2 Reunited in Death

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Likewise,’ said Christopher.

  Jemima wanted to hug both of them, but sensibly refrained on various grounds.

  Christopher had a short telephone conversation, presumably with Graham, and shook his head after hanging up. ‘I don’t know what all that was about,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s been more shaken up than I thought by – events.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him about Jim Halloran,’ said Jemima. ‘But losing Ms Farquharson would be enough to upset him. Then there was Lorelei McAndrew, actually murdered in the library. I’m not surprised he’s got a bit confused. He said something about tide times. And fishing.’

  ‘He didn’t sound confused at all on the phone though,’ said Christopher. ‘Anyway, what’s for tea?’

  ‘Um,’ said Jemima. ‘We haven’t done anything about it yet. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s ok, what I meant was, what will we do for tea?’ said Christopher. He seemed happier, thought Jemima. Maybe he and Amaryllis had reached some sort of understanding with each other, in between falling over assault victims in the lane behind the glitzy furniture shop. ‘I fancy a Chinese.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ said Jemima. David concurred, and so she found herself being escorted by the two of them down to the nearer, and some said better, of the two Chinese restaurants in Pitkirtly. This one was the Golden Peach, and the other, down near the harbour, was the Cherry Blossom.

  Jemima made up her mind to relax and enjoy herself. It wasn’t every day, after all, that she had two men with her. In a way she wished Christopher would ring up Amaryllis and invite her along too, but in other ways it was cosier with just the three of them. Christopher announced that it was his treat, and ordered more food than they could possibly have eaten – then they sat back and ate it all.

  They were a merry party walking back up the road to Christopher’s house, and for once their merriness wasn’t due to having drunk too many Old Pictish Brews in the Queen of Scots.

  Chapter 25

  Spy Chase revisited

  Amaryllis didn’t wake up until dawn was breaking over the Forth Bridge. It was the first time for weeks that she had slept through the night, but she was annoyed rather than content about it. She felt that she did her best work at night: when everyone else was asleep she could think straight; it was as if interference from their thought processes clogged her mind all day, but while they were asleep everything was much clearer. She hoped this lengthier sleep wasn’t going to be the start of a trend.

  The three Tibetans were already wide awake, to judge from the excited chatter in the kitchen. She lay there and listened to it for a while. They seemed to be arguing amongst themselves. It took her a few moments to tune in to the language, and then she realised they were talking about her. They seemed to be discussing whether to tell her about something. It was amusing for a few minutes, and then she had to get up and do something. Lying in bed was for lazy fat toads. Or was it pigs? She remembered her father having a saying about people who lie in bed after they wake up, but she couldn’t quite recall the exact wording. An unwelcome sign of old age. She sighed heavily.

  ‘All right, Miss Peebles?’ said Dorje as she went into the kitchen.

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’ she asked idly, putting the kettle on.

  He started.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said with a smile. ‘You can tell me anything.’

  He carried out a whispered consultation with the others in rapid Tibetan which she couldn’t follow properly.

  ‘We want to tell you about the man we saw,’ he said. The others nodded.

  ‘What man was this?’

  ‘A man in uniform.’

  ‘The angry man,’ said one of the others.

  ‘Where was this? Where did you see him?’

  Amaryllis hoped her knowledge of Tibetan was up to this conversation. Otherwise she would have to wheel in Jock McLean as interpreter.

  ‘Where the cars go. Near the big building.’

  ‘The car park at the Cultural Centre?’ she guessed, becoming more interested.

  ‘Yes. He came through the window and went in the door.’

  Amaryllis had to ask him to repeat the sentence twice to make sure she had understood it.

  ‘We should tell the police,’ she said.

  ‘No police,’ said Dorje firmly.

  ‘All right, no police for now. But I need to know more... When did you see him? Was it yesterday? The day before? Last week?’

  ‘It was before we came to your home,’ said Amrita

  ‘If we go there, can you show me what happened?’

  They all nodded.

