Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) (13 page)

There was a crash and a high-pitched bark from just outside the office. Jock McLean burst into the room, towing the wee white dog behind him.

‘Strictly speaking,’ said Christopher, ‘we don’t really allow dogs...’

He gave up.

‘Here, what’s all that cleaning stuff doing out in the corridor?’ said Jock indignantly. ‘How are you meant to see it in those lighting conditions?’

‘Lighting conditions? Has the bulb gone again?’ Christopher got up to have a look, while Amaryllis leaned down to pat the dog.

He might as well tidy things up a bit before anybody sued the Cultural Centre for damages. He knew Amaryllis and Jock were unlikely to do so, but you never knew when some trouble-maker would come along. El Presidente, for instance. Or Young Dave would probably have the nerve to get himself seen around town and the stupidity not to realise it would enable the police to discover his whereabouts. He stacked the mop and cleaning materials in a neat pile for the moment. He would ask Zak to put it all away in the cleaner’s cupboard near the Folk Museum if Maggie didn’t come back by the end of the day. He had a sinking feeling about that. Calling the police in would make it seem so serious.

‘Maggie’s gone off somewhere,’ he told Jock.

‘Or been abducted by aliens,’ said Amaryllis.

Jock made a derisive noise. ‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything... You don’t believe it, do you?’

‘We think she’s more likely to have gone over to the supermarket for a sandwich,’ said Christopher.

Jock frowned. ‘I’d rather be abducted by aliens than have to eat a sandwich from there.’

‘What are you living on while Tricia’s away, then?’ Amaryllis teased him.

‘We don’t live in each other’s pockets, you know,’ said Jock. ‘I’m still at home for my tea most nights.’

Christopher had begun to feel uneasy about Maggie’s failure to return to her cleaning equipment. Maybe he should check the tea-room and the library just to set his mind at rest.

‘I’m just going to have a quick look round the building,’ he told the others.

‘For Maggie?’ said Jock.

‘I’ll run over to the supermarket and see if I can catch her there,’ Amaryllis offered.

‘What can I do?’ said Jock.

‘Stay here in case she comes back,’ said Christopher. The last thing he wanted was to make it appear as if they were panicking about a disappearance that was undoubtedly temporary and had a reasonable explanation.

But, putting this together with all the other unsettling recent events, he couldn’t help worrying just a bit.

Chapter 14 Amaryllis knows too much

Amaryllis hurried up and down the supermarket aisles, looking for Maggie Munro. She had been away from her post at the Cultural Centre too long just to be buying sandwiches. But there was always the possibility that she had got chatting to a friend. Amaryllis knew some people treated supermarkets like their own front rooms, hosting large convivial get-togethers of friends and family at the intersections between aisles, and exchanging information they seemed to imagine no-one else could hear.

She didn’t know whether they or the parents of the feral children who darted under people’s feet and in front of their trolleys annoyed her more.

Oh, God help me, she thought suddenly, coming to a standstill and causing a man in overalls to swear at her under his breath, I’m turning into a grumpy old person. I thought it would take a bit longer than this. Perhaps I’ve been spending too much time with Jock McLean. And Christopher. He was born old, if anyone was.

As far as she could tell, Maggie Munro wasn’t anywhere on the premises. But that wasn’t the end of the world. Christopher might still have run her to earth in the tea-room or having a quick smoke outside the fire exit, by the wheelie-bins. She had never seen Maggie smoking, but then she didn’t know the woman all that well.

‘Why Amaryllis!’ exclaimed someone just by the ice-cream cabinet in the freezer section. ‘I didn’t know you had time to do this kind of thing.’

‘Maisie Sue,’ said Amaryllis with resignation. ‘Even I have to stop and eat sometimes... You haven’t by any chance seen Maggie Munro in here, have you?’

‘The cleaner from the Cultural Centre? I don’t think I have. Not today.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome. I hope nothing’s wrong?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Certainly, if something did turn out to be wrong, Maisie Sue was almost the last person Amaryllis would ask to help. No, that was a little unfair. Maisie Sue, as she had proved on several occasions, was a good person to have on your side in a crisis. As long as the crisis didn’t involve quilting or anything related to that, in which case her natural common sense often tended to go out the window. Amaryllis almost wished she hadn’t even thought about quilting. Would Maisie Sue sense that it had crossed her mind? Would she start asking more of the awkward questions she would be perfectly entitled to ask about what had become of the precious quilt she had last seen hanging in the Folk Museum?

It was time to make an excuse and leave.

‘I’m going to try the café in case she’s popped in there,’ Amaryllis lied, hurrying towards the exit.

