'What do you want?' he growled.
'We can't discuss it on the door-step, Mr Wilson,' said one of them, glancing over his shoulder anxiously.
'We've got to talk in private,' said the other. 'Otherwise you'll have to come with us, and I can assure you that is only the last resort.'
Oh well, thought Christopher as he stood back to allow them to come into the house, at least Amaryllis isn't here. That would be the last straw.
'Stop right there!' said Amaryllis. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, with one hand up as a stop sign, and holding what seemed to be a light sabre in the other. Christopher remembered Faisal madly coveting the thing for a while and then forgetting to take it with him when Caroline moved away with the children. He wondered where she had found it.
One of the men started to laugh, then turned the sound into a cough when the other one kicked him. Christopher looked at the kitchen door. Somewhere behind it, Jock was making tea. For the first time ever, he wished there was a lock on the door. If anything could be worse than Amaryllis becoming involved in this situation, it would be Jock blundering around in the middle of it.
He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. It was beyond his control. Fate would decide.
'You'd better come into the front room,' he said to the two men. They sidled past Amaryllis with nervous glances. Once Christopher was in the front room with them, she positioned herself in the doorway like some sort of bodyguard. Somehow the light sabre didn't look quite as ridiculous as it might have done.
'Mr Wilson,' said the more assertive of the men, the one who had kicked the other for laughing. 'The last time we saw you, we gave you certain information.'
'Yes,' said Christopher to fill the pause.
'We've been asked to tell you that we cannot under any circumstances divulge the reasons for giving you that information, or any further information relating to it.'
He paused again. Christopher couldn't think of anything to say this time. The silence persisted for several minutes. When it became clear that nobody had any more to say on the subject, the two men stood up.
'Thank you for your time,' said the less assertive one.
The other one frowned, as if the harmless words had been themselves covered by the Official Secrets Act. Perhaps time wasn't real at all, but a phantom construct with which they had all been brainwashed. Christopher blinked. It hadn't even occurred to him until now to wonder why they had come to see him in the first place, if what they had done to Amaryllis was only a test. Had it been a test for him too? Had he passed or failed? Had they expected him to drop everything and go to her rescue, or make a huge fuss and start a petition for military action? He almost felt guilty for behaving like an archivist and waiting for something to happen so that he could write it down. Or not, in this case, as he would undoubtedly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act if they found out he had written it all down for posterity.
They were on their way out of the house when Amaryllis struck. Literally. She prodded one of the men between the shoulder-blades with the light sabre.
'Tell your supervisors from me that if you ever drag Christopher Wilson into your stupid little games again I will personally make it my life's work to turn this child's toy into a real weapon that will slice your head off.'
Her voice became very slightly louder on the last phrase but she was still very calm and controlled - and dangerous. She drew the end of the thing along the back of his neck. Christopher couldn't repress a shiver as he watched.
After the two men had left the house and he had watched them hurry down the path, trying not to break into a run, Christopher turned and saw Jock McLean watching from the kitchen doorway.
'Just as well she didn't have a bunch of flowers,' said Jock inexplicably. 'She could have done them some real damage.'
Chapter 28 Put out
Neil didn’t want to say anything to Jock McLean about the note. Although the older man was as resilient as the hills, he had looked a bit tired in the few days following their futile trip to the Queen of Scots, and in Neil’s opinion should have gone for a lie-down instead of arguing with Amaryllis for what seemed like hours that evening about whether to go out for a takeaway or not. Amaryllis had tried to persuade Jock to take it easy, and that was enough to convince Jock he was fit to run along the coast to Limekilns and bring a takeaway back with him. But fortunately he was defeated at last by his own body, and now lay on the settee in his front room snoring as an accompaniment to one of these glorified talent shows that seemed to crowd into the schedules. Neil was quite glad he didn’t usually have time to watch television.
