The Christmas Puzzle (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 8) (9 page)

Chapter 13 Confidences

Any day that started with a boat trip, a shipwreck and a police chase was never going to be a good day, Jock McLean reflected as he trudged past the supermarket after the early morning adventure, shoes squelching and trouser legs splattered with mud. At least he had managed to avoid being arrested at the Cultural Centre. He was unreasonably annoyed when he saw Tricia Laidlaw coming towards him. Normally he would have been pleased to see her but since finding out about Jason Penrose living under her roof, he had begun to suspect her of having a dark side.

‘Oh dear,’ said Tricia once they were within a few feet of each other, ‘what’s happened to you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Jock.

‘I mean, how did you get all that mud on your shoes? And your trousers...’

‘Oh, that,’ said Jock. ‘I went too near the edge of the water.’

It wasn’t exactly a lie. In fact it was more or less true, except that he had made it sound as if he had been approaching the water from a landward direction.

‘Did Amaryllis have anything to do with it?’ she enquired.

‘Um, I suppose so.’

‘You’ll have to change before your stint as Santa, won’t you?’

He scrutinised her face closely to see if he could detect any hint of amusement, but she seemed quite serious.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Actually, Amaryllis and I got into a bit of trouble with a boat.’

At least that made it sound as if he wasn’t just getting too old to see where he was going and too clumsy to keep himself from falling in the river. He was tempted to tell her the whole story and try to wring a bit more drama out of it, but then he remembered Jason Penrose and decided not to share any more information with her. Not that Jason didn’t know all about it already. He might even be planning to entertain her with an account of it later.

That was why, when she smiled encouragingly and said, ‘Let’s have a coffee in here and you can tell me more,’ he found himself following her into the cafe near the foot of the High Street and ordering coffee and scones for two. Jock just hoped the smell of river mud wouldn’t put off the other customers too much. But maybe he was being hyper-sensitive.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said. ‘Jason went out first thing this morning and he hasn’t come back yet. I wonder where he’s got to... You didn’t see him when you were in paddling, did you?’

‘Um,’ said Jock, pretending to think hard about his answer. He didn’t really want to talk about Jason at all, except possibly to warn Tricia against the man.

‘Of course he’ll probably just have gone out with some of those people he’s working with,’ said Tricia after a moment. ‘I expect they’re digging somewhere... Only they won’t be able to go to the Island at the moment, will they?’

‘No,’ said Jock. ‘I hear the hard men from Dundee are looking after things there. You wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of them.’

‘The hard men from Dundee? Who are they?’

‘Oh, just some extra police that have been drafted in. According to Charlie Smith.’

‘You don’t want to believe everything Charlie Smith tells you,’ said Tricia darkly.

‘I suppose not,’ said Jock. ‘But he usually knows what he’s talking about where the police are concerned.’

The coffee and scones arrived.

‘Do you think they’ll catch somebody soon?’ said Tricia. ‘It must be awful for Mr Whitmore, all this waiting to hear. And why should anybody want to kill Jackie Whitmore? She was just a wee girl. Never mind all that trouble with Neil Macrae. She could have grown out of it all and done something useful with her life.’

‘It could still have been an accident,’ suggested Jock, buttering a scone and looking to see if there were any little pots of strawberry jam. Tricia handed him one but it was only apricot.

‘Or a mistake,’ she said.

‘A mistake? How would that work?’

‘Maybe they thought she was somebody else.’

‘Hmm,’ said Jock, nodding and munching at the same time. ‘Do you think the police will have thought of that?’

‘Oh, surely. They must explore every avenue – mustn’t they?’

From what Jock knew of the police these days, they didn’t have the manpower to explore even the main highway, never mind all the side roads.

‘They’re probably still waiting for forensics,’ he said, hoping he sounded as if knew what he was talking about. For all he knew it wasn’t even called forensics any more, but Evidentiary Logistics or something.

‘Or maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ said Tricia. She heaved a sigh. ‘That could happen to anybody.’

Jock remembered it had happened to Tricia’s son Darren, more or less. He mustn’t ask about Darren now, or it might remind her of that.

‘How’s Darren getting on these days?’ he asked immediately, and then screwed up his face in embarrassment. He tried to cover it up by taking a gulp of coffee. No wonder he didn’t venture into the social minefield very often.