‘I sure hope you find her!’ Maisie Sue called after her.

Damn! The woman had followed her to the exit. Amaryllis felt bound to turn up the High Street and head for the café. She would have to sneak back to the Cultural Centre by a circuitous route. Fortunately Amaryllis was a connoisseur of all the circuitous routes in town. Considering Pitkirtly was only a small town, it was surprising how many there were.

She glanced over her shoulder as she reached the café, saw that Maisie Sue had lost interest and gone back into the shop, possibly because she had set off a security alert by going beyond a certain point with her trolley without paying. Amaryllis turned back to face the front and moved on at the same moment, which was a mistake. She ran into someone rather larger and more solid than she was.

‘Oof!’ she said for the second time in a few days. This was a habit she badly needed to break.

‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ growled a voice that was only too familiar.

‘Oh, sorry, I’m sure,’ she said, taking a step back and regarding Young Dave with hostility. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in custody somewhere?’

‘Time off for good behaviour,’ he said, trying to step round her but finding the way somehow blocked at both sides.

‘Not according to Keith Burnet.’

‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ he challenged her.

She took out her mobile phone. He grabbed at it, and she snatched it away, chopping down on his arm with her free hand, flattened so that she could use the edge as a weapon. He yelped in pain.

Amaryllis was about to say something devastating and then turn her back and leave the scene, when strong arms came round her at about chest height from behind, pinning her arms to her sides. At the same time she became aware that a van had drawn up to the kerb only feet away.

‘Where is it?’ snapped a man’s voice.

‘Where’s what?’

‘You know what I mean. You might as well hand it over now.’

‘You’re not getting me into that van,’ she muttered, wriggling and kicking. It was embarrassing but she was going to have to scream for help. She opened her mouth again, and then found the grip had already eased. The yapping and growling she had only vaguely heard, right at the edge of her consciousness, got dramatically louder and someone shouted, and then the street was crowded with people. She pushed forward away from the arms that were no longer effectively restraining her, trod on Young Dave’s toes on purpose and faced her would-be captor. She didn’t recognise him at first, but after a moment her brain processed the image of his small moustache and little brown eyes, and knew. Beyond him she saw Charlie Smith and Jock McLean – that explained the yapping and growling. Then there were the dogs. She laughed to herself.

‘It isn’t funny, Amaryllis,’ said Jemima from somewhere behind Young Dave.

The man she had recognised as Keith’s Murray Williamson dived sideways and flung himself into the back of the van, which accelerated away violently with the doors still ajar.

Amaryllis turned back to Young Dave. His namesake had him under control, with a bit of help from Jemima.

‘Somebody’d better call the police and get him taken away,’ said Jemima’s Dave. ‘Before I strangle him.’

‘It’s all under control,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘Keith’s on his way.’

Amaryllis stared at his dog, which had flattened itself against his legs, apparently thinking there must be something to apologise for.  ‘Thanks,’ she told it solemnly.

‘He never bites,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t know what got into him.’

‘He was protecting me,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? I didn’t even know I needed protecting.’

She was irritated to note a quaver in her voice. It wasn’t that she had been scared, of course. The quaver was one of anger that she hadn’t been able to resist capture on her own instead of having to be helped out by a dog which had always seemed like a sub-standard example of its species.

Somewhere on the periphery of her vision, Jock McLean was patting the wee white dog, who had also played a part, although Amaryllis suspected that one’s talents were more of the vocal kind.

‘Thanks,’ she said to no-one in particular.

‘Do you want to sit down, Amaryllis?’ said Jemima. ‘The café’s just here.’

Somehow she and Jemima found themselves inside at a table where they could look out the window and watch what happened next. After a while, a police car came roaring up, sirens going and lights flashing. Young Dave was bundled into it, while Keith Burnet hopped out and chatted to the men outside for a few minutes. The car drove off, again at speed.

It was all wrong. Amaryllis tried to get to her feet to go out and join the others, but Jemima pushed her back into the chair. ‘The scones are just coming. You don’t want to miss them, do you? They’ve got brie and blueberry in them today.’

The bell on the café door jingled and Keith came in. He sat down with them.

‘What was all that about?’

‘Would you like a scone, Keith?’ said Jemima as someone brought a tray over with coffee cups and a plate of scones.

Keith eyed the scones critically. ‘What’s in them? Is that a blueberry?’

‘They’re too exotic for you, Keith,’ said Amaryllis.

‘I’ve been to Tenerife on holiday, you know,’ said Keith. ‘Nothing’s too exotic for me.’

‘It was your Murray Williamson,’ said Amaryllis.

