Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) (7 page)

The office phone started up next.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Christopher. He glared at Jock. ‘Take the dog outside.’

‘Fine,’ said Jock. ‘I’ll take myself away too, then.’ He smiled at Amaryllis as if to prove he wasn’t just being grumpy, and added, obviously for her benefit, ‘I’ll just smoke my pipe in the car park until you’re ready, then.’

The office phone stopped, and Christopher’s mobile phone started up again.

Amaryllis delved into his pocket and brought it out.

‘Home for Orphan Chimpanzees – how may I help you?.. Of course it’s me, you idiot. Yes, he’s here too. Just a minute.’

She passed on the phone to Christopher.

‘Hi there,’ said Keith Burnet, sounding about as cheerful as Christopher felt. ‘I just wanted to warn you that we may have found your artists.’

‘Where are they?’ said Christopher. ‘Have you arrested them?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Keith. ‘You’d better have a seat.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Christopher had heard that tone of voice before, usually under bad circumstances. There wasn’t a chair anywhere nearby so he leaned against the wall instead. ‘What’s happened?’

Amaryllis was muttering something but he couldn’t make out what it was.

‘Their van’s in the water – two people still in it. I’m there now with their father. ’

‘Where? Not Pitkirtly?’

‘No – east of Torryburn. On that bit of coast road nobody ever uses.’

‘Was there a high tide?’

‘Not that we know of. We’re checking with the coastguard...There’s always the chance of an accident, I suppose,’ said Keith sombrely. ‘We’ll need to get the divers out.’

‘I suppose that’ll take a while,’ said Christopher. ‘Aren’t they based at Kyle of Lochalsh or somewhere?’

‘Troon,’ said Keith. ‘They’ll be over in a couple of hours.’

There was a pause while Christopher searched for something to say.

‘Should you be telling me this, Keith?’

‘Maybe not. I just wanted to reinforce my warning that you mustn’t discuss the case with anybody else. There will probably be rumours and maybe some press interest if we’re really unlucky, but we don’t want all sorts of gossip and misinformation getting out... Have you told Maisie Sue about the quilt yet?’

‘No,’ said Christopher, feeling guilty.

‘Good,’ said Keith. ‘We don’t want that getting out either. Or anything about the camera we found in the room. I suppose you’ll want to speak to Amaryllis about this development, but please be discreet. Don’t go down to the Queen of Scots together and talk about it at the bar.’

‘We wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Christopher, trying not to sound as offended as he felt.

Amaryllis suddenly began to make signals, only he couldn’t work out what she was trying to communicate. She seemed to be miming cutting her own throat. He turned to look behind him and saw Maggie Munro standing there, mop in hand, brow furrowed in obvious puzzlement. He ended the call quickly. What had she overheard, if anything?

‘What wouldn’t you dream of?’ she said.

‘Oh, I was just talking on the phone,’ he said, waving the mobile phone around to demonstrate what he meant. ‘Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid.’

‘I thought maybe the police had found out something,’ said Maggie.

‘Oh, no,’ said Christopher hastily. ‘No. Nothing. Not at all... Ow!’

Amaryllis had kicked him as she passed, on her way to take the mop out of Maggie’s hand.

‘Let’s get this put safely in the cupboard,’ she said in a soothing tone. ‘Would you like to show me where it goes? Then we can all get off home.’

Within a few minutes they had all joined Jock McLean in the car park.

Maggie Munro sniffed the air appreciatively.  ‘I do like the smell of pipe smoke,’ she said.

Jock backed away, stuffing the pipe in his pocket and clutching the dog’s lead much too tightly.

‘He’s spoken for,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Now, now, I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ said Jock. ‘It’s early days yet.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Maggie indignantly. ‘I’m a married woman myself, you know.’

Christopher chose to ignore this potentially embarrassing situation by walking on past them and up the hill. He had bandied enough words with enough people today already. It was time to spend some quiet time with the Fotheringham Archive. That would calm his mind if nothing else did.

Chapter 7 The wrong body

Although Keith rationalised his urge to call Christopher as a warning to him to keep quiet in the face of spreading rumours, he knew he had done it mainly because, contrary to the usual procedure, he tended to see Christopher and Amaryllis as informal partners when it came to the detection side of police work. And after all, he told himself, it wasn’t all that different from using these community support officers that were being recruited nowadays. He was sure the two of them would have applied for that kind of job if it had been offered in Pitkirtly at the right time – and if Christopher didn’t already have a good job and Amaryllis wasn’t a retired spy who was standing for election to the Council.

He frowned as he put his phone back in his pocket.

‘Any news of those divers?’ said the man next to him.

