6 The Queen of Scots Mystery

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Fine,’ said Christopher again, although of course he knew it wasn’t fine. He snatched up the piece of paper and skim-read it. ‘OK, I’ll sign. Have you got a pen?’

  No sooner had he signed the document and handed it back than the ‘bad cop’ man said rapidly, ‘It’s a hostage situation. Somewhere in North Africa. I’m not able to be more specific than that. We sent Miss Peebles in to recover an asset, and her security has been compromised.’

  ‘I think Amaryllis likes to be known as Ms Peebles, not Miss,’ said Christopher, ‘and I’d like one of you to translate what he said into English, please.’

  The ‘good cop’ said, ‘Amaryllis went into a dangerous place to try and bring out a person of interest to the UK government, and she was taken hostage herself.’

  Christopher found his hands were shaking. He clenched his fists to try and stop it.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists, obviously,’ said the man with the darker hair.

  ‘So?’

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  ‘Are there troops on the way?’ said Christopher. He could hardly get the words out.

  The men looked at each other sideways again. The one with the lighter hair said, ‘Yes, but we can’t be sure…’

  ‘Can’t be sure of what?’

  ‘Can’t be sure they’ll be in time. Or that they’ll accomplish the rescue without collateral damage.’

  ‘You’d better leave now,’ said Christopher. ‘Will I hear something later on?’

  ‘We’ll certainly keep you informed, sir. Would you like us to send someone to be with you?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  He saw them out, although he wasn’t sure if his legs might give way under him at any moment. What he really wanted to do was to scream and shout, and fling himself about like a two-year-old having a tantrum. But he wasn’t a two-year-old, and there was a disgraced police officer and a dog asleep in the kitchen, and the only thing he could think of that might help was to go down to the beach, alone, and scream and shout at the waves.

  He put on his outdoor jacket again, left it five minutes to make sure the two men were out of the way, and left the house, closing the door slowly and carefully behind him.

  Chapter 2 Nameless No More

  Neil Macrae held his breath until his overnight guest had made it across the road to the bus stop and had got on board the first bus out of Pitkirtly. It was only seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, and he knew if anyone saw her leaving the pub they would jump to completely the wrong conclusion. He had let her sleep in his spare room in the flat upstairs because she had been so upset and he had been so confused by the whole situation that they had both forgotten the time of the last bus.

  Never mind that Penelope Johnstone seemed almost old enough to be his mother – even if she wasn’t actually that old in years, she certainly acted like his mother – but she always dressed in these sludge colours that he thought of as camouflage, intended to divert everyone’s attention from her gender and the fact that she had rather an attractive face and the kind of mature figure that some men liked. Neil didn’t think it would enhance his own image to be seen with her.

  Of course she deserved better than that idiot Liam. It was ridiculous for her to be agonizing over his whereabouts and stressing out over the fact that he seemed to be having an affair, when really these were the least of her worries.

  He was standing at the door of the pub, staring into space and vaguely wondering if it would rain, when he noticed Jock McLean at the other side of the road.

  He didn’t have time to dodge back inside before Jock came across and accosted him.

  ‘Here, wasn’t that Penelope Johnstone? What was she doing catching the first bus?’

  Neil only just managed not to roll his eyes and groan. It would have to be Jock McLean, of all people. If any man ever deserved the honorary title of fishwife, it was him. This meant that almost everyone in Pitkirtly would know before breakfast that Penelope had spent the night at Neil’s flat. So much for his efforts to be discreet, for both their sakes.

  ‘It’s none of your business, Jock,’ said a deeper voice from the other direction. Neil looked round. Dave and Jemima Douglas were strolling down the narrow street that led from the town centre. It was a pincer movement. He was trapped. All he needed now was for Amaryllis Peebles to pop her head out of the nearest drain and to start interrogating him.

  ‘I expect she missed the bus last night and had to stay over,’ murmured Jemima gently as they approached.