‘I thought so,’ said Keith. ‘Charlie got the van number. We’ll catch up with him.’

‘Young Dave will sing like a canary when you start interrogating him,’ said Jemima.

‘Sing like a canary?’ said Keith.

The doorbell jingled again and Charlie, Jock and Jemima’s Dave came in.

‘No dogs,’ said someone.

‘Those are personal assistance dogs,’ said Charlie.

‘You still can’t bring them in here... But if they’re really assistance dogs you can put them out the back just this once.’

Charlie and Jock disappeared with the dogs and Dave came over and sat down.

‘I can’t question her with all you lot about,’ complained Keith.

‘We’re not leaving her on her own,’ said Dave, crossing his arms.

‘Quite right, dear,’ said Jemima, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Have you ordered anything? Would you like a scone?’

‘Enough about the damn scones!’ said Keith, raising his voice and causing a deathly hush to fall over the whole place.

‘I’m not having you coming in here and shouting about my scones,’ said the waitress, looming up behind him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them. You’ll put off my customers.’

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Could you maybe bring us another plate of scones and a pot of tea?’ suggested Jemima. ‘Or does anybody want coffee?’

‘I think they might have been after the tablet,’ said Amaryllis to Keith in a voice pitched low enough to be just audible by him through the din caused by Charlie, Jock and Dave deciding whether they wanted tea or coffee.

‘Do you have any reason to believe that?’

‘The one who grabbed me – Murray Williamson – asked me where “it” was. I can’t think of anything else he might have meant. Unless he’d mistaken me for someone else. And Young Dave wouldn’t do that.’

‘Nobody would do that, believe me,’ said Keith. ‘How did they know you had the tablet?’ He lowered his voice a bit more. ‘It’s on its way to the forensic computer people. If they can retrieve any data from it we should know soon.’

Amaryllis considered his question. Jock McLean had been present when she found the tablet. She didn’t think either of them had mentioned it to Charlie Smith when they met him that same evening. She had been carrying it around in her backpack since then with all the election materials. Stewie might have seen it there... Stewie... She didn’t want to drop him in it.

Then she remembered the day they had been leafleting in Stewie’s Grannie’s street. She had taken the tablet out accidentally with a bunch of leaflets at about the time they encountered El Presidente and Young Dave.

‘El Presidente,’ she said slowly. ‘He was with Young Dave.’

Keith, who had been leaning towards her, jumped back so abruptly that his chair skidded out from the table and collided with another one at the next table, causing a minor diplomatic incident.

What with the fracas, and the arrival of another tray with more scones and various beverages, the moment was lost. Amaryllis didn’t think Keith would forget, though.

Sure enough, when they were leaving the café, having eaten enough scones to satisfy Jemima that the natural order of things had been restored, she found herself standing next to Keith on the street outside, his arm linked in hers in what could have been a friendly, supportive gesture but which she instinctively knew wasn’t, or at least that wasn’t its prime purpose.

Charlie and Jock had retrieved their dogs from the back yard and seemed to have come to the joint conclusion that all four of them needed to stretch their legs, so they trotted off towards the harbour.

Jemima hustled Dave on up the hill with a speed which probably wouldn’t do anything for either of their blood pressures.

‘I’d better go and let Christopher know I’m all right,’ said Amaryllis. ‘He might hear about this from someone else and start worrying.’

‘Not so fast, young lady,’ said Keith.

‘Young lady? I’m just about old enough to be your mother, you know.’

‘It’s a generic term for a female person,’ said Keith.

Amaryllis shook herself free of his restraining arm. ‘Not in my world, it isn’t. Anyway, I only popped out for a minute to see if Maggie was in the supermarket…’

‘She still hasn’t turned up, then?’

‘No. Christopher went to look round the rest of the building. Perhaps he’s found her by now.’

‘Hmm.’ Keith looked even more worried than before, a reasonable reaction to things falling apart on his watch. ‘What were you saying about El Presidente again? I assume you meant Mr Prestonfield.’

‘I think he saw me with the tablet. He was there when I took it out of my backpack when we were leafleting. Or maybe it was just Young Dave who noticed.’

‘Mr Prestonfield can’t be tied up in this,’ said Keith. ‘His family have lived here for – well, forever. They run everything.’

‘That doesn’t mean there can’t be a bad apple in the barrel,’ said Amaryllis.

‘You’re not exactly impartial, are you?’

‘Should we really be having this conversation in the street?’ she countered as two old women pushed past them. ‘Why don’t we go back down to the Cultural Centre? Then we can kill two birds with one stone.’