3 A Reformed Character (21 page)

'We're not all pensioners,' said Jock.

'OK, a bunch of interfering amateurs!'

'Amaryllis isn't an amateur,' Jock pointed out. 'She's been in the security services and now she's working as a private investigator.'

'That didn't stop her getting shot, did it?' Mr Smith snapped.

'Have you heard how she is?' Jock said.

Mr Smith looked at his watch. 'Hmm. They should know by now, one way or the other.' He sent the junior officer out to make enquiries.

One way or the other? Jock didn't want to think about what the other way was, but he couldn't help it.

'This is quite serious,' said Mr Smith. 'Are you sure you've told me everything you know?'

Jock nodded.

Mr Smith sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a while. The junior officer came back and whispered to him. Jock wished his hearing was still as acute as it had once been, in the days when he could effortlessly listen to one teenager reading from Shakespeare while detecting a faint giggle from someone else in the back row of the classroom.

'Well,' said Mr Smith at last. 'You'll be pleased to hear that both your friends now look as if they'll pull through - not that they deserve it, but don't quote me on that. We'll be waiting to interview Ms Peebles, of course. She probably knows the person who shot her. Unless this whole thing is even more complex than we thought and some other previously unknown person has entered the picture.'

Jock relaxed for the first time, he realised, since hearing the gunshot. 'Will you put a police guard on her in the hospital?' he asked.

'I doubt if we'll need one, to be honest. Mr Wilson's so angry he'll be a far better guard than any of my officers. But yes, we probably will... The real question is, what are we going to do with you?'

'Me?' said Jock in surprise. 'What were you thinking of doing?'

'By rights I should lock you up too, Mr McLean, but we're running short of holding cells around here,' said Mr Smith. Jock couldn't work out whether he was serious or not. Best to assume he was. 'So I've decided to release you into the custody of one of your friends - for now. If you get mixed up in anything else, then there's a cell here with your name on it, even if we get the Hole in the Wall gang in over the next few days.'

'What about Darren?' said Jock.

'He's safer in custody than outside,' said Mr Smith. 'Anyway, he's still the prime suspect in the Alan Donaldson case.'

'But surely,' said Jock, really pushing his luck this time, 'it's a bit far-fetched to have more than one killer at a time in a place the size of Pitkirtly?'

'Everything that's happened in the last couple of weeks is far-fetched,' said Mr Smith. 'Now go before I change my mind. And forget most of what I've said to you.'

Jock scurried out of the room and was escorted along the corridor by the junior police officer, who seemed to find the whole thing quite amusing. They encountered Karen Whitefield in the corridor and she shook her head at him.

In the reception area by the desk, Jemima Stevenson was waiting for him.

'I'm your new minder,' she said.

'Good luck with that,' said the desk sergeant, waving them on their way.

Chapter 25  Awakening

Christopher had been assured he wasn't having a heart attack. He hadn't really thought he was, but it was nice to be told that by the experts anyway. They tried to get him to go home but he said he would prefer to stay until Amaryllis was out of danger. He didn't particularly like hospitals, although he hadn't had much experience of them in his life. Someone found the gun and took it away from him. Nobody commented on it or accused him of anything. It was as if he was in a place where normal rules didn't apply, and time itself had warped so that things that would usually happen quickly took ages, and vice versa.

He was quite prepared to sit in some cavernous impersonal waiting area for hours if necessary but, perhaps because of the heart attack scare, they gave him a comfortable chair and let him sit by Amaryllis's bedside when she was brought back from the operating theatre and put in a small room on her own. She was attached to some machinery, which made little noises every so often, but once he got used to the rhythm it was quite restful. They didn't seem too worried about her.

He just sat there for a long time. Nurses popped in and out and took Amaryllis's temperature and blood pressure and checked the machines, and once a policeman put his head round the door, stared at Christopher and then withdrew again.

