Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10) (18 page)

Chapter 31 Amaryllis and her imagination

Amaryllis had been waiting for Christopher to notice the coffee machine and comment on it. She hadn’t realised until today that Charlie had bought it from Mrs Petrelli. Oh, well, better that than leaving it to rust. She gave a sigh which she hoped no-one would notice.

Re-focussing on the matter at hand, she said to Keith, ‘While you’ve been wasting time chasing me about and waiting for someone else to be murdered, Jemima’s been co-ordinating a research project.’

‘I wasn’t wasting time! There were things to be done... We’ve got our own research resources, you know. And then there were forensics to be analysed.’ Keith paused and glared at her. After a moment he blinked. It had perhaps struck him that he didn’t need to defend his actions to her. He leaned forward and stared once again at the papers on the table. ‘Anything useful?’

Jemima coughed once, politely. ‘We’ve found some background information about the Blyth-Sheridans.’

‘Have you, indeed? Maybe we’d better compare notes.’

‘We think they were in hiding, or at least trying not to be noticed,’ said Jemima. Keith nodded. Obviously emboldened, she went on, ‘There was a sister, Madeleine, who was in prison. And somebody arranged for the alpacas to be delivered and for the press to be there, to draw attention to them.’

‘We knew about Madeleine Blyth-Sheridan, of course,’ said Keith. ‘She killed the caretaker during a robbery at a big house along the coast a bit. Her lawyer made out it was an accident. The jewellery that was stolen wasn’t recovered. We’ve also established that Mr Anderson was the investigator employed by the insurance company at that time, but he didn’t get anywhere with the case.’

‘Quite a coincidence that he ended up here,’ said Amaryllis, although she didn’t generally believe in coincidence, especially when jewel theft and death were involved.

Keith shook his head. ‘No. Not a coincidence. He became obsessed with the case, and he eventually left the company to follow it up on his own. He bought the land for the garden centre because it was next to the Blyth-Sheridans’ house. He was watching them – mostly to see if Madeleine turned up there, but partly because he was suspicious of the other two.’

‘Has he admitted all that?’ said Amaryllis.

‘He has now,’ said Keith. ‘It took us a few attempts to get it out of him, though... That’s what we’ve been wasting our time on, when you thought we were just doing our nails.’

Amaryllis glanced inadvertently at his nails, which were quite neatly trimmed but not all that fancy. She wondered if she could make him blush too.

‘Did you know he’s been meeting Madeleine on the beach, though?’ she asked.

Keith looked genuinely taken aback for a moment. ‘Madeleine?’

‘Did you know she was here at all?’ said Amaryllis.

‘We saw her when she came in voluntarily to identify the bodies,’ said Keith. ‘We didn’t know she and Anderson had interacted at all... That’s different. I’d better put a call out. Back in a minute.’

He went outside, presumably to make the call that would alert colleagues throughout Scotland to keep an eye out for Madeleine Blyth-Sheridan. Amaryllis doubted whether the woman had left Pitkirtly, or at least not until after she had seen to Mr Anderson.

‘You’d think they’d have put a tail on him,’ said Amaryllis.

Charlie gave a slight nod, and she knew he agreed with her, but was too loyal to Keith and other former colleagues to say so. ‘Maybe they didn’t have the manpower,’ he suggested. ‘It does happen. There’s been a big Lughnasa festival on somewhere inland – they’ll have been over-stretched again.’

‘You’d think they’d prioritise a murder case though,’ said Christopher.

‘What’s Lughnasa?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Better ask Maisie Sue when she gets back from her holidays,’ said Jock. ‘She’s bound to know. It sounds like one of those Celtic things of hers.’

‘I wouldn’t say they were hers exactly,’ Jemima pointed out. ‘We’re probably more Celtic than she is, even if we don’t know all the fancy words for things.’

‘Any chance of another pint, Charlie?’ said Dave.

Charlie glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get ready for the tea-time rush, I suppose. Come over to the bar and I’ll get you a refill. Anybody else?’

Dave, Christopher, Jock and the dog accompanied Charlie to the bar.

‘Where did she get help, I wonder?’ Amaryllis mused. ‘We all thought Mr Anderson was in cahoots with her. There isn’t anyone else... And where’s she hiding out? She doesn’t know anyone around here, as far as we know.’

