5 Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  He swung past them and jumped out through the back doors, closing them behind him, while Christopher heard the driver, still swearing, open his door and get out. Various bumps, thuds and shouts came from outside.

  ‘We’re not going to make it to hospital,’ wheezed Lord Murray, having removed the oxygen mask again. ‘Might as well have stayed at home.’

  ‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He hoped they wouldn’t have to spend the night here in the ambulance. Surely that wouldn’t be very good for smoke inhalation. He supposed they couldn’t have stayed at Lord Murray’s with the fire going on, but maybe if he asked the ambulance crew nicely they would drop him off in Pitkirtly and he could rely on the restorative properties of Old Pictish Brew instead of modern medicine.

  He suddenly felt suffocated by the oxygen mask – was this even possible? - and moved it away from his nose and mouth again. He decided to compromise by not speaking.

  Lord Murray succeeded in pushing himself up into a sitting position. ‘I’d better be getting back home to find out what Malcolm’s up to. You never stop looking out for your little brother, do you?’

  Christopher glanced at him uneasily. He knew aristocrats sometimes seemed a bit weird to normal people like him, but he wasn’t keen on being trapped in a snow-bound vehicle with one who was having a funny turn. He decided not to confess that he didn’t have a brother, just a sister. He didn’t want to talk about Caroline. Even now that they were on good terms again, he couldn’t entirely forget the past.

  ‘Been covering up for him for years,’ continued Lord Murray. ‘Lying – cheating – stealing.’ He glanced round furtively, as if convinced there was another paramedic hiding in the dark space behind the door. ‘He stole the golden peacock, you know.’

  ‘From the jeweller’s?’

  ‘Before that – long before that. He was the one who replaced it with a fake. Years ago. It was a family heirloom – my father would have been furious if he’d found out.’

  ‘Did you know it was a fake all along?’

  The minor peer’s eyes, small, pale and cunning, met Christopher’s.

  ‘Not until Malcolm told me. And that was after I’d taken it down to the jeweller’s. I needed the money, you know. House doesn’t pay for itself. Grounds – deer park – roof crumbling.’

  ‘Can’t you get a grant for the repairs?’ said Christopher. They had both discarded their oxygen masks. Christopher was so engrossed in the story he forgot to cough.

  ‘Ha! Grants!’ said Lord Murray. ‘Council poking about, can’t be bothered with all that. They’re a bunch of lefties anyway – keep haranguing me about the deer park. Think I shouldn’t be keeping deer in captivity. It’s a perfectly natural environment for deer. The grounds wouldn’t look right without them.’

  ‘So what happened – when Mal told you the golden peacock was a fake?’

  ‘Got him to steal it back,’ said Lord Murray. He glared at Christopher as if to pre-empt any censure. ‘I didn’t know he was going to take a gun and frighten people! I told him to do it discreetly.’

  ‘Rob a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the afternoon when people were doing their Christmas shopping – discreetly?’

  The wrongness of it made Christopher feel faint. He lay back on the pillow and lifted the oxygen mask to his face again, more to hide his expression than because he really needed it now.

  ‘I couldn’t have the family name brought into disrepute,’ said Lord Murray. He paused, as if thinking, and then added, ‘Suppose it is now – in disrepute I mean. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe it was a mistake to ask him to do that. I knew he would steal other things as well once he got into the safe. He wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.’

  He stared in Christopher’s direction, but his eyes were looking at something in the distance, perhaps in that different universe inhabited by his kind, where it was normal to have a deer park, and where roof repairs were a matter of historic importance and not just a way to prevent water from dripping on to your pillow.

  ‘He doesn’t take drugs, you know. He’s got a big project to help people in Africa. He’s the black sheep of the family, but he isn’t all bad… You don’t think he really will blow anything up, do you?’ he added in a plaintive tone. ‘The family would never live that down.’

