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

El Presidente was smiling as he approached. Amaryllis nodded as politely as she could manage. Young Dave scowled. She suspected he meant to look frightening, but actually he resembled a toddler on the verge of a tantrum.

‘So you’ve got leaflets as well as a poster?’ said El Presidente, sounding surprised. ‘Well done, well done.’

‘Some of the people along here don’t want any more junk mail,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Is that a threat?’ growled Young Dave.

‘Just a friendly warning,’ said Amaryllis. She pushed a leaflet through the door of the nearest house, a bungalow with its entrance straight on to the street. It came straight back out again, fluttering gracefully to the ground and from there on to Young Dave’s shoe.

The letterbox opened slightly and a woman’s voice said, ‘We don’t want your junk mail in here – you’re destroying the planet with your so-called election campaign.’

‘See what I mean?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Dave,’ said El Presidente.

Young Dave stepped forward and pushed one of his leaflets into the letterbox. It was a bit bulkier than the ones Amaryllis and Stewie were delivering, and he had to fold it a couple of times.

They all waited, watching for it to come out again. Nothing happened.

‘Ha!’ said Young Dave.

The front door of the house opened, and a man with tattoos came out, holding the leaflet.

‘Whose is this?’ he demanded.

‘Um,’ said Young Dave, backing away.

Amaryllis grabbed Stewie’s arm, and dragged him into the road. ‘We’ve finished for the day,’ she called back to El Presidente. ‘It’s all yours.’

There was a small fracas on the pavement and Young Dave’s voice was raised in terror. ‘You can’t do that! You...’

‘Don’t look,’ Amaryllis warned Stewie. ‘It’s not a pretty sight.’

Chapter 9 A Visit from the Family

Christopher was glad Keith Burnet hadn’t been in touch with him again. He wasn’t entirely happy with this new role as sounding-board for the police, and he had decided what he really wanted was to lock himself in his office, either with or without the Fotheringham Archive, and not come out until it was all over.

One thing that worried him slightly was that Amaryllis hadn’t been in touch either. In his experience this usually meant she was up to no good and he would be sucked into trouble sooner or later. But she was probably just delivering election leaflets, he told himself. Even she probably wouldn’t be able to cause mayhem doing that. Probably.

Sergeant Macdonald popped in soon after Christopher arrived, to say he could open the Cultural Centre again now. Apparently the scene of crime team wouldn’t need to re-visit the place. They must have a lot more to do after the discovery of the van and the two artists. But that was in the category of things he didn’t want to think about. Bad enough for one young life to be cut short but two at once...

He was grateful to Maggie Munro for interrupting his train of thought at this point.

‘Mr Wilson,’ she said, sticking her head round his office door, ‘would it be all right if my son had a word with you? And his Dad as well,’ she added as an afterthought. It was an odd way of expressing it, almost as if the father and son were not related to her at all.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Christopher, trying not to sound as reluctant as he felt.

What on earth did they want?

Two large men sauntered into the office. For one horrible moment he thought they had come to threaten him, and then Maggie’s smiling face appeared just behind them and he understood this was intended to be a friendly visit.

‘We just came to say thanks,’ said the younger man, holding out his hand for Christopher to shake. ‘For being good to Mum. She was in a bit of a state, thinking she’d be sacked, and then you calmed her right down.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ said Christopher. ‘I don’t really...’

He wanted to explain to them that he didn’t have the power to hire and fire on his own, but he had to clear all human resource issues with the Council department that looked after culture. But he discarded this little speech as being over-complicated. He didn’t like to take the credit for being more benevolent than he actually was, but maybe that was better than confusing the men with too much detail.

The older man shook his hand and said gruffly, ‘Much appreciated.’

‘If you ever need any help with anything, Mr Wilson,’ said Maggie, ‘just say the word. Heavy lifting, transport, anything like that. My boys don’t say very much, but they’re very willing.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Christopher. He almost wished he could think of something suitable for them to do right away, to even up the balance of gratitude, so to speak.

‘We don’t do anything violent, though, mind,’ said the younger one. ‘Or dangerous.’

‘Michael Munro!’ said Maggie. ‘Mr Wilson wouldn’t even think of asking you to do anything that was against the law. So you can put that idea right out of your head.’

She smiled at Christopher. Just as well she didn’t know about some of the things he had been involved in over the years.

The two men shuffled their feet in embarrassment, and the older one said, ‘Now, Maggie.’

‘It’s all right, Mal. He doesn’t mind us... We’ll let you get on, then, Mr Wilson,’ she said.