During the waiting hours, he mulled over everything that had happened, turning events round and round in his mind and trying to look at them from different angles. He wasn't altogether surprised that Giancarlo Petrelli seemed to have been the one who had shot Amaryllis, although it was odd that he had then surrendered the gun so easily. Unless one of the others had left him holding the gun before they ran off. Somehow Christopher found it hard to take either Zak Johnstone or Stewie seriously as a killer, although he knew very little about either youth. He remembered talking to Penelope Johnstone, Zak's mother, who seemed like a pillar of the community. Of course there was no knowing what the offspring of pillars of the community got up to behind their parents' backs. It might even be that living with someone like Penelope would be enough to drive a teenage child to crime, thought Christopher darkly. Or having an absentee parent whose only interaction with his son was at a gun club. Stewie, on the other hand - well, someone with so little self-esteem that he was prepared to dress up as a talking ham could probably be discounted, perhaps unfairly.

But could Zak or Giancarlo also be the criminal mastermind behind all the other things? Christopher had the feeling they were both too young and inexperienced to take a leading role in a serious gang that demanded protection money and reinforced their demands with violence if necessary. There should be a larger figure behind it all - a Mr Big. How about the father of the family, Roberto Petrelli, for this role? Christopher knew next to nothing about him. Well, there was the fact that he wouldn't let Victoria go away to university as her brother had done, but had persuaded - or forced - her to stay at home and join the family business.

The family business... What if Giulia, or even Old Mrs Petrelli, had been the leader? Christopher wasn't sure if women ever played this kind of part in Mafia projects. He had the feeling it was mostly a male preserve. But even the Mafia couldn't be completely immune from the feminist revolution, surely?

Who had decided to kill Old Mrs Petrelli, and why? Maybe if she was the leader, one of the younger ones had made a bid for power, thinking it was time for a new generation. But would Roberto Petrelli kill his own mother for this reason? On the other hand, if it had been him, the fact that Roberto himself had been shot in the woods made a lot of sense. Giancarlo could have been avenging his grandmother's death. And Giancarlo had the gun in the railway yard, after all, and it looked as if he had been the one to fire the shot. There wasn't any other possible explanation.

He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes for a moment. Of course he couldn't possibly sleep until he knew Amaryllis was going to be all right, but....

He woke up with a start to find Detective Chief Inspector Smith peering at him.

'Are you all right?'

'Yes,' he croaked. 'Is Amaryllis - ?'

What he wanted to say was, what are you doing here and are you a figment of my imagination?

A woman police officer peered round Mr Smith. She smiled at Christopher. 'Everything's going well so far.'

'We just need to ask you a few questions, Mr Wilson' said Mr Smith, trying not to look threatening and failing miserably. 'Can we go outside for a couple of minutes?'

They stood in the corridor outside the room. Mr Smith had asked the policewoman, whose name was Karen Whitefield, to stay in the room 'in case of developments'. Christopher took that to mean in case Amaryllis woke up suddenly and started talking. He was surprised the policeman who had been outside the door earlier hadn't been sent in with a notebook already. Or maybe he had been there earlier recording all Christopher's snores and the funny little sounds from Amaryllis's machines in his notes.

'So tell me,' said Mr Smith in a conversational tone, 'where did you get the gun?'

'The gun?' Christopher was baffled: was he indeed dreaming? Or had everything that had ever happened to him up to now been a dream from which he had just wakened up?

'The gun that was in your pocket when you got to the hospital,' said Mr Smith.

'It wasn't my gun,' said Christopher. 'But I suppose that's what they all say.'

'In this case we believe you,' said Mr Smith.

'Giancarlo gave it to me,' said Christopher. He didn't like to incriminate the boy, but he sensed that at this point even Amaryllis herself might have given in and told the whole truth. 'I looked up and he was standing there. He looked confused - I wondered if he was on drugs. I told him to put the gun down and he did, so I picked it up and put it in my pocket out of the way.'

'It would have been better to leave it there for the police,' said Mr Smith with an attempt at severity. He sighed. 'But in the circumstances I don't really blame you. It was more important to have it out of harm's way.'

