Then there were the arrangements for the craft fair which, he realised, had now become imminent despite his strategy of ignoring it until it went away. Maisie Sue and Jan from the wool-shop arrived as the penguin made its exit and started interrogating him about putting up signs in the windows and corridors, and whether they could use his office to store things during the fair. Maisie Sue then harangued him further about the dimness of the corner where her Pitkirtly history quilt was hanging, and demanded he have it moved into the foyer. Jan then argued that this would constitute unfair free advertising for Maisie Sue’s quilt stall which might adversely affect sales at her own wool and knitted goods table.
After all this he was rather relieved when he had an unexpected visitor around lunch-time. It was Zak Johnstone, now released from custody and looking about ten years older than he had the last time Christopher had seen him.
‘I came to say thanks, Mr Wilson,’ he said, sitting in Christopher’s office and staring out the window to the car park beyond.
‘Thanks for making you spend the night in the police station?’ said Christopher, taking a bite of his egg and tomato sandwich. ‘Do you want something to eat, by the way? I’ve got a KitKat in the drawer.’
Zak shook his head. ‘No, thanks, I’m not hungry… No, it was as well I went in when I did. They said they were glad I’d come forward off my own bat. It wasn’t that great being questioned but it was just boring, really. They kept asking the same questions over and over.’
‘Hmm. And did you have answers to them?’
‘Well, I guess. They asked if I had noticed a funny smell, or if we had knocked anything over when we had that fight. Apart from me knocking Dad down, of course. But he seemed to think it was one huge laugh.’
Zak still sounded bitter about his father’s amusement, even after all that had happened.
‘It was maybe the surprise that made him laugh,’ said Christopher after racking his brains for something vaguely consolatory to say to the boy. ‘That happens sometimes.’
‘Dad used to think lots of things were funny that nobody else did,’ said Zak. ‘Like the way people ran when he shot at them.’
Christopher blinked. He tried to remember if Caroline and he had run the time Liam had shot at them on the beach at Aberdour. He supposed they must have progressed a bit more quickly than they meant to after that. Had Liam laughed at them? Not in their hearing, certainly. But he could imagine the man doing it.
‘So, have they charged you with anything?’ he asked.
Zak shook his head again. ‘No – they said there was nothing they could think of to charge me with, but I’m not to get into any more trouble or they’ll think of something.’
‘Christopher! We’re leaving – for now,’ called Maisie Sue, popping her head round the door. ‘See you on Sunday! Have a nice day!’
‘Are you all right with coming in here next week to help me start cataloguing the fossils, then?’ said Christopher to Zak, ignoring this interruption except to hope fervently that he would be run over a bus before Sunday - not that there was much chance of that in Pitkirtly with the most recent reduction in bus services. He wasn’t sure his offer would cheer up a young man like Zak, but it was the only thing he could think of. ‘Jemima says we should put them online – maybe that’s up your street too.’
Zak smiled as if he was genuinely pleased. ‘Mum said you’d let me come back,’ he said.
‘She was right. Have you thought any more about that museum course you were looking at doing?’ said Christopher.
‘Still thinking,’ Zak said with a casual air. ‘See you, then.’
As he left, Jemima and Dave barged in. So much for the ‘Private – staff only’ sign on the door, thought Christopher, suppressing a sigh. He might as well swap it for a ‘Do come in and interrupt whatever I’m doing’ notice. He took another bite of his sandwich, greeted the two of them and prepared for a long and rambling lunchtime.
‘Have you heard the news?’ said Dave. This was a surprise. Jemima was usually the gossipy one of the pair. Perhaps they were slowly morphing into one person with two bodies. Christopher would have imagined people who got married so late in life were immune from this tendency, but perhaps not. He wondered what it was like to share so much with another person. It had never really happened to him in his long-ago, ill-fated marriage. If anything he was closer to Caroline than he was to anyone else, and he had often wished he wasn’t close to her either. He had no wish to share her mind or thoughts.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I never hear any news.’