What was all that about? Once they had left, he shrugged his shoulders and tried to settle down to his self-imposed task of going through the Fotheringham Archive. But for some reason it didn’t hold his interest. Usually there was nothing he enjoyed more than imposing a structure on exactly this kind of collection of rambling letters, personal jottings and scrapbooks of miscellanea, but today he found himself wondering if the police had made any progress, how Amaryllis was getting on with her quest for votes, and even how long it would take for Jock McLean to follow through on his relationship with Tricia and ask her to marry him.

It was the last of these random ideas – they seemed to be scampering around his mind like meerkats and popping up in unexpected places – that made him decide it was time to get out of his office and survey the rest of his domain, if you could call the Cultural Centre by that name. He didn’t venture into the library section nearly as often as he should, partly because he was wary of some of the staff and sensed that not only did he not need to intervene in the running of the place but they would deeply resent if it he attempted to do so.

But today he overcame his hesitancy and strolled on through to the far end of the building.

There was a small flurry as he entered the library. It turned out to have been caused by Zak, who had knocked over a pile of periodicals in his haste to move away from his girl-friend Harriet. Christopher gave him a hand to pick them up. At least it gave him something to do, and broke the ice a bit, especially when he was also able to laugh at Zak’s effusive apologies and efforts to explain why he was there in the first place.

‘I’m glad you got my message about re-opening,’ said Christopher, speaking generally to all the staff who were there.

‘It wasn’t another murder, was it?’ said Mollie, the senior librarian, who as usual had a long-suffering air about her.

‘No, nothing like that,’ Christopher assured her. ‘There was an incident in the Folk Museum. We had to clean up a bit. It’s all over with now.’

‘Mrs Geddes at the Post Office said she saw police cars outside,’ said the assistant who worked part-time in the children’s section. ‘And men in those white suits they put on when there’s been a murder.’

They all stared accusingly at Christopher.

‘Well, yes, there were some police here. But it definitely wasn’t a murder. It was just an – incident... Zak, do you want to come in there with me now to check that it’s all right before we open to the public?’

They made a dignified exit from the library, although he noticed that Mollie, Harriet and the assistant remained in a cluster round the enquiries desk to talk amongst themselves and presumably to share the gossip they had picked up in the Post Office, the wool shop, the supermarket and at other venues up and down the High Street. It crossed his mind to hang about for longer and listen to it all, but once he had told them he and Zak were going to the Folk Museum he was afraid to change his mind in case they saw it as a weakness.

‘It’s a murder, isn’t it?’ said Zak as they entered the museum area of the building.

‘No!’ said Christopher, and almost immediately contradicted himself. ‘Not here anyway. We don’t know yet what happened afterwards. There might have been some deaths...’

‘Some deaths?’ Zak exclaimed. ‘What kind of thing are we talking about here? A serial killer? A mass murderer?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Christopher. He walked Zak through to the second room, which was slightly further away from the library. ‘Something happened in here. The police have been over, as you know, and the scene of crime team. They’ve taken a couple of things away. Everything else is fine.’

‘A couple of things?’ Zak made a circuit of the room, inspecting the contents of the glass display cases. ‘There’s a whole case missing from here – is it in the other room?’

‘I think they’ve had to take that one away with them,’ said Christopher.

‘What did they do with the contents? The Mary Winifred Bell collection of sea-shell creatures?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Christopher admitted. He had made a point of never even looking at the sea-shell creatures, because they had offended his sensibilities so much. He wasn’t sure if they had been part of the general carnage in the display case or not. His feeling was that they would probably have fallen apart if anybody had lifted a finger against them.

‘Oh, no, here they are,’ said Zak, bending to retrieve a plastic box from under a table near the window. ‘I think they’re all in the box. I’ll have to check for damage, of course.’

Christopher cleared his throat. ‘I wonder if we should – um – retire them from display for a while – rearrange the cases a bit to give visitors more room to move about.’

‘Her great-niece comes in every month to see them.’ Zak gave him a disapproving look. ‘She’s a good customer of ours. Always buys a postcard or one of the special pencils. I don’t know what she does with them all, but that’s not the point.’

Christopher felt that the point was that a twenty-first century museum shouldn’t even be giving house-room to things like the sea-shell creatures, but he could see that Zak was about to dig his heels in and make a big fuss, so he let it go for the moment. Presumably the things wouldn’t go back on display until Zak had checked them anyway, so there would be plenty of time to make a stand if he felt strong later on.

