name didn’t help.

  ‘And they’re actually twins?’ he said, trying to get his thoughts back on track.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Jock.

  ‘They’re not identical,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Obviously not,’ said Jock. ‘He’s about two feet taller than her for a start.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Christopher. ‘I suppose their eyes might be the same colour.’

  ‘That isn’t important,’ said Jock.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Christopher.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Zak, interrupting their pointless exchange. ‘It’s about their father.’

  ‘Last seen in prison after hacking into police emails,’ said Jock, nodding sagely.

  ‘How did he manage that?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Somebody else probably did it for him,’ said Zak.

  ‘But you’ll never guess what happened next!’ said Jock, his eyes gleaming.

  Christopher heaved a sigh. ‘No, I don’t suppose I will.’

  ‘It was only a few weeks ago,’ said Zak. ‘As far as we can tell, it must have been around the time the Blair Atholl deal fell through.’

  ‘Blair Atholl deal?’ Christopher wondered if he had ever known what that meant, or whether he had missed a bit somewhere along the line. It wasn’t unheard-of for him to miss out on vital information everybody else seemed to know. He was thinking particularly of Jemima’s wedding, but there had been other occasions too.

  ‘When they were going to record Open Kitchen in Blair Atholl but they pulled out at the last minute,’ said Zak patiently. ‘And then they found the place they thought they had ready as a back-up didn’t really exist.’

  ‘Glasswearie,’ said Jock as if he were making an important announcement. ‘That’s what it was called.’

  Christopher frowned. ‘It sounds like a real place. Are you sure...?’

  ‘It definitely doesn’t exist, Mr Wilson,’ said Zak. ‘It sounds quite like some other Scottish places, but it was just a figment of Eric McLaughlin’s imagination.’

  ‘But why? Why did he make it up?’

  ‘He and Bob Campbell had a long-standing feud,’ said Jock. ‘We haven’t been able to find out what caused it, but we might have another look at some of the websites – maybe there’ll be archived posts that we can access.’

  Christopher gave him a look. Jock smiled his new infuriating smile again.

  ‘Bob Campbell died at just about that time,’ said Zak abruptly.

  ‘Was it – natural causes?’ asked Christopher. He was conscious of not wanting to frame the question the other way round. Surely it would have been too much of a coincidence for Bob Campbell to have been poisoned.

  ‘There was a lot of talk,’ said Zak. ‘Rumours. They’re still all over the internet. But the family seems to have tried to put a stop to them.’

  ‘What sort of rumours?’ said Christopher, not sure if he really wanted to know the answer.

  ‘Rumours about his death,’ said Jock, nodding.

  ‘How did he die?’ asked Christopher.

  ‘His car went into a river,’ said Jock.

  ‘They’ve already taken legal action against one of the newspapers,’ said Zak. ‘And had some Twitter accounts frozen.’

  They both looked at Christopher, as if willing him to understand what they weren’t saying.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I think.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So are you saying Charlotte and Ken thought Eric McLaughlin drove their father to his death by making up this Glasswearie place?’ he said, to show he had been paying attention, but in a low voice so that he wouldn’t be overheard by the two old women at the next table, whom he had seen staring at him over their tea-cups. ‘And then they decided to kill him in revenge?’

  The others both nodded like a pair of puppets. Jock McLean did have a look of Mr Punch about him, Christopher realised.

  ‘Mr McLaughlin could even have sabotaged Blair Atholl too,’ said Zak. ‘But that would be hard to prove.’

  ‘The whole thing may be impossible to prove,’ said Christopher. ‘Shouldn’t we take all this to the police?’

  ‘Ha!’ said Jock. ‘What do you think they would do with it?’

  ‘You’ve been spending too much time with Amaryllis,’ Christopher retorted.

  ‘Better that than spending it with Deirdre!’ said Jock.

  ‘Do you think I even wanted to spend time with Deirdre?’

  Jock shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe.’

  Christopher noticed Zak was watching them tolerantly, like a parent waiting for two children to stop squabbling before he intervened and made them do something sensible, such as their homework.

  ‘Did you know Amaryllis is following Charlotte at this very moment?’ said Christopher. ‘She could be in danger. What if she has to deal with Charlotte and Ken both at once? It looks as if they might have killed twice already, not to mention running over Giancarlo.’

  ‘Danger? Amaryllis?’ said Jo
ck with a laugh. ‘She could take out both of them with one hand tied behind her back.’

  ‘How do you know she’s following Charlotte?’ said Zak, taking a final swig of his smoothie to wash last few crumbs of the falafel sub down.

  ‘She phoned me while I was on the bus. From a cupboard. I tried to get her to meet me at the bus stop but I didn’t really expect her to turn up. And she didn’t.’

  The three of them stared at each other. Jock thought he detected the beginnings of alarm in the eyes of both the others. ‘Maybe there was a mix-up over which bus stop you meant. She’ll be fine,’ he said, in an effort to reassure them all.

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘She’ll be fine.’

  Zak nodded.

  The nagging worry at the back of Jock’s mind seemed to be reflected in Christopher’s and Zak’s eyes. Yes, Amaryllis would be fine. Unless she wasn’t.

  ‘Do you think they’re the ones who killed Eric and Maria?’ said Christopher. ‘Did they get voted “most likely to go on a murderous rampage” on the school website or something?’

  ‘I don’t think you get that sort of thing on Scottish school websites,’ said Zak.

  Chapter 33 Jock sorts things out

  The three of them rose as one, scraping their chairs back in a cacophony of panic.

  ‘I’ll go and settle up,’ said Jock.

  ‘You’ve already paid,’ said Zak.

  ‘Oh, yes, so I have.’

  On the way outside, Christopher felt something tugging at his sleeve.

  ‘Are you from that television company?’ said one of the old women from the next table. Her eyes gleamed with curiosity.

  ‘Certainly not!’ he said indignantly. ‘I live here.’

  He heard them twittering and giggling to each other as he escaped.

  Once outside they looked up and down the High Street. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

  ‘We’d better split up and divide the town amongst us,’ said Zak. When had he suddenly grown up and started to take charge of things, Jock wondered, conscious that he himself was acting more and more like a petulant schoolboy as he got older. ‘I’ll go up to the hotel first in case they’ve headed back there.’