6 The Queen of Scots Mystery

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Fifty?’ cried Jock. ‘That’s no age at all. And you,’ he said to Charlie accusingly, ‘you can’t be any older than that.’

  ‘Forty-seven next birthday,’ said Charlie. ‘And I’m feeling every year of it now, I can tell you.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Jock. ‘Wait till you’re as old as me. Then you’ll be sorry.’

  He wasn’t sure what he wanted them to be sorry about. He himself had lived in Pitkirtly for his whole working life, teaching in the nearest secondary school for his sins, getting married and then divorced during that time, retiring from work and spending much of his time propping up the bar in the Queen of Scots. What did he have to show for it?

  The door-bell rang.

  Just as well, Jock reflected, otherwise we’d all be involved in a messy suicide pact and somebody would have to clean up after us. He got up and went to the door. Tricia Laidlaw stood on the doorstep, holding a dish in front of her like some sort of a trophy.

  ‘I heard you’d got out of hospital. I thought I’d bring you some lasagne in case you can’t manage to cook,’ she said.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Jock. ‘Do you want to come in for a minute? Neil and Charlie are here,’ he added quickly in case she got any ideas.

  ‘Oh! Maybe I’d better not.’

  ‘No, it’s all right, you can help me cheer them up.’

  ‘Well, maybe for a second or two.’

  The second or two stretched well into the evening as they all talked about turning-points in their lives, then heated up and shared the lasagne and then, somewhat grudgingly on Jock’s part, had a bottle each of Old Pictish Brew. Tricia had never tried it before, but she coped well with its distinctive peaty undertones. Not that Jock would normally have dreamed of using such pretentious language to describe it.

  ‘You know what?’ said Neil towards the end of the evening. ‘I’m definitely going to go to Spain. It’s the lasagne. Practically their national dish, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought that was Italy,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re thinking of paella.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Neil. ‘Lasagne, paella, what’s the difference?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ said Jock.

  Neil shook his head.

  Charlie stared at him. ‘You know what?’ he said slowly. ‘Would you consider selling me the Queen of Scots? I think I might want to take it over.’

  Chapter 22 Amaryllis Rides Again

  Amaryllis was passing the Queen of Scots when she noticed something unusual. She got up and rang the bell.

  ‘Too late,’ said the driver. ‘You should have rung before we got round that last corner. Next stop Limekilns.’

  ‘Don’t make me do anything silly,’ she warned him. ‘Just let me off here. I’m asking nicely.’

  ‘I thought you were going to Dunfermline,’ he said. ‘That’s where your ticket says you’re going.’

  ‘I refuse to be defined by my bus ticket,’ she said haughtily.

  Evidently afraid of being drawn into a long and undoubtedly insane conversation, he screeched to a sudden halt, sending her flying and causing someone’s hat to transfer itself on to the head of another passenger three rows in front.

  Amaryllis alighted with dignity, taking her time. The doors closed with a snap, almost on the backs of her heels. She shouted something very rude as the bus pulled away, then turned her attention to the Queen of Scots. She had seen a uniformed police officer opening the front door and holding it for Neil Macrae, Jock McLean and Charlie Smith to go in. Either a bizarre reconstruction of the crime was going on, or something else of interest. Amaryllis knew she had to be there in any event.

  She did wonder if Jock and Neil had finally owned up to having been in there the night Jock was attacked. It would be only fair if Bill and Andrea Lawson were held to account, after all – especially Bill, who had caused her to sprint through the back gardens of Aberdour once too often.

  She crossed the road and, finding the door unlocked behind the men, went into the foyer of the pub. The lights were on in the bar, so she pushed the swing door open and stepped inside.

  Neil and Charlie were poking about in a drawer while Keith Burnet watched and Jock McLean sat on a bar stool as if he were waiting to be served with a pint of Old Pictish Brew.

  ‘… and the rest of the books are upstairs in the flat,’ Neil was saying. ‘There’s some stuff on the computer as well. Jackie helps with that. I’m no use with it. Too old to pick up all that electronic stuff.’

  Keith Burnet glanced round at that moment and noticed her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said in rather an unwelcoming tone.

