3 A Reformed Character

by Cecilia Peartree

  They seemed to have an instinctive need to move as one, to huddle together for safety in this difficult situation. And it was just as well they obeyed that instinct: as soon as they had all moved through to the kitchen, there was a loud bang from the front room, followed by the shattering, jingling sound of glass breaking.

  'Get out of the house - now,' said Amaryllis. 'Use the back door. Don't look to see what's happened.'

  This last sentence was addressed to Jock, who was moving towards the front room.

  'But - ' was all Jock got the chance to say before Amaryllis hustled him out. She didn't let them stand around the garden for long either, but rushed them off over the tumbledown fence that led to the garden of the next-door neighbour Jock often grumbled about. They crashed through a hedge, and then hurried down to the bottom of the next garden, over a small ornamental stream and into a sparse birch wood.

  'It's quite rural here, isn't it?' Christopher observed, watching a magpie attacking a smaller bird.

  He heard a dull thud. The next minute he was dodging out of the way as the magpie suddenly fell from the sky.

  'Not a very good shot,' said Amaryllis calmly. 'We'd better go this way.'

  They came to a grassy lane between two old stone walls. It turned downhill without any warning, and Jock stumbled. Darren hauled him back upright. They ran on. Something pinged off the wall.

  'They're getting better,' said Amaryllis. 'Quick - down here!'

  They pushed through a shrubbery and found themselves in another garden. This one had rather a fancy shed in one corner. The house it belonged to had a conservatory and wooden decking, with a large barbecue. Amaryllis wrenched the padlock off the shed door and said, 'In here. Jock - never mind the flowers!'

  Amaryllis closed the door behind them and they hid behind a stack of bamboo garden furniture and waited.

  'Where are we?' breathed Christopher in her ear.

  'Tell you later.'

  There were so many things that could go wrong. What if somebody came out of the house and opened the shed? What if whoever had shot at them was even now creeping through the shrubbery? Christopher pictured the shed being peppered with bullets. He shuddered. He had never enjoyed games of hide and seek, and this was for real in a way that was worse than his worst nightmares.

  What if there were spiders? He knew Amaryllis had a phobia about them. What if she was allergic to them as well? What if she had a sudden anaphylactic attack and gave the game away?

  He heard Jock breathing heavily. What if Jock had a heart attack?

  There was a yell outside - not far away - and then a single gunshot. Then silence again. A few moments later there were footsteps outside the shed. Christopher froze. What if this was the place where it was all destined to end? It was a mundane, cramped place in which to die.

  Someone shouted, too close to their hiding place for comfort, but he couldn't hear what they said. Then he heard different, lighter footsteps, and a woman's voice, even closer.

  'What's going on out here, Andy?'

  The man, closer too now, said in loud agitated tones, 'That was a gunshot. I'm sure of it.'

  'Leave it, Andy! It's nothing to do with us.'

  'I'll just get the chairs out now I'm down here. They need oiling before the summer.'

  'That can wait. Come away in now, the football's just about to start.'

  As the footsteps receded, all the fugitives breathed again, more or less in unison. Amaryllis still wouldn't let them come out of their hiding-place.

  'They could come back to have another go,' she whispered.

  Even after all that time Amaryllis insisted on going out on her own first to have a look round. This made sense, since she was the only one capable of looking round silently and unobtrusively and without making a huge fuss if she actually found something, but Christopher still felt guilty about letting her do it. Surely it was a man’s job to put himself in the firing line ahead of women and children? But perhaps Amaryllis counted as an honorary man. In some ways she was better than a man. In all ways, now he came to think of it.

  She was back.

  ‘A trace of blood. No more gunmen,’ she reported. ‘I think we can get moving now. Just be as careful as you can.’

  Jock’s joints cracked alarmingly as he struggled to his feet. Christopher’s knees seemed to have more or less seized up, not because of old age, he told himself, but because he had been crouching in such a silly position for so long.

