2 Reunited in Death

by Cecilia Peartree

  They all stared at the very ordinary Mrs Stevenson in the hand-knitted Fair Isle hat she insisted on wearing indoors and out at this time of year: Christopher was sure they were all thinking the same thoughts about her connection to royalty. It was difficult to imagine – but he supposed stranger connections had been found.

  ‘Attila the Hun?’ muttered Jock McLean.

  ‘I got a book out of the library,’ continued Mrs Stevenson regally, ’before it was closed for refurbishment and we got that van coming round instead - remember the first driver was convicted as a sex offender and they had to get another one in. I was glad when they opened it up again in the new building. Where was I? Oh, yes, I got a book to help me get started, then I went online on the Mormons’ site and Scotland’s People, just to get the basics. I got a tree together and then I started on my brick walls.’

  ‘As in, banging your head on them?’ said Jock McLean. Christopher decided it might have been better if they had let him go outside and smoke his pipe after all. Even the residual smoke clinging to his tweed jacket would have been preferable to the fire of Mrs Stevenson’s wrath.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother coming in here if you don’t want to listen to anybody!’ she exploded, starting to rise to her feet but forgetting that it was at best a slow process due to her arthritic knees, and having to sink ignominiously back on to the chair. ‘I might as well not waste my breath talking to you! You’re as bad as that Ms Farquharson. That's the head librarian, dear,' she added as an aside to Amaryllis. 'You’d think her family was descended from royalty, the way she carries on!’

  ‘What’s your problem with her?’ said Christopher. ‘She likes to think she owns the place, but – ‘

  ‘You won’t have seen it!’ said Mrs Stevenson. ‘She’s different with men!’

  ‘Not with me, she isn’t,’ interpolated Big Dave. ‘She nearly threw me out on my ear.’

  ‘Somebody should tell her she’s there to serve the public,’ said Mrs Stevenson. ‘If she doesn’t mend her ways, she’ll come to a sticky end.’

  ‘But what’s she done?’ asked Christopher.

  ‘Tried to tell me I wasn’t qualified to do research. Made out I hadn’t taken proper care with my sources. Said what I’d found out couldn’t possibly be true,’ said Mrs Stevenson bitterly. ‘I’ll give her proper care, all right!’

  ‘Don’t get in one of your states, Jemima,’ Big Dave urged, working his way round the table so that he could stand behind her and pat her on the shoulder.

  ‘But I had done my research properly,’ said Mrs Stevenson. ‘I check all my sources as I go along. I even tracked down a couple of second cousins on my Dad’s side, and we swapped gedcoms... it all matched up.’

  ‘Swapped gedcoms?’ said Amaryllis, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, but had almost certainly taken it all in, as she always did. ‘What’s all that about?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ groaned Jock McLean. ’She’ll tell you.’

  Mrs Stevenson did indeed tell them, in one of the most convoluted explanations Christopher had ever heard. He didn’t really mind; sitting in the salubrious lounge bar of the Queen of Scots, listening to his closest friends rambling on, was one of the great pleasures of life. He supposed the younger generation would think that was really sad. But then, referring to the younger generation was in itself rather sad, in the conventional sense of the word, because it suggested he himself was no longer young.

  At some point, Jock McLean and Christopher made an excuse and fled to the sanctuary of the unofficial smoking area in the car park. It was raining. Christopher breathed in the familiar scent of Jock’s pipe smoke and together they stood in a companionable silence, watching some kids poking about in a wheelie bin across the road.

  ‘What are they up to?’ said Christopher after a while.

  ‘Just don’t even ask,’ said Jock, half-closing his eyes to savour the smoke better. ‘They’re teenagers. They do things we don’t want to know about. Get over it.’

  ‘But,’ said Christopher, ‘they aren’t the usual kind of teenager.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ drawled Jock. ‘They’re all the same when it comes down to it.’

  Christopher wasn’t sure; the teenagers had an exotic air, by Pitkirtly standards, and there was something about them that suggested desperation rather than criminality. But on the other hand, he knew better than to argue with Jock McLean about his specialist subject, young people.