'Does that mean Giancarlo shot her?' said Christopher. He was still oddly reluctant to believe in Giancarlo as criminal mastermind. He didn't know much about the boy, but he seemed a perfectly normal teenager in most ways. Not that it was exactly normal to be carrying a gun around just after someone had been shot.

'That's one possibility,' said Mr Smith. 'We haven't ruled out others.'

'Zak and Stewie?' said Christopher.

Mr Smith sighed again. 'They all seem a little too lightweight to me, But you never know what people will do if they're desperate.'

'So did whoever it was shoot Amaryllis because she was hot on their trail?' said Christopher.

'I'm guessing so. It was a panicky kind of attack though - at that range it was almost impossible not to inflict a much worse injury, and yet they went for the shoulder. But the two murders bear the hallmarks of a professional killer. We may be looking for more than one perpetrator.'

'What about the murders?' said Christopher. 'And the protection racket?'

'We've tracked down Roberto Petrelli to a private clinic in Edinburgh. You may not be surprised to hear he's suffering from gunshot wounds too. We're still pursuing our enquiries into that one. And we have an APB out for Giancarlo Petrelli. He won't get far.'

Christopher leaned against the wall. He felt very tired again suddenly in spite of having had a nap.

'Well, that's about enough for now,' said Mr Smith. 'You can go back in there if you want. We'll be sending in another constable too in case Ms Peebles wakes up and says something relevant. Thank you for your help, Mr Wilson and, as I've already said to Mr McLean, forget most of what I've said to you.'

Christopher returned to his chair. The constable with the notebook got a hard chair and a stern lecture from one of the nurses about not tiring the patient or expecting her to say too much if she woke up. They all settled down.

Interesting that Mr Smith had also dismissed the young men as lightweight. But who else was there? Roberto Petrelli could have carried out the two murders, but he hadn't been around when Amaryllis got shot. In any case, who had shot him? Was it possible that Giulia Petrelli was up to her neck in it? Mr Smith didn't seem to have considered the women. Did he know something, or was he just being sexist in disregarding them?

Christopher took a moment to feel sorry for Victoria, who, as far as he could tell, was the innocent victim in all this. First of all her boy-friend had been framed - or had he? - for the murder of Alan Donaldson, then her grandmother had been murdered, then her father shot... It must have been all too close to home for her. He pictured her little oval olive-skinned face, eyes brimming with tears, nose becomingly pink... He remembered hearing about her unselfishness at going along to the railway yard to make sure Darren was safe, the night of Alan Donaldson's murder. Making sure he was safe. Taking him to the murder house. Where Darren had slept like a log. Had slept through the murder.... almost as if he had been drugged, on top of the drinks he had with his friends.

Christopher realised that, apart from Darren, Victoria was the only other person who had an excuse for being in the murder house that night. The only person who could have left DNA or fingerprints there without arousing suspicion. Was Victoria the enforcer who helped her father run the protection racket? Did she drive the car for him and had she taken over after he was shot?

She was the twin whose life chances had been taken away, not because she was unworthy, but because of her gender. Had she tried to compensate for this by working with her father, showing that she was a worthier offspring than her brother? Then when he still seemed to prefer Giancarlo, how resentful would that make her? Resentful enough to kill her grandmother and shoot at her father? Panicky enough to shoot someone who seemed to be getting close to the right answer?

'... all fairy-tales,' he said to himself out loud. He looked over at Amaryllis. Her eyes were open and she was smiling at him.

'Tell me - fairy-tales,' she said with some difficulty.

A nurse came into the room. 'Good,' she said to Amaryllis. 'Back in the land of the living. Let's see how you're doing.'

She did all the usual checks and went out again. The policeman looked up and smiled. Christopher grinned back at him. He was swamped by a warm wave of happiness. It was almost worth it all just for this moment.

Amaryllis had closed her eyes again. Christopher was desperate to discuss his latest insight, but he persuaded himself to be patient. She must be exhausted, after all. Probably she just needed to sleep.