7 A Tasteful Crime (15 page)

‘A spanner?
In the Cultural Centre?’

‘No, not with a spanner,’ Jock muttered.
‘I was just messing about.’

Darren gave him a look.
‘Well, at least they can’t pin this one on my Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s got a cast-iron alibi. You can’t get a better alibi than being in custody, can you?’

‘We don’t know when
it happened,’ said Jock. He didn’t like pointing this out, but he didn’t want the boy getting his hopes up either.

‘Was that woman poisoned too?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough. Christopher’s there. The police have just arrived.’

‘So there’s nothing we can do again,’ said Darren, kicking the kerb. Jock hoped he was responsible for buying his own
shoes these days.

‘The police
here are going to be a bit over-stretched,’ Jock commented as they walked on down the road. ‘They’ll probably call in reinforcements.’

Darren glowered. ‘That means people who don’t know their way about. They’ll pull in anybody they don’t like the look of.
Me, for instance.’

‘Let’s go to the Queen of Scots,’ said Jock.

Darren looked at his watch. ‘Will it be open?’

‘We can get Charlie to let us in.’

But they had only just got down to the Queen of Scots when Jock’s phone went off again. Three times in one day! This was beyond a joke. He decided he would leave it at home in future – that usually worked well for Christopher.

‘Do you know where
Penelope is? I can’t get her on the phone,’ said Christopher in an oddly quiet voice – almost a whisper.

‘What do you want her for?’

‘I need her help. I think I’m about to get arrested.’

‘For goodness’ sake!’ said Jock. ‘Penelope won’t be able to help with that. She’ll just make things worse. Have you tried Amaryllis?’

‘I need an alibi,’ said Christopher in an even lower voice. ‘For yesterday evening.’

‘Wouldn’t Zak do?’

‘He was out with his girl-friend. She’s one of the Folk Museum volunteers – Hattie.’

‘What sort of a name is that?’ said Jock.

Once again Christopher stopped speaking without saying goodbye. He really wasn’t himself. Normally he had excellent manners, by modern standards. But maybe the police had knocked the phone out of his hand before dragging him off, handcuffed and pleading.

‘What was that?’ said Darren.

Jock groaned. ‘We’ve got to go and find Penelope and take her round to the police station to give him an alibi... It’s going to be awful crowded in there at this rate.’

Chapter 19 Outrageous of Pitkirtly

It took Amaryllis a while to think of something outrageous to do. Another sign of impending old age! She wished she had realised sooner that this was happening to her. It might not have got to this point if she had done something about it.

It might have been better to get started during the hours of darkness, but doing
something outrageous in daylight was of course more of a challenge, so in a way she welcomed all the difficulties. However it was very likely she would be seen and caught, or at least tracked down later. That was when she thought of donning a disguise, and it was at that point she realised there were probably at least fifty ready-made disguises lying around in the Cultural Centre at this very moment, just waiting to be appropriated by some unscrupulous person.

She wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to appear in public dressed as a banana, or a courgette, or a cauliflower, but that was the beauty of it, in a way. Nobody would know it was her, or at least not unless they got quite close, which she didn’t intend them to.

The one flaw in the plan – or at least the only flaw she was willing to admit – was that it involved getting into the Cultural Centre without anyone seeing her. In normal circumstances this would have been almost impossible. Amaryllis had asked Christopher on several occasions why he had set up such stringent security, and he always said the Council had made him do it, but really she thought it was mainly an overreaction to what had happened to Jemima’s cousin in the fire exit corridor.

Now she was hoping security had been relaxed somewhat for the benefit of the television crews. Perhaps alarms had been switched off, or people had forgotten to switch them on, or the
TV people had been allowed to go in and out through the fire exit as a special concession... Or, she thought, hope rising as she headed down to the building by a circuitous route, the librarians needed to go in and out that way during their efforts to tidy up, and they would leave it open for a while during this process. If she hadn’t been trying to be unobtrusive in her approach, she might have hopped, skipped and jumped her way towards the place.

The circuitous route took her round the back of the shops on the High Street. It must be trade waste collection day, for she narrowly escaped being mown down by a
reversing truck, the kind that clanked and groaned and creaked as it swallowed the rubbish. A man in a hi-vis vest yelled at her.

Having achieved her goal without being flattened, Amaryllis could see that t
here was something going on round at the front of the Cultural Centre, and she saw blue flashing lights reflected in the windows of the nearby supermarket. If the police were searching the place at this very moment then it would be more difficult to get in, but nothing was impossible. She found her heart beating faster, almost as if it had been shocked back into its natural rhythm after all the months of torpor when she had kept to the letter of the law.

Moving cautiously, though
not over-cautiously, which would have been conspicuous in itself, she approached the area by the fire exit, where the bins were kept.

She moved right up to the door and tried to open it with a gentle pressure on the handle. It was locked.

It was as she glanced round to see if anyone was watching that she noticed a piece of yellow fleecy fabric trailing out of the top of one of the giant wheelie-bins. Surely they hadn’t just thrown away the costumes? That seemed amazingly profligate, even for a television company. But even if it was just one, that would be enough...

Amaryllis opened the bin and peered in. A banana outfit sat on top of the other rubbish, folded neatly. It was the stalk at the top
, attached to a sort of hood, that had been left hanging out. Someone had been in a hurry.

She lifted it out and held it up against herself to see if it might fit. She knew the costumes had really been meant for children to wear, but she wasn’t all that big and she might be able to squeeze into it.