  ‘But we wait until it’s dark again,’ said Dorje.

  ‘Fine with me,’ said Amaryllis. ‘But if it’s something important, we have to tell the police. Do you understand?’

  They all nodded, but she guessed from their expressions that they were only agreeing grudgingly, and would prefer to have nothing to do with the police. Amaryllis couldn’t say she had never felt the same. She wasn’t sure what to do with them for the day, but Jock McLean solved that by turning up on the doorstep before she had even finished her first cup of coffee and saying blithely, ‘Thought they might like another game of Spy Chase.’

  She had never seen him so enthusiastic before. She imagined this was what he might have been like as a young novice teacher, before he had battled with years of unruly kids, bureaucracy and staff-room conflicts. He seemed to be teaching the Tibetans some English, as far as she could tell, and brushing up his grasp of their language at the same time.

  It was safe to go out.

  Amaryllis had a mission in mind: she planned to extract from Jemima every last crumb of family history information, including things she hadn’t written down or scrapbooked, things she had once heard her mother say, things that were rumoured within the family but never spoken about plainly. With this objective, she started to walk towards Christopher’s house, and was startled to see a small group coming in the other direction.

  ‘We were just coming to see you,’ said Jemima, seeming a bit put out.

  ‘I thought we could ring up the hospital and ask how the mud-coloured man’s getting on,’ said Christopher.

  ‘We reckon you could do it pretending to be the police,’ said Big Dave, who was holding tight to Jemima’s arm as if afraid one of them would fly off in the wind.

  ‘Don’t you think I’m in enough trouble with that sort of thing already?’ said Amaryllis, while secretly liking the idea. ‘Anyway, I was coming over to see you.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Not you - Jemima,’ said Amaryllis, and observed his disappointment.

  ‘Well, here I am, dear,’ said Jemima.

  ‘Have you brought your scrapbook?’

  ‘It’s in my shopping bag. I’ve been carrying it around everywhere, just in case.’ Jemima delved into the old-fashioned black cloth bag and fished out the scrapbook to show her.

  ‘Let’s go up to the flat then,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Jock’s already there, but I expect we can find a corner.’

  In Amaryllis’s somewhat Spartan bedroom, the interrogation began. No glaring lights or pins under the finger-nails here, but a nice cup of tea and a custard cream biscuit. Christopher and Dave had been banished to the living-room to join unwillingly in yet another game of Spy Chase, and it was very quiet in the bedroom – just the gentle crunch of Jemima eating another custard cream, and the clinking of civilised tea-cups against delicate saucers.

  ‘Lovely china,’ said Jemima. ‘is it a family heirloom?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Amaryllis, amused. ‘It came from my grandma’s house in Winchester.’

  ‘So was it only your Dad who lived in Pitkirtly then?’

  ‘He was born and brought up here, and then he came back later and built the village hall. Or nagged them into building it. He lived in London mostly apart from that.’

  ‘I suppose they were quite posh,’ said Jemima.

  ‘No
t really – well maybe a bit,’ said Amaryllis. ‘The grandma whose china this was came from a big house with servants, but everything went downhill after that.’

  ‘And did you never have any brothers or sisters?’

  Amaryllis suddenly realised the interrogation wasn’t going exactly as planned. She dragged it back on track with an effort.

  ‘No. It must have been strange for your mum, being the youngest of eleven.’

  ‘I think it was quite common in those days,’ said Jemima.

  ‘Did she talk much about the rest of the family?’

  ‘Mostly about the ones that still lived close by. I used to see my Auntie Mima a lot... She sometimes talked about Graham. He had gone to England but I think he used to write to her. And she got letters from South Africa maybe once a year, at Christmas.’

  ‘Were there any family secrets? Skeletons in the cupboard?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have known about those,’ said Jemima, sounding scandalised. After a pause she added, ‘There might have been something about my Auntie Jessie’s lot. My Mum didn’t like anybody mentioning them, I know that... I have an idea they maybe changed their name or something.’

  ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘Well,’ said Jemima, pulling the little bedroom chair closer to where Amaryllis sat on the bed and speaking in a hushed voice, ‘I overheard my Auntie Mima say something about prison once, and Mother said she knew no good would come of it.’

  ‘But was it anything to do with Auntie Jessie’s lot?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jemima frowned and closed her eyes, as though better to listen to long-lost voices. Amaryllis waited in silence. After a while Jemima opened her eyes and said, ‘They were reading the paper one day after breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table at the house in Hillside Road – my grannie’s house. Mother said it was in the blood, and that John Watson’s father was once wanted for murder and left the country. John Watson was Auntie Jessie’s husband.’

  ‘And do you know anything about the children?’

  ‘What children?’

  ‘The children of that family. Were there children?’

  ‘Yes – two. A boy and a girl. About my age. But I have in my head that one of them died. Was it the boy or the girl? I can’t just call it to mind...’

  Another long pause.

  ‘I was wondering about trying to find them,’ said Amaryllis at last.

  ‘But – why?’

  ‘There may be a link to what’s happened in Pitkirtly. They might even be in danger – we should try and warn them if we can. That would be the responsible thing to do.’

  Appealing to Jemima’s better nature and sense of civic responsibility did the trick as usual.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ she said.

  ‘Can you use your research skills to find them?’

  ‘I can try,’ said Jemima, brightening up.

  Christopher burst into the room. It wasn’t exactly the way she had imagined him bursting into her room – had the thought even crossed her mind, for that matter? He wasn’t the bursting in type, for heaven’s sake – but she could see that he had come up with a bright idea.

  ‘I’m the one with research skills,’ he said. He must have been listening at the door, she decided. How unlike Christopher - maybe he was learning from her after all. The idea cheered her up enormously.

  ‘I’d nearly forgotten about having once been an archivist,' he continued. 'I need to be the one helping Jemima, and you have to be the one who goes to the hospital and pretends to be a policeman. The other way is just – well, wrong!’

  It was a while since she had seen him so vehement. Amaryllis quite liked it. But she felt she had to protest, for the hell of it.

  ‘You’re not casting a children’s pantomime, Christopher,’ she said. ‘Or playing cowboys and Indians – you’re the one with the gun, and I’ll be the one who gets shot. It isn’t a game.’

  ‘All the more reason to play to our strengths,’ he said. Since when had he used management speak like that? And why did he have to be right for once?

  ‘Maybe Jock could do the hospital thing,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘That’s just silly,’ he said. ‘You know perfectly well that Jock’s in his element teaching those kids English while we rush about solving things. You’d have to drag him out of here kicking and screaming... Now let’s see what sort of research we need to do.’

  He picked up Amaryllis’s notebook, in which she had started to draw a great big tree in meticulous detail. She had forgotten to take any notes on her interrogation of Mrs Stevenson. Christopher would have to start again.

  Half an hour later, they were all on their way. Amaryllis had put on her dark suit again. She was sulking. She had already played the part of a police officer once in the past few days, and she had had enough of that. She had wanted to be an earnest genealogical researcher wearing a woolly cardigan and packing a mean pencil.

  Big Dave had offered to drive her over to Kirkcaldy Memorial Hospital where they thought the mud-coloured man would have been taken. ‘But if he’s taken a turn for the worse and been transferred to Little France, there’s no way I’m driving through Edinburgh. Not with the tram works going on,’ he had warned her.

  A telephone call to Kirkcaldy established that the mud-coloured man had indeed been transferred to Edinburgh. Amaryllis hoped Dave would relent, and he did, after a little light bribery: the promise of a pie from the excellent pie shop in Pitkirtly High Street.

  Christopher and Jemima were preparing to set off for Dunfermline on the eleven o’clock bus. Once there, they would head for the library and local history centre, where Christopher assured Jemima and Amaryllis that they would find plenty of old newspapers and other local records. ‘If they’ve ever done anything, we’ll find them in the paper. School football teams, Sunday school prizes, drunk and disorderly, sent to prison – anything. It’s a real treasure chest.’