‘What about the girl on the pony?’ said Jemima, rummaging among the printouts on the table. ‘In the picture. Maybe they’re still friendly.’

She found the pony picture and held it up.

Amaryllis grabbed it and had a close look, narrowing her eyes. ‘I think that other girl could be the real Mrs Blyth-Sheridan,’ she said.

‘Maybe she and her husband were childhood sweethearts,’ said Jemima, eyes misting over.

Amaryllis tried to suspend her cynicism for just a moment. ‘Yes, perhaps that’s true... But it doesn’t really help us to find out if there were any other friends... Or any other family.’

‘Just because we haven’t heard of any others doesn’t mean there aren’t any,’ Jemima pointed out.

‘Do you think they ever had any visitors at their house, Ashley?’ Amaryllis asked. The girl jumped, as if she had been miles away.

‘No - but I wasn’t really paying attention,’ said Ashley.

She did have the appearance of someone who lived in another world, Amaryllis reflected. But then, she was still young and hadn’t been moulded by real-life events the way the rest of the people in the room had.

‘So there wasn’t a lot of coming and going at the house next-door, then?’ she said.

‘I don’t remember seeing anything there at all... Of course it was a different story at the hotel.’

‘The hotel?’

‘You know, the one that’s been abandoned for a while. I read in the paper they were planning to knock it down and build a casino.’

‘Really?’ said Amaryllis. That would certainly liven things up a bit. But some stick-in-the-mud – perhaps even Christopher - would probably get it stopped.

‘I heard it was going to be an old folks’ home,’ said Jemima. ‘Ha – you’d never get me into one of those places.  I’d rather fall down my own stairs at home and die in the front hall, thank you very much.’

‘Um – just don’t do that, Jemima,’ said Amaryllis. She continued thoughtfully, ‘The hotel... I think someone’s been living in there.’

‘Madeleine?’ asked Jemima.

‘No – it was a young man. Just a boy, really. The police were taking him away when I was went in to have a look at the grounds first thing one morning. He got away somehow. Goodness knows where he is now.’

‘It’ll be one of those migrants,’ said Jemima. ‘He’ll have walked through the Channel Tunnel.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Amaryllis. She closed her eyes, trying to remember what the boy had looked like. She remembered the cheeky grin and the air of over-confidence. ‘I don’t think he was a migrant. He was too sure of himself. Anyway, Pitkirtly’s a long way from the Channel Tunnel.’

‘Ah, that’s what everybody always thinks,’ said Jemima. ‘Then we find we’ve been invaded and it’s too late.’

‘Have you been reading the right-wing press again?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Just the local news,’ said Jemima. ‘But it was all on the television.’

‘I wonder if he went back inside the hotel again after the police had left. Well, there’s only one way to find out.’ Amaryllis got up from the table and stood quite still, thinking.

The tool-box outside the hotel. The young man fixing the electrics in the café and the one who had almost been arrested that day. Madeleine’s baby. The garden centre audio system. Charlie’s unsolicited visitor... She was poised for action when someone spoke to her.

‘Not so fast, Ms Peebles,’ said Keith, re-appearing in the bar with perfect timing. He got between her and the door. She did consider dodging round him, but he would only have summoned up more officers from somewhere and had her dragged off to a cell.

Actually that was just an excuse. Amaryllis knew that, much though she liked to pretend to have the secret of eternal youth, she wasn’t quite as slick at dodging round people as she had been at one time. She would just have to make up for that with extra cunning.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ said Keith.

‘If you must know, I’m going out to dinner with Christopher.’

Time stood still for a moment as everyone in the group at the table stared at her and then, as one, turned to stare at Christopher, standing at the bar and apparently oblivious to this latest development.

She wished she had been cunning enough to conjure up some other engagement from her imagination, but realistically there was very little to do in the evenings around Pitkirtly, and a claim to be going into Dunfermline or elsewhere to the pictures or the theatre would have been met with incredulous heckling about the time of the last bus and so on.

Even going out to dinner was pushing it a bit, but there was always the Golden Peach.

Chapter 32 A bit late for a school night

‘If you’d told me we were going out to dinner, I would have gone home to change my shirt,’ said Christopher reproachfully as they walked up the High Street together.

‘We’re not really going out to dinner,’ Amaryllis told him, sounding scornful, as if he should have known such stereotypical behaviour didn’t have any place in their relationship.