The note had been shoved through the letterbox while Jock was in the kitchen. It was lucky Amaryllis had got bored and gone home by then, otherwise she wouldn’t have rested until she had wormed all the information she could out of Neil, and no doubt offered him unsolicited advice on what to do about it. From what he had heard, she would quite likely have wanted to ride shotgun, as he thought the expression went, on his expedition to the old railway yard. Unless, that is, the tales about her previous exploits there were true, in which case she wouldn’t want to set foot in the place ever again.
The memory of what was said to have happened there gave him pause for thought, but he carried on with what he was doing anyway. The circumstances were quite different, he told himself. He doubted if he would come across someone mad and vengeful there, and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be armed. No, this was more of a white-collar crime, as far as he could tell.
Of course nobody expected to die. Liam Johnstone hadn’t expected it when he lay laughing on the Queen of Scots cellar floor. Neil frowned as he considered that. But he wouldn’t be in any danger of suffocating on carbon dioxide in the open air.
He made his way down the dark streets of Pitkirtly without too much trepidation. He was curious more than he was apprehensive. And he had decided he wanted his computer and account books back now after all. Even if Charlie didn’t follow up on his vague idea of buying the pub, Neil would still need the accounts for the reckonings with the tax authorities that couldn’t be postponed forever. He didn’t think they would be very happy to hear all the information had been stolen. And he had gone to quite a bit of trouble to make sure the figures added up in the first place.
He stopped in his tracks. Gradually the meaning of the half-formed sentence at the back of his mind took a more definite shape and came to the forefront.
He didn’t understand accounts, but he did understand the concept of being robbed. And only a few people in the world would have had the opportunity to do it.
For a moment he re-considered waking Jock and bringing him along on this expedition. But he still couldn’t bring himself to do it, for some of the reasons that had already crossed his mind. He wondered whether to go down to Christopher’s and try to get him to come out – or Charlie, for that matter. Charlie might insist on bringing the dog, which could be an advantage or a nuisance. It seemed to be docile enough most of the time but a bit on the nervy side with strangers.
In the end he decided not to bother anyone else. He had always been a bit of a lone wolf, he supposed. That was probably why his marriage hadn’t worked out and why he had wanted to run the pub on his own. He would have preferred not even to employ a barmaid, but Jackie Whitmore had come and asked him for a job and he had thought it wouldn’t do any harm to give it a try.
Wouldn’t do any harm! How deluded had he been?
Well, he would definitely learn from his mistakes this time. It was always safer to work on your own and to insulate yourself from the demands and even the beneficent contribution of others. When he went to Spain, he would make sure he did that. He realised he was now definitely thinking in terms of going there. And why shouldn’t he? He had nothing to keep him here, as he had already told some of the others. He wasn’t in the business of running some sort of social enterprise to give old people somewhere to go. Let the council take care of them with bingo clubs and bowling afternoons.
They could even go tea-dancing if they wanted. It was nothing to do with him.
In this spirit of angry resentment he covered the ground between Jock’s house and the railway line in practically no time.
The darkness was much deeper once he had crossed the line, pushing the little gate aside swiftly and with determination. He instinctively looked both ways before crossing the tracks, although he knew that trains only came along once in a blue moon and certainly not at night. He could feel a cool breeze coming in off the river, and he could smell the salty muddy smell you got when the tide was out, and overlaying that the woody smoke of a bonfire. It was early in the year for people to have garden bonfires: maybe it was a barbecue. He wondered if he would miss these things once he lived in the warmth of Spain where the scents and sounds were quite different and foreign.
He was surprised to see the flames as he pushed past the flimsy wooden gate that attempted to bar the way into the yard these days. If somebody else was about it could make things tricky.
He half-expected to see a group of teenagers capering about by the fire or slumped drunkenly on the ground, more like. It was the kind of thing they would find exciting. But as he approached more closely there was no sign that anyone else was in the yard at all. A shiver ran down his spine. Who had started the fire, and why? What was the note about? Why hadn’t he told anyone where he was going?
