6 The Queen of Scots Mystery

by Cecilia Peartree

  Penelope looked up at her with red eyes. ‘I don’t know what they thought. They asked me why I was there in the Queen of Scots on Friday night. Somebody had seen me.’

  ‘Jackie Whitmore.’

  ‘Who?’ said Penelope and Amaryllis almost at the same time.

  ‘The barmaid,’ said Neil shortly, and went back to watching the toaster..

  ‘I told them the truth – that I’d come to warn Neil that Liam might be violent, but they didn’t seem to believe me at first. They kept asking me the same questions again and again. Then they suddenly let me go.’

  Neil put the toast on a plate and brought it over. He busied himself at the sink, doing something that probably didn’t need doing. Amaryllis wished he would sit still and do nothing. She had noticed this with men before: if they felt helpless or awkward, and yet thought they would look like a waste of space if they did nothing, they would do something pointless and perhaps even dangerous or annoying to fill the gap.

  She ground her teeth.

  ‘Did you miss the last bus home just now, Penelope?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Penelope. ‘The police were going to take me home, but I asked them to drop me off at Tricia’s. But I’d forgotten this is her book club night.’

  ‘Oh, yes, book clubs,’ said Amaryllis, unable to keep the doom out of her voice. She was highly suspicious of book clubs, and had been wrestling with her urge to infiltrate this one ever since it started up in the library at the Cultural Centre. ‘So then you walked over here?’

  ‘No, I walked over to the wool shop first. I thought Jan might be there. But she wasn’t. And then I went up to Jemima’s to see if I could catch her. Last week when I met her she offered to show me how to make a proper pease brose some time, and I thought she might… But I couldn’t get any reply. That was when I wondered if I should have a word with Christopher about it.’

  ‘About what?’ said Amaryllis in genuine bafflement. Then she remembered. ‘Is it something to do with Zak?’

  Amaryllis’s mobile buzzed at that moment, on the table. She glared at it, but picked it up anyway. When she clicked to accept the call, the tortoise that represented Christopher on her phone appeared.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘I wanted to let you know – Jock’s come round. The doctor says he should be fine but they’re keeping him in overnight because of his age.’

  He said the last word in a paranoid whisper, but she could still here a noisy protest in the background.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Has he said anything?’

  ‘Said anything? He hasn’t stopped! We’re leaving to come home any minute now. Don’t wait for us though. Go home if you want.’

  She interpreted that to mean that he would like her to stay there but didn’t want to ask.

  ‘We’ve got Penelope here,’ she told him.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, better go now.’

  Zak. She must ask Penelope again about Zak.

  ‘I won’t be able to get into Jock’s house,’ said Neil. ‘I haven’t got a key.’ He glanced at the two women. ‘I’ve had to give his address to the police as part of the bail conditions.’

  ‘Christopher won’t mind you staying here,’ said Amaryllis. ‘He’s got plenty of room.’

  ‘I don’t know where I’m going to go,’ Penelope sniffed. ‘And – oh dear – I don’t know where Zak is.’

  ‘Have the police spoken to him?’ enquired Amaryllis.

  ‘There’s no reason why they should!’ said Penelope, indignant on her son’s behalf. ‘He’s always got on perfectly well with Liam. I tried to make sure of that. He never knew what I went through with his father. He had no reason to do him any harm.’

  Do you want to bet? thought Amaryllis, recalling occasions in the past when Zak had seemed to her to be fully aware of the situation between his parents. She caught Neil’s eye and saw the cynicism on his face. She wondered where Zak had got to. On occasion he had come to her for sanctuary, as had some of his friends.

  ‘Well, I’d better be going then,’ she said. She looked at Neil and Penelope. They were adults: she could leave them alone together. ‘I’m sure Christopher wouldn’t mind one of you sleeping on the settee. You can sort something else out in the morning.’