‘Charlie’s going to take over the Queen of Scots when Neil emigrates to Spain.’
‘I don’t think it’s called emigrating these days if you go somewhere in Europe, David,’ said Jemima. ‘Not with this Eurozone thing. Or is Spain not part of it any more?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with anything, Jemima,’ said Dave.
‘I heard about Neil Macrae wanting to go to Spain,’ said Christopher. ‘But not the other bit. Is Charlie so sure he’s going to have to leave the police, then?’
‘Jock McLean says he is,’ said Dave.
Christopher laughed. ‘Oh, yes, and Jock McLean’s always right, isn’t he?’
‘He’s got to be right some of the time,’ said Dave. ‘Law of averages.’
‘Have you got organised to put the fossils online yet?’ said Jemima. ‘Only I saw Zak on his way out of your office and I thought a nice young man like him might know what to do about websites. And apps.’
‘What do you know about apps?’ said Dave suspiciously.
‘More than you do, anyway,’ said Jemima with a smug expression on her face. ‘I’ve been on a course.’
This was so unlikely that Christopher wondered if she had got mixed up with some sort of new knitting stitch, but he didn’t like to challenge her on it. Apart from anything else, he knew next to nothing about apps either.
‘Ha!’ said Dave. ‘If mobile phones were meant for people to educate themselves with…’
His voice tailed off, presumably because he realised there was nowhere for the sentence to go.
‘Exactly,’ said Jemima. ‘They’d be able to access the internet and find information whenever people wanted it and not when somebody else decided they were ready for it.’ She fixed Christopher with a look. ‘Do you think Charlie can afford to buy the Queen of Scots?’
‘Depends how much Neil Macrae wants for it, I suppose,’ said Christopher. ‘He’d need to find out if it’s sound financially. A viable business.’
What Christopher knew about business could at one time have been written on the back of a stamp, but since he had begun running the Cultural Centre he had been forced to find out more about financial matters, both by actually reading the many emails and letters that arrived from the Council and by attending courses about management, to which he had more or less to be dragged kicking and screaming.
‘Do you think there’s a chance it isn’t?’ said Dave. Christopher saw the beginnings of panic in his eyes.
‘Well, we’ve all tried our best over the years, anyway,’ he said. ‘Jock McLean alone must have sunk enough pints to keep the whole thing going.’
‘There’ll be a lot of overheads though, mind,’ said Jemima, nodding wisely. ‘I wouldn’t like to have to balance the books.’
‘You did for PLIF,’ said Dave, harking back to the time when they had all been part of the short-lived Pitkirtly Local Improvement Forum, run by Christopher.
‘That was an amateur thing,’ said Jemima. ‘Nobody was relying on it for a living. I only had a notebook. Nowadays you need to keep proper records and have them on a computer.’
‘Zak’s going to be helping to catalogue the fossil collection,’ said Christopher, who didn’t want to be reminded of other financial aspects of the PLIF era. ‘So I suppose we should be able to think about putting them online after that, if we can get organised.’
‘People can always find time to organise things they really want to
organise,’ said Jemima, nodding wisely as she delivered another of the pieces of wisdom she had built up during a lifetime. ‘Look at Maisie Sue and this craft fair of hers. What I can’t understand is why you agreed to it. She’ll turn the place upside-down. But I suppose it’s nice for the tourists.’
Christopher frowned, wondering when he had last seen a tourist in town. But before he had time to articulate this thought, she stood up, with a bit of creaking at the knees. ‘Come on Dave, we’ve got to get to the fish shop while they still have something left. The trawlers aren’t allowed to catch nearly enough these days. They only go out once or twice a week, if that.’
Jemima and Dave left the office, grumbling gently to each other again about the price of lemon sole. They were quickly replaced in the doorway by one of the library staff. Christopher groaned inwardly. He thought he had resolved the tea-spoon problem. Obviously his negotiating skills weren’t quite as good as he had imagined.