  Christopher wondered if this man had a wife and children stashed away somewhere, or whether he was the last of his line, the only person standing between his ancestral home and the developers who would no doubt move in after him to turn the place into a luxury hotel or old people’s flats. He tried to think of a tactful way of asking this, without hinting at feelings of surprise or even revulsion that the man had bred.

  ‘Is your wife - away?’ he ventured at last.

  ‘Oh, Marion left me years ago. Lives on the Riviera with a Lottery millionaire. Kids grown-up – skiing over Christmas. I see them sometimes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Christopher.

  He suddenly thought of the homeless man and wondered if he had ever been married and had children, or whether his dog had been his only companion in the world ever. He supposed Mal and Jimbo must have killed the man because they thought he knew too much about them and their activities. They had got rid of him with the same insouciance as most people would swat a bluebottle.

  He lay there and pondered on the various consequences of Lord Murray’s urge to protect his family name.

  Until there was the sound of a car engine outside, and a low growling voice that he recognised.

  ‘… give you a hand to get that moved?’ said Dave.

  Christopher cast aside the oxygen mask, struggled to his feet and flung open the back doors of the ambulance. He stumbled round the side of the vehicle and came to a snowdrift, in which the front wheels were embedded. Dave and the paramedics were assessing the situation by staring at it and shaking their heads. Beyond them sat the Land Rover, Jemima’s uprightness in the front seat only threatened by the dog, which stood on her lap glaring at the group of men. When it saw Christopher it started to bark. He chose to believe it was pleased to see him, but he didn’t test out that theory by going anywhere near it. Instead he waved to Jemima, and approached Dave and the others.

  ‘What are you doing on your feet?’ said one of the paramedics.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Christopher. He tried hard not to cough, but the freezing air got into his throat and he began to wheeze.

  The driver indicated the snowdrift in front of the wheels and said, ‘Where do you think we’re going?’

  ‘I could pull you out,’ Dave offered.

  Christopher stared at him. Dave was a big man but even so…

  ‘With the Land Rover, I assume,’ said the paramedic who had been looking after them.

  ‘Haha,’ boomed Dave. ‘Hear that, Jemima? I could still do it on my own, mind you. We used to have a tug of war team years ago. I had to give up after a while – the others didn’t think it was fair having me in the team. Discrimination, I suppose you’d call it nowadays.’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t let you tow us out, sir,’ said the driver after a brief consultation between the paramedics. ‘It’s against the rules. We have to call it in and wait for a replacement ambulance.’

  ‘I could take them home,’ said Dave, sweeping his arms around to encompass Christopher and Lord Murray, who had appeared beside the ambulance.

  ‘They’re supposed to stay with us,’ protested one of the paramedics. ‘They should really be in hospital. At least overnight.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Dave cheerily. ‘A bit of smoke never hurt anybody.’

  ‘I’d rather go home than hospital,’ said Christopher. ‘And it’s much nearer.’

  ‘Not sure if the house is habitable,’ muttered Lord Murray. ‘Might have burned down by now.’

  ‘Take him as well, and you’ve got a deal,’ said the driver, addressing Dave. ‘But make sure you keep them indoors and call out a doctor if they get worse. I’ll give them a couple of inhalers to calm
down the coughing. And at least they’re on their feet now, so it’s doubtful if they’d be kept in hospital anyway.’

  He turned to Christopher. ‘It’s at your own risk,’ he warned. ‘Against medical advice.’

  Christopher shivered. He couldn’t see that the risk of going off with Dave to a nice warm house, where Jemima would undoubtedly bring them hot cups of tea and refilled hot water bottles every ten minutes as well as producing some hitherto unheard-of Scottish delicacy that had the twin effects of curing smoke inhalation and causing a dangerous leap in cholesterol, was any worse than the risk of standing around here in the cold while the paramedics argued about how to get the ambulance out of a snowdrift.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  Lord Murray nodded agreement.

  ‘Good,’ said Dave. ‘Jemima’s got some pease brose on the go.’

  Christopher smiled to himself, and happily followed Dave to the Land Rover.

