3 A Reformed Character (5 page)

'I'd rather work it out myself,' said Amaryllis.

'We all need a bit of help sometimes,' said Maisie Sue reprovingly. Amaryllis noticed something odd about the woman's hair. It had lost its sculptured curves and the artificial golden sheen that had always made it look like a not very good wig. It was starting to look like - oh God! Maisie Sue had been absorbed into the culture of Pitkirtly! She had started going to the hairdresser in that awful frilly shop just off the High Street. Now that Amaryllis looked more closely, she saw that Maisie Sue was now almost indistinguishable in appearance from a certain type of native West Fife women of her age, who, it seemed, prided themselves on being aggressively plain, eschewing make-up apart from the odd random dash of ill-chosen lipstick, wearing thick stockings at all times, actually going out shopping in full length quilted coats in a range of subdued colours, and wearing woolly hats outdoors and in. Maisie Sue hadn't quite got to the woolly hat stage yet. Maybe you had to be Pitkirtly born and bred to be entitled to wear the hat. But the hair - the lipstick - the quilted coat - all these lent credence to Amaryllis's theory. She wondered how Maisie Sue's husband Pearson felt about it all. Or maybe CIA men didn't notice what their wives looked like.

'How is Pearson?' she asked idly.

Maisie Sue looked directly at her for the first time. She had a suspicious pink puffiness around the eyes which wasn't caused by make-up. 'How would I know?' she said. Before Amaryllis could reply, Maisie Sue's eyes filled with tears, which started to spill over. 'Pearson - Pearson... Oh, dear God, I never thought this would happen to me....'

Amaryllis recoiled instinctively. This was exactly why she had never had any close women friends in the first place, or very many friends at all - in fact until she walked into the lounge bar of the Queen of Scots in Pitkirtly the previous spring she had never let herself get close to anyone at all. Friendships, relationships with people of either gender could and generally did get very messy quite quickly. It was only because she had kept Christopher at arm's length that she had managed to stay even acquainted with him this long.

But now that this had happened, Amaryllis couldn't just get up and walk away. For one thing, logic dictated otherwise. All those months - well, two months - of attending Cosy Clicks meetings while pretending to Christopher she was at the gym; the tortuous process of learning to knit; all that would be wasted if she walked away now. And it was just starting to get interesting too. She had the chance now to prove to herself that her immersion in a Pitkirtly activity was worthwhile. She steeled herself.

'What's happened, Maisie Sue? Can I do anything?'

She willed the woman to say No, of course you can't do anything. I can cope on my own. I'll be better off without him.

Maisie Sue sniffed unattractively.

'That's real neighbourly of you, Amaryllis. But I don't think there's anything to be done.'

'It might help to talk,' said Amaryllis. She noticed Jan had finished setting up the chairs and was listening to them with a sceptical look about her. She turned her armchair to a different angle so that she and Maisie Sue formed a twosome, huddled together. 'Just tell me about it.'

It was a sad little story, although Amaryllis was more or less immune to emotion so she wasn't unduly upset by it, although she could see Maisie Sue had found it very distressing. Pearson McPherson had left his wife a couple of weeks before to run off, Maisie Sue thought, with an Eastern European lap dancer. His CIA paymasters had somehow managed not to notice him leaving his posting in the UK, and had sent a couple of hatchet-faced hitmen - or so Amaryllis thought of them, although that wasn't Maisie Sue's exact description - to check out why he hadn't reported in for some time. They had been very rude to Maisie Sue in the process. They had said she would now have to return to the USA herself as she would be persona non grata in Scotland.

'... and just when I thought I was at home in Pitkirtly?' Maisie Sue sobbed. 'I thought we could maybe stay on here after he retired... I don't want to go back home now this has happened. Everybody's going to think it's all my fault.'

The others started to arrive. Jan delayed them on their way through the shop for as long as was humanly possible, chattering inconsequentially and pointing out new batches of wool that had just come in, but Amaryllis gathered from her frequent glances at Maisie Sue that she wanted to get on and start the knitting session. Penelope Johnstone was one of the people there: Amaryllis had planned to corner her and ask a few incisive questions about Zak, but she could see it would be difficult in the circumstances. She encouraged Maisie Sue to stop talking, to dry her eyes and to demonstrate how to use a cable needle - not that Amaryllis had any intention of using one.