  ‘Christopher and I are going to have a word with the Donaldsons,’ said Amaryllis, ‘You two wait in the shed,’ she instructed Jock and Darren. ‘Don’t let anybody see you until we come back.’

  ‘The Donaldsons?’ said Christopher. He must have missed something. He thought he’d been keeping up with what was happening, but apparently that had been an illusion.

  ‘This is their garden,’ said Amaryllis, as if it was perfectly obvious.

  ‘So that was them just now?’ said Christopher, losing his grip on English grammar. And, as an afterthought, ‘What about that trace of blood?’

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Either one of the gunmen shot himself in the foot, or somebody else did. There wasn’t a lot of blood. And no sign of anybody in the wood. Stop worrying.’

  She said all this as the two of them walked up the garden path and towards the house, which, now that Christopher had time to think about it, he realised must be the house of a builder or joiner with its multiple extensions and outdoor buildings. As well as the posh shed they had taken shelter in, there was a more mundane steel one near the house. The steel one probably fulfilled the real function of a shed in housing tools, lawn-mower and weed-killer, whereas the posh one was more of a summer-house.

  Christopher realised his mind was wandering as a defence against the reality of being about to walk up to the front door of a couple of strangers who would quite likely not be pleased to see them.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he hissed, seizing the sleeve of Amaryllis’s camouflage parka – the one she wore when she was up to something. ‘What are we doing here? What are we going to say?’

  ‘Just leave it to me,’ she said.

  They made their way round to the front of the house along a rather attractive path of circular paving stones edged with tiny snowdrops, and Amaryllis rang the door-bell. Christopher remained on the step below her as a sign that he wasn’t the one who had insisted on doing this.

  The door opened slowly.

  ‘Yes?’ said the man whose voice they had heard from their hiding-place. He didn’t exactly snap but he wasn’t over-friendly either. They heard a dog barking from somewhere inside the house.

  ‘Who is it, Andy?’ called a woman’s voice.

  ‘Who are you?’ said the man in the doorway. Mr Donaldson had the look of a man currently immune to shock. Someone who had already suffered the worst that life had to throw at him, and somehow survived. Or maybe it was too early to assume that. Maybe he was still in a state of post-traumatic stress and hadn’t even emerged from it yet.

  Amaryllis introduced herself and Christopher, and waited politely for Mr Donaldson to react, which he did after a very short pause.

  ‘You’re friends of that lowlife scum Darren Laidlaw, aren’t you?’ he growled. ‘You can get off my doorstep right now before I set the dogs on you.’

  ‘Could we just have a quick word with you?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘I can’t think of anything you could say that I’d want to listen to,’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘Caroline!’

  A woman with red-rimmed eyes appeared so promptly that she must have been very close by, perhaps listening from the front room with the door open.

  ‘I’m going to let the dogs out now,’ he said to her. ‘Shut yourself in the kitchen and call the police.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Why not?’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘You scared of the police?’

  He seemed almost amused at the idea.

  ‘We’re not involve
d in this the way you seem to think we are,’ said Christopher. ‘We’re trying to get at the truth.’

  ‘The truth?’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘I’ll tell you the truth…’

  ‘Andy, please don’t….’ said his wife, but he continued.

  ‘The truth is that my son’s lying on a mortuary slab and we can’t even bury him until the police say we can. And you’re playing at being detectives… You don’t know what you’re getting yourselves into, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘We’re not playing,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’re just trying to stop the police making a big mistake, otherwise more people are going to get killed.’

  She turned and started to walk away. Christopher, wondering if the dogs were going to come after them at any moment, followed, walking gingerly.

  He breathed out as he closed the garden gate behind him. Mr and Mrs Donaldson still stood on their doorstep watching.

  'Interesting,' said Amaryllis as they walked off down the road.

  'Interesting? We nearly get savaged by dogs and you call it interesting? And what are we going to do about Jock and Darren? We can't just leave them in the shed!'

