2 Reunited in Death

by Cecilia Peartree

  As he wandered round the hall looking for Andrew, Christopher became aware of an altercation taking place near the door, where two uniformed police officers had been standing stoically since everyone arrived.

  There were raised voices. ‘... a police state.... Stalinist Russia!... freedom to roam.... four freedoms... Abraham Lincoln.’

  He wasn’t sure if he had heard the last of these correctly. The two policemen were under siege. He hurried over to see if there was anything he could do, such as explaining how things were done here, and trying to persuade people to go back to the relatively peaceable pursuit of genealogy.

  Somehow once he got into the middle of the group, someone pushed him over and someone else kicked him – perhaps accidentally – and he ended up in an approximation of a foetal position, knees drawn up as near his chest as he could get them, head tucked in, trying to protect himself.

  After a while the crowd parted and one of the police officers pulled him to his feet.

  ‘You want to be more careful,’ he said. ‘You could have been trampled then. They’re like wild beasts, some of those family researchers.’

  ‘Did they want to leave?’ said Christopher.

  The other police officer nodded. ‘But she’s talked them into staying.’

  Christopher glanced round and saw Mrs Stevenson leading away some of the people who had seemed to be the ring-leaders in the escape attempt.

  ‘They’ll be digging a tunnel next,’ said the first policeman.

  ‘The minister wouldn’t like that, though,’ said the second. They both laughed.

  ‘They’re getting restless,’ said Christopher. ‘It's not surprising really. Couldn’t you just take their names and addresses and let them go? They want to go and look for their ancestral homes.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said one of the policemen.

  ‘That wouldn’t do at all,’ said the other.

  ‘We haven’t been given any orders to do that,’ said the first. ‘We’ve got to wait for orders.’

  ‘Otherwise the whole system would fall apart,’ said the second.

  Great double act or what, thought Christopher. Fortunately he managed not to say it aloud.

  ‘I’ve got to get to the supermarket in ten minutes,’ he said, ‘for my evening shift. What are the chances of me being able to do that?’

  Both policemen shook their heads. ‘Not good, sir, not good,’ said one.

  Christopher took out his mobile phone again. Using it twice in one day went somewhat against the grain, but he supposed this was a bit of an emergency. He rang the supermarket and made his excuses. He hoped he wouldn’t lose his job. Not that it was much of a job, but it helped to pay the gas bill. Actually it also helped him to save in an ISA he was hoping to use eventually to persuade Amaryllis that he was a man of substance, but that was so boring that he had never talked about it to anyone.

  He glanced up from the phone and noticed Clarissa walking past him. She jumped when he spoke to her, as if she had been somewhere else altogether.

  'Clarissa?' he said again. 'Sorry. Have you seen Andrew anywhere?'

  He was just about to explain why he was looking for Andrew when she interrupted his half-formed sentence. 'No, should I have?'

  She seemed to be about to walk on. He put his hand on her arm. She flinched away from him. 'I've got to get on.'

  'Are you all right, Clarissa?' he said. He noticed belatedly that her hair was even wilder and wispier than usual, and her eyes looked big and scared like those of a startled animal - perhaps a deer or a hedgehog, he thought fancifully. He realised Clarissa wouldn't like being compared to a deer or a hedgehog, so he tried to push this image out of his head. 'Sorry - I didn't mean to interrupt your train of thought. It was just that Graham wanted Andrew to go back round to the Centre and take over for a while, so I wondered - '

  'I think he's deep in conversation with his friend the minister,' she said coolly, gesturing towards the tea queue. It took Christopher a minute to locate Andrew in the crowd, but once he had homed in he saw what Clarissa meant. The minister, leaning closer to Andrew than was surely compatible with her vocation as a woman of the cloth, gazed up into his face, eyes wide, mouth curved in a gentle smile.