  When they judged it to be safe, they went back into the lounge bar. Amaryllis welcomed them in tones of desperation.

  ‘So – what’s new out there?’

  ‘In the car park?’ said Christopher. ‘Nothing much.... Oh, yes, there were some teenagers rooting around in a wheelie-bin. Chinese or something. One of them looked as if he was wearing a yak.’

  ‘A yak?’ said Amaryllis, and to his surprise she jumped to her feet and rushed out of the pub.

  ‘What did I tell you? – it’s all part of the eternal mystery of women,’ observed Jock McLean.

  Chapter 4

  Lost and found

  Grumpy Graham leaned heavily on the desk. It creaked with a greater intensity than usual. Christopher took a step backwards. He was due to meet Amaryllis later on and he couldn’t afford to be incapacitated by a collapsing desk.

  ‘She’s probably got one of her headaches,’ said Graham. ‘All right for some.’

  ‘If having a headache is all right,’ said Christopher.

  ‘One law for them, one for us,’ said Graham, ignoring Christopher’s mild disagreement. ‘Hasn’t even rung in, Clarissa says. She's left the wee girl to cope on her own with the Thursday crowd.’

  ‘They’re making a lot of noise out there,’ said Christopher. It took two of them to cope with the extra influx on Thursdays, when it seemed that every retired person for miles around converged on the Cultural Centre between ten and one. Sometimes the main thrust was in the library, sometimes in the Folk Museum. It was hard to predict, but they had developed a routine to deal with the initial influx.

  Graham looked at his watch as somebody knocked on the outside door. ‘Two and a half minutes to go... I could be out fishing right now and I have to be in here! It's all right for some.’

  'Fishing?'

  Graham ignored him, studying the watch as if he expected it to teleport him to another dimension.

  ‘Shouldn’t we just let them in now?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Let them in now? Oh, no, that won’t do. It’s the thin end of the wedge – one week you’d let them in at two minutes to, and before you knew where you were they’d be turning up at eight-thirty wanting in before I’d even done the dusting.’

  One of the unexpected joys of this job was watching Grumpy Graham wielding a feather duster round the bookshelves. Ms ‘call me Gloria’ Farquharson was very particular about dusting in the library. It was a different story in the Folk Museum. Christopher had been told firmly on his first day by Andrew, the curator, that it added to the authenticity of objects to have a layer of dust over them, with the odd cobweb and perhaps a small spider among the grime, although most spiders were in fact too fastidious to stay in the place for long. Ms Farquharson and Andrew had spent many a happy hour wrangling over that.

  ‘Wake up in there!’ shouted someone from outside. ‘It’s past time!’

  Graham strode over to the door and opened it.

  ‘It’s exactly ten a.m. according to my watch, so I’ll thank you to stop your noise, pal,’ he said, but most of the sentence was lost in the rush of pensioners into the foyer. Jemima Stevenson, carried along in the current, waved to Christopher as she passed on her way into the library. ‘... OPRs for Auchtermuchty,’ was what he thought she said, but it didn’t make any sense so he thought he might have been wrong.

  At the back of the crowd, Amaryllis strolled in.

  ‘Morning,’ she greeted them. ‘I’m looking for books about Pitkirtly in the fifteenth century.’

  ‘Books, eh?’ said Grumpy Graham, ‘
you’ll be wanting the library, then.’

  He pointed towards the library entrance.

  ‘Thanks very much indeed for your help,’ Amaryllis smiled, going in that direction. Christopher admired her stateliness, while wondering why she had decided to play the gracious aristocrat mingling with uncouth commoners. She usually had a reason for everything she did, although it sometimes had to get close enough to hit him in the face before he worked out what it was.

  After Amaryllis there was a flurry caused by a very young-looking Big Issue salesman of slightly exotic appearance, reminding Christopher of the teenagers around the wheelie bin, who tried to come in and sell his wares and was summarily evicted by Grumpy Graham. It went quiet in the foyer at that point, so Christopher was dispatched into the Folk Museum to help Andrew with the crowds. He was still there two hours later when the police arrived.

