7 A Tasteful Crime (25 page)

‘Ha!’ said Jock. ‘What do you think they would do with it?’

‘You’ve been spending too much time with Amaryllis,’ Christopher retorted.

‘Better that than spending it with Deirdre!’ said Jock.

‘Do you think I even wanted to spend time with Deirdre?’

Jock shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe.’

Christopher noticed
Zak was watching them tolerantly, like a parent waiting for two children to stop squabbling before he intervened and made them do something sensible, such as their homework.

‘Did you know Amaryllis is following Charlotte
at this very moment?’ said Christopher. ‘She could be in danger. What if she has to deal with Charlotte and Ken both at once? It looks as if they might have killed twice already, not to mention running over Giancarlo.’

‘Danger?
Amaryllis?’ said Jock with a laugh. ‘She could take out both of them with one hand tied behind her back.’

‘How do you know she’s following Charlotte?’ said Zak, taking a
final swig of his smoothie to wash last few crumbs of the falafel sub down.

‘She phoned me while I was on the bus.
From a cupboard. I tried to get her to meet me at the bus stop but I didn’t really expect her to turn up. And she didn’t.’

The three of them stared at each other. Jock thought he detected the beginnings of alarm in the eyes of both the others. ‘
Maybe there was a mix-up over which bus stop you meant. She’ll be fine,’ he said, in an effort to reassure them all.

‘Yes,’ said Christopher.
‘She’ll be fine.’

Zak nodded.

The nagging worry at the back of Jock’s mind seemed to be reflected in Christopher’s and Zak’s eyes. Yes, Amaryllis would be fine. Unless she wasn’t.

‘Do you think they’re the ones who killed Eric and Maria?’ said Christopher. ‘Did they get voted “most likely to
go on a murderous rampage” on the school website or something?’

‘I don’t think you get that sort of thing on Scottish school websites,’ said Zak.

Chapter
33 Jock sorts things out

The three of them rose as one, scraping their chairs back in a cacophony of panic.

‘I’ll go and settle up,’ said Jock.

‘You’ve already paid,’ said Zak.

‘Oh, yes, so
I have.’

On the way outside, Christopher felt something tugging at his sleeve.

‘Are you from that television company?’ said one of the old women from the next table. Her eyes gleamed with curiosity.

‘Certainly not!’ he said indignantly. ‘I live here.’

He heard them twittering and giggling to each other as he escaped.

Once outside they
looked up and down the High Street. Everything seemed perfectly normal.

‘We’d better split up and divide the town amongst us,’ said Zak. When had he suddenly grown up and started to take charge of things, Jock wondered, conscious that he himself was acting more and more like a petulant schoolboy as he got older. ‘I’ll go up to the hotel first in case they’ve headed back there.’

Christopher sighed heavily. ‘I suppose I’d better take the Cultural Centre. She wasn’t there the last time I looked, but...’

‘Why don’t you try her mobile?’ said Zak.

‘I’ll go down to the river front and the Queen of Scots,’ said Jock.

‘Ha! That’s a surprise,’ said Christopher.

Jock gave him a hurt look. It wasn’t like Christopher to snap like that – but then, he was probably much more worried about Amaryllis than he wanted anybody to know.

‘Sorry – I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,’ said Christopher in a reversion to his usual self. ‘I’ll ring her mobile before I do anything else.’

He took out his phone and began the process of fiddling about clumsily until he found the number and worked out how to dial it. Jock had seen him do this before and been driven mad, so there was no need to watch the whole operation again. He gave Christopher a quick nod, then turned and walked up the hill. Zak was already ahead of him, bounding along as only a young person could. He would probably be the one to find her.

Jock hesitated at the top of one of the old cobbled wynds that led towards the river front and the harbour. Should he go this way, or would it be quicker to walk a bit further up the hill and
go round by the less bumpy route? What if Amaryllis’s life depended on his decision?

He resigned himself to
life-threatening injury on the cobbles, and plunged down through the wynd.

Knowing her, she was probably making her way tortuously across garden walls and up and down back staircases in an effort not to be seen, but he wasn’t planning to do that. He did, however, glance to left and right as he went, hoping for a glimpse of her
in one of the little gardens. If she didn’t want to be spotted there was no way he would get a sighting, but he didn’t want to miss something obvious.

He arrived at t
he river front without incident, but when he peered out from the end of the wynd he couldn’t see very much because of a big van that was parked in a position that if it wasn’t illegal, certainly should have been. It was partly blocking the narrow entrance. He was just about to walk round it and cross the river front road to see if he could get a better view somehow, when he remembered where he had seen the van before, or one very like it. The television company logo on the side helped to jog his memory.

Everything moved very fast from that moment
on.

He saw something on the ground and picked it up. He recognised Amaryllis’s mobile phone only because she had put a sticker on the back saying ‘Hands off’ with a picture of a crossed-out hand.

Doors banged at the front of the vehicle as he stood there, and then the engine gave a growl.

The
van’s rear doors weren’t quite closed. Before he could advise himself not to do anything silly, he found he had wrenched one of them open and clawed and heaved until he was inside. Instinctively he lunged forward into a far corner where it was dark. Behind him somebody slammed the loose door shut, and soon after that the van started moving with a jolt that sent him crashing down on to something with sharp angles. There were various aches and pains in his limbs and joints that hadn’t all been there before.

Jock had
never thought of himself as a heroic man of action, and he was somewhat alarmed by this whole sequence of events. He hoped he would find Amaryllis and that she would be in a fit state to sort out everything with one blow from her hand – or her foot, if that was how she operated. Or from a hidden knife she had about her person, for that matter. He knew she was much better qualified to foil the efforts of villains than he was.

