‘I wonder why he didn’t take the dog with him,’ said Christopher.
‘You’re right. It’s a bit odd.’
‘I suppose he couldn’t get it out the window.’
‘But how did he know he was going to escape through the window?’
‘Maybe he’d seen it wasn’t shut properly earlier,’ suggested Christopher.
‘He could have lifted the dog over the windowsill,’ said Amaryllis, frowning. ‘It wasn’t that high up, and the dog’s quite thin. It probably doesn’t weigh much.’
‘Oh well,’ said Christopher, yawning. ‘Better get a good night’s sleep. I expect it’ll all seem clearer in the morning.’
There was the standard wrangle over whether he walked her home or not, and in the end she was so tired she just agreed to it.
‘But you can’t come in for toast,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got any bread. I need to go to the - oh my God!’
By this time they had turned down the road that led to Merchantman Wynd, where Amaryllis’s apartment was. She stared ahead with wide eyes and broke into a run, or the nearest approximation to a run she could manage in the snow.
There was a dark shape in the snow in the road just by the entrance to the Wynd. As she got closer, she knew it was exactly what she had feared it was. A man’s body. A man wearing a thick parka.
She fell on her knees beside him and searched for a pulse.
‘Will I call an ambulance?’ said Christopher, suddenly at her side. He pulled out the phone she had lent him, dropped it in the snow, retrieved it with clumsy gloved fingers and stared at the little screen as if wondering what it was. She knew she was taking in these details to get her mind off the fact that she couldn’t find any sign of life.
‘Police as well,’ she said.
Christopher must have charged up the phone for once, she told herself. And even brought it with him. Wonders would never cease. She wondered whether to start resuscitation. The man was cold, but it might be that his temperature had dropped to the sort of hibernating level where he could be revived. Then she saw the blood spots on the snow.
Chapter 22 Animal Shelter
The call came in just as Charlie was getting ready for bed. Because the alternative was the floor of the staff kitchen, he elected to sleep in a cell. He had threatened dire consequences if anyone locked him in.
Sergeant McDonald came down the corridor fast, his heavy tread making him sound like a whole herd of rhinos charging down to a waterhole somewhere in Africa.
‘Mr Wilson’s just called,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got your radio on, sir. I was just about to go home.’
‘Sorry,’ said Charlie, glancing round to see where he had put the radio. There was no sign of it. He hoped Amaryllis hadn’t taken it while he wasn’t looking. It was just the kind of thing she would do. ‘What did he want this time?’
‘They’ve found a body.’
Charlie sank down on the bed and put his hands over his eyes to shut out reality. ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘I don’t believe it. What have those two got against me? How did they know I was just about to fall into bed?’
‘Suspected foul play. Ambulance called but he said there’s no sign of life. Looks like our man. He’s wearing the parka Ms Peebles lent him… I’ll be surprised if the ambulance can get through – we’d maybe better alert the duty doctor.’
Charlie pulled himself together. ‘I’ll go. Better get Keith to come with me. You go home and get some sleep. You’ll be no use to anybody if you’re half-dead on your feet. And when you say your prayers, just ask for an overnight thaw.’
He pictured Sergeant McDonald on his knees, hands folded, eyes closed, beside a high, old-fashioned bed and he smiled in spite of the gravity of the situation. The dog, which had been snoozing in the corner of Charlie’s chosen cell, opened its eyes suddenly and lifted its head.
‘Go back to sleep,’ Charlie told it. Tomorrow would be soon enough for the dog to find out it was orphaned, or whatever the appropriate term was.
Charlie and Keith, the latter bleary-eyed because he had already fallen asleep at the kitchen table, wrapped up as warmly as they could and went out again. It seemed even colder than before. Was it always colder just before a thaw? That didn’t seem right. But weather could do all sort of strange, unexpected things. A bit like women.
‘So what do you think? Will it thaw overnight?’ he said heartily to Keith, mostly to deflect his thoughts from a path he knew would only end in tears.
Keith Burnett looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses.
‘No way, sir,’ he said. ‘This lot’s going to freeze over and then we’re in for more snow in a couple of days. It said on the radio.’
‘More snow?’ Charlie had been too preoccupied to listen to any weather forecasts, and he was aghast at the idea of this situation continuing indefinitely.
They slipped and slithered down the slope towards the spot where Amaryllis and Christopher stood guard over a motionless shape that obviously no longer needed guarding.
‘We can’t get an ambulance into the town,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re calling out the nearest doctor. But I’m guessing there isn’t any big rush now,’ he added, crouching over the body.
‘There’s blood,’ said Amaryllis.
She seemed unnaturally upset by her standards. She must have seen blood before, and in far worse circumstances than this. At least this body wasn’t crushed and broken like some of the victims of road traffic accidents he’d been unfortunate enough to see over the years. Of course, this one was closer to her home territory than most of the others had been. He stood up slowly and said, ‘It’s him all right.’
‘Maybe he slipped on the ice and hit his head on something,’ said Keith Burnett, as if trying to make things seem a bit better.
‘Not unless he slipped in such a way that he twisted round and accidentally shot himself in the back of the head,’ said Charlie Smith.