Everyone else had already settled down and started to work on their projects when Giulia Petrelli arrived, out of breath and flustered. Her big brown eyes held a panicky look. She hadn't brought her mother-in-law this time.

'Sorry I'm late,' she said to Jan. 'Family crisis - but we sorted something out.'

'It's just one family crisis after another here,' muttered Maisie Sue. She and Amaryllis were still sitting rather closer together than Amaryllis found comfortable, and she doubted if anyone else had heard. At first she presumed Maisie Sue was referring to her own matrimonial problems, but the American woman tutted and said,

'There's Penelope Johnstone and that husband of hers - always away in London, never at home.'

'I didn't know Penelope Johnstone was married,' said Amaryllis, trying and failing to pass a slipped stitch over. She had never thought about Penelope Johnstone's marital status, to be honest. There were more important things to clutter up your brain with.

'Why wouldn't she be?' said Maisie Sue. It was as if, despite years of feminism and the problems she was having with Pearson, she still considered the matrimonial state to be the natural one, the norm.

'So does her husband have much to do with Zak?' said Amaryllis.

She noticed Penelope glance round; maybe she had heard her son's name. Amaryllis waited until she had turned back to the baby cardigan she was knitting for orphans in Zimbabwe, then added, 'Or does he just run wild?'

'Oh, I don't think he runs wild,' said Maisie Sue. She measured one knitted sleeve against another. 'His father takes him to the gun club some weekends.'

'To the gun club?' Amaryllis couldn't avoid raising her voice, but fortunately this coincided with Jan dropping a box of knitting needles, and various people crawling around the floor picking them up, so she didn't think Penelope had heard.

'Yes, of course the gun club.' Maisie Sue stared at her with narrowed, rather critical eyes. 'I guess in your profession you've heard of gun clubs.'

'Yes, but I didn't think - in Pitkirtly?'

'It isn't in Pitkirtly as such. It calls itself a country sports club and there's a place up on the moors. Pearson goes - used to go - there. That's how I know about it. He met Ben Johnstone there a couple times. Zak was with him once.'

Amaryllis was about to query the name Ben Johnstone but just in time she thought it might be the kind of thing Christopher would question. She must have been spending too much time in his company again. It was the caravan holiday that had done it. She stored away the information about the Johnstone family for later.

In the tea break, Amaryllis tried to get close to Giulia and find out what kind of crisis had happened in the Petrelli household, but Penelope got there first, and the two of them went into a huddle.

It had been an unsatisfactory day in many ways, Amaryllis reflected as they came out into the night at the end of the session, Jan closing the door behind them with an audible sigh of relief or exhaustion. It was no use being cross with Maisie Sue about it, but it was obvious that this oblique style of investigating would take much longer than her usual methods.

Maybe it was time to get physical.

Chapter 6  A bedraggled stray

Jock McLean liked to take his wheelie-bin out last thing at night, so that nobody could see him doing it. He believed firmly in the ill-will of his neighbours, and thought they would seize the opportunity to poke about looking at his leftovers and working out what he had eaten for tea, given half a chance. He wasn't bothered about the risk of anyone going through his bank statements, even although he didn't believe in shredding documents before discarding them. Life was too short to be paranoid about money matters.

So it was quite late, almost midnight, when he went round to the back of the house to drag the bin out. It was a cold night, but at least the rain had stopped, so the task wasn't too unpleasant. In the darkness by the hedge something moved. He paused. At one time there had been a cat who liked to hunt around there, but he hadn't seen it for a while. A fox? A hedgehog? He didn't think any hedgehog worth its salt would have come out of hibernation yet, but maybe with global warming...

'Mr McLean?'

He jumped, his heart racing, his hand frozen as it reached for the handle of the wheelie bin.

A mysterious hooded shape emerged from the dark space between the bin and the hedge, head bowed slightly like a sinister penitent monk.

As the light from the street lamp outside Jock's front door fell on the face under the hood, Jock recognised the boy and took a step backwards in surprise. 'Darren?'

'Um,' said Darren. He looked like a rabbit that had been run over, limp, crumpled and defeated.

'What are you trying to do, give me a heart attack?' said Jock crossly. 'Let me get this bin out and then we'll go into the house.'

'Thanks, Mr McLean.'