  Her steps speeded up as she reached the slope that led down towards her apartment block in the little cul-de-sac called Merchantman’s Wynd. She hoped he wasn’t – well, he wasn’t hanging around at the main door anyway. And he wasn’t –

  ‘Hey, Amaryllis!’ came a low voice in the darkness. From somewhere above her. She glanced up. He was on her little balcony. Two thoughts crossed her mind simultaneously. How had he got up there? And, more worrying, if Penelope ever found out her son had come to Amaryllis, she would kill both of them.

  Chapter 17 Crowded

  Christopher breathed a sigh of relief as he came in his own front door again. Charlie and the dog were just turning in at the garden gate. The house was dark. He hadn’t thought until now about where Neil would spend the night, but he wondered if Amaryllis had given him the other spare bedroom – the little one his sister’s daughter used to inhabit when they all lived with him. Christopher didn’t mind. He didn’t think Neil Macrae would be a particularly difficult house-guest. Charlie was more trouble in many ways. Not to mention the dog, which had woken up full of joys of spring as they got out of the car.

  ‘You don’t think you should take him round the block, do you?’ he suggested, closing the front door behind them. ‘To settle him down?’

  ‘He’ll only get worse,’ said Charlie. The dog had run to the door of the front room and was pawing at it. Surely Amaryllis wasn’t still here, keeping Neil up late discussing football or something? In the dark? Christopher tried to think whether Amaryllis had ever shown any sign of fancying the landlord of the Queen of Scots on any of the many and varied occasions they had been in there over the past couple of years. A quick trawl of his brain came up with nothing, but he was aware that didn’t mean she hadn’t.

  He opened the door to stop the dog from scratching it to bits.

  ‘Stay!’ said Charlie in a futile attempt to seem as if he was in charge. The dog dashed over to the settee and jumped on top of a shape that was lying there.

  ‘Urghh!’ said the shape, jiggling around frantically. Christopher switched on the light. The muffled voice had sounded sort of female, but he didn’t think it was Amaryllis. He ran through a mental list of all the women who were likely to camp on his settee for the night, deleting each name on various grounds as he got to it. He was taken aback when the figure escaped from the spare room duvet, in which it had apparently become inextricably entangled, and said, ‘Sorry, Christopher. Amaryllis said it would be all right. Ugh, I need to wash my face.’

  Charlie succeeded in calling the dog to his side at last. Christopher stared at Penelope, not quite accepting yet that it was indeed her. She looked a lot older and more untidy than usual, with straggly hair and eyes that had gone so puffy round the edges you could hardly see what colour they were.

  ‘Is Neil still here?’ he said at last, unable to think of anything sensible.

  She nodded. ‘He said something about not being able to get into Jock’s house. I’m not sure what he was talking about. Is he staying with Jock?’

  Christopher summarised the events of the evening. They became more ludicrous as he revisited them, but Penelope didn’t turn a hair. It seemed that she had retreated into a happy land where nothing mattered any more. He wished he could do the same. He seemed to have taken on responsibility for far too many other people’s problems. He wasn’t a social worker, after all. Perish the thought, squire, he told himself, and smiled.

  ‘Are you all right there, Penelope?’ he said. ‘You could always have my room if you like, and I’ll sleep down here.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Penelope, with a flash of her former middle-aged-woman-in-charge persona.
‘Go on up to bed, Christopher. I’m sure you need to get up for work in the morning. And I’ll be going home then anyway. I can sleep all I like there.’

  Christopher heroically refrained from questioning her about what she was doing in his front room. He would find out later from Amaryllis. He didn’t even offer to make tea and toast for Charlie and the dog. Instead he walked straight upstairs and into his room.

  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, he told himself, not entirely sure what it meant.

  Of course he couldn’t get to sleep right away, and then it was morning almost at once and the doorbell was ringing. Go away, he said in his head, turning over and trying to pretend there was any chance of going back to sleep.

  ‘Zak’s got something to say,’ said Amaryllis’s voice somewhere above him.

  He stuck his head under the pillow, hoping she would take the hint and go away. He knew Amaryllis was impervious to hints, of course, but at least he had bought himself some time.