  ‘Yes, that was it,’ said Neil, nodding. ‘Got to get on,’ he added hastily before this turned into a full-scale social gathering. What were they all doing out at this time in the morning anyway? Had the clocks gone forward again? No, that was last weekend.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep after seeing that zombie film,’ said Jemima to Jock. ‘What about you?’

  ‘It didn’t bother me,’ said Jock with a barely concealed shudder.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ said Jemima to Neil. ‘Something to do with zombie horror. There was a special showing for pensioners. Half price. We got a cup of tea and some biscuits – only rich tea, though, not custard creams.’

  ‘I don’t have time for the pictures,’ said Neil. ‘Well, see you later. I’ve got to go and…’

  He couldn’t think of an ending for the sentence so he turned and went back into the pub entrance. He felt like going back up the stairs to his flat and possibly even back to bed, but he had things to do. Instead he pushed open the door that led into the bar. He had better open the cellar door and check on the carbon dioxide warning system, which he already knew had developed an intermittent electrical fault. He crossed the room, went behind the bar and opened the heavy door that led to the cellar steps.

  The first thing that struck him was the unusual smell. He had a very sensitive nose, which as a pub landlord he often wished he hadn’t, though this was only one of many aspects of the job that he found increasingly hard to put up with. He tilted his head up like an animal sniffing the air for predators or prey, but tried not to inhale too deeply. There was a sort of acid tinge to the air, and that was what warned him in time. He took a step backwards, and another. He swore aloud, and the acid got into his throat and made him cough.

  He grabbed the mobile phone that was lying on the bar, flung himself back through the door and out through the pub entrance so fast that he was halfway across the road outside before he came to a halt. Fortunately there was no traffic around.

  Jock, Dave and Jemima, however, were still on the pavement outside.

  ‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’ Jock yelled as Neil’s outstretched arm hit him in the chest.

  ‘What’s the matter, Neil?’ said Jemima. He turned and blinked at her.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew my name,’ he said, feeling stupid. Then, ‘Excuse me, I’ve got to make a call.’

  Neil walked along the pavement a little way, hoping their hearing wasn’t quite as acute as their brains appeared to be, and rang the alarm maintenance company, wishing he had contacted them earlier when he had first noticed the problem. But he had been preoccupied with other matters then.

  He had been slightly concerned that the company wouldn’t come out at the weekend but the person he spoke to was aghast to hear the cellar might already be full of carbon dioxide, and said someone would be there in half an hour, and on no account was he to go back into the building in the mean-time. He resigned himself to standing at the door telling people to go away.

  ‘What’s wrong, lad?’ said Dave as Neil walked back towards the pub entrance.

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Neil, sliding his phone into his pocket and wishing he had worn a parka to come out and see Penelope off. It was colder than it looked this morning, and surely colder than it should be for the time of year. Or maybe he was in shock. He wished Jock McLean, Dave and Jemima would go away. At least Amaryllis Peebl
es wasn’t with them – knowing her predilection for poking into things that didn’t concern her, he thought she would probably have endangered herself in an instant by going to check out the premises.

  They were all staring at him, which was rather unnerving.

  ‘Didn’t you have things to do?’ said Jemima after a while.

  ‘Yes, well, now what I have to do is stand out here waiting for the maintenance people to come along.’

  ‘One of us could do that,’ Jemima offered politely. ‘Then you could go in there and get on.’

  For heaven’s sake… He realised they weren’t going to leave until he gave them some sort of reasonable explanation for his behaviour.

  ‘I can’t go in there at the moment,’ he said after a moment. ‘I think there may be a gas leak.’

  ‘Is it a good idea to stand in the doorway, then?’ said Jock McLean. ‘What if the whole place goes up?’

  Neil forced out a short laugh, which came out sounding a bit like the bark of a smallish dog. ‘I don’t think it’s that kind of gas leak.’

  ‘Hmm, well,’ said Jock, obviously unconvinced.

  ‘We’d better be going anyway,’ said Jemima. ‘We only came out to work out an appetite for breakfast. It’s smokies today.’

  Neil’s stomach began to churn.

