‘No, you weren’t quilting all day,’ said Jan from the wool shop, opening her mouth again at last. ‘You came into the shop about half-past two asking for cashmere sock wool.’
‘And you told me it was a special order and it would have to be sent by train from Halifax,’ said Maisie Sue. ‘Thank you so much, Jan – I wouldn’t want to perjure myself.’
‘This isn’t exactly a court of law,’ muttered Charlie Smith. ‘About as far from it as you can possibly get, in fact.’
‘Now, now, Charlie,’ said Jemima, who had treated Mr Smith like one of the family ever since the time she had let him sleep in her spare room. ‘Try and pretend you’re not a policeman for five minutes.’
‘Craft fair?’ said Tricia. ‘Where’s that going to be?’
‘Well,’ said Maisie Sue proudly, ‘Christopher has kindly offered to host it at the Cultural Centre. We’re kind of honoured – he doesn’t usually let outside organisations do that kind of thing.’
Jock glanced at Christopher to see if he knew he was hosting a craft fair. Christopher’s face had his usual blank expression, the one that annoyed all his friends because they couldn’t tell if he agreed, disagreed or had switched off completely.
‘When’s that then?’ said Rosie. ‘I know somebody who makes cats. She might like a stall.’
‘Makes cats?’ said Christopher. Evidently he had indeed been paying attention.
‘Ceramic cats,’ Rosie explained. ‘She started out making different kinds of animals, but cats were the most popular.’
Ha! Jock knew why that was: there was nobody like a mad cat woman to want to collect ceramic cat ornaments that had no conceivable use except to clutter the place up and need dusting. The fact that he didn’t actually know anyone who could possibly fall into the category of ‘mad cat woman’ didn’t deter him from coming to this conclusion. Rosie was the nearest and in his experience she was a long way from fitting the stereotype. In many ways he thought she was the sanest person of his acquaintance.
‘What about Friday afternoon, though?’ he said. Somebody had to heave this runaway conversation back on to the rails.
‘I went into Dunfermline too,’ said Tricia Laidlaw. ‘I was looking for a birthday present for Darren.’
Darren scowled at her ungraciously.
‘Anybody else?’ said Jock.
‘Well, there’s me,’ said Penelope. She clasped her hands in her lap. Her face had gone scarlet, but not in the pretty, apologetic way Tricia Laidlaw’s had done. Jock noticed this particularly. ‘I was at home all morning,’ she continued. ‘In Aberdour, you know. And then – well, early in the evening I came into Pitkirtly and went to see Neil Macrae at the Queen of Scots.’
The silence that followed this statement was denser and more profound than anything Jock had managed to inspire in any of the many classrooms he had taught in during his career.
Chapter 7 Caged Bird
Amaryllis was getting more and more irritated. It was bad enough to have been taken hostage during her mission to rescue a hostage, but being locked up with an internationally renowned psychologist for nearly a week was driving her mad. She would almost have preferred solitary confinement, and it would have been a lot easier to escape if she hadn’t had to worry about anyone else’s safety. She didn’t know, for instance, how far or how fast her companion could run, and how ruthless she might be about killing anyone who got in their way as they made their bid for freedom.
On the other hand, she knew there was little point in sitting there waiting to be rescued. Even if the special forces did manage to cobble together a budget to fly out here and storm the compound, they would probably shoot everyone in sight, particularly the hostages. Amaryllis had little confidence in her military colleagues, perhaps even less than she had in the rest of humanity.
‘… and of course,’ the other woman droned, ‘it’s been recognised for years that people who tend towards the perceiving end of the spectrum have the best chance of surviving in these situations. Because they’re better able to see a way out, without using preconceptions about not being able to escape to get in their way.’
Too right, thought Amaryllis grimly. Even now she could perceive that if she didn’t get out of here in the next half hour, she would punch her fellow hostage on the nose.
‘And whereas in most other situations it’s beneficial to judge and weigh up what to do next, to plan ahead, so to speak…’
The woman was even more annoying than Christopher at his most pompous. No wonder they had hardly seen any of their captors from one day’s end to another. They knew she could bore them to death at ten paces.