  Jock looked in her direction and laughed. ‘Amaryllis is always around when she thinks something’s going on,’ he said. ‘She’s got her radar switched on all the time, looking for blips.’

  ‘I like to keep tabs on what my friends are up to,’ she said. ‘So I can keep them out of trouble.’

  Charlie Smith, overhearing, made an inelegant snorting noise. ‘Lead them into it, more like.’

  The dog came out from behind the bar to welcome Amaryllis.

  ‘At least somebody’s pleased to see me,’ she said.

  ‘The flat goes with the pub, is that right?’ said Charlie to Neil.

  ‘It certainly does,’ said Neil. ‘Two bedrooms, lounge and kitchen. And bathroom with built-in shower.’

  ‘What’s going on here?’ said Amaryllis slowly. It sounded almost as if – but surely she had the wrong end of the stick – as if Charlie were considering buying the Queen of Scots. She sat down suddenly on the nearest table. It wobbled but stayed upright.

  ‘Having a look round,’ said Charlie.

  Amaryllis glared at Keith Burnet. ‘How did they talk you into this? I thought Neil wasn’t supposed to come near the place? They haven’t got you into trouble too, have they?’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jock McLean. ‘Since when have you been so bothered about what people are supposed to do and not do? Who made you the Chief Constable all of a sudden?’

  ‘It’s all quite above-board,’ said Keith Burnet, blushing. ‘Neil asked us if he could do this. Inspector Armstrong told me to come down with them and make sure they didn’t touch anything except the books.’

  ‘Books?’ said Amaryllis. She was annoyed with herself and with them for making her sound so squeaky and feminine. Christopher was the one who traditionally asked the stupid questions.

  Charlie sighed. ‘Neil’s thinking of going to Spain, and I’m considering buying the pub. So we've come down to have a look at the books. The accounts,' he added in case she didn't understand technical accounting terms. 'Simple really. Now are you satisfied?’

  ‘Mmm, interesting,’ said Amaryllis. She quite liked the idea of the cosy sameness of Pitkirtly life being shaken up a bit. She wasn’t sure how some of her friends might feel, though.

  ‘Good idea, isn’t it?’ said Jock. ‘I wasn’t sure at first, but with Charlie getting thrown out of the police he’ll need to go somewhere.’

  Amaryllis stared at Charlie as if he had sprouted parsley on top of his head – which at least would have helped to hide his bald patch. ‘Have you been thrown out of the police?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Keith Burnet impatiently. ‘He’s allowing for every eventuality. Neil can’t sell up or go to Spain anyway, not until he’s cleared of this Liam Johnstone business.’

  ‘But if you’re not thrown out of the police,’ said Neil, peering at something in the folder of paperwork, ‘then I can’t sell up and go to Spain, and the whole deal falls apart.’

  ‘You could sell to somebody else,’ said Jock. He caught Amaryllis’s eye. ‘How about you? Did you get a good pay-off from those spymasters of yours?’

  ‘That would be telling,’ said Amaryllis. She certainly had no wish to go into the licensed trade. She could imagine how draining it would be having to spend hours on end listening to people in various stages of intoxication holding forth about how misera
ble – or happy – they were, and what they thought about politics, and what the weather had been like today and was going to be like tomorrow. And that was quite apart from the financial responsibilities of running a business, having to order things and chase up suppliers, and make sure nobody got into your cellar and knocked over a canister of carbon dioxide. Even the thought of it all was enough to send her into a bleak depression.

  ‘Christopher, then?’ persisted Jock. ‘Why would he want to run a boring old museum when he could spend all his time at the Queen of Scots?’

  Fortunately nobody replied to him.

  Neil, who was looking a bit abstracted anyway, said, ‘I’d better go up to the flat and see if I can find the rest of it. I can’t get this to add up the way it should.’

  ‘We’d better stick together,’ said Keith Burnet. ‘Otherwise I can’t keep an eye on you all.’

  Amaryllis didn’t like the idea of being kept an eye on, but she was curious to see the flat upstairs, so she followed the others as they trooped back through the entrance hall and Neil unlocked the door to his own living space.