  'Surely you can't imagine - ' Christopher started to say as he turned back towards Clarissa. But she had gone already, pushing her way past family historians of all sizes and ages towards her goal. He watched, helpless, as she approached the couple in the queue who were apparently oblivious to everything outside their little bubble of niceness. At the last minute another couple got in her way, and she shoved them aside, pushing the man to the floor. His partner made a big show of picking him up. He heard her voice above all the background noise in the hall.

  'Jim! Are you all right there? Here, take my hand!'

  'I'm all right, Lottie!' he said, getting to his feet. 'Just stop fussing, would you?'

  'That's my new cousin,' said Mrs Stevenson, materialising at Christopher's side. 'Jim Halloran. And his wife. But David thinks his wife's a bit of a dragon though.'

  'Clarissa pushed him over,' said Christopher. 'Did you see?'

  'I missed it,' said Mrs Stevenson. 'Oh dear. I'm rather worried about that wee girl.'

  Chapter 14

  The little escape

  Amaryllis was getting claustrophobic, and she didn’t like it. She always preferred to have an escape route from any situation she was in. So after getting cups of tea at last and conveying them to Big Dave and Jemima, who seemed to have had some sort of an adventure while she’d been in the tea queue, she did a survey of the building. There must be a fire exit, and with a bit of luck it wouldn’t be blocked with odd boxes and step-ladders and also wouldn’t have a dead body in it. She couldn’t possibly stumble across another one today: it would be against the laws of physics or something. Although, come to think of it, some of her days were like that.

  She slipped through a door at one end of the hall, hoping the gaggle of researchers by the computers would screen her from most people’s view. As she turned, she just caught Clarissa’s eye, but the wee girl didn’t show any sign of having seen her, and certainly didn’t set up a hue and cry.

  Amaryllis found herself in a kitchen. It wasn’t exactly state of the art, in fact it looked as if it had probably last been refurbished in the late 1950s, but she reminded herself that she wasn’t a photographer from ‘Ideal Home’ and didn’t really need even to think about the decor. Instead she looked for a way out. There was a door, but that turned out to lead into some sort of old-fashioned larder: it did have a very small window, but she told herself firmly that her days of clambering through very tiny windows high up in the walls of cupboards were well and truly over. Or at least, she would only do it if her life depended on it. Which it almost certainly didn’t in this case.

  She tried some of the cupboard doors in a desultory manner, discovering a small hatch in the cupboard under the sink. It looked as if it might house a colony of spiders, the only living creatures Amaryllis was afraid of. Not many people had discovered this, since she tended to try and keep it hidden, but Christopher knew, and to his credit had never teased her about it or left any big plastic spiders or indeed tomato stalks around her flat for her to come upon unexpectedly. She shuddered.

  The kitchen didn’t seem very promising, so she cautiously slid back through into the main hall. Things had gone very quiet since her departure only minutes before. Amaryllis glanced round, and then followed the direction of most people’s gaze.

  Detective Chief Inspector Smith was standing at the end of the hall, giving some sort of a speech.

  ‘... so any of you who weren’t in the Cultural Centre at that time are free to go,’ he said. ‘I must ask the rest to be patient while my officers take a note of your names and addresses and a very brief account of your movements and of anything relevant you may have seen during the morning. After that most of you will also be free to go. I estimate this process could take up to two hours in all.’

&
nbsp; The small window in the larder started to seem very appealing. Amaryllis felt a very tiny pang of guilt about abandoning Christopher, Jemima and Big Dave, but she could catch up with them later in the Queen of Scots. In the meantime she had an urgent errand to run. What she didn’t feel was a pang of conscience about running out on the police. After all, they had already had their chance with her. They would have to do without her expert assistance: let them come crawling to her if they needed her.

  She slid back into the kitchen, dragged a set of folding steps into the larder and set them up. Just as she was hoisting herself up to the little window and trying to push it open, Christopher came into the kitchen. She wished she had thought of closing the larder door.

