5 Frozen in Crime (14 page)

‘He needs to go home and sleep for a week,’ said
Amaryllis once they were safely outside. The Council snow-plough sat in the
middle of the road. ‘I wonder why it’s taken them so long to get round to us.’

‘They may have forgotten about Pitkirtly,’
suggested Christopher. ‘We’re a bit off the beaten track here.’

Amaryllis remembered thinking much the same thing
when she had first arrived in town. Now - well, it wasn’t exactly the centre of
the universe, even now. But she liked living here, and she felt at home, while accepting
that nobody was truly at home in Pitkirtly until at least four generations of
their family had lived there.

‘Come on, this way,’ she said, heading for the
High Street.

‘What now?’ groaned Christopher. Evidently he
thought he deserved to go home and sleep for a week too. We’ll see about that,
thought Amaryllis, who liked to keep him on his toes.

‘We might as well go and have a word with the
jeweller, now we’re so close by,’ she said.

‘We’re not that close by. And we’ll have to come
up the hill again to get home.’

Not for the first time Christopher reminded her of
a whiny toddler. Only he was too big to lift up and physically move to where
you wanted him to be. And much too big to wheel around in a baby buggy, even
one of the ones built like tanks that took up the entire pavement and got in
the way on the bus.

‘But once you get home, you’ll just fall asleep on
the sofa with the 24 hour news channel on. Then you’ll grumble for the rest of
the week about not knowing what’s going on in the world.’

She couldn’t resist harking back to a time when
Christopher had fallen asleep every time the words ‘Eurozone crisis’ were
mentioned on the news, and then couldn’t understand why people were rioting in
Greece the next time he paid attention. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he
could have just let it go and not worried about it, but he was also the kind of
person who prided himself on keeping up with current events. He insisted it was
part of his job, which it wasn’t.

‘I don’t grumble,’ he said with misplaced
confidence in his sunny disposition.

By this time they were halfway down the High
Street and she knew he had already forgotten what they were arguing about. She
smiled to herself. Maybe he could help convince the jeweller that they were on
the level and not scoping the place out for another robbery. Christopher had
such a transparently honest face that people tended to believe him. She knew
they didn’t always feel the same way about her, quite rightly in many cases.

‘What are we going to say to the jeweller?’ he
asked. ‘And how will he know we’re not casing the joint?’

‘I don’t know if people say that any more,’ she
said.

After they had trekked all the way down the High
Street they found the jeweller’s was closed.

Christopher leaned against the wall next to the
shop.

‘That was a waste of time,’ he complained.

‘I thought he might have re-opened by now,’ said
Amaryllis. ‘Oh, well. It’s nearly lunch-time. Last one to the Queen of Scots is
an overweight cissy?’

‘You know that’s always me,’ he said, not moving. ‘What
did you want to ask him about, anyway?’

‘I just wonder if this gold octopus or shark
Constable Burnett mentioned was stolen in the robbery.’

‘That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?’

‘Most brilliant brainwaves are,’ said Amaryllis. ‘And
he was so embarrassed about telling us that, he must think it’s important.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Christopher. ‘He seemed a bit
unsure about it. As if maybe he realised he wasn’t meant to tell us and changed
his story halfway through.’

Amaryllis was sceptical about this theory, and
they bickered about it all the way round to the Queen of Scots.

‘Ah,’ said the landlord as they came in. ‘There
you are. I was just telling Alan here you’d be round in a bit.’

The landlord, whose name they could never remember
although, Amaryllis thought, they probably should after wrecking his Range
Rover, wasn’t usually so loquacious. There was a man she didn’t know standing
at the bar, a glass of whisky in front of him. She hoped they weren’t going to
get dragged into some pointless conversation with him when they could spend the
time deciding where to go next with the shark-octopus clue.

‘Hello,’ she said. Christopher, behind her,
murmured something.

‘Those are the two I was telling you about, Alan,’
said the landlord. ‘Amaryllis Peebles and Christopher Wilson. They go around
solving things. A bit like the Famous Five, except there are only two of them
and they’re not really young enough to play games.’