‘He’s fine,’ said Tricia, showing no sign that she had noticed his clumsiness. ‘Rosie’s thinking of sending him to college in Dunfermline on some animal course.’

‘That’s good,’ said Jock, relieved that his blundering had at least led the way to more solid ground. He could cope with this. ‘Darren wasn’t bad at school, you know. He just didn’t apply himself as much as some of the others.’

‘He was distracted by his father leaving us when he was in second year,’ she said.

This was getting too close to home for Jock, whose wife had run off years before on some flimsy pretext he had now shoved to the back of his mind. He didn’t think of her very often, but he was still in touch with his son. He swallowed the last gulp of coffee and stood up.

‘Better get on,’ he said. ‘This Christmas stuff is taking up a lot of time.’

‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ said Tricia, ‘why did you agree to do it in the first place?’

‘Amaryllis,’ he said.

‘Ah.’

They left the cafe together but went their separate ways after that.

Jock walked on up the hill, pausing only when he tripped over a little white dog. Its owner, who didn’t have it properly under control, shouted at him. Some people were just too quick-tempered for their own good.

He had almost made it home without further incident when somebody called to him from across the road.

Fighting an almost irresistible urge to make a run for it, he turned to see who it was. A vision in a long flowing purple dress which looked totally unsuitable for the likely temperatures in December in Pitkirtly, even with a shapeless cardigan flung on top of it, waved at him. She plunged into the road without looking, narrowly missing a cyclist who made several rude gestures at her, and arrived by his side only slightly out of breath.

‘Hello, Tamara,’ he said. What could the woman possibly want?

‘Jock! Are you all right after this morning?’

‘Yes. I haven’t been home yet to change though,’ he said, hoping she would take the hint.

Instead she tucked her hand in his arm and said in a low, husky voice, ‘I need to talk to you.’

Why on earth were all these women making a bee-line for him today? He didn’t even wear after-shave on a normal day, and this morning what he liked to think of as his manly smell of Imperial Leather soap and tobacco with a light, not unpleasant overlay of healthy perspiration was probably playing second fiddle to the aroma of river mud that decorated his shoes and trouser legs.

Not that Tricia was superficial enough to be swayed by some after-shave named after a hollow, transient celebrity, but he would have thought Tamara might be.

‘Did the police catch you?’ she whispered.

‘No,’ he whispered back. ‘How about you?’

‘I managed to get away by pretending to be with that funny old man with the wee white dog,’ she said, still in a low voice. ‘But I’m worried that Jason might have been trapped. You haven’t heard anything, have you?’

So she really only saw him as a way of getting to Jason. That was a relief. He began to relax.

‘Have you tried asking Amaryllis?’ he said. ‘She usually knows everything that’s going on around here.’

‘I saw her at the Cultural Centre,’ said Tamara, ‘but I didn’t get the chance to ask her directly. From what she was saying, it sounded as if she thought he might have fallen into the hands of the police.’

He was surprised by the sinister emphasis she gave the last few words. Did she have a particular reason to be wary of the police? He suddenly wished Amaryllis was here to interrogate the woman. He wasn’t at all confident of his power to dig up her secrets – and he was a bit worried that she might misinterpret any interest he showed in her.

‘Which way are you going?’ he asked.

‘Oh, just here and there. I’ve got to get the bus home soon to feed the cats, but I think I’ve just missed one, so I thought I’d browse about the town a bit.’

‘I’m going home to change,’ he said, hoping she would let go of his arm. She didn’t. He turned and started to walk in the direction of his house. Maybe she would let go once they got past the last of the shops.

‘So,’ he said, as they strolled further up the hill together, ‘how did you come to be interested in this FOOP thing?’

‘Friends of Old Pitkirtly?’

‘Yes. You don’t live around here, do you?’

‘No, but I think of Pitkirtly as my spiritual home,’ she said, waving her free arm and causing the edge of her long flowing sleeve to catch a passing shopper in the eye. ‘I’ve known Bruce for a while. We met at badminton in Valleyfield church hall, but we were both more interested in history than sport. When he started up the Friends, he asked if I’d like to join him.’

Jock pushed aside the mental picture of Tamara in something long, flowing and purple on the badminton court, and concentrated on wheedling information out of her.

‘Have you lived in Pitkirtly before?’

She hesitated before replying. ‘Yes, a good while ago. When my daughter was young.’