  ‘What’s going on here then?’ he said, observing her struggles.

  ‘Can you – give me a hand?’ she gasped, unable to get a good grip on the window catch.

  ‘I don’t know if I should aid and abet a felon,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not a felon,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’ve already been questioned by the police. They know where I am if they want to speak to me again. I’m not going to queue up with a bunch of - researchers - just to go through it all again.’

  She banged at the window catch ferociously, and it gave way. The window swung open. It was a struggle to get through, but she pushed and manoeuvred herself until she did it.

  ‘I’ve got other things to do,’ she said to him from outside. She hated the sense that she was apologising or justifying herself in some way. ‘I need to get up to the furniture shop and speak to the homeless Tibetans.'

  ‘Homeless Tibetans? Where do they come in?’

  ‘Not at all,’ she said, turned on her heel and sprinted off round the next corner, to minimise the chances of the police spotting her. She was going back up to the glitzy furniture store, and nothing was going to stop her.

  It was starting to get dark already: it had been an overcast day, threatening rain but not delivering it, and now it was about two-thirty o’clock in the afternoon. Amaryllis checked her watch. No wonder the tea queue in the hall was so long. Most of the family historians must now be desperate for something more than biscuits to sustain them in their researches. Amaryllis never underestimated hunger as a catalyst. She had even used it as a weapon herself, in operations she tried hard to forget.

  The lights of Pitkirtly’s shops shone out brightly into the dimness. Some shopkeepers had already dressed their windows for Christmas, bringing out the dusty tinsel and the moth-eaten snowmen to spread festive cheer. In the butcher’s window, an incongruous snow scene was displayed, with cute little toy rabbits scampering while their real, very dead counterparts dangled above them. It was enough to give children nightmares, Amaryllis reflected.

  She reached the furniture shop and ducked round into the lane. It was even darker than she remembered. All her senses tried to warn her not to go any further, but she was accustomed to deliberately disregarding the evidence of her senses and pressing on anyway.

  The loading bay was empty and the roller-shutter door firmly closed. No deliveries of glitzy furniture today. She was turning towards the giant wheelie-bins when she heard a sound behind her. A muffled footstep – an intake of breath. She was too late to take evasive action.

  Something soft and dark fell over her head, completely blocking out the remaining light, and at the same time someone man-handled her, seizing her by the arms and shoving her forward. Then a hand on her head forced her downwards. She sank to the ground, subjugated.

  Chapter 15

  Scrapbooking for beginners

  Jemima had never imagined herself getting on the wrong side of the police. She had always thought of herself as an upright citizen, apart from not paying the poll tax of course, and that was only because she didn't trust the local council as far as she could throw them. She always made sure the check-out assistants removed security tags; she had once handed in a ten pound note to the police station after finding it in the street outside her house; as far as she could recall she hadn’t even been late returning her library books. Now, just because she had said to the nice young uniformed officer who was taking names and addresses that she thought Lorelei McAndrew might have been her cousin, she had been made to wait behind after most of the others had gone. She even saw Jim and Lottie Halloran disappear out the door with a regretful-looking wave at her. Obviously either they hadn’t yet heard the news or they hadn’t admitted to a connection with the murder victim. It wasn’t as if Jemima felt any close kinship with her either. It was only a couple of hours at most since she had found out about the relationship in the first place.

  David had loyally stayed by her side, even when the police said he could go.

  ‘They’ll have to throw me out,’ he muttered. ‘Of course then I’d be able to sue them, what with my bad back and everything.’

  ‘Just don’t do anything silly,’ she said to him. Having to keep an eye on him as well as facing the police was going to be a bit tricky, but she could manage it. She was quite glad Christopher and Amaryllis had gone. There was no reason for them to get mixed up in this.