  ‘Come on, Jock,’ said Dave, perhaps responding to some unspoken signal from his wife. ‘There’s enough for you if you want some.’

  They ambled off, back towards the town centre. He hoped fervently that nobody else came along in the next half-hour. It wouldn’t be good for business if people thought there was the danger of an explosion.

  Finding a body in the cellar wasn’t exactly going to help either, Neil reflected an hour later.

  He and the carbon dioxide monitor maintenance man stood on the top step looking down at the scene. A man’s body was sprawled among the beer barrels. It was currently impossible, or at least extremely inadvisable according to the maintenance man, to go into the cellar without breathing apparatus, which the local fire brigade were due to bring with them any minute now. Even standing where they were was a bit risky, although they had put wet cloths over their noses and mouths to enable them to open the door in the first place so that the maintenance man could better assess the situation. There was no knowing whether the man was still alive or, as seemed much more likely, stone dead.

  ‘Come on,’ said the maintenance man in muffled tones. ‘We’d better wait outside. This stuff’s deadly even in quite small amounts. It’ll disperse a bit if we leave all the doors open. But the police’ll need to see this now anyway.’

  He ushered Neil outside and, perhaps sensing that the landlord was in a state of shock, rang the police himself.

  ‘Come on and sit down over here, pal,’ he said once he had completed the call. He led Neil to the bench by the bus stop. ‘Bit of a shock, eh?’

  ‘I didn’t know – do you think he’s dead?’

  ‘There’s a good chance.’

  ‘I meant to call you in before,’ said Neil, stuttering a little in his agitation. ‘I didn’t know this would happen.’

  ‘No worries,’ said the maintenance man in a futile attempt to play it all down.

  There were sirens in the distance. The fire engines arrived first, and after only a few cursory questions which the maintenance man answered on Neil’s behalf, two firemen donned breathing apparatus and went into the building. They re-emerged fairly quickly, and one of them came over to the bench.

  ‘Who’s that in the cellar?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Neil, feeling ridiculous.

  ‘Not an employee of yours, then?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know there was anybody down there at all. I’m the only one who goes in there usually.’

  More sirens. The police were on their way.

  ‘Is there any chance he’s still alive?’ said the maintenance man.

  ‘No,’ said the fireman baldly. Neil closed his eyes and wished himself thousands of miles away. If only he had emigrated to New Zealand when he had the chance. If only he were on holiday in the Caribbean… Spain…. Thailand.

  When he opened his eyes, a police officer was standing over him, blotting out the light.

  ‘Mr Macrae?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘What’s all this about a body?’

  ‘We saw – in the cellar – wedged between two barrels. Do you mean he isn’t there now?’

  ‘He’s there all right,’ said the policeman, a scornful edge creeping into his voice. ‘We’re waiting for the Fire people to give us the all clear to go in and have a look. We’re going to need breathing apparatus. Do you have anything you can tell us before we do that?’

  ‘There’s a carbon dioxide leak,’ said the maintenance man nervously.

  The policeman glared at him. ‘I need to hear this from Mr Macrae first, if you don’t mind, sir.’ His gaze returned to Neil. ‘When did you first notice this leak?’

  ‘Just this morning. I opened the cellar door and I smelled something. A kind of acid smell. It made me think of carbon dioxide so I called the maintenance people. I’d been meaning to get them to have a look at the detection system. It seemed a bit erratic lately.’

  ‘Erratic?’

  ‘I thought there might be an electrical fault,’ mumbled Neil, staring at the ground.

  Fortunately the firemen came to fetch the policemen at that point. More sirens sounded and an ambulance drew up on the street near the bench.

  ‘Not much point in that now,’ said the maintenance man cheerfully.

  Now that all the emergency services were here, they seemed to need an inordinately long time to discuss the situation amongst themselves and presumably to decide what action they needed to take, and in what order. At one point they seemed to be arguing heatedly amongst themselves. Neil was rather glad he didn’t have to join in with their deliberations, although the maintenance man seemed a bit miffed that they didn’t solicit his expert advice. After a while Neil closed his eyes again, and at some other point, hours and hours later, he was asked by the police to have a look at the man’s body and see if he recognised it.