‘How old is she now?’

‘Oh – she isn’t – she died.’

Jock didn’t know what to say to that, so he fell back on convention, something he usually avoided like the plague. ‘I’m sorry.’

He hoped she didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t think he could keep up the platitudes for very long. She hesitated again.

‘Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to,’ he said hurriedly.

‘It’s all right – it was quite a long time ago… I don’t really think about it very often.’

‘Sorry to have reminded you,’ he said.

Tamara shrugged her shoulders and fell silent. They walked along for a few minutes. They walked right past the end of Jock’s street, but he didn’t want to upset her by rushing off home as soon as she had shared this sad snippet of information with him. It wouldn’t do him any harm to retrace his steps a little way.

Fortunately she spotted somebody else she knew before she had led him too far astray. She darted across the road to greet them, and Jock turned his steps towards home. He didn’t think the afternoon would bring anything as interesting as a boat trip, a shipwreck and a police chase and then two women after him, but you never knew. Maybe he should have a lie-down before going out again.

Chapter 14 From the archives

‘Interesting,’ commented Bruce, staring at the flipchart pages that still adorned the walls of Christopher’s office. ‘Is she a detective or something? Ms Peebles, I mean.’

‘Something,’ said Christopher. ‘She does do some private investigations,’ he added as an afterthought, realising that his initial response might not have clarified things very much.

‘She doesn’t seem to have much evidence to go on. And the police are on the case, aren’t they?’

‘Yes.’ Christopher nodded. He felt he should say more. ‘She just wants to give them a hand. Do some of the strategic thinking.’

He didn’t entirely feel this expressed Amaryllis’s contribution to local detection, but he didn’t want to engage with Bruce. The man was only in his office at all because he had tricked his way in. Or at least he had said he was interested in Christopher’s work on the McCallum letters. The McCallums had been a large local family who wrote to each other at length throughout the eighteen-eighties, recording the events and trivia of their lives for the benefit of sisters and cousins who had moved as far afield as Kirkcaldy in some cases. Rather unfortunately, in Christopher’s view, there were still a few McCallums around Pitkirtly, and a woman from one of the local branches of the family had decided to collect as many letters as she could track down and to present them to the Cultural Centre with a great flourish in a small ceremony orchestrated by Jemima and her fellow family historians.

Every so often, when Christopher wanted to shut himself in his room and brood or think, he would tell people he was working on the McCallum letters. So far he had worked on three of them, fallen asleep over one and frittered away some time wondering if anybody would notice if they accidentally fell into a fire and were destroyed. The main drawback with that was that there wasn’t a fire in the Cultural Centre for them to fall into, and the nearest place he knew of which still had an open fire was the Queen of Scots, which was a bit too public for a discreet accident to take place. With Christopher’s luck, Jemima would plunge her hand in to save the letters, thereby giving herself first-degree burns and inciting Dave to kill him.

Bruce, despite his professed interest in the letters, only seemed to want to look at Amaryllis’s messy flipcharts, which had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

‘Do you have a marker pen I could borrow for a minute?’ said Bruce suddenly, homing in on one particular page and frowning at something in the middle of it.

‘Yes, I think it’s – what do you need it for?’

Christopher paused with his hand halfway across the desk towards the pen.

‘Hyphen,’ said Bruce. ‘There should be a hyphen here. In between self and harm.’

‘All right,’ said Christopher grudgingly. He held out the marker pen. ‘Go ahead.’

But once Bruce got hold of the pen, the power vested in it seemed to go straight to his head. He underlined some phrases, he crossed out a word here and added one there... Amaryllis would have been extremely irritated if she had seen him. She would be angry the next time she came in here. She might even think Christopher himself had been through the pages, correcting her grammar and adjusting the wording.

He already knew that an angry Amaryllis was a dangerous Amaryllis.

‘Bruce,’ he said a few moments later. ‘I think you’d better stop that now. Give me the pen back.’

‘All right, take it!’ said Bruce, flinging it on the desk. It rolled off the edge, and its momentum carried it across the room and under the bookcase.

Christopher gritted his teeth.

‘I’ll go in a minute,’ said Bruce, backing away slightly. ‘I just thought I’d offer to give you a hand with the McCallum stuff. I’ve got plenty of time to spare and you seem to be so busy.’