‘That’s all right then... Are we getting a takeaway then? All that research has given me a bit of an appetite.’

‘Since when have you been obsessed with food?’

‘I’m not obsessed with food, but if I’ve got to take part in one of your mad schemes, I’d rather not do it on an empty stomach.’

They stopped just outside the wool-shop and glared at each other.

Amaryllis was the first to laugh, which was surprising. He had found in the past that she was quite capable of holding a glare for at least five minutes – sometimes almost indefinitely.

‘How do you know I’ve got a mad scheme?’ she demanded.

He shrugged. ‘Just a wild guess.’

‘It’s not all that mad,’ she said. ‘I just want to pop up to the hotel and see what’s going on there. You don’t even need to come with me. You’re just my alibi.’

He wasn’t sure whether to be offended at being reduced to this status, but there was no point in being offended with Amaryllis. It was water off a duck’s back as far as she was concerned.

‘I’d better come with you,’ he said. ‘As long as we can get some fish and chips first.’

‘It’s Monday,’ she said. ‘The chip shop’s closed. We’ll have to get something from the Golden Peach instead.’

A little later, they resumed their slow progress towards the hotel, stuffing food in their mouths as they went in time-honoured but messy fashion. Christopher was hoping the police had beaten them to it and cordoned off the whole area, but there was no sign of a police presence anywhere near the hotel or even further up the road by the garden centre.

‘They’ll all be down at the beach now, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Well, you can’t really blame them. Any evidence at that crime scene will be washed away in,’ Amaryllis glanced at her watch, ‘approximately an hour. At high tide.’

‘What sort of evidence would they find on a beach anyway?’

‘Oh, footprints, weapons, that kind of thing. Much the same as they might find anywhere.’

Christopher finished the last bite of his dinner and scrunched the packet up, looking around for a bin.

‘If there’s anybody at the hotel they’ll probably smell us coming,’ said Amaryllis.

‘I wasn’t going to mention that,’ he said. ‘But maybe we should go home and have a shower first.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Just as well Jock McLean didn’t hear you say that. His imagination would be running riot.’

Christopher never allowed his own imagination to run riot, of course, but it had definitely opened one eye and squinted at the daylight for a moment before drifting off back to sleep. If it were possible to imagine what your imagination looked like, he pictured it as a shy, retiring creature that slept most of the time and lived in a sort of cupboard under the stairs in his mind.

Amaryllis laughed. ‘But if he’d heard my share of the conversation he’d know exactly how romantic that last sentence was.’

‘This is turning out to be some dinner date,’ said Christopher. He hoped he didn’t sound too grumpy.

The sky had clouded over as it usually did around this time of day – if not even earlier – and although there were still a couple of hours to go before nightfall, the light was rapidly diminishing.  For a moment Christopher wondered if the sea mist had come in, as it had done while he was in the woods on his own. He shivered at the memory.

‘Are you all right?’ said Amaryllis.

‘I’m fine. I was just wondering if I should have gone home for an extra jumper.’

‘Ne’er cast a clout until May is out,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s the wrong time of year for that saying, though.’

‘It’s never the right time of year to cast a clout around here,’ he said with feeling. ‘April, May, August, October – all as bad as each other.’

They had almost reached the hotel.

‘Are you sure you want to come in with me?’ said Amaryllis. ‘You could always wait outside – as a lookout.’

‘No,’ he said, wishing he could shake off that feeling of being responsible for her that was about to make him do something he didn’t really want to do – again.

Amaryllis refused to go in the main gate, instead clambering over a section of wall that had started to collapse.

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ he asked before he could stop himself.

She laughed. ‘As safe as houses! I’ve carried out a thorough risk assessment, you know.’

His foot caused a minor landslide but he was almost over by then, and managed to leap to safety without any visible injury.

‘I hope we haven’t made too much noise doing that,’ she said censoriously. ‘We don’t want them to hear us coming.’

Christopher decided he would vastly prefer any squatters in the hotel buildings to hear them coming and get out of the way without any unnecessary blood being spilled. Well, any blood, in fact.

‘We’d better be careful,’ he said.

‘Of course we will,’ she said. ‘Risk assessments and all that. Come on, this way.’

