5 Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Better do a few stretches now,’ she advised, and headed for the door to make a preliminary assault on it.

  Yes, it was old and thick, but she was confident she could find a way through.

  After a while she was conscious that he was so close behind her that he was almost breathing down her neck. She couldn’t exactly complain he was standing in her light, since the available light was so dim it was almost negligible, but she definitely felt crowded. She turned towards him and said, ‘Would you mind taking a step back, please? I need a bit of space to do this.’

  ‘What are you doing? You do know that’s an original door, don’t you? I don’t want it damaged.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, calling up her not very extensive reserves of patience. ‘If he comes back -’

  ‘Who, Mal?’ He laughed. ‘Mal’s just playing games with us. He wouldn’t really hurt me. He’s got bigger fish to fry, anyway.’ He seemed to think about it for a moment, then he added, ‘Maybe literally.’

  What was the idiot talking about? She gave up on the lock. She would have to kick the door in. Never mind not damaging it. Amaryllis was more concerned about whether Mal would be back to damage her again before she could get out of here. If Lord Murray didn’t believe his brother would hurt him, he was welcome to stick around and find out.

  ‘Can you please stand back? I’m going to kick the door, and I need more space.’

  ‘Kick the door?’ his voice squeaked to a crescendo.

  ‘Go and stand over there. By the wine-racks. Don’t move until I get the door open,’ she ordered him firmly. To her surprise, he stumbled off again, his feet catching on aged flagstones as he went.

  She tried a tentative kick. But tentative wasn’t going to work, she knew that already. She took a deep breath, tensed her muscles appropriately, and went for it with all guns blazing - figuratively. If she had really had all guns blazing she could definitely have blasted her way out of here a lot more quickly.

  She jarred her leg almost unbearably against the solid oak of the door. Paused for breath. Had anyone called for reinforcements yet? She would be very happy if the cavalry - or its modern equivalent - were to come galloping over the hill at this point.

  She kicked the door again with her other foot in annoyance, not putting much effort into it. The door swung open. The lock must have been fatally weakened by that first, stronger kick.

  As she peered out into the dim light that filtered down the corridor from the back door, she heard voices, not far away. She was sure she heard the word ‘fireworks’, but it wasn’t quite clear, and she couldn’t think what its significance was. There was laughter immediately after this and some more words to do with setting charges. But she didn’t really listen to the words: the voice alone transfixed her. One of the men out there was her old friend Jimbo, or at least someone who sounded very like him. The other one, she thought, must be Mal.

  They were approaching from outside, breathing heavily as if they had been running. As she cowered back into the doorway of the wine-cellar, they flung something down in the corridor. She had imagined they might check on their captives in the wine-cellar, but they didn’t seem to be lingering here.

  Suddenly, while Amaryllis still lurked in the shadows, there was a smallish explosion and smoke billowed along the corridor. They must have thrown something in as they left: either a relatively harmless smoke bomb - if you didn’t count the effects of smoke inhalation - or some sort of small grenade, which could do worse damage.

  She hissed in the general direction of Lord Murray, who was still obediently loitering in the deep shadows, ‘Come on - we’ve got to get out now.’

  She didn’t wait for him, but headed for the door to the outside world. Even if Mal and - possibly - Jimbo waited out there, there was a chance that she could get past them. She didn’t want to wait for another, more powerful explosion, which was what she would have arranged if she had been setting something off, or to be overcome by smoke.

  She thought she was close to the door when she fell over something on the floor. It was soft, and groaned faintly when she fell on top of it. It was Charlie Smith.

  Almost as soon as she started to drag him towards the open air, someone else ran in from that direction.

  ‘Help me with Charlie,’ she said brusquely. ‘I’ve got to go back for Lord Murray.’

  To her surprise, he pushed her out of the way, muttered something like ‘I’ll be back’ and disappeared, coughing, into the smoke. She had never seen Christopher put himself in danger with quite so much determination.