‘The McCallum stuff,’ said Christopher. He got up from his chair, pushing it back quickly. It made a horrible scraping noise as it moved backwards across the uncarpeted section of the floor, probably damaging the laminate and making it inevitable that the wrath of the cleaner would descend on him sooner or later. He strode purposefully over to the filing cabinet and wrenched the middle drawer open with so much force that the cabinet rocked. Half the drawer was occupied by the letters in their special archival pockets. He pulled them all out, returned to his desk and flung them down. Bruce had retreated further to what he probably imagined was a safe distance. ‘There it is,’ said Christopher. He almost added ‘Do your worst with it’, but the archivist in him wouldn’t let the words escape.

‘Maybe not right now,’ said Bruce.

‘Here, have a look,’ said Christopher, picking up one of the archival pockets and emptying it on to the desk. The letters, still in their envelopes, had an oddly uniform appearance although an initial sift through had revealed that they had been written by various correspondents. He removed one from its envelope and unfolded it, starting to read immediately without waiting for any reaction from Bruce. ‘Dear Sissy, hope you are well. I am the same but George had a summer cold last week. The cat went missing last night but returned in the morning. He had caught three mice which we found on the doorstep.... What do you think? There’s some scope for cataloguing the detail. References to cats, construction of a family tree....’

‘I’ll leave it for now,’ said Bruce, by now almost at the door on his way out.

Christopher read relentlessly on. ‘A funny thing happened last week. Mrs Greig from along the road went out one morning and didn’t come back. The police were round all the neighbours. There’s been no sign of her... Jean’s Jack Russell caught a rat at the allotments. I hope it wasn’t carrying the bubonic plague... See you later, then, Bruce.’

He glanced casually at the date on that last letter. It had been written less than twenty years before.

Bruce had gone. Mission accomplished. He put the letter down on his desk and started to return the batch to its pocket. Mrs Greig from along the road. He had no doubt that if he read the next few letters in the sequence he would come to a report that Mrs Greig had been called away urgently to visit her sister in West Wemyss, or that she had left her husband and run off to North Berwick with a toy boy, or that she had met with an accident and had been taken to hospital.

He put the whole thing back in the drawer and closed it carefully. He sat down at his desk. It was only then that he wondered if he had gone too far. It wasn’t like him to show any sign of impatience with visitors to the Cultural Centre, even when they drove him very nearly to the end of his tether, as sometimes happened. Was he suffering from stress? He didn’t really believe in stress, but maybe that didn’t make any difference. Amaryllis hadn’t appeared to notice anything wrong earlier. He knew she wouldn’t hesitate to point it out if he were unusually grumpy or anything. Did he need a holiday? Thinking back to the last couple of times he had taken anything resembling a holiday, he shuddered. A stay in a caravan along the coast which ended in a police chase and a humiliating rescue from a cliff. A walk along the Fife Coastal Path with Caroline, resulting in a lifetime ban from at least one of the campsites they had visited. If he had been going to be stressed, either of those should have done it. No, holidays were just recipes for exhaustion and mental turmoil. What he needed was a drink.

Still surprised by how simply he could pull himself back from the brink, he found himself at around lunch-time, standing at the bar in the Queen of Scots, ordering a pint of Old Pictish Brew.

‘You’re in early today,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘Everything all right?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Christopher.  He took his pint and paused. ‘I think I need a holiday.’ He waited for Charlie to say something reassuring, gave up waiting and added, ‘I’ve been feeling a bit tired.’

Charlie looked up from pulling the next pint and stared at him assessingly for a moment. ‘You look all right to me.’

‘I shouted at Bruce from FOOP today,’ said Christopher.

Charlie laughed. ‘Do you think there’s anybody in Pitkirtly who hasn’t shouted at Bruce from FOOP at some time or another? And what sort of stupid name is that for an organisation, anyway?’

‘But it was unprofessional,’ Christopher insisted.

‘It was human,’ said Charlie. He took the pint along to another customer and returned. ‘What makes you think you’ve got to be perfect?’

‘I don’t!’ said Christopher. ‘I just have standards to maintain. At work.’

‘I bet you didn’t even really shout,’ said Charlie.

‘I banged a drawer. In the filing cabinet.’

Charlie tutted. ‘I’m surprised at you!’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘If I were you I’d have trapped his head in it first.’

Christopher smiled reluctantly.