'Don't thank me yet. I haven't done anything.'

They walked round to the front; Darren waited while Jock placed the wheelie-bin carefully on the pavement; they went inside the house. Darren looked even worse in the light of Jock's sitting-room. He seemed to have slept in his clothes, which was probably the case, Jock reflected, since he had been in the murder house one night and ever since then on the run. His face was dirty, with streaks that might be tear-stains running down vertically. There was a hole in one knee of his jeans and one of his trainers was caked in mud.

'I got stuck in the mud crossing the bay,' he said.

'What have you done with your friend?' said Jock.

'She's fine... She went home. It was her night to help in the restaurant. Her mum was going to the knitting club. Vic wanted to get back.'

This was as much as Jock had ever heard the boy say. His resistance was evidently low.

'What have you come round here for? What do you want?'

'Victoria said,' Darren began, paused and then began again. 'Vic said - you might help me.'

The final two words came out like sobs, but he cut himself off abruptly and glowered at Jock.

'I don't know what gave her that idea,' muttered Jock. He looked at the boy again, sizing up the state he was in. There was no doubt that the right thing to do would be to turn him in to the police straight away, but he found, to his own surprise, he wasn't that heartless. No doubt there would be mundane, terrible things to be done once he was in custody; the boy was already on the brink of mental breakdown, and in no fit state to be hustled from one bit of the police system to another, made to sit in interview rooms with peeling paintwork in some institutional colour, waiting for some hard-bitten policeman to come and rough him up. Or perhaps Jock had seen one too many hard-bitten police dramas on television.

Darren could do with a square meal and a good night's sleep in a real bed before he had to go through all that.

'I'll put the chip-pan on,' said Jock.

They talked a little more over this impromptu late supper of bacon, egg and chips - Jock thought he deserved to join in, after what he had been through, what with Darren jumping out at him and everything. And then there were the six nights in the caravan too, having to put up with sharing that tiny compartment - too small to be called a room - with Christopher, and having to put up with the funny little mumbling noises he made in his sleep. And then being the centre of a police siege which really had nothing to do with him.

He wondered, as they chatted, if the murder had anything to do with Darren after all. The boy didn't seem to him to have enough get-up-and-go to murder somebody. He was the kind of boy things happened to, and this was just the latest incident in a long line of situations where he had been the victim of circumstance. He didn't even seem to remember the night it had happened, which was very odd in itself. Surely something dramatic like that would impinge on his consciousness, no matter how far out of it he was.

'What about your mum? Won't she be worried about you?'

'She's given up on me,' said Darren with a gulp that veered dangerously close to another sob. 'She threw me out. I don't care, though.'

'No, I don't suppose you do.' Jock resolved to pay a visit to Mrs Laidlaw, Darren's mother, just as soon as he had delivered Darren into the hands of the police.

He put Darren in his son Steven's room for the night. It was still full of Lego and Star Wars memorabilia that might amuse the boy. Halfway up the stairs, Darren paused and looked at a framed photograph. 'Is this your wife?'

'It's Marilyn Monroe,' said Jock. His wife had run off to Ardrossan with a trawlerman so long ago he couldn't remember when it had happened. He liked to imagine what it might have been like if he had married Marilyn Monroe instead. He felt he could be reasonably confident she wouldn't have run off with a trawlerman.

'Cool,' said Darren. Jock warmed to him very slightly. It was the first time the boy had shown any sign of being anything other than a mindless young thug.

He hoped Darren would still be around in the morning, but he didn't lose any sleep over it. He had done all he could for the moment. He went to sleep with a clear conscience and without worrying about being stabbed in the night. His screwdriver was locked up in a toolbox in a locked cupboard anyway.

When it came to the point, Darren didn't put up much resistance to the idea of turning himself in. Jock thought it would probably be a relief after being on the run.

'Just remember, if you're not guilty, you'll get out in the end,' said Jock as they set off from the house. He hadn't rung the police. He wanted to turn up at the police station and report to some round avuncular desk sergeant, not to have to endure another siege.

Darren looked even gloomier than before. 'My mum'll kill me whatever happens,' he said.