His eyes gradually got used to the dark interior of the van. He began to be able to distinguish shapes, although many of them were unfamiliar. He guessed that they were pieces of cameras and related equipment he had never even thought about before.

The mobile phone! It was still in his hand. Assuming it had survived all the clawing and heaving and crashing, he could use it to get help. If only he had been intelligent enough to get the registration number of the van... On the other hand, how many vans did this particular television company have? Probably only enough to count on the fingers of one hand, if that. The police shouldn’t have any difficulty tracking them all down.

He crouched down in a corner and managed to get the phone to switch on, more by luck than judgement. Fortunately the screen lit up and he could see the buttons well enough to enter the emergency number.

Just as he got a reply at the other end of the line, he heard a groan nearby. The start he gave caused him to drop the phone. As he scrabbled around on the floor of the van for it, he tried to listen for more signs that he was sharing the space with somebody else. Or something else. He tried not to imagine the vicious guard dog Charlotte and Ken might have installed there to guard their equipment.

‘Hello, caller?
Which service do you require? Hello?’

Jock wanted to tell the woman to speak a bit more quietly, but he could tell she had been trained to make sure she was audible. To make up for her bright tone, he whispered into the phone.

‘Police, please.’

‘Connecting you now.
Please hold.’

He tried to marshal his thoughts so that he would be ready with a coherent explanation, but when it came to the point
, after giving his name, all he could say was, ‘I need help... I’m in a van. Somewhere in Pitkirtly – well, we could be heading out of town by now for all I know. It’s a television company van.’

‘Is there any immediate danger to life and limb?’

‘There might be. If they find me in here... I think somebody I know is already in danger.’

‘Are you talking about Miss Amaryllis Peebles, by any chance?’

‘How did you know that?’ he said indignantly, forgetting to whisper.

‘We have our methods, sir.
Stay where you are and we’ll find you.’

‘Over and out,’ whispered Jock.

He had two almost simultaneous realisations just as he stopped speaking. The van had come to a halt. And something had slithered over to him and was pawing at him.

He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping irrationally to shut out the image in his head of the slavering hound
– or was it a huge snake that would wind itself round him, squeezing and... The mental picture dissolved as a familiar voice intruded on his thoughts.

‘Get ready to go for them when they open the doors.’

He opened his eyes and looked down.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ hissed Amaryllis, who was lying in front of him in a peculiar position. ‘Quick –
cut the rope on my wrists first. They’ll be at the door in seconds.’

‘The police are on their way,’ he whispered, leaning down to investigate
the bonds that held her wrists and ankles. He hoped his arthritic fingers could loosen them speedily enough.

She heaved a sigh.
‘Knife in my right hand jacket pocket.’

He could manage that. He
found the knife and got to work quickly.

‘Oh, yes, and we know how fast and efficient the
local police are, don’t we?’ Amaryllis continued as he freed her. ‘There are probably five different forms to fill out before they even leave the station.’

‘Is it Charlotte and Ken?’ said Jock, wanting to hear that his research efforts hadn’t been wasted.

‘Of course. Who else would it be?’ she said, rubbing at her ankles. ‘Give me the knife. At least I won’t stab myself in the chest with it.’

‘Neither will
I,’ said Jock, summoning up a burst of indignation.

The doors rattled,
and a patch of grey twilight appeared. Two dark figures were framed against it.

‘Oh dear,
oh dear,’ said Ken. ‘What have we here?’

‘There’s no need to speak like a movie villain,’ said Charlotte sharply.

‘Oh, I think there is,’ said Amaryllis, not moving an inch. ‘Otherwise how would we know who the baddies were?’

‘You’ll find that out soon enough,’ said Charlotte.
‘Let’s get them out, Ken.’

The van rocked as Ken clambered aboard.

‘Now,’ said Amaryllis quietly. ‘Follow me.’

She hurled herself forward and, catching Ken off balance, caused him to fall backwards off the van.
Charlotte side-stepped neatly at the last minute, and in the fading light Jock saw the thing in her hand.

‘Amaryllis!’ said somebody outside. Giancarlo Petrelli, still limping, had appeared just behind Charlotte, and grabbed at her arm, jerking it upwards.

Jock for his part moved swiftly forward, pushing Amaryllis down and aside and plunging to the floor just as the gunshot echoed in the hollow interior of the van. For a moment he lay there, wondering if either of them had been fatally wounded. He didn’t feel any pain, which he thought might not be a good sign, but almost immediately all his previous aches and pains started up again in unison. Flinging himself around wasn’t a very good idea at his age, but on the other hand it was better than being shot.

Amaryllis lay still. Charlotte
shook off Giancarlo, giving him a vicious dig in the ribs with her elbow, and was in the process of clambering up to investigate when Amaryllis suddenly sprang to life and gave her a powerful shove, which sent her flying after her brother.

‘The thing about baddies,’ Amaryllis explained breathlessly to Jock as she took a leap off the van to see to the twins, ‘is that they never learn from each other’s mistakes.’

Jock fought against a strong compulsion to lie where he was and play dead, but a sense of obligation he didn’t know he had forced him to get up and follow her.

She stood over them like a warrior queen, now brandishing the gun in one hand and the knife in the other. Jock had never admired anybody so
much in his life. Of course, she would never let the rest of them forget her heroism, but that was a price well worth paying just to experience this moment of euphoria. He could tell that Giancarlo, who had got back on his feet and was staring at her with an expression that doubtless mirrored Jock’s, felt the same.