‘What is this – a confessional?’ said Amaryllis from behind Christopher. ‘Mine’s a dram of Glenfisk, please, Charlie.’

‘You can’t go out there as an elf smelling of whisky,’ said Charlie, going to fetch the drink anyway.

‘There’s no other way of getting me out there as an elf,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Not today, anyway. I need some sustenance. I’ve been up since before dawn and I’ve just had an unsettling encounter with Jason Penrose at the police station.’

‘So he was there?’ said Christopher.

‘Yes, but not for the reason everyone’s been imagining,’ said Amaryllis.

‘If you need sustenance, you should have had something to eat before you have whisky,’ said Jemima sternly from behind them all. ‘I’ve got a ham sandwich in my bag if you want that. In case David gets hungry on the way up the road.’

Charlie glared. ‘You’re not supposed to bring your own food in here.’

‘But if she eats it just over by the window it doesn’t count, does it?’ said Jemima. ‘We could open the window and she could lean out...’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Charlie. ‘Let her eat it wherever she wants.’ He turned his attention back to Amaryllis. ‘And talking of confessionals... what have you done with my boat?’

‘What do you need a boat for anyway, Amaryllis?’ demanded Dave, who had materialised alongside Jemima. He could move quietly for a large man when he wanted to. ‘You don’t have the time to go fishing, do you? What with all your other interests. Not to mention being an elf.’

‘It wouldn’t take much time,’ said Amaryllis. ‘After all, the harbour’s just along there a bit.’

‘But you can’t just walk out your front door and jump in the boat and go,’ said Dave. ‘There’s things to organise. Charlie can’t get away just any time... But if you ever need me to mind the bar for you while you do that, Charlie, just let me know.’

‘Don’t encourage him,’ murmured Jemima. ‘He’d spend all his time in here if he could.’

Under cover of the burgeoning argument, Christopher noticed Amaryllis pick up her glass from the bar and take it over to the table where Charlie’s dog had already settled down in anticipation of their arrival. There was an unspoken agreement that if the man from the brewery paid an unannounced visit, they would shield the dog with their bodies, smuggle him off the premises or do whatever else it took to hide him from view.

Christopher followed her over to the table with his pint. ‘Have you been over to salvage the boat yet?’

‘I haven’t had a chance,’ said Amaryllis. ‘The police are still working out there, as far as I know.’

‘And what’s all this about Jason Penrose? Have you been stalking him?’

‘Oh, please!’ said Amaryllis. ‘I don’t stalk people. Not since I had that restraining order put on me back in Warsaw, anyway. I just happened to be round at the police station and I just happened to bump into him.’

‘What was he doing there? Has he been arrested?’

‘No. He was doing an archaeological dig.’

Christopher choked on his beer. He was still spluttering when Jemima and Dave arrived at the table. Dave patted him on the back a bit too heartily, and he had almost collapsed under the table by the time Amaryllis pulled him upright again.

‘Who was doing an archaeological dig?’ said Jemima.

‘Jason,’ said Amaryllis. ‘In the garden behind the police station. He thinks he’s found a Roman mosaic there.’

‘Roman mosaic?’ said Christopher, his voice rising as disbelief mingled with indignation. ‘He’s more likely to find the lost valley of the dinosaurs.’

Jemima frowned. ‘There’s no evidence of the Romans anywhere near Pitkirtly, is there?’

‘No,’ said Christopher firmly. ‘Otherwise Maisie Sue would have incorporated them in her local history quilt.’

‘That isn’t exactly evidence, though, is it?’ said Amaryllis. ‘What sort of research do you think Maisie Sue has done to prove there weren’t any Romans here?’

‘It isn’t a case of proving there weren’t Romans,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s that there’s no reason at all to think there were any.’

‘I haven’t come across any references to them in the Cultural Centre archives,’ said Jemima, nodding sagely. ‘That’s enough for me.’

‘That reminds me,’ began Christopher. ‘About the McCallum letters…’

‘There’s a woman over there waving at you,’ Dave interrupted. ‘By the door.’

Christopher glanced over to the other side of the room. He didn’t recognise the woman who was waving, but he supposed he should go and speak to her anyway. He was just heaving himself to his feet in a martyred kind of way when Amaryllis looked round and said, ‘Oh, there’s Elizabeth. I’d better go.’