  Chapter 33 Following the Trail

  The men on the ground had made better progress than anyone expected: the helicopter made several sweeps over the whole area: the grounds of Old Pitkirtlyhill House, the towns of Torryburn, Pitkirtly and Culross, Pitkirtly and Preston Islands and the mud-flats in between them, and nobody saw them. Amaryllis couldn’t believe Mal and Jimbo had just vanished into thin air. For a few moments she wished she was on the ground chasing them. If they had skied along the line of trees it would have been easier to follow on foot than from the air. But surely they would have to emerge at some point.

  Listening in on a headset she heard an exchange of radio messages between people on the ground and the pilot. A place was named where the helicopter could touch down, but it hovered for a while. Just after that, the helicopter suddenly lurched, the pilot corrected it and they headed out to the middle of the river.

  ‘Sudden cross wind,’ Amaryllis shouted in Charlie’s ear.

  ‘Are you enjoying this?’ he shouted back.

  She nodded and smiled. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Your hair!’ he said, and pointed at her head. ‘It’s standing on end.’

  Her hands instinctively went up to try and smooth it down, but it was a lost cause, what with the adrenalin that always seemed to go straight to her hair, and the draught that whistled through the interior of the helicopter.

  Charlie’s expression told its own story. He would have done anything to avoid this sort of scenario, she knew. Almost like Christopher, except that none of it seemed to have an impact on the loose partnership between him and Amaryllis, which she knew some people considered completely incongruous. It seemed to work though. The helicopter hovered over Pitkirtly Island for a few minutes, then circled above the mud-flats in the bay. It was frustrating not being able to see the action at closer range, but she had a lot of sympathy for the idea of not being caught in cross winds. She listened to the headset again and frowned.

  ‘Still no sign of them,’ she called to Charlie. Even in this raised voice he detected a note of grudging admiration. ‘They’ve disappeared, maybe gone to ground… There’s going to be hell to pay in the army over this - they always claim they can spot people who are likely to do this kind of thing, and to alert the civil authorities to people leaving the forces. But presumably you didn’t get any word of it?’

  ‘Nobody would have told me anyway,’ said Charlie gloomily. He had spoken almost too quietly for her to hear, but she sensed that he hadn’t really been speaking to her at all.

  ‘Not your fault!’ she yelled.

  ‘Too bothered about the weather, and Christmas… We had Christmas dinner at the station… Microwaved sprouts. Might as well have been cold pizza… Minds on the job instead of…’

  She wasn’t sure if she had heard him properly. What was all that about microwaved sprouts?

  ‘Charlie, what are you talking about?’ she shouted in his ear. ‘Microwaved sprouts? Cold pizza?’

  ‘We had Christmas dinner,’ he shouted back. ‘At the station. Instead of concentrating on the job. Might as well have been cold pizza.’

  ‘Everybody deserves a Christmas dinner,’ she yelled, although she was far from convinced of the truth of this.

  As the helicopter’s circuit widened to include Preston Island and Culross, Amaryllis glanced down. The top of the old mine shaft leading to the workings that had once extended out under the Forth caught her eye. There were patches of snow scattered across the seaweed, but it was freshly fallen and would melt quickly with all the salt water and mud around it. She pictured men working in tunnels far below, in constant fear of the water breaking through and drowning them, or the tunnels collapsing and burying them forever in layers of rock and mud. She shivered. They had worked there all the year round, even in this weather. Who knew how many tunnels criss-crossed each other below the mud flats, as well as inland around the power station?

  ‘Tunnels!’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘There are tunnels under Pitkirtly. That’s what they’ve done!’

  Charlie stared at her blankly.

  ‘Tunnels!’ she said again. ‘There are tunnels all around here. Old mine workings. Mal and Jimbo haven’t gone to ground – they’ve gone underground - that’s why we can’t see them.’

  Charlie was still staring as if she had grown two extra heads. She remembered something important.

  ‘The maps! From the kitchen table!’