‘Surely the fact that she spent her time creating and collecting things like this is symbolic of the status of women in pre-Great War Britain,’ said Zak, who obviously felt there was no time like the present when it came to making a stand about something completely worthless. ‘She could have been studying art or medicine, or joining the police force or setting out to explore new places, but she was sitting at home gluing shells together and painting them... That’s why we have them on display – not because of their intrinsic merit.’

‘Be that as it may,’ said Christopher, still unwilling to concede defeat although he didn’t have the energy to fight. ‘There hasn’t been any serious damage in here and once you’ve got the sea-shell things out of the way we can allow the public to come in.’

Zak clutched the plastic box to his chest and wandered back through to the first room. Christopher had a final glance round and hurried back to join his colleague only when he heard the words ‘Oh, my God!’ echoing through the museum space.

‘What’s happened in here?’ Zak added, staring at the blank space on the wall where the quilt had hung.

‘Oh – the quilt,’ said Christopher, remembering he still hadn’t broken the news to Maisie Sue.

‘Does she know about it yet? She’s going to go nuts,’ said Zak. ‘Where’s it gone?’

‘The police took it away for tests,’ said Christopher.

‘What sort of tests?’

‘It might be evidence of something.’

‘Evidence? How could it be evidence? It wasn’t splashed with blood or anything, was it?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Christopher.

Zak’s frown deepened. Unfortunately he seemed to have inherited his late father’s dark glower as well as his mother’s persistence.

‘You mean it’s worse than that, don’t you?’

‘Christopher! Zak! The door was open so I just came on in,’ said Maisie Sue at that moment, breezing in through the door from the corridor. She took one look at the empty space on the wall where her quilt had been, and gasped.

‘It’s been stolen, hasn’t it? That’s why the police were here!’

‘Not exactly,’ said Christopher.

Zak and Maisie Sue both stared at him accusingly.

‘You’d better sit down,’ he told them. ‘I’m afraid there’s bad news...’

Chapter 10  Relentless Drudgery

There was so much to be done. Paperwork, interviews, liaison with the forensics people, and now the task of fending off reporters too. When Inspector Armstrong had been around, Keith had been more or less unaware of the last of these. Now Sergeant Macdonald seemed to think it was part of his job as well as everything else. He either needed a clone of himself or more hours in the day or both. There wasn’t a lot he could delegate to the two constables who had now been seconded from North Queensferry. He didn’t want to complain too much in case somebody above him got to hear about it and they decided to send a replacement for Inspector Armstrong after all. That was all he needed, somebody who didn’t know the local situation getting involved.

He had so much to do that when he found himself passing the Queen of Scots at about lunch-time he called in for a bite to eat, having first checked there were no media photographers lurking nearby. Although he knew he couldn’t divulge any information on the case, Charlie Smith might have some ideas on how to handle the workload.

It wasn’t too busy in there, and he didn’t recognise any of the customers anyway, which made him feel a bit better about not being caught out, although Charlie’s advice was rather disappointing.

‘You can’t,’ Charlie told him when he asked about getting through all the work. ‘You’ll only burn yourself out trying to keep up. You just have to prioritise, and resign yourself to the fact that some of it doesn’t get done at all.’

‘But what about the press?’ said Keith, keeping his voice down in case one of the strangers in the bar whipped out a reporter’s notebook and started taking notes.

‘Don’t look so furtive – if there’s any of them in here, you’ll only attract attention.’ Charlie’s gaze swept round the room. ‘No – I don’t see anybody I know.’

‘They’ll have changed since your time – I mean, you know...’

‘Come on, it’s not that long since I left the force. You can always spot a journalist a mile away. They’ve got that look about them.’

The dog, hidden behind the bar as usual, gave a faint growl.

‘You see – he agrees with me,’ said Charlie fondly.

‘It didn’t sound like that,’ said Keith.

‘So you’re saying I don’t understand my own dog, are you?’

Keith shifted from one foot to the other uneasily. He knew how attached Charlie was to his scruffy mongrel.

‘He’s not a mongrel, anyway,’ said Charlie, almost as if he had retained the uncanny ability to read people’s thoughts that he had previously displayed during the bacon roll incident that had rocked the equanimity of the entire Pitkirtly force.

‘I didn’t say...’

Jemima and Dave came into the bar. Oh, good, now he would find out from them how the investigation was going.

‘How are you doing?’ he enquired casually.

‘We’re fine,’ said Jemima. ‘Have you got anywhere with finding out who ruined Maisie Sue’s quilt?’