While these thoughts were running through her mind, stirring up adrenalin that might come in useful later on, Amaryllis was also considering the possibilities. She was hesitant to use the ‘hostage taken ill’ ploy. Surely these terrorists would have studied all the relevant hostage movies and they would be familiar with this well-worn technique for escaping.
Then there was the ‘hiding behind the door and hitting them on the head when they come in with the food’ thing. That was all very well, but there was nothing in the bare hut with the sandy floor to hit anyone with. Amaryllis could try using her hands, but she knew that breaking them on some beefy man’s hard skull wouldn’t do her any good. In any case, they usually pushed the food in through a kind of cat door, which opened low down in the big wooden door with all the bolts. They didn’t need to come into the hut at all, although one of them had ventured inside a couple of times, perhaps to make sure the hostages were still there.
The cat door… she considered the possibilities. She might have managed to squeeze through it, now that she hadn’t eaten properly for a week, but the psychologist was particularly well-padded and had been munching everything religiously – it looked as if she had been chewing every mouthful forty times too.
She leaned down and rattled the cat door anyway. It didn’t have very much give about it. It must be locked somehow on the other side. Amaryllis had wondered if it was one of these modern cat doors that only opened if the cat with the right microchip came along. In which case it might be possible to fool it using the microchip from her bank card, which she had somehow managed to keep concealed when the kidnappers searched her. Rosie or even Darren might know if this were even possible. But she mustn’t think about Pitkirtly, or the cattery, or the Queen of Scots, or anything normal. Focus, she told herself sternly.
Someone shouted from outside the door. Amaryllis got to her feet in case they decided to come into the hut, giving her the opportunity to overpower them.
She glanced at the psychologist, who was staring at her, eyes like saucers. Evidently her strategy, such as it was, involved lying low and not drawing attention to herself. That’s worked really well up to now, thought Amaryllis crossly. Time to try things my way.
‘Oi!’ she shouted, kicking at the door. ‘Let us out of here, you illiterate heaps of camel droppings!’
She wasn’t absolutely sure which dialect of Arabic to use, but she took a wild guess at it.
‘Sssh,’ said the psychologist. ‘You’ll anger them.’
‘That’s the idea,’ said Amaryllis over her shoulder. ‘Then they’ll make a mistake and we’ll escape. Be ready to run.’
But nobody came in. She shouted a bit more. She banged on the top part of the door and only succeeded in hurting her hands. Should have saved them to give somebody a crack on the head, she thought grimly as she nursed one hand in the other.
It was later, when the blue cloudless sky they could see through a very tiny skylight window far above them had turned dark in that sudden way she couldn’t get used to, that they heard a different sound from outside.
It was a kind of chattering, gibbering sound. Amaryllis, having a rough idea of where they were being held, thought at first it was a monkey that had wandered up to the hut entrance, but after listening to it again she decided it sounded more like a grey squirrel. A grey squirrel? In which part of North Africa o
r the middle East were grey squirrels native; in which Arabic-speaking country did they chatter in fear or defiance as they climbed up vertical house walls to get away from domestic cats and dogs?
If only the other woman had been an award-winning naturalist instead of a psychologist.
Climbing the walls. Now there was an idea. Or, to borrow ideas from other animals more likely to live in these parts, what about tunneling down under the sandy floor? They would have to dig with their hands, but if both of them worked together… Her gaze fell on the psychologist, who so far had shown no inclination to get her hands dirty – or any other part of her, for that matter. Her silk garments looked very nearly as fresh and feminine as they had when Amaryllis had arrived here.
There were voices outside, shouting. Perhaps they were telling the squirrel to get lost or whatever the equivalent was in their own dialect. Amaryllis sincerely hoped they weren’t trying to catch it to cook. She had eaten some weird dishes of unknown origin during her career to date, but she wasn’t nearly as open to trying new delicacies as she had been when she was younger.