Neil wasn’t interested in religion of any kind, but for some reason, perhaps because the night was so dark and the place seemed so remote, although it couldn’t have been more than fifty metres from the nearest inhabited house, his mind jumped to the topic of pagan festivals. He had very little knowledge of them, but didn’t fire play a large part in some of them? He vaguely recalled a horror film he had once seen.
He walked forward anyway. No pagan was going to scare him away.
Almost at the edge of the fire, he started and swore and grabbed at something that was too hot. Surely that was one of the folders he used for all his paperwork? He leaned down, picked up a stick from outside the flames and poked it into the fire, trying to dislodge the folder, but its cover only sizzled a bit and started to melt into little bubbles. The papers inside would be ruined. He wondered if he could get down to the river for water in time, but he didn’t have anything to carry it back in.
He was leaning down to try and find another stick that wasn’t burning, when something struck him hard in the middle of his back and then he was falling fast towards the fire. He instinctively put out one hand to save himself, but it plunged into the red-hot centre of the flames. Someone squealed. He didn’t know if it was him or not. Something was trying to push his legs out from under him, but he kicked back with one foot and heard a grunting sound.
Then he heard a shout and he was suddenly grabbed round the waist and dragged backwards and upright in one movement. Pain from the hand that had been in the fire made his head swim, and the sleeve of his jacket was smouldering.
A dog barked nearby.
‘Get his jacket off!’ said Amaryllis’s voice. ‘Come on, Christopher, make yourself useful.’
He found himself lying on the ground on his back, without really knowing how he had got there. Amaryllis was leaning over him and Christopher was stamping on something nearby.
‘Water,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We need water. And an ambulance. In that order.’
‘You run up to that house at the corner,’ said Christopher calmly. ‘I’ll stay here and call an ambulance.’
‘I can walk,’ said Neil, but when he tried to sit up his head swam again and he felt sick. The dog came and licked his face. He couldn’t even be bothered to push it away.
Amaryllis was already moving, but she called over her shoulder, ‘Bet you haven’t got your mobile with you, Christopher.’
Something flew towards Christopher out of the darkness. He fumbled the catch and Neil saw him looking for it on the ground. He picked up the phone triumphantly and made the call.
‘My phone’s on the kitchen table,’ he told Neil after that. ‘She knew that.’
‘What? How…?’ said Neil. He wanted to know what had happened, but his brain couldn’t form the right questions.
‘Don’t worry about any of it for now,’ said Christopher.
‘Thank you,’ said Neil, and closed his eyes. If he could go right off to sleep maybe his hand wouldn’t bother him so much.
After a while something cool was placed on his arm that made his hand feel a little better, but he didn’t open his eyes to see what it was. After another little while he heard sirens somewhere in the background, then they were very close and if he opened his eyes just a slit he saw a blue flashing light, too bright to watch for very long.
A bit later, after some more fuss, he went very woozy. Let them all look after themselves now. He was leaving.
Chapter 29 Amaryllis follows up
Amaryllis was furious with herself for not having stopped Neil’s attacker before things got out of control. She had been following the girl all evening to see what would happen. The girl had left her father’s newsagents around seven, as he shut up shop for the night. She walked round to Jock McLean’s house and put something through the letter-box. She went to the fish and chip shop and came out with a bag of chips, at which point Amaryllis very nearly mugged her just to get something to eat. She went down to the harbour and walked along the river front for a while, eating. That was when it started to get interesting.
The girl had then doubled back to the newsagent’s, let herself in with a key and come out a few moments later with an armful of folders, which she carried with her down towards the railway line and into the yard. Once there she left the folders neatly piled up at one side by the wall where the coal bunkers had once been, while she trudged round towards the sliver of beach between the sea wall and the mud-flats.