Oh dear, thought Amaryllis. Alan’s a lawyer and he’s
going to sue us over the Range Rover incident. The landlord certainly didn’t
sound too friendly. Then he suddenly laughed and said, ‘Only joking. They’re
good citizens who help out with catching villains. Them and their friends. I
think Jemima and Dave were in earlier, by the way.’

‘So can we help you, Alan?’ said Amaryllis politely
to the other man, who had been waiting patiently for the landlord to finish
rambling on.

‘Alan’s got a wee jeweller’s shop in the High
Street,’ said the landlord.

‘Fantastic!’ said Amaryllis. ‘Can we get you
another whisky, Alan? Let’s go and sit over there. Near the fire. It’s too cold
to be standing around in a draught.’

Now she understood why Alan looked so miserable.
It must have been a shock to his system to be robbed at gun-point, particularly
on Christmas Eve when things were winding down to the holiday. She steered him
over to the table while Christopher got the drinks in.

It was the perfect opportunity. She wondered if he
actually wanted to hire her as a private investigator or whether the landlord
had just been recommending her as an interested amateur for whom money didn’t
matter. As it happened, the money itself didn’t really matter to her; the main
advantage of being a professional investigator was that it gave her some sort
of standing. Not that it would necessarily be accepted by the police as a good
reason for her to stick her nose into everything, but it made her role
unambiguous. She might just mention that once she’d spoken to him about the
robbery, but without any aggressive marketing.

By the time Christopher brought the drinks over,
they had been through the boring preliminary chat; when she met someone new she
thought this resembled the start of a chess game, with little pawns moving
about before the main action took place. Of course as a chess player she was
also aware that these moves could equally well lead to instant disaster, so she
always tried to keep her wits about her even during casual conversation.

‘Alan was saying there was somebody in the shop
choosing an engagement ring when the robbery started,’ she told Christopher. ‘That
must have given her a terrible fright.’

‘She and her fiancé ducked down behind the
counter,’ said Alan. ‘She gave him a telling-off afterwards for being such a
coward. It sounded as if they were about ready to break off the engagement.
They never did choose a ring,’ he added sadly. ‘I haven’t been open since then.’

‘But they couldn’t really go anywhere else for
one,’ said Amaryllis, trying to comfort him. ‘The roads have been closed all
this time and there isn’t another jeweller’s in Pitkirtly, is there?’

He shook his head somberly. ‘Sam just told me the
snow plough’s broken through. First thing this morning. But I can’t open up the
shop yet anyway - the police are still treating it as a crime scene.’

‘Do you get much business at this time of year?’
said Christopher.

‘It builds up just before Christmas, but this is a
dead time, between Christmas and New Year. I don’t do post-Christmas sales so
people just don’t come in unless they’ve got something special in mind. To be
honest, it doesn’t really make much difference not being able to open up the
shop. I’ve been in a few times just to use the computer though. There are some
things I have to do online or by phone. Speaking to potential buyers, that kind
of thing.’

‘So do you ever find special things for potential
buyers?’ said Amaryllis, seizing the opportunity. ‘Or source things to order?’

She couldn’t imagine he would just have happened
to have a golden octopus among his stock. It wasn’t the kind of thing someone
would want unless they had a reason for it. Personally she found the idea of an
octopus gave her the creeps since the incident in Anatolia. She shivered
slightly just thinking about it.

‘Would you like to sit nearer the fire?’ said
Alan, noticing.

‘No, I’m fine…’

Just answer the question, she was screaming
silently in her mind.

‘Do you have clients in other parts of the
country, or overseas?’ Christopher asked.

‘Yes, a few. It’s the only way to survive these
days. There isn’t much money in Pitkirtly. On the other hand, the business
rates aren’t too bad. If it wasn’t for that and the online trade I might move
to Dunfermline. Or even Edinburgh. Not to the city centre, though, I couldn’t
afford it.’

‘So what exactly happened during the robbery?’ she
prompted. He was a bit of a rambler, but she had learned not to be too
impatient with people like that, at least not outwardly. Sometimes you could
learn a lot from them. ‘The robbers rushed in, the engaged couple dived behind
the counter – what did you do?’