There was blood on it. Anyone who wasn’t quite so used to seeing blood might have dropped the costume on the ground and gone into hysterics. Amaryllis didn’t do either of these things. She looked again at the rust-coloured stain. She sniffed at it to be sure it wasn’t paint, although she had been in close proximity to dried blood often enough to be reasonably sure of identifying it. Perhaps one of the children from the procession had had a nosebleed. Or they had been injured in the fighting between the fruit and vegetable contingent and the church people. It would be quite reasonable to throw the outfit in the bin once that happened.

But putting
this together with the blue lights at the front of the building and the fact that someone had already died, it felt suspicious.

Amaryllis had a brief struggle with her conscience. Annoyingly, her conscience won. Now she knew she had been spending too much time with Christopher.
She sighed, abandoning her outrageous project for the day.

Lugging the banana suit with her, she made her way round to the car park and the front door of the Cultural Centre. She was just in time to see Christopher being put into a police car and driven off at speed.
She waved at the driver and shouted ‘Hey!’ but it didn’t do any good.

There was an ambulance at the front of the building too, and a police constable on guard. In the only stroke of luck she had experienced
so far that day, he turned out to be Keith Burnet.

‘I thought you might be interested in this,’ she said to him, holding up the banana suit with the bloodstain to the front.

‘Well, I’m not,’ said Keith sharply, not even looking at it. ‘You can take it away again.’

‘That’s not very nice,’ she said. ‘And you’re going to get into terrible trouble if you don’t take me seriously.’

He sighed. ‘Not half as much trouble as you’ll get into for wasting police time – again. Just get lost before I tell Inspector Armstrong.’

‘Ha!’ said Amaryllis. ‘There’s a bloodstain on
it. What do you think of that?’

She pointed to the rusty mark and waited.

‘So what?’ said Keith.

She began to count the seconds until he changed his tune. She got up to five.

‘Wait a minute! Let me see that!’ He peered at the stain without touching anything. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Round the back.
In the bins.’

‘You shouldn’t even have touched it. Now you’ll have contaminated the evidence and I’ll be the one who gets into trouble.’

‘You should have found it first, then,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Have you got a bin-bag or something I can put it in? I think it’s starting to rain.’

He disappeared into the building for a few moments and came out with a black bag.

‘Put it in here. You can come up to the station later on and give us a DNA sample.’

‘I think you’ll find my DNA is already on file,’ said Amaryllis, squashing the banana suit into the bag.

‘I’m not surprised, the number of times you’ve been in trouble,’ he muttered.

‘I’m just a helpful member of the public,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to m
iss any of the evidence. The bin-men are on their way just now. This could have disappeared without trace. There might even be more evidence round the back for all you know.'

‘Just out of curiosity,’ he said, ‘what makes you think this could be evidence? There wasn’t any blood in the McLaughlin case.’

‘Something else has happened since then, hasn’t it?’ she challenged him.

‘Can’t tell you that,’ he said.
‘More than my job’s worth.’

The next moment he leaned forward and said in an undertone, 'Can you keep an eye on the door for a minute? I'd better go and put some crime
scene tape round the bins. Even if there isn't anything there, I don't want to get into trouble over letting evidence get carted off under my nose... Just don't let anybody wander into the building. There are some - things - going on in there. There are people who won't be very pleased if they get interrupted.'

'Are you sure you want to trust me with this vital task?' said Amaryllis.

He laughed as he disappeared round the corner. 'Just don't tell anybody I did, that's all.'

She positioned herself outside the front door and stood there clutching the black bag with the banana suit in it. Of course she should really rush up to the police station and get them to let Christopher go. But, apart from the fact that she knew he was completely incapable of committing any crime more serious than dropping litter - and he would only do that if he had a cast-iron motive, and probably one that involved the public good - she remembered she had been quite miffed with him
when he had appeared to harbour feelings for Deirdre. Perhaps a few hours in police custody would cure him of that.

But why on earth had he been taken away in a police car at all? Something was going on here, and she wouldn't rest until she found out
what it was. The rain was getting heavier in any case, and she didn’t think she should risk the evidence getting wet. She turned and peered in at the door. The foyer looked dark and deserted. Then there was a sound from further inside the building, and as she watched, a trolley came into view, wheeled by two paramedics. On the trolley was something she recognised as a body-bag, and it looked very much as if it was occupied. Another death?

Putting down the black bag and pushing it towards the corner of the foyer with her foot, s
he held the door open for the trolley to get through.

'Where's Constable Burnet gone?' said one of the paramedics suspiciously as they emerged into the open.

'I've sent him round the back to investigate a suspicious package,' said Amaryllis. She had no idea if they would accept her without question as Keith Burnet's superior officer or not. She didn't really care. Their job wasn't to expose fake police officers, but to remove the body, if that was indeed what was on the trolley.

'Where are you going with that?' she asked, as casually as she could.

The paramedic who had asked about Constable Burnet gave her another suspicious look. 'The usual place,' he said.

'Along to the police mortuary at Rosyth,' said the other one. 'The doctor wasn't sure if the blow on the head killed her, or the shelves.
Or something else again. She’s got swelling and distortion of the features. As if she’d been poisoned.’

Amaryllis nearly questioned this.
Poisoned as well as hit on the head? And how could shelves kill someone? Did they suspect Christopher of administering the poison or the blow on the head? She came to her senses just in time and said with a shrug, 'The knock on the head accounts for the blood, then.'