Amaryllis, not knowing how long the girl would be, used the opportunity to dart over to the pile of folders and skim-read parts of the contents with the aid of her torch. When she realised what the papers were, she removed a handful in case she didn’t get another chance. She darted out of the way again when she heard footsteps returning.
The girl constructed a great mound of assorted debris. Amaryllis puzzled over what she was planning until it was too late to stop her. Once the flames leaped up, Amaryllis had to retreat to avoid being seen. Peering out from behind what was left of the old workman’s hut, she saw the girl ripping pages out of the folders and throwing them on to the blaze, then stuffing the folders themselves into the heart of the flames. Fingerprints, Amaryllis thought, the folders wouldn’t burn but would the fingerprints be lost?
Only minutes after that she saw Neil Macrae stepping into the circle of light that spread out from the bonfire. The girl had vanished.
Amaryllis was about to break cover to warn him not to go too close when someone came up behind her and said in a low voice, ‘What’s going on here?’
She hadn’t realised until then that Christopher, taking Charlie Smith’s dog out for a late evening walk, had seen Neil on his way from Jock’s house and had decided to follow him.
‘You idiot!’ she hissed. ‘You nearly gave us both away.’
‘Look out!’ squeaked Christopher.
She turned back to the scene by the fire in time to see Neil tumbling towards it, head first. They both ran forward to grab him, one on each side, and pull him upright again.
Somewhere at the periphery of her consciousness, Amaryllis heard footsteps running away, but she knew her focus had to be completely on saving Neil. The girl could wait. They would catch up with her later.
After the ambulance came the police: Constable Burnet and Sergeant Whiteside by car and the ubiquitous Inspector Armstrong on his bicycle. They weren’t allowed to question Neil on the spot, so Keith Burnet and Karen Whiteside were dispatched to follow the ambulance while the inspector conducted an impromptu interview with Amaryllis and Christopher. He seemed a bit cross.
‘Isn’t that the dog?’ was his f
irst question.
‘It’s a dog, certainly,’ said Amaryllis, trying to ignore the inspector’s lycra cycling shorts.
‘Is it yours?’ he asked Christopher.
‘Look, inspector, the dog has nothing to do with it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘What you need to do is to go and arrest Jackie Whitmore right now, before she does any more damage.’
‘Mmhm,’ said the inspector. ‘I think you’ll find I’m the one to decide who to arrest around here.’
‘I think you’ll find Jackie Whitmore’s the one who killed Liam Johnstone, and who has just attempted to murder Neil Macrae,’ said Amaryllis.
The inspector sighed in a long-suffering way which reminded her strongly of the way Charlie Smith used to sigh before he got to know her. There was still time for Inspector Armstrong to get to know her, but she really hoped he wouldn’t bother. She didn’t think she wanted to know someone who went around in lycra cycling shorts.
‘All right, I suppose we’d better go up to the station and sort this out,’ he said. ‘I can’t go and pick up Miss Whitmore without any evidence.’
‘Evidence!’ said Amaryllis. She pointed to the fire, still burning behind them. ‘There’s your evidence. Better recover as much as you can before it all goes up in smoke. And here’s more,’ she added, taking a few sheets of paper from the pocket of her jeans, and handing them to him. 'I got these out of the files before they were thrown on the fire. Sorry I couldn't get hold of any more.'
‘These should be in an evidence bag,’ he said, not taking them. ‘If they’re evidence, that is. I’ve only got your word for it so far.’
‘Have you got one with you?’
‘One what?’
‘An evidence bag.’
He sighed heavily. Then he ferreted around in a container at the back of his bike and came up with an official-looking plastic bag.
‘In there,’ he told her. ‘We’ll have to take your prints too for elimination purposes.’
‘I think you’ll find you’ve already got them,’ said Amaryllis, conscious that she had already been fingerprinted and eliminated from practically every crime that had taken place in Pitkirtly in the past couple of years. ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’
6 The Queen of Scots Mystery Page 17