  She slid her hand into her pocket and brought out her mobile phone, hoping the pictures she had taken of the maps were still there. Of course they must be: she hadn’t archived anything off recently: she hadn’t had time. The only thing that might have gone wrong would be if Christopher had used the opportunity of staying at her flat overnight to play with the settings.

  As she navigated to the image store and retrieved the maps, she knew she had been worrying unnecessarily. Christopher treated his own mobile with the caution that most people would have applied to an unexploded bomb. He wouldn’t have dreamed of touching an unfamiliar phone that didn’t belong to him. She peered at the maps on the small screen. She wished now that she had given in and bought reading glasses. But it didn’t matter too much. All she had to do was to remember what Christopher had found in the library that day when they had looked it all up.

  ‘It looks as if they must have gone into a tunnel before they even hit the main road,’ she said, zooming in and using the touch screen to trace the probable route taken by Jimbo and Mal.

  ‘I thought all the tunnels around here were flooded years ago,’ said Charlie, looking puzzled.

  Amaryllis consulted the map images again. It was all coming back to her. She could almost hear Christopher speaking, in the quiet but confident voice he used when he was talking about history and archives. Not that she encouraged him to do that under normal circumstances. She didn’t want to be bored to death, after all: there were other, worthier ways to die.

  After a while she spoke to the pilot. ‘Can you put us down on Pitkirtly Island?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said the pilot’s voice in the headphones. ‘You’ll be a sitting duck if I winch you down. And there’s no way I can land around there. They’ve set up an exclusion zone for ten miles round Longannet – that was HQ telling me more about it just now.’

  She sighed, consulting the maps again. ‘OK, near that little wood then. Behind Sunk Causeway.’

  ‘We’re waiting for reinforcements,’ he said censoriously. ‘They’re arriving by boat in twenty minutes.’

  ‘But we won’t be in the way,’ Amaryllis protested. ‘I just want to check something out near the island.’

  She had visions of making her way through the tunnels with Charlie and taking out the conspirators. Then she looked at Charlie’s face. Was he up for it? He had always seemed far too sensible. Too law-abiding. Playing it by the book.

  Like Christopher.

  She sighed again. Why was Christopher in an ambulance when she needed him? He would have tried his best to stay completely law-abiding, but she knew from previous
experience that in this kind of situation he would just follow her lead and do what she asked him to do – unless it involved keeping mobile phones charged up and switched on, of course. She wasn’t sure Charlie would be so ready to relinquish responsibility to her. In fact she was almost sure he –

  ‘When you asked if he could put us down, what did you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘I meant I want to be on the ground where the action is, not skulking up here as if I were watching the whole thing on television,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Yes, but ‘us’?’ he said.

  ‘You can come with me if you want,’ she said. ‘But there are rules. You’ve got to forget you’re a boring policeman.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘You’ve got to do what it takes.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘And remember, Christopher will kill you if anything happens to me.’

  ‘That’ll be right,’ he muttered as the co-pilot helped Amaryllis into a harness. ‘I’d better do it, I suppose. It won’t be any stupider than any of the other things I’ve done lately.’

  She smiled at him just as she slid over the edge. ‘Up to you,’ she said. Then the cold air hit her and she shivered all the way down to the ground. She landed well, went into a crouch, dodged behind the nearest tree and called Christopher on her mobile phone. When he didn’t reply, as she had thought he wouldn’t, she called Jemima instead.

  She wasn’t surprised when Charlie arrived on the ground a few moments after her, in the middle of the conversation. He joined her behind the tree and waited patiently while she spoke, only stamping his feet once and rubbing his gloved hands quite unobtrusively.

  There was a lot of background noise and she found it hard to make out what Jemima was saying, but the gist of it seemed to be that something strange had happened when she and Dave were making their way back to Pitkirtly.

  ‘… got them in the car… pease brose,’ was what it sounded like.

  ‘Who do you have in the car? And what’s pease brose when it’s at home?’

  ‘No, we’re going home,’ said Jemima.