5 Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  After a while he came back with nothing to report. ‘No sign of any bullet marks on this side, anyway. But we can still look around outside if you want.’

  Amaryllis was so engrossed in a replica of a seventeenth century map that she didn’t take in the sense of his words until later. She could see Pitkirtly Island but there was very little sign of habitation in the area currently occupied by Pitkirtly itself. It must have been a tiny hamlet with only a few dozen inhabitants.

  On the next one, which dated from the time of the Jacobites, she noticed a huge difference.

  ‘Coal mining,’ said Christopher, looking over her shoulder. ‘The mines started to open and more people moved in.’

  ‘I thought that wasn’t until much later.’

  ‘There were coal seams that ran out under the Forth that were developed early on. They didn’t have to dig too far down – but there was always the risk of drowning, of course. The Murray estates would have owned some of the mines around here. All the landowners did. They owned the miners too.’

  ‘What do you mean, owned?’

  ‘The miners were tied to working for one coal owner. They didn’t get their freedom until late in the eighteenth century. But there were advantages in it too. They’d have got somewhere to live. Some of the coal owners built model villages. And it was better paid than farm labouring.’

  ‘That doesn’t really explain what’s on Mal’s maps,’ said Amaryllis, frowning. She retrieved one of the images again and magnified it. ‘Oh, look! I didn’t notice this before but it mentions Old Pitkirtlyhill. Seems to be written in pencil – it’s quite faint. Then there’s a kind of road – or is it a river? It leads from there for a bit, maybe southwards.’ She flung her phone down. ‘This is a pointless exercise. I don’t even know why I’m doing it.’

  ‘No, wait!’ said Christopher. He picked up the phone and scrutinised the map she had been looking at. ‘There isn’t a river on the Pitkirtlyhill estate at all – and the road leads off from the other direction. It’s shown with a dotted line over at the other side of the grounds. Maybe that’s a tunnel.’

  ‘A tunnel? But why would they have – do you think it’s an old mine tunnel?’

  ‘Could be… I wonder why Mal should be looking at it though?’

  ‘Maybe he’s interested in that kind of stuff. You know, like you. Can’t resist poking about in the past.’ Afraid her tone had been unduly dismissive, she added, ‘And he probably knows a bit about it, like you.’

  Christopher grabbed another map from the shelves, opening it out with care and setting it on the table on top of the others.

  ‘Here we are – somebody mapped out all the old mine tunnels years ago, before the last working pit closed. I knew we had this somewhere… I thought so! Look where the tunnel leads to after it gets out of the Old Pitkirtlyhill estate.’

  He traced the line of the tunnel with his finger. It led almost directly to the coast near Pitkirtly Island and from there –

  ‘It’s gone off the edge of the map!’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘It’s gone out under the Forth,’ said Christopher. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Maybe Mal’s planning to re-open the mines,’ said Amaryllis. She had to admit even to herself that she would find it easier to think of ten sinister explanations for his interest in old mine tunnels than one innocent one.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Christopher, obviously unconvinced.

  There was a muffled crash from elsewhere in the building. Amaryllis jumped.

  ‘I’d better go and see what that was,’ he said calmly, picking up his keys from the bookshelves and making his way to the library door.

  Amaryllis wasn’t sure why she felt so twitchy, but she hastily folded up the maps, jammed them back on to the shelves and followed him. It wasn’t like her to be wary of staying in a room on her own, even if it did have dark corners where an intruder could be hiding, and even if someone had once been murdered in the fire exit corridor. She hoped she wasn’t going soft in her retirement. Time she got back into the way of acting impulsively and taking risks. Never mind all this history and cartography. She would be consulting books on cat care next, at this rate, and then where would she be?

  Even after Christopher reported that a pile of post had fallen from the reception desk and that it had probably been destabilised by the breeze they had created themselves by opening the front door, she still couldn’t help looking over her shoulder as they left the building, wondering if there was anyone lurking behind one of the snowed-in cars in the car park.

