5 Frozen in Crime
Page 8
A faint feeling of melancholy washed over him. They should have had a drink with their meal. That would have made them all feel better. But he hadn’t had the nerve to flout the regulations to that extent, quite apart from the risks if one of them had to go out urgently on a case.
‘Aren’t there usually lots of domestic quarrels and scenes over Christmas?’ said Keith. He had a knack of asking questions that were difficult to answer.
‘Most people can stand the first half of the day,’ said Sergeant McDonald placidly. ‘It’s when they wake up from their after-dinner nap that it gets tricky. They’ve had all their presents, and there’s nothing more left to look forward to.’
‘We’d better not let ourselves nod off, then,’ said Charlie.
Once they had cleared away the dinner plates, he set Keith to work making paper hats and tearing up bits of scrap paper to write cracker jokes on. He planned to have another look at the jewel robbery case, bringing all the notes and lists and immediate witness statements together on his desk to see if he could discern some sort of a pattern that would lead him into the robbers’ minds.
He hoped he could concentrate on it. He had a horrible feeling that he had created a monster when he authorised Keith Burnett to pursue the cracker theme. It would be his own fault if the young constable suddenly appeared at his elbow asking why elephants paint the soles of their feet yellow.
Chapter 13 Restless in Pitkirtly
Amaryllis was very fond of Jemima and Dave, but she really didn’t want to spend Christmas with them. She had a feeling of impending doom even about the few hours on Christmas Day when she and Christopher were due to go round to Jemima’s house for tea and cake. She spent the morning wishing she could go down with some acute but not life-threatening illness that would mean hibernating for a few days and then resuming what passed for her social life just before the Queen of Scots Hogmanay party. If she and Christopher were even welcome at the Queen of Scots again after wrecking the landlord’s Range Rover.
She expressed this last point to Christopher as they made their way over to Jemima’s.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve let him know the worst and promised to get it back to him in a reasonable state before the middle of the week. If the weather doesn’t get any worse, that is. Otherwise I’ve offered to lend him Dave’s truck if he needs transport.’
‘Very organised,’ said Amaryllis. She hoped he didn’t sense any criticism in her tone. It would have been more fun to wind the landlord up a bit, have a shouting match with him and then produce the Range Rover at the eleventh hour. She sighed.
‘Still feeling restless?’ he said.
‘Restless isn’t the right word,’ she said, frowning. ‘Dissatisfied, maybe.’
‘Dissatisfaction’s all right,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes people do something to improve things.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You could always use this time to work out what to do about it,’ he said. ‘Do some brainstorming, mind-mapping, maybe a SWOT analysis…’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘Have you been on one of these management training courses again?’
‘Not for a while,’ he said defensively. ‘OK, well, two weeks ago.’
‘Where would we be if the hobbits had waited to do a SWOT analysis before they set off on their journey?’ she said.
‘That’s fiction, Amaryllis! Fantasy fiction, at that. For goodness’ sake don’t try and emulate it.’
‘I know it’s fiction, you idiot! I was joking!’
They stood glaring at each other, and Amaryllis suddenly realised they had reached Jemima’s doorstep. The door opened and Jemima looked at them quizzically.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.
Of course it was nice and homely being at Jemima and Dave’s for a few hours, sitting by a coal fire, eating great big chunks of home-made cake and drinking several too many cups of tea. Jemima offered sherry instead at one point, but they all turned it down in favour of tea, having sampled Jemima’s sherry before. The wind was getting up again and the lights kept flickering. Dave wanted to watch something on television, but the picture was terrible, and when Jemima tried the phone it wasn’t working at all.
‘I hear you want to go on an epic quest,’ said Jemima to Amaryllis.
‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ said Amaryllis. ‘I might go somewhere exciting for a holiday. Thailand - Indonesia - Korea.’
‘Haven’t you been to all these places before?’ said Christopher.
‘That was work,’ said Amaryllis. ‘It was quite different.’
Yes, she thought, different in the sense that she had infiltrated a drugs ring that was helping to fund terrorism in Indonesia, she had followed a CIA agent into North Korea to see if he would lead her to the head of the secret government propaganda organisation, and she had waited in Thailand for the signal that would send her to rendezvous with a double agent in Beijing.
‘Would you not find it boring just having a holiday though?’ said Dave.
‘That’s a good question,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Maybe I should be looking at some sort of extreme sport.’
She saw Christopher’s expression of panic, and smiled to herself. But winding him up wasn’t really enough to amuse her for the whole day. She decided to browse online for extreme sporting opportunities when she got home. But somehow, sitting in the apartment on her own with the lights flickering and the internet only available in short bursts, she lost interest.