  ‘We’ll use the dog if we have to,’ she added. What was he supposed to do? Jump up in sheer terror, screaming, ‘No, not the dog! Anything but the dog!’? Damn! He had made himself laugh. They would see his shoulders shaking under the bedclothes.

  ‘OK, would it help if we made tea?’

  ‘Only if you bring it to the bedside table,’ he groaned, lifting the pillow enough for his words to be heard.

  Amazingly she retreated downstairs and returned ten minutes later with a mug of tea, which she placed carefully beside him before retiring from the scene again. It wasn’t like her to be so conciliatory, particularly in the morning. What was wrong? He glanced at his alarm clock. Six-thirty? He couldn’t believe it. Morning hadn’t even started to show signs of wear and tear along the fault lines, never mind breaking. What was she doing here at this time?

  Just don’t wake the dog, he said to her silently. Too late: he already heard something whimpering and scratching at the bedroom door. He resolutely ignored it. He would go downstairs in his own time and only when fully dressed and prepared for the day ahead - which, if it was going to be anything like the previous one, he wasn’t looking forward to at all. He didn’t even want to think about anything that Zak might want to say.

  Following a shower, he felt almost human and also rather remorseful. He had known Zak Johnstone for quite a while now, and although the boy had got himself mixed up with a bad crowd at one time, he had also been doing voluntary work at the Cultural Centre on and off for six months or so with a better grace than some of the paid employees showed. Old ladies seemed to like his help with the computers, and Jemima had once told him he had an aptitude for research and asked why he didn’t consider a career in genealogy, although Christopher doubted that there were many opportunities for that sort of thing. But as a former archivist he supposed he should encourage the boy a bit more. Maybe take advantage of the interest in dinosaurs all boys had at one stage or another, and get him to arrange a fossil display.

  As he walked downstairs mulling this over he remembered something. He was so annoyed with himself for not recalling it earlier that his head swam and he had to clutch at the banisters, otherwise he might have fallen and landed in a ungainly heap in the hall.

  He arrived in the kitchen a bit more precipitately than he had intended anyway. Amaryllis and Zak were sitting at the table eating toast. Amaryllis took one look at his face and said, ‘You might want something stronger than tea.’

  ‘No, I’m fine… Zak! What were you doing outside the Queen of Scots that day? When the beer delivery came? Friday?’

  Zak stared at Amaryllis. ‘You said he’d forgotten about seeing me. You didn’t tell him just now, did you? When you went up with his tea?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I had forgotten until now,’ said Christopher. ‘I was thinking I might get you to do a fossil display, and I remembered thinking about fossils while I was sitting on the bench waiting for Charlie to stop being sick, and you were walking past.’

  ‘Too much information, man,’ muttered Zak, looking a bit green himself. He took a steadying bite of toast and added, ‘I saw my dad that day.’

  ‘Liam?’ said Christopher stupidly.

  ‘He’s only ever had one dad, as far as I know,’ said Amaryllis. ‘If you stop asking silly questions, we might get this over before Penelope stops us. Carry on, Zak. You’ve already told me. Christopher’s even less likely to bite than I am.’

  ‘I saw him going into the cellar at the Queen of Scots,’ said Zak very quickly. ‘I followed him in there. We had an argument.’

  Christopher pulled a chair away from the table and slumped down on it. Zak’s glowing future helping old ladies and arranging fossils in the peace and quiet of the Cultural Centre seemed to recede into the far distance and lose some of its shine.

  ‘He was alive when I left, though,’ Zak insisted, looking as if he might burst into tears at any moment. ‘And he didn’t die until much later – did he?’

  ‘Any more toast?’ said Christopher. Amaryllis, for some reason that might only be known to herself, stepped into the role of traditional 1950s housewife and turned all her attention to brewing a pot of the right strength of tea, and adjusting the toaster so that it would produce the right shade of toast for Christopher. He hadn’t realised until then how fussy she must find him.