They pushed through some brambles, not the most direct route into the hotel but one that Amaryllis favoured for some reason – fine for her when she was wearing one of her leather outfits and was therefore more or less immune to bramble scratches. Christopher found, to his consternation, that he had shed some blood after all.

‘Keep going this way,’ said Amaryllis in a low voice. ‘Nearly there.’

Christopher recalled wondering not long ago how she had persuaded Jock McLean to accompany her on so many doomed expeditions. Now he knew that she just didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

At last they stood outside what had obviously once been the back door of the hotel or the staff entrance.

‘Stay close,’ she warned him. ‘If anything happens and I’m out of action, use my phone – in my right hand jacket pocket. It’s got Keith and Charlie on speed-dial.’

Christopher definitely wasn’t reassured by this information.

‘You’d better not,’ he muttered.

‘Better not what?’

‘Be out of action.’

She said nothing, instead pushing at the door. To Christopher’s disappointment, it swung open easily, not even creaking on its hinges.

‘They must have been coming and going this way,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Just follow me, and don’t talk unless you have to.’

It was like some hideous game of hide-and-seek, something Christopher had never liked even when he was supposed to be playing it for fun. Amaryllis led the way through a utility area, and then through a massive stainless steel kitchen that was a contradiction in terms, with dusty surfaces and stained oven doors. Christopher half-expected dinosaurs to burst into the room at any minute. He looked to see if any of the cupboards under the worktops were big enough for him to climb into.

Amaryllis turned the door-handle – again the door opened silently, as if in constant use - and they were out in a corridor. She moved quietly and cautiously. Christopher blundered along behind her as best he could. The place was in a state of decay, with cracked plaster and a mess of dead leaves, little twigs in clumps along the floor and cobwebs adorning the ceilings and light fittings.

‘You haven’t got a gun, have you?’ he whispered.

She turned and put a finger to her lips, but shook her head. She looked as if she should have had a gun as a prop to help her stay in character as a television detective from some American show made towards the end of the twentieth century. Then they would have come to the corner and flattened themselves against the wall so that they could peer round and then go in with guns blazing to defeat the enemy.

Christopher gave himself a small shake which he hoped would conceal the trembling in his limbs as he pictured the scene.

It wasn’t like that at all.

They proceeded along the corridor until they came to a sort of padded door.

‘Reception,’ breathed Amaryllis. ‘Keep right behind me. Don’t say anything. Hang on to this for now.’

She slid the mobile phone out of her pocket and into his hand in one swift, sleek movement. He panicked immediately in case he dropped it. It was so smooth he was afraid it would just slip through his fingers. On the other hand, his hands were so sticky with sweat that he started to worry that he would get fingerprints all over it.

She pushed the door open just enough for the two of them to squeeze through the gap. It had been fairly dark in the corridor, but there was light coming into the reception area from somewhere. The front door that must have at one time been barricaded up, was wide open. When Christopher craned his neck he could see there was something propping it. A broken crate, maybe, or a section of fencing. Something with slats.

He wondered if this meant there were people around right now, carrying things in and out, or whether it was just that the occupants had been making themselves at home here for a while and didn’t any longer care if they left the place open to the elements and to other squatters.

Christopher distinctly preferred the second of these two options.

‘Stairs,’ whispered Amaryllis, heading for another door.

Of course, they had been in here once, years ago. Just before the man from the Council was kidnapped, if his recollection was accurate. It wasn’t a good omen.

They swung through the door and found the stairs.

‘They’re more likely to have based themselves on one of the higher floors,’ said Amaryllis, her lips almost touching his ear. ‘Easier to defend.’

This expedition wasn’t improving as it went along.

‘It’s getting a bit late for a school night,’ he whispered back, trying to lighten his own mood as much as anything.

They crept up the stairs. Just before the turn, there was a sound from somewhere above them.

‘Look out!’ hissed Amaryllis. ‘Somebody’s coming the other way.’

Christopher accidentally took a step backwards – his brain seemed to have told him there wasn’t time to turn round – and slipped right off the stair he had been standing on. Just as he regained his balance and was about to grin at her in triumph, the sounds from above amplified themselves until they had adopted the rhythm of running feet, louder and louder until...

He only had time to register a banging noise, sharper than the footsteps and closer, before he lost his balance again and fell back down the way they had come, right to the bottom. There was a sharp, sudden, agonising pain in one elbow and then nothing.