  Christopher didn’t notice anything at first. He was busy holding up an old rag rug, on Andrew’s instructions, so that the assembled crowd could take in the intricacy of its design and the quality of the craft work. He could hardly hear himself think through the chorus of ‘they don’t make them like that any more’ and ‘my granny used to make our old clothes into rugs – it was a hard life though’. He spotted Amaryllis somewhere in the background, smiling and looking benign. He had learned from experience that when she looked benign she was at her most dangerous.

  Grumpy Graham appeared in the doorway, his expression more than living up to his nickname. He didn’t say anything, but a uniformed policeman moved up to stand next to him, and announced,

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we need to clear the building now. No cause for alarm – purely routine.’

  The staff pulled together in a procedure they had rehearsed in many a fire drill and in the occasional false alarm set off by Jock McLean’s pipe smouldering away in his jacket pocket. Among other members of the public, Christopher spotted Mrs Stevenson and Amaryllis leaving together, deep in conversation, and Big Dave, who must have come along to keep Mrs Stevenson company.

  ‘Would the staff please assemble in the foyer?’ said the policeman as Graham and Christopher checked that the last straggler was out and started preparing to leave themselves too.

  ‘It isn’t a bomb scare, then?’ said Andrew brightly.

  ‘Oooh, I never even thought of that!’ said Clarissa, the assistant librarian, who Christopher thought must be over thirty but who still dressed, and often behaved, as if she were still at school, squeaking with excitement and jumping up and down on the slightest pretext.

  ‘It’s nothing like that,’ said Grumpy Graham.

  The four of them looked at the policeman, who was standing just in front of the reception desk.

  ‘Mr Smith’s on his way,’ he said, as if they were supposed to guess the significance of this statement.

  ‘Mr Smith?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Smith, of West Fife Constabulary.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Christopher, still completely baffled. Grumpy Graham obviously had some idea of what was going on, but a glance at Andrew and Clarissa told him that they were as puzzled as he was.

  They waited in silence for a few moments, then there was a knock at the door.

  ‘If that’s some OAP wanting in for a free read of the papers – ‘ said Graham darkly. He opened the door. A tall thin man in a dark suit came in.

  ‘Thank you, Constable,’ he said to the uniformed officer. ‘Have you told them the news?’

  ‘Waiting for you, sir. I did just give Mr Ferguson here an idea of what it was about.’

  It was odd hearing Grumpy Graham referred to like this. Christopher wasn’t sure if he had ever heard the man’s last name before.

  ‘I have some bad news,’ said Detective Inspector Smith. ‘Your colleague, Ms Gloria Farquharson, has been found.’

  He paused for just about long enough for Christopher to start wondering what was so bad about that, but fortunately not aloud.

  ‘Dead,’ the police officer added.

  Someone gasped; another of them made an odd moaning sound; Grumpy Graham coughed and looked at the floor. Christopher, feeling that some physical gesture was required to show the extent of his shock, frowned and put a hand up to scratch the back of his head, where he suspected there was a patch of psoriasis.

  ‘Where?’ he asked, after a carefully judged pause. And ‘what happened?’ said Andrew at almost the same time. Clarissa meanwhile swayed and leaned against the reception desk.

  ‘We can’t say at this point exactly what happened,’ said Detective Inspector Smith. ‘As soon as we can release that information we will do so. I wanted to inform you all personally about Ms Farquharson’s death, and to assure you that we will be treating the case with the utmost urgency.... There’s something else.’

  He paused again.

  ‘Something else?’ said Andrew. Christopher was glad he hadn’t had to step in this time with the fatuous remark.

  ‘We wondered if any of you were aware of the identity of Ms Farquharson’s next of kin.’

  ‘It’ll be in the Council records, surely?’ said Graham.

  Mr Smith shook his head.