She opened the doors to the balcony and stood there for a while, feeling the freezing wind in her face and admiring the array of icicles that had formed on the overhang of the roof. One of them in particular caught her attention: it must have been at least 75 centimetres long with a diameter of around 10 centimetres. It would make a good weapon in an emergency, she mused. But hadn’t that idea been used in a famous murder mystery novel? That was the problem: everything she thought of had either been done before or wasn’t even necessary. In some ways she wished she had been young during the war, when she could have joined SOE and parachuted into occupied France, stolen the Enigma machine and got back in time to help invent the atomic bomb. Well, possibly not the last part. But she could have done something that would have made an obvious difference at the time. The things she had done during her career might have made a difference, but it was usually quite a small difference that took a while to have any effect.
Was she really trying to think of a way of achieving some sort of immortality? Or was she just missing the adrenalin rush of being in danger and finding a way of surviving? In the latter case, extreme sports would be the answer, but unless she practised a lot and became good enough to represent the nation in some international event, then the first part of it wouldn’t work at all. Even if she did win a gold medal at the Olympics, she knew it would soon be forgotten, and wouldn’t be all that important in the scheme of things.
She considered Mal’s big charity project. How did he feel about being a civilian after serving in combat and trekking through the Arctic under a military umbrella, so to speak? Would the charity thing be enough to satisfy him?
At last, becoming tired of thinking on a large scale, her mind wandered back to the jewel robbery in Pitkirtly. It seemed like a simple enough crime. Get some forensic evidence, fingerprints, DNA, whatever, and it would more or less solve itself. The police should manage it all right without her help. She wondered vaguely why Charlie Smith had wanted to speak to Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill. He hadn’t told them anything, of course, but maybe there was some connection with the robbery, since all the officers currently on duty were probably involved in the case. Would they be at work on Christmas Day? She pictured them all sitting round a small electric heater in the police canteen after a sketchy cold lunch of turkey sandwiches washed down by cranberry juice in lieu of wine. For the first time in her life she felt sorry for the police. They got all the hard work to do without the adrenalin or the trips to far-flung places she and others
like her had experienced.
Amaryllis suddenly realised that she was still standing on the balcony and her feet were extremely cold. Knowing the weather was too bad even for her to go for one of her moonlight treks, she had taken off her Goretex walking shoes and big woolly socks when she got home. Bad enough having to wear them to avoid frostbite when she went out; there was no need to let her feet get all sticky in them in the flat, where she liked to prowl around in bare feet. She closed the doors, regretfully, and switched on a small electric heater.
Almost as if it had just been waiting for her to need electricity, the power supply chose that moment to give out altogether. It looked as though the latest wave of gales had finally brought the lines down. She remembered reading stories the previous winter about people waiting for weeks to get their power re-connected. Now she would find out what it was like. This really wasn’t the kind of epic she wanted to be involved in. The quest for power, although it might make a good title for a fantasy epic novel or even a whole trilogy, wasn’t going to be much fun to live through.
She wrapped her cold feet in a towel, fumbling in the dark to find one, put on the fleecy pyjamas she had been hoarding since she decided to come and live on the east coast of Scotland, added a jumper over them and went to bed.
About half an hour later, still in the dark, she got out of bed again and found her way to the wardrobe. She needed an extra layer.
She shone her torch on to the clothes rail, looking for the old towelling robe she usually kept for visitors, but something else caught her eye, and she pulled it out and studied it thoughtfully. It was the pink bullet-proof vest someone had once given her. She turned it over so that she could see the back, although she already knew very well what the lettering said: Danger, PI at work.
Maybe the police would need her help yet again before long. Maybe she should try and find real paying clients, and turn this game into a business. It wouldn’t be world-shaking, but it would be something useful and enjoyable for her to do, in the absence of a wizard coming by with some bizarre story about a ring.
She put on the vest over everything else, found some long socks in a drawer and got back into bed. She couldn’t make a mind map by torchlight, but at least she could set her brain to work on it so that she would be ready to write it all down in the morning.
Adding the vest made all the difference.
Chapter 14 Extreme knitting
Christopher was worried enough to call round at Amaryllis’s apartment at eight on Boxing Day. It would have been still pitch dark at that time, except that the snow made seem it a bit lighter. He wasn’t sure of the scientific explanation for this but the extra light helped if you were getting up and going out while the rest of the world slept.
He trudged through the snow. At least the gales had died down again. It had been annoying having to go to bed early because there was nothing to do once the electricity went off, and he was pleased to find the power supply suddenly working again today. It must have been some temporary blip, not the lines coming down as he had imagined. He remembered reading about people having to wait days or even weeks to have their power restored. What did they do without the ability to boil a kettle and make a cup of tea?
The blinds were up at Amaryllis’s sitting-room windows, which led to the balcony, and when he rang the bell downstairs she answered almost at once, sounding bright and breezy. Whatever had been bothering her on Christmas Day, she must have got over it very fast. He even felt a tiny trace of resentment about having got up so early to rush round and see her.
‘Good that we’ve got the power back,’ he said as she took his coat. Then he glanced round the room, normally a white minimalist haven with little furniture and no clutter, and his eyes widened.
There were big sheets of paper all over the floor, the glass-topped table, the big white sofa. They were covered in diagrams and lists drawn with marker pens in various colours. On the sofa some multi-coloured knitting formed a second layer of chaos, flung down as if randomly.