  Relief had made Christopher furious.

  'We'll go round the back way for them,' she said, as they reached the end of the cul de sac. She led the way down another road, then into a second cul de sac.

  'So what was interesting?' he demanded as they walked past a row of houses which were almost identical to each other. Each had only one feature that was slightly different from the next one: a white painted porch here, a rockery there. But they all seemed to be built to the same basic design.

  'You don't know what you're getting yourselves into,' said Amaryllis. 'Don't you think that's interesting?'

  'Scary? Yes,' said Christopher. 'True, yes. I don't know about interesting.'

  Amaryllis led him off the road into a small wood. He started to look around for hidden snipers.

  'They've all gone,' she said. He couldn't help feeling she was being a bit over-confident.

  'It suggests he knows something we don't know... This is a bigger thing than it seems. That's why it's interesting. That and the gunmen, of course.'

  They crossed the small stream again - or was it a different one? Suddenly they were back in the shrubbery at the bottom of the Donaldsons' garden.

  'Wait here, I'll get them.' said Amaryllis. She pushed through the bushes towards the shed. Within moments she was back at a run.

  'They've disappeared!'

  Chapter 14 Off on their holidays

  Jock didn’t want to leave the shed. It was Darren who just barged out on to the lawn, and stood there staring around him. He might as well, Jock thought, have had a big arrow pointing at his head with a neon sign saying 'He's here.' Quite apart from the police and the mysterious gunman or gunmen who had chased them through the woods, what if the owners of the house happened to look out their back window and see him? They might easily call the police.

  It was going to be even more difficult to talk him into giving himself up this time. For one thing, Darren had already had experience of prison before in his short life and didn’t like the idea of being on remand. For another, there was now nowhere safe to go and reason it all out. Jock's house was presumably out of bounds: at the very least the front window had been shattered by some sort of missile, and there was no knowing what other damage might have been done. If the missile had been some sort of explosive device... Jock's imagination ran riot in a way he didn't usually allow it to, and before long he had written off his house as a lost cause, picturing it as a smouldering wreck which would be so far from being habitable that it would have to be demolished. Oh well, he thought. At least we got out in time.

  He considered and discarded several other options. He knew his friends would have opened their doors to him willingly, but how could he bring such terrible danger to the door of Jemima Stevenson, for instance? He couldn't see her being able to hide in a shed for very long without complaining about her arthritis. Anyway, Dave would kill him if anything happened to her.

  Christopher or Amaryllis would have taken him and Darren in, but he didn't consider their homes as being any safer than his home at this point. Maybe Christopher would let them camp in the Cultural Centre?

  Darren wandered off into the woods again, and Jock followed him, reluctantly. He wasn't entirely convinced the gunman or gunmen had gone. But they managed to arrive at the ornamental fence of Jock's neighbour unscathed, and then they both instinctively turned to walk down Jock's road in the opposite direction from his house – they didn’t even look to see what sort of state it was in, but Jock couldn't smell burning which was a good sign - and headed in the direction of the High Street.

  That was when their luck changed.

  With the roar of a souped-up engine, a pick-up truck screeched to a halt beside them as they walked along what had only moments before been a peaceful back street. It was Dave.

  'Going anywhere?' he called from the driving seat.

  'Yes,' said Jock. 'Can you give us a lift?'

  'Jump in!'

  He held the front passenger door open for them, but they both got in the back seat. He gave them an odd look. 'Do you not want to sit up in the front, Jock?' he asked. 'My driving isn't that scary.'

  'We're on the run,' Jock explained. 'We don't want anybody seeing us.'

  'Who the hell are you on the run from this time?'

  'What do you mean, this time? I don't make a habit of being on the run,' said Jock.

  'Who is it though?'

  'Well, there's the police, for starters. Then there were some idiots who threw a brick through my front window and chased us through the woods shooting at us, and we had to hide in some garden shed for hours...'