Keith Burnett took a big step back.
‘Is it murder, then?’ he asked quietly.
‘Of course it’s murder!’ snapped Charlie, and then felt sorry for raising his voice. He wasn’t really angry with Keith but with himself for failing to protect this man. He had taken him and his dog in off the streets to try and do just that, and he had just made things even worse.
He looked across at Christopher and Amaryllis. ‘Did you see or hear anything?’
Christopher shook his head. ‘We’d just come back from a walk round the town. We came down the road and he was lying there. No sign of anybody else around.’
He wondered why Amaryllis hadn’t spoken for the two of them as she often did. Then he saw that she was trembling and that Christopher had his arm round her shoulders, which could have been the only thing keeping her upright.
‘You might as well go indoors,’ he said to them. ‘Your flat’s just along here, isn’t it?’
Amaryllis nodded, teeth chattering. Of course, she didn’t have her big parka any more. Charlie didn’t think she would want it back now though, even if he had been able to give it to her.
‘Be careful,’ he added suddenly. ‘Do you want Keith to go with you?’
Christopher met Charlie’s eyes. ‘Do you think that’s necessary?’
‘Could be,’ said Charlie, trying to sound casual despite a horrible thought that had just crossed his mind. What if the killer had been waiting for Amaryllis here, and had imagined she was the one wearing the big parka? What if, realising his mistake, he had then moved to wait in or near her apartment? It wasn’t worth taking the risk. Normally she would have been the best person to deal with any intruders or masked gunmen in the shadows, but she didn’t look up to that in her present state.
Reason re-asserted itself. The man had been shot in the back of the head, and there was no sign he had been wearing the hood of the parka up at the time. Anyone who had seen him without it would have realised at once that he wasn’t Amaryllis. You couldn’t mistake that spiky tangle of dark red hair for anyon
e else’s. Unless she was unknown to the killer, of course.
He pulled himself together, conscious that the others were all looking at him.
‘OK, Keith, go along there with them. Come back once they’re safely shut in. The doctor should be down in a minute. Then we’ll need to get Karen to bring the Land Rover. Give her a call now.’
He didn’t want to have to wake up Karen, who hadn’t had any more sleep for the past few nights than the rest of them, but she was younger than Sergeant McDonald and would recover faster, even if she was likely to grumble a bit more at the time.
There were some grim things to do next, and he wished the time had passed in a blur so that he could blot them out of his memory quickly. But it all seemed very real, from the wait for the doctor, through the unpleasant task of loading the body into the police Land Rover and then transporting it to the premises of a local undertaker who hadn’t been best pleased to be woken up either. Rushing to store it like this had made Keith raise his eyebrows, but they couldn’t leave the man out in the snow in case the longed-for thaw should arrive in the middle of the night. It wasn’t done according to standard procedure, but as they had driven a coach and horses through the regulations over the past few days, nobody was about to lose any sleep over it. Apart from anything else, they couldn’t afford to lose any more sleep what with all that had been going on.
They disturbed the body as little as was humanly possible, but something odd happened as they were leaving the undertaker’s. Karen, who was driving, put her bag down behind the seat and picked something up off the floor. It gleamed gold in the light from the street lamp just outside.
‘Look - what’s this, sir? It looks like some sort of bird. With a long tail,’ she added, turning it over in her fingers. ‘It’s very pretty. Where did it come from?’
Even after recent events, Charlie Smith still had the capacity to be surprised.
‘The golden peacock,’ he breathed. ‘Well, who’d have thought it?’
Chapter 23 Breakthrough
Amaryllis’s spare room was stark, but comfortable. Christopher had slept well when he eventually got to bed, which was long after his usual time. The process had involved making cocoa and lots of toast for Amaryllis, who didn’t seem to want to sleep, and then eating most of the toast himself. In the morning one of his first thoughts was to hope she hadn’t now run out of bread, because he was looking forward to making toast for breakfast in her space-age kitchen.
He spent a few moments lying in bed and reproaching himself for feeling so up-beat after the experience of the previous night. Maybe he’d been spending too much time with Amaryllis lately and had become blasé about violence and death; on the other hand she herself had seemed to be unusually upset by what they had seen. Was it because she had imagined she might be in danger? He didn’t think so. That kind of thing usually brought out the best in her.
‘How many slices?’ called Amaryllis through the half-open door.
‘Two would be fine, if you can spare them,’ said Christopher. He wasn’t sure if she had minded him staying overnight. He usually managed to leave and go home to spend the night in his own bed, even in times of serious crisis, but on this occasion, with a mad gunman possibly wandering around outside and with both of them so exhausted that they would probably have slept through the Texas chain-saw massacre, it had seemed like the only possible option.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked as he eventually wandered through to the kitchen, trying to flatten his hair down with his hands so that he didn’t look as if he’d had a major fright.
‘Fine,’ said Amaryllis, sounding surprised. She presented him with a cup of coffee from her complicated machine and took a jar of marmalade out of the cupboard. She sat down at the table opposite him. She certainly didn’t look any different from usual, her startlingly blue eyes watching him with amusement as they always did, her dark red hair apparently bristling with its own energy. Even the way she sat there was energetic; she twitched and tapped her feet, ready to spring into action at any moment.