He didn’t intend to pry into whatever she had been writing, but he caught sight of his own name halfway down one of the sheets. He glanced up to the top and saw the word ‘Weaknesses’ written there in big letters. He wasn’t sure what to make of this.
‘It’s a SWOT analysis,’ she said.
‘So I’m a weakness, am I’?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve put you down as a strength too.’ She held up another piece of paper. ‘It’s because sometimes when I bounce ideas off you, you come up with a really helpful point, like Dr Watson - and sometimes you use delaying tactics to try and stop me following up a clue.’
‘No, I don’t!’
‘You do, if you think it might be dangerous.’
‘Well, maybe. But that could be a strength as well,’ he argued. In spite of the bickering and the fact that he hadn’t needed to get up early after all, he was relieved to see her like this. She still seemed restless, but she had turned the energy from this restlessness into something that could be useful.
‘Is the knitting part of it?’ he said mildly.
She laughed. ‘Believe it or not, I like to do a bit of knitting when I’m thinking about things. It helps me to focus.’
He stared at the tangle of wools. ‘But you don’t actually focus on the knitting.’
‘Don’t make fun of it - you might end up with a woolly hat next Christmas. Or a pair of socks. I haven’t worked out which it is yet.’
‘But isn’t there a pattern?’
She laughed, as if patterns were for wimps. ‘The shape develops organically from the wool. Like a sculpture emerging from a piece of stone.’
‘So what’s all this about anyway?’
She let the ‘Strengths’ list flop back to the ground, and picked up another piece of paper from the table. The diagrams on it crawled around all over the place, and the text straggled round them like ivy round an old window-frame.
‘It’s a mind-map.’
Christopher examined the drawing. He wasn’t sure what it said about the state of Amaryllis’s mind. It would have provided fuel for all sorts of psychological research projects.
‘I was thinking about your epic quest,’ he said, at a loss for a positive comment about the mind-map.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve scaled back my ambitions a bit, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important,’ said Christopher. ‘I was thinking of this thing about the butterfly –’
‘The butterfly that flaps its wings and brings the world to an end?’
‘Yes, sort of. The fact that even if you think of what you’re doing to help people here as small and insignificant, it could affect the whole course of human history.’
‘Yes, whatever. So what do you think? Will it be a viable business?’
‘I don’t know.’ Christopher was slightly baffled, not unusually. ‘What sort of business is it?’
‘My PI business, of course. So much crime has happened around here, I think the police need some competition to spur them into solving it.’
‘I thought you usually provided that already. Does this have something to do with the bullet-proof vest Tricia Laidlaw gave you?’
‘Yes – I found it at the back of the wardrobe. When the electricity went off,’ she said, as if it explained everything. ‘I’m going to start with the robbery.’
‘But don’t you need a client to be able to call it a business?’ he said. ‘Otherwise it’s just you nosing around as you always do.’
She gave him a look.
‘That’s why you’re on the Weaknesses list, Christopher.’ She turned over the Opportunities sheet which, he noticed, didn’t have his name on it anywhere, and started to write on the back. ‘Now that you’re here, I might as well ask you about what the robbery looked like from where you were standing.’
‘At my office window,’ he said. ‘Are you just going to ask people all the things the police have already asked them?’
He sighed, sat down at the glass-topped table since there wasn’t a more comfortable space available anywhere, and said, ‘Will I get a cup of coffee if I tell you?’
She agreed to his terms, and he ran through his recollection of what he had seen from his office window on Christmas Eve. Faithful to her methodology, she listened closely. At the end she sat back and said, ‘What about Jock McLean? I wonder if he saw the same as you.’
‘He didn’t see as much,’ said Christopher. ‘He was hiding on the floor.’
‘Hmm. I’d better give him a call at the cattery if I can get through. By the time he gets back he’ll have forgotten all about it.’
‘Can I have a coffee now?’
‘Just one more thing – you were looking out the window before you heard anything, weren’t you? Can you remember what you saw then?’
‘Some idiots falling over on the ice. An ambulance coming to pick somebody up. That’s about all. Why?’
‘I was just thinking if the two robbers ran towards the Cultural Centre as part of their getaway, they might have arrived from that direction in the first place. Do you know if there’s cctv anywhere around there?’
He shook his head. ‘We looked into it but there were some human rights and privacy issues so we decided against it.’
‘What about strange cars parked in that road behind the Cultural Centre? Did you notice anything?’
He shrugged, feeling guilty now: he realised he didn’t really pay much attention to cars in general, but obviously that wasn’t a very helpful attitude. In fact he didn’t consider himself all that observant at all. Amaryllis could do with having an assistant who was good at all the detail. Not that he thought of himself as her assistant, of course. In the light of his appearance on the ‘Weaknesses’ list he was perhaps more of an anti-assistant, only nobody had bothered to invent a word for that.
‘A bit like anti-matter,’ he muttered.