But it wasn’t anything to do with tea-spoons.
‘There’s a young lady here who’s asking a question about the Queen of Scots,’ said the librarian with faint disapproval.
‘The Queen of Scots? What does she want to know? I’m not sure that we have anything on the history of the place itself, but maybe if she looked in that book about Pitkirtly in bygone ages or whatever it's called…’
‘No, she wants to know what’s going to happen to the pub now.'
‘What’s going to happen? Now?’
‘Could you have a quick word with her? She’s quite determined.’
‘All right, but don’t send her in. I’ll come out to the foyer. It isn’t as if we’ll be talking about
state secrets.’
He heaved himself out of the chair – was he getting heavier or was there some sort of atmospheric effect keeping him from getting up as quickly as he used to? Perhaps increased gravity with global warming or something? – and went through to the entrance hall where he and Grumpy Graham had once stood behind the reception desk. These days they were lucky to have a volunteer to man the desk every other Tuesday. In between times, people who wanted information had to be brave enough to ask one of the library staff. Not many did.
The girl looked familiar, but then Christopher was finding as he got older that everyone under twenty-five looked the same, no matter what their gender. It wasn’t so much that their clothes and appearances were homogenous as that he didn’t take enough notice of them to be able to distinguish one from another.
Three surprising things happened at approximately the same time.
Christopher remembered where he had seen the girl before. She was Jackie, the former barmaid from the Queen of Scots, whom he had last seen coming out of a computer shop in Dunfermline. As he reflected on that incident, someone else pushed a bicycle in through the front door, which was strictly against the rules, and the girl took one look at Christopher and ran. She pushed past the man with the bike and ran out to the street.
‘Hmm,’ said Inspector Armstrong, the owner of the bicycle. ‘That one’s easily intimidated.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Christopher, on auto-pilot. ‘I didn’t even speak to her.’
The Inspector gave him a disbelieving look.
‘Can we have a word?’ he said.
Christopher wasn’t sure he wanted someone in Lycra cycling shorts invading his office, but if the alternative was being arrested for getting in the way of the police, or whatever the appropriate charge was these days, he more or less had to agree. He turned to lead the way.
When he heard the creaking of wheels behind him, he turned back indignantly, prepared to remonstrate.
‘You don’t mind the bike, do you?’ said Inspector Armstrong cheerfully. ‘I don’t like to leave it lying around. It cost an arm and a leg.’
Christopher wanted to refuse this request, partly because he disliked Inspector Armstrong, partly because he had an instinctive aversion to cycling, and partly because he was aware that a bicycle inside the Cultural Centre represented a health and safety hazard. He was sure the inspector would insist on saving it first in the event of a fire, for example. He could almost picture all the women and children queuing up behind its over-sized wheels as he pushed it along the corridor through the smoke.
Even thinking about this made him cough.
‘All right?’ said Inspector Armstrong, still with that cheeriness that surely must be completely false.
‘I’m fine,’ wheezed Christopher. ‘Maybe – allergic to – bicycle oil. That must be it.’
The inspector laughed. ‘No such thing as allergies. It’s all in the mind. People are much too sensitive these days. Present company excepted, of course.’
‘Mmm,’ said Christopher, sitting back down in his chair and staring out of the window so that he didn’t have to watch Inspector Armstrong leaning fondly over his bicycle and in the process putting even more of a strain on the Lycra cycling shorts. ‘Have a seat, inspector. How may I help you?’
For a moment he worried that he sounded like a shop assistant in a mobile phone shop who had recently failed an exam in customer service; then he sat up straighter, told himself he didn’t even know the meaning of the phrase and turned to look the inspector in the eye, man to man.
Instead of sitting down, the police officer wandered over to the window and stared out for a moment.
‘Nice view,’ he said.