  Chapter 17 Fencing with Icicles

  Turning the corner into Merchantman Wynd where Amaryllis lived, the following afternoon, Christopher heard joyous, uninhibited laughter. As he got closer to her apartment building he saw them on the balcony. There were two of them and they seemed to be fencing in the confined space.

  At first his heart thudded hard as he imagined someone had broken in and she was in the middle of a genuine, and desperate fight for survival, and then he realised they were both laughing as they wielded large chunks of icicle with considerable aplomb. When he was almost there, something shot past him and buried itself in a small snowdrift at the side of the path. He stared at it: it was the point of a large icicle, and it looked as sharp as he imagined the edge of a sword to be.

  Amaryllis’s face appeared over the edge of the balcony, looking down at him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. Sorry to interrupt.’

  ‘We’ve finished now - first one to lose the point of their icicle has to get the drinks in at the Queen of Scots.’

  He couldn’t help laughing in spite of his irritation. What was the point of icicles anyway?

  A large fair-haired man filled a lot of the space in Amaryllis’s apartment. He extended a hand to Christopher.

  ‘I’m Jimbo Watts. Amaryllis and I met in Tibet a few years ago.’

  ‘Good,’ said Christopher. The familiar feeling of inadequacy started to creep over him. ‘What brings you to Pitkirtly?’

  ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ said Jimbo pleasantly. ‘We’ve been assigned to look after coal supplies to Longannet - some sort of alert going on, I won’t bore you with the details. I meant to pop along and see Amaryllis before the snow started, but I didn’t get round to it. I’ve been on duty for three days, non-stop, and today I said to myself, why not borrow some skis and get on over to Pitkirtly. I thought she’d be going nuts, cooped up in this weather. But she tells me she’s been doing a bit of detective work on the side.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what she does,’ said Christopher, understanding now why there was a pair of skis downstairs in the lobby of the building. He was prepared to take an instant dislike to this large capable-looking man with the sun-tanned face and the air of general competence, but instead he rather liked the look of him. Maybe it was the sense that the man had nothing to hide. Or maybe that was an illusion.

  He remembered that Mal was supposed to be a friend of Jimbo’s, and thought about the contrast between the two men. He hoped Jimbo wouldn’t try and talk Amaryllis into going on an epic quest, but it didn’t seem likely.

  ‘You’ve met Mal too, haven’t you?’ said Jimbo. ‘Back in the family home again. About time he settled down a bit.’

  ‘Settled down?’ said Christopher. He remembered telling himself on many occasions to stop asking these obvious questions, but his self-talk didn’t seem to have worked yet.

  ‘He’s been all over the place since he left the army. Seems to think he can carry on sorting things out in the world’s hot spots. I told him he should scale it down a bit.’

  ‘That sounds familiar,’ said Christopher with a sideways glance at Amaryllis.

  ‘But isn’t it admirable to keep on working on the bigger picture?’ she asked. ‘It’s all very well doing little bits of good here and there, but doesn’t somebody have to look at big things that really make a difference?’

  Jimbo shrugged. ‘That’s for people wiser and more powe
rful than us. We’re just tiny cogs in the machine - if we don’t do it right, then the whole machine grinds to a halt.’

  ‘Yes, that’s all very well if you want to be part of a machine,’ argued Amaryllis. ‘But not everyone does.’

  Jimbo looked puzzled. ‘Anyone who tries to maintain the peace is a part of the machine in some way. Maybe not a cog. Could be a motor or a drive-belt. A spark-plug, even?’

  ‘I think we’ve taken this metaphor as far as we can,’ said Amaryllis. ‘My knowledge of machines doesn’t really go much deeper.’

  Christopher thought she was being falsely modest. He knew she was quite capable of fixing a car engine if she really wanted to. He hoped she wasn’t going to go all fluttery and feminine just because of this large fair-haired soldier with his round innocent blue eyes. Or to become nostalgic for the privations of Tibet or the adrenalin rush of North Korea.