  ‘That information seems to have slipped through the net – there’s no next of kin in any of the relevant documents,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter too much – we have other methods of tracking these things down. It would just have been easier if all the paperwork were in place. You don’t know if her parents were still alive, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Clarissa in a low voice. ‘Ms Farquharson was a very private person.’

  She wiped away a tear, apparently genuine. Christopher almost warmed to her.

  Andrew spoke up.

  ‘She was orphaned at an early age,’ he said. ‘I caught her – saw her – once reading an airmail letter. In the staff kitchen. She said it was from an orphan she sponsored in Tibet. She told me a bit of her own story. But she was a private person. I never found out all of it.’

  Graham glared at him as if he shouldn’t have intruded into Ms Farquharson’s life even to that extent.

  ‘And then the police just left,’ Christopher said later, narrating it all to Amaryllis.

  ‘So you didn’t find out any more?’ she asked incredulously.

  ‘We aren’t all master interrogators, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not an interrogator,’ she said, voice rising alarmingly. ‘I’ve never interrogated anybody in my life! What made you think I had?’

  He shrugged. ‘Hazy, lazy, crazy ideas about your profession. Sorry – I should always check my facts before talking to you about anything.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘I didn’t mean –‘

  ‘Oh, that’s the classic male excuse, isn’t it? I didn’t mean it so everything’s all right. You’d better leave now, before we both say more things we don’t mean.’

  It wasn’t until he was outside in Merchantman Wynd that Christopher started to get suspicious about how quickly this storm had blown up from a clear blue sky: had Amaryllis wanted rid of him so that she could get on with one of her devious nocturnal projects? He shrugged his shoulders, tomorrow would be soon enough to think about that. If then.

  Chapter 5

  Incident room

  It was an audacious thing to do and Amaryllis wasn’t sure why she was so keen to do it. She wrestled with her conscience for a while as she crouched in the shrubs in the Cultural Centre car park, just outside the temporary incident room the police had brought in that afternoon; but Amaryllis’s conscience was a lithe and flexible beast at the best of times, and she didn’t spend long convincing herself she was doing it for the greater good.

  It was a pity she had been forced to get rid of Christopher in that slightly underhand way. Their relationship thrived on warmth and stability, not on flare-ups and dramas. Since she had got to know him she had really worked at being warm and stable, although it went against the grain of her personality, and she felt that he ha
d blossomed in the intermittent sunshine of her affection. He had more than one job to keep him busy so that he no longer seemed to regret having been made redundant, or even having lost the chairmanship of the committee. He still hung around with the core members of the Pitkirtly Local Improvement Forum, but they were his friends by now so that was fine. She was pleased with the effort she had put into Christopher.

  There were only two policemen in there at the moment, if her study of their comings and goings had been accurate. All she needed was to work out when they were due to stop for a break, and then she could go in.

  A small window at her side of the Portakabin was open. She heard a deep voice that carried across the car park.

  ‘Shut that bloody window while you’re over there! It’s brass monkeys in here.’

  ‘Do you want a biscuit? There’s hobnobs, bourbons or – what’s this one? – chocolate fingers.’

  ‘We’re not going round bloody Tesco’s,’ shouted the other one. ‘Get back here with the tea.’

  Then the window banged shut.

  Amaryllis left it for five minutes, to make sure they were both sitting with their feet up. Then she came out of the shrubs and stood up in one movement. She was at the door in a couple of steps. She turned the handle and pulled gently. It swung open. The idiots hadn’t activated the swipe card security system. Anyone could have got in. Forgetting that she had benefitted from this laxness, Amaryllis felt a quick burst of indignation and annoyance on behalf of the community. If the police didn’t take care of their own security, then who were they to advise anyone else? She strode down the corridor and straight into the room where, as suspected, the two policemen had their feet up on a desk and cups of tea in their hands.

  They jumped up, one of them spilling tea all down himself, as they saw her, and stood approximately at attention.

  ‘Good evening, officers,’ said Amaryllis, flashing her security services identification card and speaking in the voice of authority she found useful in all sorts of awkward situations. ‘Any developments on the Farquharson case?’