  'That'll do to be going on with,' said Dave, and got the truck under way without wasting any more time.

  'Where do you want to go?' he asked after a while.

  'I don't know,' said Jock. 'We've got nowhere to go.'

  'So you need a hideout, do you?' Dave pondered this for a few moments, as he drove in his usual fashion through Pitkirtly town centre, scattering before him pedestrians, cyclists, dogs and people unfortunate enough to be driving smaller cars.

  They were driving along the river front when Jock had the courage to look again.

  'Well, you can't come up to ours,' said Dave. 'I don't want Jemima getting in the way of any gunmen. She's had enough of that kind of thing... I suppose it's out of the question to go to Christopher's or -'

  'They're compromised,' said Jock. 'They're on the police radar already.'

  'There's only one thing for it then,' said Dave, and did a sudden U-turn which confused the woman in the Fiat Panda who was coming the other way. As far as Dave was concerned Fiat Pandas didn't really exist, so he wasn't bothered by the blast of its horn. 'You aren't allergic to cats, are you?'

  ‘Um – I don’t think so,’ said Jock. He nudged Darren, who looked as if he was almost asleep. ‘Cats. Any allergies?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind them,’ said Darren. ‘I don’t like dogs though.’

  ‘There won’t be any dogs,’ said Dave. ‘Lots of cats. No dogs.’

  He accelerated past the harbour. The Petrellis’ café was all closed up. Funny, you’d think they’d be open at this time of day. Of course, Jock remembered suddenly, they must have closed out of respect for Old Mrs Petrelli. Such a lot else had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours that he had almost forgotten about her.

  Before long they were outside Pitkirtly. Dave drove up towards the main road that ran all the way between a roundabout near the Forth Road Bridge and Kincardine, where there was another, less spectacular bridge across the Forth.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’ said Darren, whose face looked grey by this time. The pick-up truck bounced round another corner. ‘I think I’m going to – ‘

  He was violently sick into one of Dave’s wellies which was conveniently to hand.

  Dave stopped on the verge on a narr
ow bit of road and they did as much cleaning up as they could stand.

  ‘Better out than in,’ said Jock hopefully.

  ‘Maybe you’d both better sit in the front with me now,’ said Dave. ‘You won’t get swung about so much there.’

  They clambered back in and set off again. Jock himself was also wondering if they were nearly there yet but he didn’t want to annoy Dave by asking the question. It was quite enough like a school outing without that. They crossed the main road and dived down another narrow winding road. Just when Jock thought the road couldn’t get any narrower or more winding, it got narrower and started to climb. Soon they had turned on to a track and were apparently driving up a cliff. Dave couldn’t possibly tell whether anything was coming the other way, but he kept going at approximately the same suicidal speed. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t have an accident.

  ‘It’s just round the next corner,’ said Dave at last, after a seemingly endless journey. ‘Or do we have to turn off this road first? I can’t remember. It’s a while since I’ve been up here.’

  ‘Where are we heading exactly?’ said Jock, daring to voice his thoughts for the first time since they got in the truck. One thing was for sure: nobody would find them up here unless they knew where to look. He would have been cautiously optimistic if he hadn’t started to feel travel-sick by then.

  ‘My niece’s place,’ said Dave. They went round a corner at speed, shot past a farm gate and screeched to a halt Dave jammed the gear-lever into reverse and they shot backwards.

  ‘This is it,’ he announced. ‘Can one of you open the gate?’

  Jock climbed out to open the gate. It seemed to lead to a large field, but at the other side stood some sort of an enclosure. As they approached, it looked more and more forbidding, with a tall sturdy metal fence topped with big lights and security cameras every so often along its length, and razor wire in the gaps. Somewhere behind the fence was a cluster of farm buildings.

  ‘What the hell is this place?’ said Jock.

  Dave didn’t answer. He drew up beside a gate in the fence, got out and pressed a button on a keypad, held a brief conversation with someone at the other end of the connection, and got back into the truck.