  ‘Are you coming round to the pub with us?’ said Jimbo to Christopher.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Christopher.

  ‘He means yes,’ said Amaryllis, laughing. ‘There isn’t anything else to do here the day after Boxing Day in the snow.’

  ‘Except playing with icicles, I guess,’ said Jimbo. ‘Or we could go tobogganing if there’s a slope.’

  ‘Is there a slope?’ said Amaryllis. ‘This town is all slope and no level ground. I don’t have a sledge, though. Or even a tin tray.’

  ‘I might have one in the attic,’ said Christopher, surprising himself. He had never really taken to sledging after a bad experience with a tilting sledge and some brambles. But he remembered he and Caroline having rather a grand wooden sledge, which he didn’t recall throwing out. Unless she had taken it away with her for the kids.

  So it was that after a few drinks at the Queen of Scots, where the landlord seemed to harbour no hard feelings about his Range Rover, they all headed back to Christopher’s, excavated the sledge from a pile of old carpet in the attic and then, as it started to get dark, they went up the hill in the park. So many people had been up there already that they had made the slope extremely slippery. Jimbo and Amaryllis seemed to enjoy it, but Christopher could only cope with one scary run down the hill. The main problem was that you had to stop or swerve abruptly before running into the fence. He wasn’t entirely successful in doing either of these things.

  Eventually it was too dark for any of them to carry on. Jimbo said regretfully, ‘I suppose I’d better get on back. It’ll be my shift soon.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have been sleeping in between shifts?’ said Christopher as they trudged back from the park pulling the sledge behind them like children - he was quite relieved that Amaryllis hadn’t wanted to sit on it and be pulled along.

  ‘Sleeping’s for wimps,’ said Jimbo, and grinned in almost exactly the same way Amaryllis did when he asked her a silly question.

  He only paused long enough to pick up his skis from the lobby of the apartment building, then he was off.

  ‘Aren’t you going to put them on?’ said Christopher.

  ‘I might as well wait until I get to the top of the hill,’ he said.

  They watched from the end of the cul de sac as he carried the skis up the road, showing no sign of tiredness or muscle pain, Christopher noted enviously. Just before he got to the top he stopped to put on the skis. Another man came along as he did so, slithering down the middle of the road from one icy patch to the next. He was weaving slightly as if drunk. He stared at Jimbo, held something out to him and spoke. They were much too far away to hear what was being said.

  Jimbo straightened up after fastening both skis, and seemed to be replying. Something changed hands between them, or was that an illusion? The man came on down the road, but as he passed Christopher and Amaryllis, his step faltered, he gazed at them in apparent terror and he speeded up, causing him to slip even more often.

  Staring after him, Christopher realised the man was limping badly at one side.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said out loud. ‘I’ve seen him somewhere before.’

  ‘Isn’t he that Big Issue salesman who hangs around outside the wool shop sometimes?’ said Amaryllis, turning to walk back along to her apartment building.

  ‘No - I think - wait a minute!’ he said again, raising his voice. ‘Stop! Come back!’

  He set off after the other man at a run, but within a moment his feet had slid out from under him and he was lying flat on his back in the middle of the road.

  Amaryllis’s face loomed into view above him, framed by the weird knitted scarf with the long dangly bits that she had wrapped round her head.

  ‘Have you broken anything?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Christopher, testing out each limb in turn as he started to pull himself upright again. She reached a hand down to help him.

  ‘Haven’t you had enough playing in the snow for one day?’ she said.

  Chapter 18 Sleuthing

  Amaryllis couldn’t wait to get rid of Christopher. It took longer than she had expected to persuade him to take the sledge away with him and not leave it lying around the lobby of her apartment building, where she knew at least one of her neighbours would complain, claiming they had fallen over it. It was a miracle that hadn’t happened with the skis. But perhaps everyone else was away for Christmas, or in hibernation.