  ‘I didn’t mean to leave him in there to die,’ Zak went on. ‘I thought he’d get out. He always used to manage to get out of tricky places. It was the only thing he was any use at.’

  ‘There must have been something else…’ Christopher started to speak, caught Amaryllis’s eye and stopped again.

  ‘That and shooting at things,’ added Zak. ‘He used to take me up to the gun club and make me shoot too. I enjoyed it for a while – it was a cool thing to talk to the other kids at school about. It made me feel more mature – and then later on it didn’t. But I would never have killed him. I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘Was he OK when you left him?’ said Christopher. He was a long way out of his depth and he knew what he would have to do was to talk Zak into going to the police with his tale, but he needed to find some extenuating circumstances first, for the boy’s own sake.

  ‘Well, he was lying on the ground, but apart from that…’

  Christopher and Amaryllis stared at each other.

  ‘You didn’t tell me that bit,’ said Amaryllis accusingly.

  ‘You didn’t ask me,’ said Zak.

  ‘But he was OK?’ said Christopher. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘He wasn’t unconscious or anything,’ said Zak. ‘He was laughing – at me.’

  They didn’t get the chance to say anything else to Zak after that. Penelope appeared in the room like an avenging angel, swooping towards her son on wings of fury, and flinging her arms round him in a way which caused him to choke on his toast. She turned on Christopher and Amaryllis. She had evidently heard some of the conversation that had just taken place.

  ‘How could you – interrogate him like that? When we were guests in your house? This is quite inexcusable.’

  She made it all sound like a dreadful social faux pas.

  Christopher had no doubt the police would see it rather differently.

  Chapter 18 Not very close encounters

  When Neil got up that morning, he came upon a disturbing tableau in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but something was.

  Neil hadn’t realised until that moment how very tired he was of hearing about other people’s problems. It was the part of being a pub landlord that drained all his energy and left him exhausted at the end of the evening, so that he sometimes almost dreaded opening the doors again the following day. That was partly why he liked customers such as Christopher, to whom people seemed to gravitate with all the weird stuff, and Amaryllis, who wasn’t at all interested either in agonising over situations herself or in encouraging others to do so. Jock McLean could be a bit of a pain in the neck, which was ironic considering what ha
d happened yesterday, but Christopher seemed to have the patience of a saint as far as Jock was concerned. At times Neil had almost wondered if at least one of them had gay tendencies, but then Jock had suddenly started to show interest in women after all those years, and everyone knew Christopher and Amaryllis were… well, what were they? An item? Not exactly. More of an enigma inside a conundrum in the middle of one of those jigsaw puzzles with a picture of lots of baked beans or something.

  Seeing Penelope clutching her son in a death-grip, and Amaryllis looking baffled and Christopher anxious, Neil’s first instinct was to turn and go out the front door and to keep walking. But he didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the bed he had slept in so he gulped down a cup of tea, standing up, and then muttered some excuse and left.

  ‘Come back later if you don’t have anywhere else to go,’ called Christopher after him. Well, it sounded a bit half-hearted, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  He wandered off in a random direction and found himself walking down the High Street. It had rained overnight, which made him reconsider his emergency plan of sleeping in a shop doorway, but it wasn’t cold by Pitkirtly standards. Everything looked cleaner than usual. He supposed he didn’t usually come down this way so early in the morning, if at all.

  ‘Hello there!’ someone called out. He wasn’t sure if she was addressing him or not, but he glanced in her direction anyway. She was opening the door to the wool-shop. He assumed she was the owner and he vaguely recognised her from somewhere, but he couldn’t remember her name. She wasn’t the kind of woman he would ever have taken any notice of: middle-aged, short, plump, with mousy hair. She and her kind were two a penny in most places. She smiled at him in a tentative, anxious way. ‘How are you?’

  Neil wondered if she had mistaken him for somebody else. He paused and looked at her again. The smile faded a little.

  ‘I’m Jan,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’ve seen me in the pub sometimes. Has anything happened about that? I mean, are you going to be able to open up again soon?’