Amaryllis scrabbled in the sand, fighting against its natural tendency to fall back down the sides of any hole. She hadn’t got very far down before she came up against something more solid. Floorboards? She scrabbled a bit more. Yes, they were definitely old style tongue and groove floorboards. What were they doing here, underneath a traditional middle Eastern style hut?
She scooped up a handful of sand and got to her feet slowly, easing an unexpectedly aching back with a gradual stretch of the relevant muscles. She glared at her fellow captive.
‘Are you in on this?’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s a set-up, isn’t it? We’re not in the middle East at all. We’re in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of London somewhere.’
‘What do you mean?’ The woman’s eyes were wide again as she tried to look innocent.
‘I should have guessed from the food – I thought I’d seen falafels like that in the supermarket in Pitkirtly. Then there was the squirrel. And now the floorboards.’ Amaryllis hammered on the door again. ‘Hey! The game’s up! You can let us out now.’
There was a murmur of voices just outside, the sound of bolts being pulled back, and the big door opened. The abandoned warehouse was in darkness but as Amaryllis walked forward, someone switched the lights on. She blinked.
‘You’d better get me on the next plane, train or stagecoach back to Pitkirtly. Believe it or not, there are people there who might be worried about me. Better yet, give me that.’
She snatched a mobile phone from one of the hapless junior operatives who had formed a semi-circle and were all staring at her.
She made two calls. After the second one, she gave the phone back, glaring. ‘If they’ve solved the murder case without me by the time I get back, I’ll hold you personally responsible. And don’t give me that line about following orders. Nobody’s used that excuse since 1945 and even then it didn’t work.’ She rounded on the psychologist, who probably wasn’t even a psychologist. ‘Next time you do this, try and find some research to quote that isn’t decades out of date and completely discredited. I should have guessed from that what was going on. And you could have looked a bit more terrified too.’ She groaned. ‘How did I ever let you lot take me in? It was all so obvious!’
‘The drugs helped,’ said one of the junior operatives.
She gave him a hard stare. After a while he looked away, muttering about something he had to do. Meanwhile, a team of builders had started to dismantle the hut, and someone was sweeping up the sand.
It was time to go home.
Chapter 8 After the Silence
Christopher couldn’t remember ever experiencing a silence like it.
Charlie Smith was oblivious to its depth and profundity.
‘I hope you’ve told the police this, Mrs Johnstone,’ he said. His words shredded the atmosphere and made Penelope flinch.
‘They haven’t asked me,’ she said.
Charlie sighed and leaned back in his chair, causing it to creak alarmingly. The dog, still hiding in the sage green curtains Penelope had admired, gave a warning growl. Darren, sitting nearest to it, made a sort of clucking sound and reached round to give it a pat.
Most people seemed to be watching Penelope, but Christopher’s eyes were on Zak. He had snatched his hand away from the arm of his mother’s chair just after she had come out with her bombshell, and now he was sitting with his arms folded, looking stern. What was going through his mind? Christopher longed even more for Amaryllis to come home and sort it all out. She had always had a way with recalcitrant boys, and Zak seemed to respect her.
‘You do know it’s wrong to withhold information?’ said Charlie.
Christopher nudged him. ‘This isn’t a law court – or a police interview room. We’re all friends here.’
‘We’re all on the wrong side of law together, you mean,’ grumbled Charlie. But he said in a more conciliatory tone to Penelope, ‘You might as well carry on, I suppose.’
‘There wasn’t anything going on,’ said Penelope. ‘Between Neil and me, I mean. Not that anybody would think there was.’ She glanced round at the faces of the assembled throng and sighed, perhaps knowing they wouldn’t mistake her for somebody Neil Macrae would be interested in romantically. ‘I went there to warn him.’
Zak turned slightly and stared at his mother. So she had surprised even him, thought Christopher. Seeing the boy in profile like that, he remembered something. But it could wait until later.
Nobody interrupted, for once. After only a short pause Penelope continued, ‘I wanted to warn Neil to let his ex-wife know how dangerous Liam was.’ She gave her son an apologetic look, but didn’t stop talking. ‘I’d heard she had – got involved with him – and I didn’t think she would know the worst of it.’