  He did.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he said when the paramedics pulled back the sheet. ‘Oh, God.’

  His legs started to give way under him, and he clutched at the ambulance doors to stop himself from falling.

  ‘Do you know this man?’ said the policeman who had originally stood over him.

  Neil nodded. He didn’t think he could speak but the policeman was waiting for him to say something, so after a moment he said, ‘His name’s Liam Johnstone.’

  He saw the policeman making some sort of signal to another uniformed officer, who approached briskly. Before he knew where he was, they had cautioned him and manhandled him into one of the waiting police cars. He was under arrest.

  Chapter 3 Locked out

  Christopher had been trying to avoid his friends ever since the two men had visited him and told him about Amaryllis. In normal circumstances they would all have met at the Queen of Scots on Friday night, but he hadn’t gone there at the usual time, preferring to stay at home and stare at the walls. He did have the television on, set to the 24 hour news channel, but he couldn’t have claimed to be watching it. His gaze often strayed to the window and occasionally he would make a foray into the kitchen, where he would open a food cupboard and stare miserably at the contents, or to the front door, where he willed the doorbell to ring heralding Amaryllis’s arrival. After he had worked out that the doorbell could equally be a harbinger of doom, he stopped doing that. Amaryllis rarely used the front door anyway.

  So when the bell did ring in the early evening on Saturday, he didn’t rush to the door immediately. Either it was bad news, or Jock McLean, which amounted to much the same really.

  He wasn’t sure to be relieved or irritated when the door opened and Jock McLean’s head popped round it.

  ‘Anybody in?’

  ‘Yes,’ he s
aid.

  ‘You’ll never guess what’s happened!’ said Jock, advancing into the house with only this small amount of encouragement.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I will.’

  ‘It’s the Queen of Scots.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s shut,’ said Jock. ‘Police tape all across the front door and everything.’

  ‘Police tape?’

  Christopher had started to develop a headache already. Jock sat down on the chair that had once been Christopher’s father’s. He pulled his pipe out of his pocket, looked at Christopher’s expression and put it back again.

  ‘And danger of death signs,’ he added hopefully.

  ‘All right,’ said Christopher wearily. ‘You might as well tell me.’

  ‘They’ve found Liam Johnstone. Dead. In the cellar. Karen Whiteside told me.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have told you anything of the kind, should she?’

  ‘She was standing outside guarding the place when I was round there… They’ve arrested Neil Macrae.’

  ‘Who’s Neil Macrae?’ said Christopher.

  ‘The landlord,’ said Jock.

  ‘But I thought nobody knew his name,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Hmph. That’s what he wanted you to think,’ said Jock scornfully. ‘Anyway, what happened was that there was some sort of gas leak first thing this morning, and Liam got stuck in the cellar and breathed in the fumes.’

  ‘But gas isn’t poisonous these days, is it? It just explodes.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I’m only telling you what Karen told me. Jemima and Dave and me were around when Neil first found the gas leak, but we had to go and get our breakfast. Jemima had got smokies in. When’s Amaryllis due back? We need her here to sort this out. We can’t have Neil Macrae locked up and the Queen of Scots out of bounds. Where will we go? What will we do?’

  ‘That’s a bit selfish, isn’t it?’ said Christopher. ‘What about Liam Johnstone?’

  ‘Good riddance,’ said Jock callously.

  ‘But what about Zak and what’s-her-name?’

  ‘Penelope,’ said Jock, giving him an odd look. ‘You know that. We’ve known her for years. And don’t you remember she and Liam separated? And Liam got arrested last year for firing his gun without due care and attention, or whatever it was. She didn’t have any more to do with him after that. Jan at the wool shop said she was getting a divorce. Come to think of it, she was just leaving the pub when we were there this morning. She caught the first bus. Neil told us some sort of story about her missing the last one the night before.’