  She was envious almost at once of the view of the river he had from his front room. For an insane moment or two she wanted to buy the pub herself just for that view. Her own flat had a little balcony she sometimes used for sitting in the fresh air, but all it overlooked was a lane that led to the bit of waste land on which the village hall had once stood. Being able to see the sky in all its moods, the wide river and everything beyond it, would have been perfect. It wouldn’t be worth the hassle of running the pub though. She even considered for a few seconds whether Neil would sell her the flat separately, but she could see that for the landlord to live on the premises was advisable, if not essential.

  ‘That’s funny,’ Neil was saying. ‘Where’s my computer gone?’

  ‘Your computer?’ said Keith. ‘Where do you keep it?’

  Neil indicated the top of a cluttered old-fashioned desk with pigeon-holes at the back.

  ‘On here.’

  ‘You don’t lock it up when it’s not in use, then?’ said Keith, making it sound as if this was what all sensible computer owners did in a crime hotspot like Pitkirtly.

  Neil shook his head.

  ‘Could you have left it somewhere else?’ asked Charlie. ‘By your bed? In the kitchen?’

  Neil gave him a look. ‘It’s a desktop computer. The monitor alone weighs a ton. It’s plugged into an internet connection right here. Why would I want to move it around?’

  ‘Have a look anyway,’ Charlie suggested. The two of them conducted a leisurely search of the flat. Jock joined Amaryllis at the window, watching the distant chimneys at Grangemouth and the tide creeping in over the mud-flats.

  ‘Anything else missing?’ said Keith as they returned to the living-room.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Neil.

  ‘Televisions, DVD players, mobile phones?’ said Keith.

  ‘I’ve got my phone with me. I don’t have a TV.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Keith. ‘I mean – how do you manage without one? For the news and stuff, I mean.’

  Neil smiled. ‘I get all the news I need in the bar. I don’t have time to watch television.’

  Keith got out his notebook with a sigh. ‘How much do you think the computer was worth? Have you got the serial number?’

  ‘Do I look as if I’m the kind of person who keeps track of serial numbers?’ said Neil.

  ‘I don’t know what that kind of person would look like, sir,’ said Keith solemnly, making a note.

  Jock turned from the window at last. ‘Do you think it was the two that attacked me? That took the computer?’

  ‘What, Bill and – I mean, what are you talking about?’ said Neil.

  ‘Attacked you?’ said Keith, pencil suspended in mid-air. ‘What’s all this about then?’ He gave Charlie Smith a hard stare. ‘You didn’t say anything about that, sir.’

  ‘It can’t have been them,’ said Amaryllis, taking no notice of Keith. ‘They don’t have a computer in their house. Of course, they might have got rid of it already… Or hidden it in a cupboard. I didn’t have time to open the wardrobes or anything… Keith, if you can’t close your ears, can you go downstairs for a minute?’

  Keith’s stare swivelled from Charlie Smith to Amaryllis and back. He put away his notebook and pencil. ‘There’s things going on here,’ he muttered. ‘We’ll find out the whole story, don’t you worry.’

  Surprisingly, he did as Amaryllis suggested. She thought it might have been because of Charlie’s presence. Evidently Keith was still clinging to the hope that his superior officer would be reinstated, although in the light of what Amaryllis knew Charlie had been doing during his suspension, this seemed increasingly unlikely.

  ‘Why should anybody steal my computer?’ said Neil. ‘It was quite an old one – I was thinking about replacing it soon. Jackie told me I should get something that didn’t run on steam.’

  ‘They must have taken it for whatever was on it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘That’s why Andrea and Bill Lawson would be the most likely suspects – if they still had it in their house, that is. But then, they may have passed it on to somebody else already.’

  ‘If they got in here, maybe somebody else could too,’ said Jock.

  ‘But they only got in because you left the door open,’ said Neil accusingly.

  ‘I only did that for a quick getaway,’ said Jock. ‘Anyway, you should have stopped them. You were the one keeping a lookout.’

  ‘Does anyone else have a key?’ said Charlie.

  Amaryllis gave him a scornful look. ‘You wouldn’t need a key. There’s all sort of ways in.’