  She thought there was no point in all of them blundering around in the semi-darkness and breathing in smoke, so she completed her task of dragging Charlie Smith outside, put him in the recovery position behind an overgrown Christmas tree at the edge of the scrubland, and was about to return to the fray when two things happened.

  One was that a helicopter came into view round at the front of the house, and landed on what would have been the front lawn if it hadn’t been covered with snow. The other was that Christopher emerged from the back of the house, coughing like mad but managing to support a portly middle-aged man in jeans and a holey jumper, who looked like a tramp but who, she now knew, was a minor member of the aristocracy.

  Chapter 31 Going Up

  When he opened his eyes, Charlie Smith thought he had fallen through a warp in the space-time continuum into another dimension. He was sure he could hear a helicopter - or was it just the buzzing in his head? As he struggled to his feet Amaryllis said in a satisfied tone, ‘Jemima and Dave are behind this!’ He was so befuddled that he found himself straining his eyes to see if he could spot Mr and Mrs Douglas lurking in the bushes at the other side of the helicopter as it decanted a small group of armed, uniformed men who went straight into a classic formation, fanning out to cover the whole area around the house.

  ‘What?’ he asked blearily, and coughed.

  ‘Take it easy, you may have inhaled some smoke,’ Amaryllis warned him. She didn’t seem to be rushing to join in with the operation, whatever it was, but was fussing over Christopher and another man who had both collapsed in the snow not far away.

  There were sirens in the distance. In his befuddled state Charlie struggled to distinguish between police and ambulance, police and fire service.

  ‘Good, they’re on their way,’ said Amaryllis. She pushed Christopher back down as he tried to stand up. ‘Stay there until the paramedics have checked you out.’

  ‘I didn’t - I forgot to call,’ said Christopher, hoarse and gasping for breath.

  ‘Sssh - you might need some oxygen,’ she said. ‘It looks as if Jemima and Dave called for backup.’

  The other man wasn’t so determined to get up. He lay with his eyes open, watching them and wheezing.

  ‘This is Lord Murray, by the way,’ said Amaryllis to Charlie. ‘I don’t think this is the best time to speak to him. But you might catch him later on. Once all this is finished.’

  ‘What was that about Pitkirtly and fireworks?’ said Christopher suddenly.

  ‘Did you hear it too?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Was there something else about setting charges?’

  He nodded, set himself off coughing again, and gave up trying to speak.

  Amaryllis frowned. ‘There’s something funny about all this… I thought the setting charges bit must be to do with what they did in there -’ she waved her hand towards the back of the house, where the smoke had died down a bit but, even more ominously, flames now shot out through the door, and as they watched, a window caved in and they saw fire inside the room too. Charlie shuddered as he thought about what might have happened. But Amaryllis didn’t seem to want to waste time worrying about that. She continued, ‘Are you sure they said Pitkirtly?’

  ‘Well it might have been Timbuktu, I suppose,’ said Christopher, in the middle of a coughing fit, with a trace of his usual sarcasm.

  ‘Don’t try and talk any more,’ Amaryllis told him brusquely. ‘I
don’t know… Jimbo told us he was guarding Longannet against a possible terrorist attack. It did seem a bit unlikely at the time, and what’s that got to do with fireworks anyway?’

  Her voice tailed off as one of the uniformed men approached. She took him aside, out of earshot, and Charlie saw her talking with great animation and many gestures. At first he seemed to be listening in patient resignation, but after a while he became alert, like a dog pricking up its ears, and eventually he and Amaryllis went off together. Charlie felt suddenly tired, leaned against a tree and closed his eyes. By the time she came back he was more or less asleep on his feet.

  ‘They’ve found ski tracks. They’ll take the chopper away and look for the two men,’ she told Charlie.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m tired,’ he said, yawning.

  She gave him a look. ‘Don’t you want to know about the island?’

  ‘Oh, all right, what about it?’

  Christopher, still coughing, sat up with a struggle, and seemed to be listening. Lord Murray was still just lying there.