‘I asked them what they wanted,’ he said. ‘I was
surprised at how calm I felt. If anyone had told me I’d have to face a man with
a gun that day, I wouldn’t have bothered going into work… But they weren’t
waving the gun around randomly. The man who had it – well, it looked like he’d
handled one before. I didn’t think he would let it go off by accident or
anything. The other one, the one without the gun, said they wanted me to open
the safe. I couldn’t think of any way to stop them, or fob them off. It
happened too quickly. Maybe I should have worked something out in advance, but
–’

‘But you didn’t know there was going to be an
armed robbery that day,’ said Amaryllis. For a moment it crossed her mind to
wonder if he did know, and if the whole thing was going to turn out to be an
insurance scam, but then she decided to carry on as if she believed him. She
wouldn’t get very far with her questions otherwise.

‘No. I hadn’t even thought about it actually.
Pitkirtly seems like such a sleepy place. Why would anybody have a gun in the
first place?’

‘So you opened the safe,’ said Amaryllis. She had
finished her drink. She was dimly aware of Christopher taking her glass away.

‘Yes. Then they just bundled everything out of the
safe and into a kind of holdall they had with them, and then they took off. It
was all over in minutes. I went after them for a bit, but then I heard the
shots from outside and I - just went back in to see if the engaged couple were
all right. And to ring the police.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Amaryllis, knowing that she
wouldn’t have gone back inside but would have pursued the armed robbers to the
bitter end. ‘Is there anything else you can tell me? And how can I help?’

‘There’s a special piece among the stuff that’s
missing,’ said Alan.

‘An octopus?’

He looked puzzled. ‘No, why should it be an
octopus? It’s a peacock. A gold peacock set with sapphires and emeralds. Said
to have been made by Fabergé - like the eggs, you know.’

‘A peacock? Are you sure it was a peacock and not
a shark?’

‘Of course not! I don’t know much about wildlife
but I do know the difference between an peacock and an octopus and a shark.’

‘What’s so special about it?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Apart
from it being an antique, of course.’

‘That’s just the thing,’ said the jeweller.

‘What?’

Christopher put a drink on the table in front of
her. She was too intent on the conversational chase to take a sip from it.

‘The thing is,’ said Alan, ‘it wasn’t an antique
after all. It was a fake.’

‘Are we talking about the octopus?’ said
Christopher.

‘No!’ said Amaryllis and Alan at the same time.

‘What made you think it was an antique in the
first place?’ said Amaryllis to the jeweller.

‘It’s quite embarrassing really,’ he said.

‘You can tell us anything,’ Amaryllis assured him.

‘It was Lord  Murray of Pitkirtlyhill,’ he said. ‘He
sold it to me personally a few weeks ago. Just appeared in the shop with it. Gave
me a little piece of paper with the alleged provenance written on it in
copperplate, and said it had been handed down in his family. Well, I’d been looking
for something like that for one of my overseas clients so I jumped at it. I
wasn’t quite as careful with my checks on it as I should have been. And I
wouldn’t have wanted to contradict his lordship anyway. Of course, I’d have had
to look at it very closely before sending it to Dubai. But when the robbery
took place I’d only just finished examining it. That morning. And I found I’d
been deceived.’

‘By Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill?’ said Amaryllis.
‘Are you sure it was him?’

‘Well, yes. He had all the paperwork. There was
nobody else it could have been. It was a modern copy - quite a good one, but a
modern technique had been used that wouldn’t have been known to Fabergé, and
the stones weren’t real.’

‘I still don’t know what you want us to do,’ said
Amaryllis.

‘I thought you might be able to look into the Lord
Murray situation. Discreetly. See if he’s been involved in anything else dodgy,
or if this is a one-off. I don’t want to take any action if he’s just some
forgetful old man. Not that he’s all that old, as it happens. I thought maybe
you could get up there and have a word with him. Of course, the weather makes
it a bit more difficult.’

‘Up there? To Old Pitkirtlyhill House?’ said
Amaryllis.