‘I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about that,’ said Charlie, beginning to pour Dave’s pint.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Jemima with a sigh. ‘Do you know who was in the van in the water, then?’

‘Not yet,’ said Keith. ‘Do you?’

‘Of course not,’ she said indignantly. ‘That’s up to you to find out, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Keith.

‘How did it get there?’ said Jemima.

‘It was forced off the road by a Fiat Panda!’ said Dave, and roared with laughter.

‘If you know something pertaining to the incident I hope you’re planning to share it with the police, Mr Douglas,’ said Keith. ‘Otherwise you’re going to be getting into water too – the hot kind.’

‘I think David was joking,’ said Jemima. ‘Even if it wasn’t very funny,’ she added with a glare at her husband. ‘He doesn’t know anything. About your case, I mean.’

‘That’s told me,’ said an unrepentant Dave.

‘You know I can’t divulge anything,’ Keith warned them. ‘Don’t even ask me about it.’

It was time to go. He scooped up the last quarter of his sandwich to eat on the way.

‘You’ll give yourself indigestion eating while you walk!’ Jemima called after him.

‘There’ll be a Panda driver behind this - you know it makes sense,’ Dave added.

‘Don’t overdo it!’ shouted Charlie as Keith stuffed the last of the sandwich in his mouth and got on his bike.

As he cycled up the road, having decided to return to the police station by a different route from the way he had come to confuse any stray journalists who might decide to try the Queen of Scots for information, he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He brought the bike to a standstill just a bit further on and glanced back. He had thought someone ducked into the doorway of the Petrellis’ restaurant as he passed just now.

But the Petrellis were as respectable as could be now that the mother of the family ran the place herself, with occasional help from her son, Giancarlo. Her husband and daughter were both in prison for assorted crimes, but Keith knew that she had more or less disowned them both and that this had made her more determined than ever to behave in a way that was above suspicion. She had even been known to come round to the police station with free lasagne on special occasions.

He could eat a free lasagne right now. He wondered if she had any left over from lunchtime. But there was paperwork on his desk that had risen almost high enough to qualify as a new Munro, and he had promised to go over to Rosyth later in the afternoon to interview the artists’ parents, although he would be surprised if he got any sense out of them today.

He pedalled harder as he got going again. Somebody could have ducked into the doorway for one of any number of reasons. He couldn’t think of one off the top of his head, but that was only because his imagination was dulled from overwork. It might even have been a cat, wanting to get well out of the way of the oncoming bicycle.

‘There was a call for you from Edinburgh,’ said Sergeant Macdonald as he wheeled his bike into the police station. ‘You’d better put that thing in a safe place. We don’t want members of the public falling over it.’

Damn! Today was one of the days when the police station was due to be briefly open for public enquiries and complaints. He knew Sergeant Macdonald would be busy with all that, and so unavailable to help with anything else. The Sergeant should really have put a constable on the desk instead, but for some reason the old man liked dealing with the public, unlike almost everybody else around here. He sometimes claimed it was better than watching stand-up comedy, but as Keith didn’t like stand-up comedy either, that wasn’t saying much.

Keith stood the bike against the wall in the corridor that led to the cells, currently unoccupied as it was a while since the last Pitkirtly crime wave.

He remembered what the Sergeant had said, and returned to the front desk to follow up on it.

‘A call from Edinburgh?’

‘They said they’d call you back. Something to do with the bodies in the van.’

‘Of course it was. They didn’t say anything else, did they?’

‘That’s all... You off to Rosyth this afternoon?’

‘Yes, later on. The North Queensferry lot are bringing a car over for me.’

‘Better than walking.’

‘Aye.’

Keith didn’t have time to make much of a dent in the paperwork. It was almost all to do with what he thought of as the case of the vanishing artists, although giving it that name even in his own mind seemed to trivialise it to the level of the television mystery shows he refused to watch, or the novels he refused to read. Not that he would have time for either of these pursuits in the foreseeable future, the way the case was shaping up.

He was glad he didn’t have to write the scripts for one of these shows. He had trouble even making enough sense of his notes to write up a reasonable report either on the scene in the Folk Museum or on the discovery of the van.

However, he would rather have spent all night working on the notes than one hour with the bereaved parents in Rosyth.

Bert Wishart, the father, who had evidently been drinking steadily since the day before, fell into Keith’s arms sobbing as he went in through their front door. The mother, Cynthia, was dry-eyed, frowning, wearing rubber gloves and an apron, and holding a can of some sort of toxic cleaning spray in one hand and a pink and white cloth in the other. She seemed to be disinfecting every flat surface. It looked methodical until he noticed she was returning to the same surfaces again and again in rotation.