  ‘There’s been a ransom demand,’ she told them. ‘They think it’s to do with Longannet – the power station. Unless we give them lots of money and a safe conduct they’ll detonate charges they’ve planted in the old mine tunnels and blow it up.’

  There was a stunned silence. Then Christopher started to cough and wheeze in alarm. Charlie felt a shiver of panic ripple through his body. He noticed how stupid Christopher looked as he turned a shocked gaze on Amaryllis, and decided to make an effort not to appear quite so stupid himself. He thought of an intelligent question.

  ‘So was Longannet mentioned in the demand?’

  ‘Not exactly. They just said they would blow the whole place sky-high and the fires would be seen for miles around.’

  ‘The whole place?’ Charlie queried.

  Amaryllis shrugged.

  ‘They assumed it was about Longannet – nothing else around here would have the same impact.’

  ‘So,’ said Charlies, ‘this demand - how did it come in?’

  ‘Mobile phone - not used before or since. Around twelve today. They must have been quite confident of getting into position before anyone did anything. They didn’t know they’d have to deal with us, though. That was a mistake. They should have secured the perimeter before they sent the demand.’

  Her voice held a note of triumph which was, Charlie thought, a little bit premature.

  ‘Not over yet,’ said Christopher, speaking with difficulty.

  ‘Do they know what sort of damage that would do?’ asked Charlie in a low voice. He didn’t particularly want Christopher and Lord Murray to overhear.

  Amaryllis frowned at him. ‘Wait,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Damage?’ wheezed Christopher. ‘What about Pitkirtly? How much damage?’

  ‘You need some help,’ said Amaryllis, fixing him with a stare. ‘Hey!’ she called to a couple of paramedics who had just emerged from a newly arrived ambulance. ‘Over here!’

  ‘But why?’ said Charlie. ‘Why would they want to do that? What’s in it for them?’

  The fire brigade arrived just then, making their way through the snow with some difficulty; two fire engines skidded to a halt by the back door of the house and the firemen began work.

  Just when Charlie thought there was nobody left to come along, a small van pulled up alongside them and the woman from the cattery tumbled out of the driving seat, followed closely by Jock McLean from the passenger side. By this time the paramedics had whisked Christopher and Lord Murray away to the ambulance where they were receiving treatment for smoke inhalation. Charlie felt he was fortunate not to have suffered too badly from it, but then, according to Amaryllis he had been dumped close to the door and she had got him out fairly quickly. She herself seemed immune to that kind of thing.

  ‘Here, wasn’t that his lordship?’ said Jock McLean, jerking an irreverent thumb towards the ambulance.

  ‘Do you mean Christopher?’ said Amaryllis.

  Jock snorted in his usual inelegant way. ‘No, course not. Lord Murray, that’s the one. He gave out prizes at the school every year - until some idiot decided prizes weren’t fair. I can tell you what wasn’t fair - depriving the whole school of the extra couple of hours of freedom we got from going home early on prize-giving day.

  Fortunately Amaryllis, who had received some sort of a signal from one of the armed men - were they army or Special Branch? Charlie asked himself - interrupted Jock’s random reminiscences. Otherwise Charlie realised there was a good chance Jock would drive his companions to do something desperate such as covering him with snow and leaving him to stand there with his pipe still clamped between his teeth like a hideously moth-eaten snowman.

  ‘Charlie - would you be ok to come with me in the helicopter? I’ve hitched a lift – to help them spot Jimbo and Mal. And then to see how it all works out.’

  ‘OK,’ he said, hoping he wouldn’t regret it later.

  And so it was that he unexpectedly got an aerial view of Pitkirtly and its environs as the helicopter defied gravity to lift itself into the air and swing out over the trees, its occupants keeping their eyes peeled for two men crossing the snow below. He hadn’t realised before how many trees there were between Old Pitkirtlyhill House and the town of Pitkirtly, but then of course he hadn’t had any reason to think about it before.