  She was on the case and her skin bristled with excitement as she got ready to go out. She considered whether she could fit her PI vest under her coat and if not, whether she was prepared to look ridiculous by wearing it on top. In the end she had to leave it at home. She wasn’t really expecting to get shot at tonight anyway, although she knew from previous experience that when you didn’t expect it to happen was actually the most dangerous time.

  The black leather jacket she usually wore for this kind of expedition wasn’t warm enough, so she had to wrap up in her big parka again, and the woolly scarf Christopher seemed to think was highly amusing. The parka would slow her down and make her movements less lithe, but on the other hand there was no point in freezing to death just looking for someone who might after all turn out to have nothing to do with anything.

  She decided to start at the wool-shop, on the grounds that she had often seen him there, and to work outwards from there in big circles, concentrating on sheltered spots slightly off the beaten track but not too far off. Someone like that might spend a bit of time rummaging in bins, for instance, just as the Tibetan children had done before she introduced herself properly to them. She wasn’t sure if anyone had slept rough in the lane behind the former glitzy furniture shop, now a designer florists’, for a while. The new owners might be even less forgiving about that sort of thing than the previous lot.

  She was proceeding down the High Street, heading for the wool shop, about halfway down, when she became aware that someone was watching her.

  Because Amaryllis was highly trained in carrying out and equally in avoiding surveillance of every kind, she didn’t immediately look round, hoping to catch a dark mysterious stranger popping out from behind a lamp-post or a wheelie-bin. Instead she carried on down the road past the wool shop, paused in the shadow of the fish-shop awning, staring at the plastic lobster in the window with apparent fascination for exactly two minutes, then she walked on and turned down the lane that led to the harbour, took the first turning on the right, which she happened to know led into the back garden of Jan from the wool shop, who wouldn’t mind if she ran across it and climbed the fence at the far side before sliding into the dark lane that went uphill very steeply and came out next to the war memorial gardens. From there she returned to the top of the High Street, from which vantage point she observed a uniformed police officer and a tall-ish man in plain clothes who might be Charlie Smith. They were staring down the lane that led to the harbour and Charlie was saying something to the uniformed officer.

  Interesting.

  Well, only mildly interesting, if she were to be honest with herself, which she usually tried to be. She couldn’t think why they wer
e out and about at all in this weather and at this time in the evening, when surely their shifts must have finished and they should be on their way home. Then she remembered Charlie Smith lived out of town, somewhere in Dunfermline, and was presumably cut off from his home comforts by the snow. So this ramble down the High Street was just a way of passing the time until he went to bed on the police station floor or wherever he had found to lay his weary head. She didn’t think she would be offering him her sofa any time soon.

  ‘Psst!’ said a low voice from behind the war memorial.

  She turned round.

  The Big Issue salesman was trying to attract her attention. She wouldn’t be offering him her sofa either, but she didn’t like the idea of anyone sleeping rough in these temperatures.

  ‘Buy the Big Issue?’ he muttered.

  ‘Got one already,’ she lied.

  ‘Want a drink?’ he said.

  ‘No, thanks. Do you?’

  He got a bottle out of his jacket pocket. The jacket itself had seen better days and didn’t look heavy enough to keep the cold out. He beckoned to her. There was a small shelter behind him with a bench in it, and inside she could see a heap of blankets, a bag of chips and a dog, curled up in a ball but shivering even so.

  ‘It’s too cold for him to sleep outside here,’ she said, trying not to make it sound critical. ‘Can’t you find anywhere?’

  He shrugged. ‘We’ll live. We have done up to now.’

  She supposed he and the dog snuggled up together to keep warm. It was what she would do.

  He suddenly ducked back into the shelter, out of sight. Turning away, she saw that Charlie Smith - if it was indeed him - and the uniformed policeman had started to walk up the road towards them. She didn’t particularly want to speak to them, but she decided it would look suspicious if she hid from them now, and it might draw their attention to the homeless man, something she was sure he didn’t want.

  She walked towards them as they came up, their breath swirling in front of them and making pale wraith-like shapes in the icy air.