3 A Reformed Character (12 page)

Chapter 13  Outlaws

'I knew you were hiding something,' said Amaryllis as they sat in Jock's front room and ate chocolate digestives. 'And it didn't take a rocket scientist to work out what.'

'I suppose that means the police'll be up here soon,' said Jock.

'Victoria was round looking for Darren too,' said Christopher. Darren's expression, which rivalled Jock's in its gloominess, brightened fractionally.

'We didn't tell her anything,' said Amaryllis. 'The fewer people who know about this, the better.'

'Need to know,' said Jock, nodding as if he understood.

'More than enough people know,' said Christopher, 'and some of us would rather not know anything. What are we going to say to the police? They're bound to ask us about Darren again.'

'We'll go on the run,' said Amaryllis casually.

'What do you mean, go on the run?' Christopher wasn't impressed by this as a solution to anything. 'That's a really silly idea. What about my job? Some of us have responsibilities, you know.'

'We all have a responsibility to prevent a miscarriage of justice,' said Amaryllis. 'You didn't kill Old Mrs Petrelli, did you, Darren? Or Alan Donaldson.'

'I never killed nobody in my life,' said Darren, nursing the ankle he had landed on at the foot of the stairs. 'I liked Old Mrs Petrelli. She gave me free ice-cream when Mr Petrelli wasn't looking.'

'We need some tea to go with those biscuits,' said Amaryllis. 'Let's go through to the kitchen.'

They seemed to have an instinctive need to move as one, to huddle together for safety in this difficult situation. And it was just as well they obeyed that instinct: as soon as they had all moved through to the kitchen, there was a loud bang from the front room, followed by the shattering, jingling sound of glass breaking.

'Get out of the house - now,' said Amaryllis. 'Use the back door. Don't look to see what's happened.'

This last sentence was addressed to Jock, who was moving towards the front room.

'But - ' was all Jock got the chance to say before Amaryllis hustled him out. She didn't let them stand around the garden for long either, but rushed them off over the tumbledown fence that led to the garden of the next-door neighbour Jock often grumbled about. They crashed through a hedge, and then hurried down to the bottom of the next garden, over a small ornamental stream and into a sparse birch wood.

'It's quite rural here, isn't it?' Christopher observed, watching a magpie attacking a smaller bird.

He heard a dull thud. The next minute he was dodging out of the way as the magpie suddenly fell from the sky.

'Not a very good shot,' said Amaryllis calmly. 'We'd better go this way.'

They came to a grassy lane between two old stone walls. It turned downhill without any warning, and Jock stumbled. Darren hauled him back upright. They ran on. Something pinged off the wall.

'They're getting better,' said Amaryllis. 'Quick - down here!'

They pushed through a shrubbery and found themselves in another garden. This one had rather a fancy shed in one corner. The house it belonged to had a conservatory and wooden decking, with a large barbecue. Amaryllis wrenched the padlock off the shed door and said, 'In here. Jock - never mind the flowers!'

Amaryllis closed the door behind them and they hid behind a stack of bamboo garden furniture and waited.

'Where are we?' breathed Christopher in her ear.

'Tell you later.'

There were so many things that could go wrong. What if somebody came out of the house and opened the shed? What if whoever had shot at them was even now creeping through the shrubbery? Christopher pictured the shed being peppered with bullets. He shuddered. He had never enjoyed games of hide and seek, and this was for real in a way that was worse than his worst nightmares.

What if there were spiders? He knew Amaryllis had a phobia about them. What if she was allergic to them as well? What if she had a sudden anaphylactic attack and gave the game away?

He heard Jock breathing heavily. What if Jock had a heart attack?

There was a yell outside - not far away - and then a single gunshot. Then silence again. A few moments later there were footsteps outside the shed. Christopher froze. What if this was the place where it was all destined to end? It was a mundane, cramped place in which to die.

Someone shouted, too close to their hiding place for comfort, but he couldn't hear what they said. Then he heard different, lighter footsteps, and a woman's voice, even closer.

'What's going on out here, Andy?'

The man, closer too now, said in loud agitated tones, 'That was a gunshot. I'm sure of it.'

'Leave it, Andy! It's nothing to do with us.'

'I'll just get the chairs out now I'm down here. They need oiling before the summer.'

'That can wait. Come away in now, the football's just about to start.'

As the footsteps receded, all the fugitives breathed again, more or less in unison. Amaryllis still wouldn't let them come out of their hiding-place.

'They could come back to have another go,' she whispered.

Even after all that time Amaryllis insisted on going out on her own first to have a look round. This made sense, since she was the only one capable of looking round silently and unobtrusively and without making a huge fuss if she actually found something, but Christopher still felt guilty about letting her do it. Surely it was a man’s job to put himself in the firing line ahead of women and children? But perhaps Amaryllis counted as an honorary man. In some ways she was better than a man. In all ways, now he came to think of it.

She was back.