  After almost everyone else had disappeared, all desperate to get out and follow their ancestral trails through Pitkirtly, or perhaps to get something to eat and then look for the next bus back to civilisation, Detective Chief Inspector Smith individually interviewed these remaining. The minister, who, Jemima thought, had stood up remarkably well to the onslaught of genealogists but who was starting to look a bit frayed round the edges, showed him a small room off the main hall he could use. She said it had sometimes been used to store sports equipment but the group who used it had moved to another hall. It still smelt a bit like old gym shoes to Jemima when it was her turn to be interviewed. She was glad she hadn’t yet eaten anything for lunch, and she resolved not to eat cheese for some time.

  ‘So,’ said the chief inspector, ‘Mrs Jemima Stevenson of 23 Station Gardens. What can you tell me about the late Mrs Lorelei McAndrew, deceased?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jemima. She almost wished she had let David accompany her into the interview so that he could see how uncooperative she was prepared to be, even without his support.

  ‘There must be something,’ said the chief inspector. ‘You told one of my officers she was your cousin. Is that just a genealogists’ expression for anybody who’s related to you, or was she your cousin in the sense that most people would understand it?’

  ‘She was my first cousin,’ said Jemima. ‘At least, that’s what Mr Halloran said. And it fits in with what I know.’

  ‘Aha!’ said the chief inspector. ‘So you do know something!’

  He sounded as if he had caught her out in some way.

  ‘It’s nothing really. I just know my Auntie Dotty went to America and we never heard from her again. And Mr Halloran told me who she was – Lorelei, I mean.’

  ‘So who’s this Mr Halloran? Is he one of the people waiting out there?’

  ‘Oh, no, I saw him and his wife leaving. They’ll be wanting something to eat, or maybe to get back to their hotel. They’re from Australia, you know.’

  ‘Well, as long as they’ve given their names to one of my officers,’ muttered Chief Inspector Smith, scribbling on a piece of paper and handing it to the woman officer who was sitting quietly behind him. ‘Here, Constable Sandilands, take this to the men on the door and see if they can find him on their list.’

  The quiet woman officer left the room. The chief inspector drummed his fingers impatiently but didn’t say anything. Jemima crossed her feet at the ankles and wondered if she should just forget about lunch and have something nice for tea instead. Fish would be good. If there was any left at the nice fish shop in the High Street by the time she got out of here.

  The woman officer returned and handed a piece of paper to Mr Smith.

  ‘So – Mr James Halloran from Alice Springs. Travelling with his wife Lottie. Staying at the Argosy Inn, South Queensferry.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said
Jemima when he paused.

  ‘Is this the man you mentioned?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘And did he have a connection with Mrs Lorelei McAndrew?’

  ‘He said he was a cousin of hers too. And that made him my cousin as well... I hadn’t met any of my cousins before,’ added Jemima wistfully.

  ‘Did he have any evidence to back up this claim?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a claim. He just asked me if I knew the street where his granny had lived, and we got talking, and – ‘

  ‘He claimed to be your cousin?’

  ‘Yes. But I know where he fits into the family. His mother was my Auntie May. She was named after the Queen.’

  ‘Queen May?’

  ‘Queen Mary was known as Princess May of Teck before she became Queen,’ said Jemima.

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Before my time. So your Auntie May emigrated to Alice Springs?’

  ‘We never knew where she’d gone exactly,’ said Jemima darkly. ‘She ran away with an Irishman who worked in the Rosyth dockyards.’

  ‘That would fit, I suppose,’ said the chief inspector somewhat grudgingly. ‘So is this your mother’s or father’s side of the family?’

  ‘My mother’s side. Her mother was Bella Murray. She lived in Hillside Street. Upper Terrace. She had eleven children.’

  ‘So you’ve got lots more cousins?’

  ‘I don’t know how many,’ said Jemima.

  ‘So any Tom, Dick or Harry could come along pretending to be your cousin and you might believe him?’

  ‘It isn’t like that – there’s lots of detail only the family would know,’ protested Jemima.

  ‘But you’d be more likely to believe them than not?’