Keith had been in the living-room of the house where the artists lived with their parents, Bert and Cynthia Wishart, when he had received the call from the central control room. A fisherman had seen the van in the water and called it in, and naturally it was passed on to the Pitkirtly people because everybody imagined the place was a backwater and they didn’t have enough to do. This was despite several years when the murder rate there had been considerably higher than in other comparable areas across Scotland, including the worse parts of Glasgow.

One advantage of being with the artists’ father was that he could immediately check the van registration, which the fisherman had written down and given to the control room. The much bigger disadvantage was that he had immediately had to break the news about the two bodies inside, and then pretend not to watch while the man fell apart in front of him.

Another disadvantage was that the man had wanted to chain-smoke from that moment until now. Keith knew he shouldn’t have allowed him to do so in the police car, but he had stretched a point and opened all the windows. It seemed like the least he could do under the circumstances. Maybe nobody would notice, although Inspector Armstrong was famous for having a nose like some animal with a very sensitive sense of smell – the stress was getting to Keith at this point and he couldn’t think of any animal species – and was bound to find out sooner or later. If he ever got back from sick leave, that was.

‘The divers will be a wee bit longer, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go and sit in the car?’

‘No. I need to be out here where I can see it – them... Are you sure there’s nothing we can do? I don’t mind getting wet.’

Keith and the two constables who had been sent over from North Queensferry had already had to restrain him from jumping into the water as soon as he had seen the van. To be fair to him, it must have been very frustrating to know his children were almost certainly in there and not to be able to do anything about it, not even to see if they were there or not. Keith himself had got to the stage of pacing up and down. He had called the control centre twice to find out if there was anything they could do to speed up the divers.

‘They’ve got to make sure they’ve got the right equipment with them,’ the woman on the phone had said patiently. ‘It’s no use them getting there and then finding they have to go back for more oxygen or whatever.’

Suddenly everything began to happen at once. A couple of police cars came along the minor road a bit too fast for Keith’s liking – it wouldn’t help if one of them went into the water too. Several uniformed officers got out and stood and stared at the parts of the van that were currently visible. Two of them saw Keith and began to walk up the slope to where he was standing. He had thought it wise to keep the artists’ father away from the water. He knew he shouldn’t have brought the man here in the first place, but it seemed only fair to give him the chance to be here. A helicopter buzzed into view and hovered over their heads. If that was the press... Keith mentally began to construct phrases composed entirely of swear words.

After a few minutes, a man in diving gear was lowered down, and then another. A bundle of equipment followed. The helicopter swung away again and headed for the Forth Bridge.

‘Quicker than you thought, eh?’ said the artists’ father, throwing half a cigarette on the ground and stamping on it. He began to walk down the hill. Keith clutched at his arm.

‘We don’t want to get in their way, sir.’

‘Hmph! If that’s my son and daughter in there, I need to see exactly what’s happened to them,’ said the man. It sounded as if grim determination was the only thing holding him together.

They encountered the two uniformed officers. One of them put out a hand to stop the father going on, but he shook it off, ignored them and continued.

‘What did you bring him for?’ said one of the officers. ‘He shouldn’t be anywhere near the scene.’

‘He’s their father,’ said Keith in a low voice. ‘He needs to know.’

‘He doesn’t need to see them now, before...’

Keith knew what the officer meant. Before they were tidied up and made to look more acceptable to a grieving parent’s eye. But he also knew that there was nothing that could be done to make what had happened tidy and acceptable. Maybe it was better to acknowledge that, and to accommodate the father’s urge to know as much as he could about the last moments of his children. He had met people who closed their minds to it all, and those who wanted to know every last detail. It was hard to deal with in either case.

It was the surprise that made this one harder, in the end.

Things went more or less according to plan, if you could call it that, in the initial stages when the two divers were circling the wrecked van, presumably to try and establish whether they could get the doors open easily and recover the bodies, or whether the van itself would have to be recovered first.

The first indication that there would be a surprise came with a shout from one of them.

‘Hey! Sergeant Burnet?’

‘That’s me!’ Keith called back, starting across the road towards the water’s edge.

‘What does he want?’ muttered the father, close behind him.

‘Let me speak to him first.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘No – stay here with these two officers. I’ll let you know exactly what he says.’

Hoping the other officers would grab the man or do something to distract him, Keith pressed on and stood on the grass verge at the other side of the road. One of the divers approached, standing up as he reached the shallow water. He pushed back his mask.

‘Two bodies in there.’

‘That’s what we thought,’ said Keith. ‘A brother and sister.’

The diver shook his head. ‘Two men.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure as can be without actually getting them out... One’s got a kind of wee ginger beard and the other one’s got a dark moustache and a shaved head.’

Keith frowned. ‘So they might not be his kids at all?’