He groaned inwardly, and then realized he had actually groaned out loud too.
‘Are you all right?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Didn’t you sleep?’
‘There could have been a maniac with a gun wandering around nearby and he might be after you – why shouldn’t I sleep?’ he said. ‘Actually, I did sleep all right. I’m just wondering what you’ve got planned for today.’
‘Are you sure I’ve got something planned? Don’t I sometimes surprise you with my spontaneity?’
‘I wouldn’t say surprise is the right word,’ he said.
‘What is the right word, then?’
He considered this, sipping his coffee. ‘Terrify?’
‘Ha ha. Well, I’m planning to go round to the police station to offer a witness statement of my own free will, if you must know. You’d better come too - we’re both in this together.’
‘OK, that sounds reasonable,’ said Christopher. ‘And I suppose you’re going to risk arrest by snooping around inside the police station to try and find out more?’
‘It isn’t a big risk,’ said Amaryllis confidently. ‘They’ve got bigger fish to fry than me. And Charlie knows I’m on their side.’
‘Hmm,’ said Christopher. ‘So we’re snooping for clues. Keeping our eyes peeled and all that.’
‘We aren’t the Famous Five,’ said Amaryllis primly. ‘Apart from the fact that there are only two of us and we don’t have a dog. We’re going to see if we can pick up any chatter while we’re being good citizens and sharing our valuable information with the police.’
Christopher thought about this. ‘We could be the Famous Five if Jock came back and we roped in Jemima and Dave,’ he pointed out after spreading marmalade on his toast.
‘But we still wouldn’t have a dog,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Unless we -’
‘Unless we what?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
Christopher knew she was at her least trustworthy when she said the word ‘nothing’ in this context. His heart sank. She was going to offer to adopt the homeless man’s homeless dog, and then regret doing so the first time she had to take it for a long walk in the rain, or when it savaged some harmless child or poodle. There would be tears before bedtime.
As it turned out, things didn’t unfold in that way at all.
Charlie Smith, looking somewhat more grey and lined than usual, opened the door to them personally at the police station. He had a piece of toast in his hand and the dog at his heels. He explained as he ushered them through to an interview room that he had sent Sergeant McDonald home to get a good night’s sleep, and that the sergeant hadn’t surfaced yet. Constable Burnett would take their statements. He didn’t mention the dog.
Even young Constable Burnett looked greyish.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Christopher enquired politely.
‘I’m grand,’ he said, obviously exaggerating wildly. ‘Now, it’s irregular for both of you to give me your statements together, so who wants to go first? Who actually discovered the body?’
‘I was first on the scene,’ said Amaryllis. ‘But only by minutes. We were together the whole time.’
Constable Burnett sighed. ‘OK, then, we’ll just do this all in a oner. I’ll sort it out later. Don’t tell the chief.’
They ran through what had happened. It didn’t take long, and Christopher felt guilty that they hadn’t noticed a dark figure running away from the scene, or found some amazing clue that had melted away before the police got there. The young policeman went through it all twice and there was still nothing, even when he started to ask what ground they had covered before deciding to go down to Amaryllis’s apartment.
It wasn’t long before Amaryllis got bored with being interviewed and decided to turn the tables.
‘So does Mr Smith have any theories?’
‘Theories?’
‘About why somebody should shoot a homeless man in the back of the head? Was it the same person who helped him
to escape?’
‘Um,’ said Constable Burnett. Obviously he hadn’t been in the police force long enough to know that he would have to be downright rude to Amaryllis to stop her. Anything less, and she would persist until he gave in. It was no use warning him, Christopher thought, he would just have to work it out for himself.
Amaryllis rephrased her questions. ‘Does he have any suspects? Any good lines of enquiry?’
‘Come on, Ms Peebles,’ said Chief Inspector Smith, coming into the interview room with the dog hot on his heels. ‘You know I can’t tell you any of that. And neither can any of my officers.’
‘I’m just a concerned member of the public,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I only want to help - but I need to know a few more facts if you want me to do that.’
‘Not only do I not want you to help,’ said Mr Smith, ‘but if the roads were open, I would strongly advise you to go and stay in another town for a few days, until we clear this up. For your own safety, of course.’
The words ‘and to get you out from under my feet’ hung in the air, unspoken.
The dog barked suddenly. It was on the alert, listening. A moment later, Sergeant McDonald popped his head round the door of the room.
‘They’ve ploughed the road right into town, from the top. The guy from the Council’s just been in to tell us. He’s off to do the other side now. We should be able to get cars in and out this morning.’
‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ said Mr Smith, and looked at Amaryllis.
‘I haven’t got a car,’ she said, ‘and I bet it’ll be a while before the bus comes round this way.’
‘Hmph,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I suppose I’d better go and have a word with the people out there. Don’t go anywhere.’
Christopher knew this was all she needed to make her go and break out through the window the homeless man had escaped from. But, although she wriggled a bit as if her body was urging her to get out, she stayed where she was. Evidently she still imagined she could get more information out of Constable Burnett.
5 Frozen in Crime Page 13