Christopher knew it wasn’t a nice view. Even last winter when everything had been covered in a picturesque but deadly layer of snow and ice, it hadn’t been pretty out there in the car park. On a nondescript spring day like this all you could see was tarmac and concrete, with a tantalising glimpse of sky above the flats they had built on top of the supermarket. He couldn’t quite work out what the inspector wanted. He was hoping it wasn’t something embarrassing when Mr Armstrong turned back into the room and said,
‘What about Charlie Smith, then?’
‘What about him?’ said Christopher, taken aback.
‘Can you alibi him?’
‘Alibi?’
Some part of Christopher’s brain told him ‘alibi’ wasn’t a verb. Another part told the first part to stop being so pedantic and answer the question as a normal person would. The first part retorted that it wasn’t a verb in the original Latin so it couldn’t be a verb in English – so there!
‘Was he staying with you at the time of Mr Johnstone’s death?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Christopher.
‘Is it possible,’ Inspector Armstrong continued without apparently waiting for Christopher’s reply, ‘that he could have been so disturbed by his suspension that he went berserk and murdered Mr Johnstone?’
Christopher gasped and wheezed at the same time.
‘Take all the time you need,’ said Mr Armstrong, with a short laugh that somehow suggested he thought Christopher was trying to cover something up.
‘And Ms Peebles?’ he added, again without waiting for a reply. ‘Does she have something to hide? Could she be playing for the enemy?’
‘Just a thought,’ he added before Christopher even opened his mouth. ‘You can park it for a while if you want.’
‘I wouldn’t want to get a parking ticket when I haven’t even got a car,’ Christopher replied, wondering at his ability to make a joke – albeit a limp one - under such adverse circumstances.
Inspector Armstrong waved his arm around, as if to say he wasn’t bothered either way.
‘All right then, froth it around your mind for a while – come and see me in a day or two if any of it rings a bell.’
‘Froth? A bell? Playing for the enemy?’ With a gargantuan effort Christopher stopped himself from cycling back through the inspector’s words. Cycling! He was becoming obsessed by it. ‘Right,’ he said, realising he had to get Armstrong out of his office before the man inflicted any more damage either on the English language or on Christopher’s own sanity. ‘I’ll definitely come and see you if it all froths up into a cappuccino. Or anythi
ng like that.’
‘With chocolate curls on the top,’ nodded Inspector Armstrong.
‘Goodbye then,’ said Christopher. He remained in his chair, swiveling round to the bookshelves behind him and taking down a dusty volume. He began to wheeze again as he opened it. Maybe he should make a doctor’s appointment.
But once the inspector had wheeled his bike out of the room, Christopher felt much better.
Chapter 24 Crafty Interlude
The Cultural Centre was usually closed on Sundays, so Amaryllis was mildly surprised to see people going in and out of it until she remembered the craft fair. As she got closer she noticed someone had put up a big banner over the front door. Christopher wouldn’t like that. Then she saw him up a ladder, apparently struggling to fix one end in place. She smiled.
Amaryllis had never been to a craft fair before, but she thought this one might be quite amusing.
‘Do you want a hand?’ she called to Christopher once she got within a couple of metres of him. She had deliberately not shouted too loudly in case she caused him to fall off and injure himself – she didn’t think the paramedics would appreciate having to come out to Pitkirtly again so soon after Jock McLean’s escapade – but he gave a start and the ladder wobbled alarmingly. She put out a hand to steady it.
‘Careful,’ said Christopher, sounding a bit squeaky.
‘I’ll hang on here until you’re finished.’
‘What if I fall on top of you?’ he said.
‘You’ll have a soft landing, and I’ll crawl out from under you and die quietly in the gutter.’
There was a bang from somewhere above her, and then he started to climb down, perhaps a little more quickly than he would have otherwise.
‘Is there anything else I can do?’ said Amaryllis.
They stood there while he mulled this over. Then the banner fell down again and draped itself artistically round their shoulders.
6 The Queen of Scots Mystery Page 14