‘There’s no knowing. Could be two completely different men. Or one of his kids and somebody else. That side of it’s up to you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem. We’ll get on and get them out then. Better get transport to take them away.’

‘What about the van?’

‘It’ll be low tide in a few hours. Should be able to winch it out then.’

‘Thanks.’

Keith trudged back to where the others were waiting, one of the police officers with a hand on the artists’ father’s arm to detain him. In a frivolous moment that almost made him giggle, he thought he might say, ‘Well, there’s good news and bad news...’

No. That would mean the long walk to the Job Centre. Not that he particularly liked his current job at moments like this anyway.

‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ said the father. He tried to wrench his arm away from the officer. ‘Let me go and have a look.’

‘You won’t get near the van, sir,’ said Keith wearily. ‘It’s still in several feet of water. But the tide’s going out.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said the father. ‘Do we really have to wait for that to happen?’

‘No, we don’t,’ said Keith. ‘The divers are hoping to have them out just now. There won’t be much longer to wait.’

‘But is it them?’ said the father, trying to light up another cigarette but messing it up because his hands were shaking too much to bring the lighter anywhere near the cigarette. He threw them both down on the ground in frustration. ‘Can they see anything – you know – through the windows?’

‘Did – does your son have – um – facial hair of any kind, Mr Wishart?’ said Keith, not sure if he was being tactful enough.

The man nodded glumly. ‘Silly wee ginger beard. I don’t know why he bothers.... Oh, God, does that mean...?’

He burst into tears at last. Probably the best way, Keith decided. 

One of the other police officers patted Mr Wishart clumsily on the shoulder. ‘You’d better come and have a seat in the car,’ he said. The man allowed them to lead him away. They wouldn’t let him smoke in their car, Keith was sure of that.

It was a long day, and it didn’t end with the recovery of the bodies from the van, with the tearful identification of one of them by Bert Wishart, or with the dispatch of the father, accompanied by two police officers including the statutory female who always had to break bad news, back to his house to tell his wife what had happened, or even with the winching up of the van and its removal on the back of a truck which only just made it along the narrow road without going over the edge into the water. Keith still had to write up his report, to institute a missing person enquiry to try and find the other twin, and to placate his girl-friend, who had been hoping for a meal out to make up for having their last evening out interrupted.

He didn’t have the time or the energy to think about any of it properly until well into the following morning. And even then the thoughts came to him courtesy of a phone call from Amaryllis.

‘I was going to break into your house and leave you a note,’ she said, ‘and then I remembered I had your mobile number.’

‘You sound quite disappointed,’ he said.

‘Obviously I need to know what happened yesterday. We saw the truck bringing the van up to the police station. Will forensics be round later to look at the inside?’

‘You know I can’t tell you anything about that.’

‘Jemima says there was only one twin in the van after all.’

‘How the hell did Jemima find out...?’

There was a pause while Keith wondered if he could stab himself to death with his standard police issue pencil. He jabbed it into his side to see what happened.

‘Aha!’ said Amaryllis. ‘Only one. So that means the other one is either still at large or lying about in a ditch or somewhere... Was it the boy or the girl?’

‘Don’t push your luck!’ he snapped. He couldn’t ever recall snapping at a member of the public before. Although Amaryllis didn’t really count. He remembered Charlie Smith nearly tearing his hair out during one of the cases she had got involved in. Was it the one with the tramp and the dog, or one of the others? They had all started to blur into one now in his head.

‘I know where there was somebody lurking the other night,’ said Amaryllis.

She had that smug ‘I’ve got a secret’ tone in her voice.

‘Lurking? I don’t think that’s at all relevant.’

‘How do you know? Maybe it was the missing twin.’

‘I don’t care,’ Keith lied. ‘I just want you off my back. So stay out of this case or I’m going to have to get a restraining order.’

‘You can’t restrain a law-abiding member of the public.’

‘No, I don’t suppose I can. But you’re a different matter.’

She laughed. ‘I like to think so... Anything else I can do for you?’

‘Go away.’

He rang off decisively. She was impossible. He didn’t know what a usually sensible and mature man like Christopher Wilson saw in her. Unless it was the red hair. Some men liked it.

For just a moment he stood there considering how exciting it might be to go out with somebody so unpredictable and so liable to take you right to the edge of the law – maybe even beyond the edge on occasion – instead of with a girl who probably already had both their lives planned down to the last detail. For just a moment he experienced a kind of resentment about all that planning, and then he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and came back to reality. Because you had to live in the real world, at the end of the day. Visiting la-la-land was all very well for a wee while at a time, but he liked his feet to stay on solid ground.

Amaryllis had the ability to conjure up quick-sands wherever she went.