  ‘Maybe for somebody like you,’ said Charlie. ‘But any normal person would need a key.’

  ‘Normal?’ said Amaryllis huffily.

  ‘Andrea might still have a key,’ said Neil. ‘I think Jackie does too – but she wouldn’t take away the computer. If there was anything she wanted to do with it, she could do it here. She’s the one who knows how everything works. I used to let her use the internet when she had time. She used to look up holidays. She always fancied going to Thailand.’

  ‘What about the rest of your books?’ said Amaryllis, losing interest in Neil’s barmaid, of whom she had never taken any notice. She supposed the girl had been about in the background a lot of the time, but she had never drawn attention to herself by being particularly obnoxious or excessively polite.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Neil. ‘I’ve got to have all the paperwork too, for the VAT people.’

  He went to the sideboard and rummaged around inside.

  ‘That’s funny,’ he said after a moment. ‘There’s all these loose papers, but I always put them away in folders to keep things straight. The folders aren’t there.’

  ‘Could you have put them somewhere else and then forgotten?’ said Amaryllis. She had an increasingly bad feeling about this for Neil’s sake, but it was combined inexorably with a boost to her spirits as she sensed that a real challenge was about to appear in her path.

  ‘No,’ said Neil indignantly. ‘They’re always in here. I never take them out of this room. It would be pointless.’

  Keith came back upstairs. ‘We’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘Inspector Armstrong has told me to go and assist with a road traffic incident in the High Street.’

  ‘It isn’t Dave, is it?’ enquired Amaryllis.

  ‘Not this time, Ms Peebles. He does keep us all quite busy, though, but not so much since he got married… You’ll all have to leave the building. I’ve got to secure it now. We can’t have anybody else getting in.’

  ‘There’s nothing for us to see here anyway,’ said Neil gloomily. ‘Until you can get my computer back. And the folders.’

  ‘Can you give me the stuff from downstairs to look at anyway?’ said Charlie. ‘It’ll be something to be going on with. Until you get the rest of it back.’

  ‘Where does Jackie live?’ said Amaryllis, trying to sound
casual, as they left.

  ‘Jackie Whitmore? The barmaid?’ said Neil. ‘What do you want to know that for?’

  ‘Just wondered,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I thought maybe she’d seen or heard something she didn’t tell the police. But she might be willing to speak to another woman about it.’

  ‘But where are we going to find another woman to speak to her, that’s the question?’ said Jock McLean with an evil laugh. Amaryllis ignored him.

  ‘Well, she works part time at her dad’s newsagent in the High Street,’ said Neil. ‘You should be able to catch her there in the morning. I don’t think I should give out the private address of an employee to anyone though.’

  She thought he was only saying that to stay on the right side of the law because of Keith Burnet’s presence, but it was very annoying. She didn’t want to have to interrogate Jackie Whitmore with her dad around. He might turn out to have a falsely optimistic idea about his daughter’s innocence, or an over-protective attitude towards her. It would be much better to try and get her on her own or at least without a family member hovering over her.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said to Neil. ‘Thanks.’

  She had abandoned her plan to go to Dunfermline for the day. It looked as if things were more likely to kick off in Pitkirtly after all.

  Chapter 23 Visitors

  There was a lot to catch up on at the Cultural Centre, even after one day away. Christopher spent most of the morning trying to resolve the question of what to do with a stuffed penguin someone had left on the doorstep wrapped in newspaper, and then carrying out high-level peace negotiations in the staff tea-room when one of the library staff accused another of not washing up a tea-spoon after her morning break. Apparently this was an issue that had been building up for some time. Christopher felt simultaneously annoyed with himself for not noticing the tension in the air and pleased that he hadn’t been sucked into this minor housekeeping dispute before now.

  Eventually an agitated mother came in to retrieve the penguin, which was apparently not the result of someone’s attempts to practise taxidermy in the comfort of their own home but a child’s toy and bedtime comforter, made to look like a real, but deceased penguin. Christopher wasn’t too sure that this level of realism was appropriate for a toy, but the parent claimed her son couldn’t sleep without it, glassy eyes and all.