Her voice got quieter and quieter and almost disappeared altogether with the final phrase.
‘Dangerous?’ said Christopher. He must stop asking stupid questions: he knew Amaryllis found it annoying, and so must his other friends. ‘Do you mean the guns?’ he added, to make up for it.
‘Not just the guns,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘But we don’t need to go into details.’
Christopher realised that Charlie was trying to head off further questions that might upset Penelope.
‘Of course, Mr Smith, you’re well aware of the whole sordid story,’ said Penelope. ‘As is Tricia. I don’t think I need to share it with the whole town. My reputation will be in ruins anyway after this.’
There was a glimpse of her former, stately self as she sat up straight, pushed her chest out and tried to look down her nose.
‘So, did Neil listen to your warning, then?’ enquired Jock McLean.
‘I’m afraid I had overestimated Neil’s willingness to engage with his ex-wife,’ said Penelope. Somewhere in mid-sentence her body gradually slumped back down in the chair. ‘Actually he described her in quite unflattering terms and said he’d like to see her get what was coming to her.’
‘How did you know she was carrying on with Liam?’ asked Jock McLean.
‘Well,’ said Penelope, leaning forward slightly. ‘That’s the funny thing – I didn’t really know her at all, apart from seeing her with Neil a couple of times when they were still together. I didn’t even recognise her when I saw her on her own. But she’s remarried, and living in Aberdour. Or somewhere nearby. I saw her and her husband on the station platform when I was going into Edinburgh to the theatre one Saturday afternoon last autumn.’
Of course, Christopher thought, she would be one of these ladies who frequented Saturday matinees. He knew Penelope wasn’t old enough to be a pensioner, but she seemed to have adopted pensioner ways early in life and to have decided to stick to them from then on. He supposed it made things simpler in the sense that she wouldn’t then have to bother dyeing her hair when it went grey, or buying new clothes except when they wore out.
It had made her and Liam, the eternal teenager, an extremely odd couple, but of course they hadn’t been a couple for some time now.
‘But she isn’t happily married this time either,’ said Maisie Sue, nodding. ‘Or she wouldn’t have taken up with Liam.’
‘But how did you know, Penelope?’ said Jemima. She directed a certain gaze on the other woman: Christopher recognised it as the one she wore when she was absorbed in family history detective work. He had last seen it a few weeks ago in the computer room at the Cultural Centre, when she was on the brink of discovering a certain ancestor’s whereabouts at the time of the 1841 census.
‘How did I know what?’ said Penelope, who had evidently got lost somewhere in her own narrative. Looking at the rest of the audience, Christopher suspected some of them were also lost. He was particularly suspicious of Rosie and Darren, whose overtures to Charlie Smith’s dog had resulted in it coming out from the curtains, putting its head on the coffee table in the window and fixing both of them with a mournful stare, of Jan from the wool shop, who was glaring at a piece of knitting she had taken out of a bag that seemed too small to contain it, and of Dave, whose glazed look suggested he was about to fall asleep.
‘How did you know the woman was carrying on with Liam?’ said Jock, who tended to pursue things that caught his attention like a terrier, persisting long after any reasonable person would have lost interest.
‘Well, she was talking to one of her friends in that wee café in Inverkeithing – you know the one near the bus stop – I had popped in there because it was so cold and I had a while to wait for my next bus. I heard her saying something about Liam.’ Penelope paused, and her face got even redder. ‘I think she had just come back from spending the weekend with him. She was a bit – tired.’
They all digested this in an embarrassed silence.
‘But how did you know it was your Liam she was talking about?’ said Jock, who in Christopher’s experience was more or less immune to embarrassment.
‘Well, after that I seemed to see them together everywhere,’ said Penelope. ‘Not in Aberdour, of course – her husband would have noticed something – but at the pictures in Dunfermline, and down by the harbour here, sitting on a bench in the cold – you’d think they would have frozen to death.’
6 The Queen of Scots Mystery Page 5