  Chapter 32 Confessions of a minor peer

  After what seemed like a lot of time-wasting by the paramedics, although they were probably either waiting for more casualties or trying to find out which hospital to go to, Christopher and Lord Murray were whisked away by ambulance. It was an unnerving experience because, as they soon found out, ambulances didn’t handle any better than any other vehicle under these conditions. Christopher almost wished they could have gone by helicopter instead, although he knew he would only have embarrassed himself by being sick or having a panic attack.

  Neither of them was ill enough to justify the sirens, and the paramedic who was with them spent most of the journey leaning into the front of the ambulance and making jokes with his colleague who was driving.

  After a while Lord Murray pushed aside his oxygen mask and said, ‘You don’t think they’ll really be stupid enough to blow anything up, do you?’

  ‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He pushed aside his mask too, coughing as he did so. ‘Amaryllis will stop them.’

  ‘Good-looking girl,’ commented Lord Murray.

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. Even when he wasn’t actually coughing, his throat hurt so much he didn’t feel like speaking very much. It turned out, however, that Lord Murray did.

  ‘Never thought Malcolm would do something like that,’ he said, struggling to sit up and eventually flopping back on the pillow. ‘Wild boy – that’s why we put him in the army, you know. Couldn’t settle to anything… Did someone mention blowing things up?’

  Christopher tried a tentative ‘Mmm’ to see if that would hurt too. It wasn’t quite as bad as forming words. Unfortunately Lord Murray took it as a prompt to continue with Mal’s life story.

  ‘He got into a bit of trouble with that before,’ continued his lordship dreamily. ‘Playing with explosives in the tunnels under Pitkirtly Island. I heard a couple of the local girls drowned. We had to put him in the army after that. Save the family name. That sort of thing.’

  ‘The family name?’ said Christopher incredulously. He hadn’t removed his oxygen mask so he didn’t think anyone would notice his tone of voice, and perhaps they hadn’t even heard the words.

  ‘Bit of a hero in Afghanistan,’ added Lord Murray, wheezing a little. ‘He and his friend went in all guns blazing to rescue some local people from one of the warlords… He found out afterwards they didn’t even want to be rescued – extraordinary.’

  It didn’t sound all that heroic to Christopher; he even caught himself feeling smug about having seen through Mal at a very early stage in their acquaintance. He had always known it wasn’t natural to want to go on these maj
or quests. Doing good by stealth or in small ways was the better option. Not that you always got any thanks for it.

  He started to cough again and the paramedic was at his side in a couple of moments, adjusting the oxygen mask and then listening to his chest.

  ‘Better keep quiet for a while,’ he advised.

  Christopher started to explain that he wasn’t the one who had trouble keeping quiet, but the paramedic just shooshed him and turned to Lord Murray.

  ‘We don’t just give you these masks for fun, you know,’ he scolded. ‘Try and keep quiet – give your lungs a rest.’

  ‘Nothing the matter with me,’ said Lord Murray, trying to wriggle into an upright position while struggling against a paroxysm of coughing. The paramedic put one hand on his chest and gently pushed him back down.

  ‘I don’t want to hear another word from either of you,’ he said. ‘You’re distracting the driver with all this coughing. It’s not easy getting along at all under those conditions, you know.’

  Christopher considered pushing aside his mask again to say something sarcastic about the conditions, but the paramedic gave him a look.

  They lay there silently for a while, one at each side of the ambulance. The paramedic resumed his conversation with the driver. A few minutes later there was a bump, and the whole vehicle shuddered and lurched. Christopher braced himself: he could picture them skidding along on two wheels, heading for the nearest ditch. But they suddenly made a 180 degree turn and came to a halt. The driver was swearing under his breath. Somehow that made it seem much worse than if he had shouted obscenities into the frosty air. But he probably wasn’t allowed to do that while he had passengers.

  ‘Everybody all right back here?’ asked the paramedic, picking himself up from the floor. ‘There’ll be a slight delay while we regroup. Try not to talk amongst yourselves.’