‘A trace of blood. No more gunmen,’ she reported. ‘I think we can get moving now. Just be as careful as you can.’

Jock’s joints cracked alarmingly as he struggled to his feet. Christopher’s knees seemed to have more or less seized up, not because of old age, he told himself, but because he had been crouching in such a silly position for so long.

‘Christopher and I are going to have a word with the Donaldsons,’ said Amaryllis, ‘You two wait in the shed,’ she instructed Jock and Darren. ‘Don’t let anybody see you until we come back.’

‘The Donaldsons?’ said Christopher. He must have missed something. He thought he’d been keeping up with what was happening, but apparently that had been an illusion.

‘This is their garden,’ said Amaryllis, as if it was perfectly obvious.

‘So that was them just now?’ said Christopher, losing his grip on English grammar. And, as an afterthought, ‘What about that trace of blood?’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Either one of the gunmen shot himself in the foot, or somebody else did. There wasn’t a lot of blood. And no sign of anybody in the wood. Stop worrying.’

She said all this as the two of them walked up the garden path and towards the house, which, now that Christopher had time to think about it, he realised must be the house of a builder or joiner with its multiple extensions and outdoor buildings. As well as the posh shed they had taken shelter in, there was a more mundane steel one near the house. The steel one probably fulfilled the real function of a shed in housing tools, lawn-mower and weed-killer, whereas the posh one was more of a summer-house.

Christopher realised his mind was wandering as a defence against the reality of being about to walk up to the front door of a couple of strangers who would quite likely not be pleased to see them.

‘Wait a minute,’ he hissed, seizing the sleeve of Amaryllis’s camouflage parka – the one she wore when she was up to something. ‘What are we doing here? What are we going to say?’

‘Just leave it to me,’ she said.

They made their way round to the front of the house along a rather attractive path of circular paving stones edged with tiny snowdrops, and Amaryllis rang the door-bell. Christopher remained on the step below her as a sign that he wasn’t the one who had insisted on doing this.

The door opened slowly.

‘Yes?’ said the man whose voice they had heard from their hiding-place. He didn’t exactly snap but he wasn’t over-friendly either. They heard a dog barking from somewhere inside the house.

‘Who is it, Andy?’ called a woman’s voice.

‘Who are you?’ said the man in the doorway. Mr Donaldson had the look of a man currently immune to shock. Someone who had already suffered the worst that life had to throw at him, and somehow survived. Or maybe it was too early to assume that. Maybe he was still in a state of post-traumatic stress and hadn’t even emerged from it yet.

Amaryllis introduced herself and Christopher, and waited politely for Mr Donaldson to react, which he did after a very short pause.

‘You’re friends of that lowlife scum Darren Laidlaw, aren’t you?’ he growled. ‘You can get off my doorstep right now before I set the dogs on you.’

‘Could we just have a quick word with you?’ said Amaryllis.

‘I can’t think of anything you could say that I’d want to listen to,’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘Caroline!’

A woman with red-rimmed eyes appeared so promptly that she must have been very close by, perhaps listening from the front room with the door open.

‘I’m going to let the dogs out now,’ he said to her. ‘Shut yourself in the kitchen and call the police.’

‘Don’t do that,’ said Christopher.

‘Why not?’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘You scared of the police?’

He seemed almost amused at the idea.

‘We’re not involved in this the way you seem to think we are,’ said Christopher.  ‘We’re trying to get at the truth.’

‘The truth?’ said Mr Donaldson. ‘I’ll tell you the truth…’

‘Andy, please don’t….’ said his wife, but he continued.

‘The truth is that my son’s lying on a mortuary slab and we can’t even bury him until the police say we can. And you’re playing at being detectives… You don’t know what you’re getting yourselves into, that’s all I can say.’

‘We’re not playing,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’re just trying to stop the police making a big mistake, otherwise more people are going to get killed.’

She turned and started to walk away. Christopher, wondering if the dogs were going to come after them at any moment, followed, walking gingerly.

He breathed out as he closed the garden gate behind him. Mr and Mrs Donaldson still stood on their doorstep watching.

'Interesting,' said Amaryllis as they walked off down the road.

'Interesting? We nearly get savaged by dogs and you call it interesting? And what are we going to do about Jock and Darren? We can't just leave them in the shed!'

Relief had made Christopher furious.

'We'll go round the back way for them,' she said, as they reached the end of the cul de sac. She led the way down another road, then into a second cul de sac.

'So what was interesting?' he demanded as they walked past a row of houses which were almost identical to each other. Each had only one feature that was slightly different from the next one: a white painted porch here, a rockery there. But they all seemed to be built to the same basic design.

'You don't know what you're getting yourselves into,' said Amaryllis. 'Don't you think that's interesting?'

'Scary? Yes,' said Christopher. 'True, yes. I don't know about interesting.'

Amaryllis led him off the road into a small wood. He started to look around for hidden snipers.