She looked at Keith’s boots with disfavour.

‘Could you leave them on the door-mat? Bert, can you tell him to leave them on the door-mat? I won’t have men treading dirt through here.’

Keith didn’t want to upset her any more than necessary, so he disengaged himself from Bert, which took a couple of minutes, and obediently put his boots just inside the front door. He was glad Sergeant Macdonald wasn’t around to see him in his socks, which had been a surprise present from Amaryllis and had Christmas elf motifs knitted into them at intervals. He wasn’t sure if she had knitted them herself or not. He wouldn’t even have worn them if he had any other option, but what with all that was going on he hadn’t had time to run the washing-machine this week.

Cynthia glared at the socks, and said, ‘You can sit down on that chair, but don’t touch anything.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Wishart,’ said Keith said meekly. He was sure his driver, a constable from North Queensferry, was laughing at him behind his back. There were some snuffling sounds.

‘If you’re getting a cold you’d better wait outside,’ Bert’s wife told him. ‘We don’t want any germs in here, not with what’s just happened.’

‘I’m afraid there have to be two of us here, Mrs Wishart,’ Keith said. ‘Regulations.’

She sprayed the coffee table next to his chair and rubbed away at it with the pink and white cloth.

‘Give us a break, Cynth,’ mumbled her husband, slumping into an armchair near the window. ‘That stuff’s going to kill us all.’

‘Stop it, Bert! Just – stop it!’ said his wife sharply. ‘And don’t call me that either.’

Keith wondered if it was worth his while even coming here. The chances of conducting any kind of interview with those two seemed fairly remote. No wonder their kids had turned to art.

‘What made your son and daughter take up art?’ he enquired, trying to sound casual. ‘Did their teachers encourage them at school?’

‘Well,’ said Cynthia Wishart, pausing for a moment after spraying the window-sill. Her husband coughed ostentatiously, no doubt in a wordless protest about the fumes. She rubbed at an invisible mark. ‘There was that one art teacher. He took them to a big gallery. In Edinburgh or Glasgow – I can’t remember which. They hadn’t really been interested up to then, but I think they saw that modern video art, and they got the idea they could do it themselves.’ She sounded sceptical. ‘At least they didn’t get the house messed up with paint though.’

‘The equipment cost an arm and a leg,’ grumbled Bert. ‘Any more whisky?’

‘There’s a bottle in the cupboard by the sink,’ said his wife shortly. ‘No more after that.’

‘Vodka?’

‘You’ve had all that.’

‘What kind of equipment?’ said Keith.

Bert was halfway out of his chair. He straightened up before replying. ‘All sorts. Cameras, computers, so on. God knows how much it all cost.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘They used to take it out in the van with them, so it’s probably still there now,’ said Cynthia. She blinked. ‘Will it still work? After being in the water?’

Her legs suddenly seemed to give way under her, and she began to crumple. Showing unexpectedly good reflexes for somebody who had been drinking, Bert caught her and shoved her into the chair he had just vacated. She doubled up and put her head on her knees.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Wishart?’

It was the usual silly kind of question. She obviously wasn’t all right and probably never would be again.

‘Just leave her,’ said Bert. ‘She’ll be herself again in a minute.’ He stared at Keith as if wondering who he was, and added, ‘I think there’s some of it still in his bedroom. Do you want to have a look?’

‘We might need to take it away,’ said Keith hesitantly.

‘Take anything you want,’ said Bert. ‘Is there any sign of our girl?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Find her,’ said Bert, and lurched through a doorway, hanging on to the frame to keep himself upright.

Half an hour later, after getting the parents to sign for the equipment they had found in the boy’s room, Keith was on his way back to Pitkirtly with the now much more sober constable.

‘You’d better get all that stuff to the forensics people,’ said the constable.

‘They can come and get it themselves if they want it. If there’s anything on here that might help us to find the girl, I’m going to find it first.’

Despite his bravado, Keith had no idea where he was planning to start looking for the girl. To be honest, he had hardly given her a thought while he had been wallowing in self-pity over his workload. She hadn’t been found in the van, that was all he knew. If she had somehow come out of the van and landed in the water, the divers would probably have found her – if she hadn’t been washed away by the overnight tide. If she had come out of the van before it got into the water, then the search teams who had scoured the road and the verges would have found some trace at least. It was anybody’s guess where she had got to, and whether she was alive or dead.