  Jemima hadn’t looked very enthralled at the prospect, and seemed to think it would be more like a Pandora’s box than a treasure chest.

  ‘I hope they’ll get on all right,’ said Amaryllis to Big Dave as they turned the corner and she glanced back to see the others still waving valiantly.

  ‘Jemima had better be all right, or Christopher’s going to be in trouble,’ said Big Dave fiercely.

  ‘Thanks for taking me to the hospital, Dave, I know you’d rather be keeping an eye on her yourself.’

  ‘It’s like Christopher said. We’re playing to our strengths. My strength’s driving. I wouldn’t have thought Jock’s strength was speaking Tibetan, mind you. That was a bit of a turn-up for the books.’

  ‘I hope this isn’t a wild-goose chase,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Maybe we should have stayed in Pitkirtly and looked for the answer here... But I do have an expedition planned with the kids tonight. That might bring us a few answers.’

  Chapter 26

  Bus trip

  The wind was getting up. Christopher could feel it battering the bus as it wound its way along the narrow coast roads. He hadn’t had time to see the weather forecast, but he wondered if a bigger storm was on its way.

  ‘Bit of a breeze the day,’ said an old man as he got on at Limekilns.

  ‘There’s a smirr of rain in it too,’ commented the woman behind him.

  Mrs Stevenson stirred in the seat next to him.

  ‘I hope this isn’t a wild-goose chase,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll find something,’ said Christopher, trying hard to sound reassuring. ‘There’s lots of information in the library. Even if we don’t get anything from the old newspapers, there’ll be microfiche or digitised records in there... If you fancy going back a bit further in your family, we could see if they’ve got Kirk Session records or land transfers. Or wills.’

  ‘It’s probably all bad stuff,’ said Mrs Stevenson gloomily. ‘The workhouse and cholera and children dying too soon to be christened, and so on. No fancy wills or big houses.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ sa
id Christopher, desperately wishing they were due to arrive in Dunfermline in the next few seconds. ‘You haven’t had an argument with Dave, have you?’

  To his surprise, this caused Mrs Stevenson to burst out laughing.

  ‘Where have you been for the last thirty years?’ she said at last, between giggles. ‘I’m long past worrying about having a fight with my boy-friend!... No, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about the murders. In a way it’s all my fault for bringing people together in one place for the family history day. All this homecoming stuff’s really a big mistake – most people left Pitkirtly for very good reasons of their own. It’s no use stirring everything up again – we’d be better to forget about it all and move on just like that television psychologist keeps saying.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t your fault!’ said Christopher, more loudly than he had intended. A woman two rows in front jumped in her seat and then glared at him over her shoulder. He lowered his voice. ‘It was a good idea to organise the family history day. A lot of people whose ancestors are from Pitkirtly wanted to come back and have a look for themselves. There’s a lot of interest these days. It doesn’t mean old feuds have to be resurrected. Anyway, we still don’t know that this really has anything to do with Lorelei and Jim being your cousins. It might be something completely random that we haven’t thought of yet.’

  ‘Hmm,’ muttered Mrs Stevenson. ‘It doesn’t seem very random to me.’

  The bus trundled on. Christopher’s feeling of nausea intensified as they dived down yet another small narrow street to pick someone up at a rural road end. He was glad when they arrived at Dunfermline Bus Station and he could suggest to Mrs Stevenson that they have a quiet cup of coffee and a sandwich somewhere before starting work.

  ‘I hope David’s managed to get something to eat,’ she said as they sat in the nearest cafe. ‘He gets awful grumpy if he goes too long between meals.’

  ‘Blood sugar,’ said Christopher between mouthfuls. Somehow eating a cheese and pickle sandwich had made him less nauseous.

  ‘Oh, no, he doesn’t have any blood sugar, I know that. He’s had the tests.’