Jock looked the boy up and down as they turned the corner into the High Street. He wasn't quite as scruffy as he had been the night before, after borrowing Jock's shower gel to clean himself up, and then watching with a kind of distant interest while Jock scrubbed at his trainers. He had also borrowed a sweatshirt that had been left behind by Steven on the flimsy grounds that the pattern was minging. It wasn't that great, but at least it was clean, and it didn't have a hood.

'Tell the truth and they can't catch you out,' Jock advised as he pushed at the police station door. It didn't open. He pushed harder. He looked for a door-bell but there wasn't one. He knocked as hard as he could, hurting his knuckles. He glanced at his watch. Nearly noon. For God's sake, the police station couldn't be closed! It was against the law. What if there was a crime wave while they were all stuffing themselves with cheese and onion sandwiches or pasties from the nearest baker's?

A young woman, wearing one of these tabard things that passed for overalls and pinnies these days, opened the door.

'It's shut,' she said.

She held a dustpan and brush. Jock was just about to feel cross all over again at the shameless exploitation of cleaning staff by not providing proper equipment when he noticed an industrial scale vacuum cleaner sitting in the hall-way behind her.

'It can't be shut,' he said.

'Well, it's shut,' she said.

'When will it be open?' said Jock. He was starting to wish he hadn't bothered.

'It's only open on weekday mornings,' she said.

'So they don't work in the afternoons or at weekends? What if something happens?'

Jock sensed rather than heard Darren shuffle his feet, perhaps in embarrassment at Jock's persistence. Being a former teacher he was fortunately immune to the tactics of young people. 'What if there's a crime wave?'

She shrugged her shoulders, apparently losing interest.

'What if I've brought in a wanted man for questioning?' said Jock.

She looked from him to Darren and back.

'I'll get somebody,' she said at last. 'But you'd better not be making this up.'

'The cheek of it!' Jock commented to Darren as she closed the door again and hurried off through the hall-way. 'Do I look like the kind of person who makes things up?'

He only felt one pang of guilt and that was when Darren turned to look at him as he was being hustled away between two uniformed policemen. His panic-stricken eyes were the stuff of nightmares. Jock resolved to harass the police unmercifully until they agreed he was innocent - or at least, not guilty of this particular crime - and let him go.

Now for Mrs Laidlaw.

He realised he didn't know where she lived. And the police would probably contact her soon anyway. Maybe he could give up and go home and read the teaching job adverts in the paper and scoff at people who were actually trying to get a job in the profession. Or he could get the bus into Dunfermline and walk in the glen: the problem with that option was that he knew he would use the time to mull things over in his head and start to feel guilty that he, like most of the people Darren had ever known, had abandoned the boy. He wouldn't enjoy the simple pleasures he was used to until he paid for them by taking some altruistic action. He kicked the wall beside him and muttered, 'Damn!'

Amaryllis would probably know where to find Darren's mother, he realised. Even if the woman didn't attend the famous knitting group herself, someone who went to it was bound to know her. And Mrs Laidlaw would have been the subject of some gossip lately. Jock started to feel sorry for her and then immediately felt cross with himself. What was the matter with him? He must be going soft in the head or something. He had survived all his years of teaching by steeling himself against this kind of sentimental view of the world.

He went round to Amaryllis's flat, at Merchantman Wynd. The burnt-out shell of the former Pitkirtly Village Hall mocked him for his concern about Darren. But he quite liked the way nature had started to colonise the site. It looked almost picturesque.

Sometimes when he pressed the buzzer he had worried that he might interrupt some torrid scene between Christopher and Amaryllis, but if the six nights in the caravan had taught him anything, it was that whatever was going on between them was too deep and too complicated for someone like him to be able to interrupt it.

Amaryllis didn't know Mrs Laidlaw's address, but she made a couple of phone calls to knitting group acquaintances, and one of them came up with the goods. To his annoyance, she then insisted on coming with him to speak to Mrs Laidlaw. 'It might help to have another woman there.'

'And where are we going to find another woman around here?' said Jock. Her eyes flashed briefly, either in amusement or anger: he couldn't tell which.

After being flattened a bit by the damp weather they had on holiday, her dark red hair was now standing on end again as it often did when she was on the trail of something. He did notice she was walking a bit awkwardly, though. But of course she wouldn't admit to having an accident even if he asked her, so he didn't bother asking.

'I'm surprised you managed to get Darren to do that,' she said.

'Give himself up? Yes, I think he was just tired of running.'