Chapter 13 Restless in Pitkirtly
Amaryllis was very fond of Jemima and Dave, but she really didn’t want to spend Christmas with them. She had a feeling of impending doom even about the few hours on Christmas Day when she and Christopher were due to go round to Jemima’s house for tea and cake. She spent the morning wishing she could go down with some acute but not life-threatening illness that would mean hibernating for a few days and then resuming what passed for her social life just before the Queen of Scots Hogmanay party. If she and Christopher were even welcome at the Queen of Scots again after wrecking the landlord’s Range Rover.
She expressed this last point to Christopher as they made their way over to Jemima’s.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve let him know the worst and promised to get it back to him in a reasonable state before the middle of the week. If the weather doesn’t get any worse, that is. Otherwise I’ve offered to lend him Dave’s truck if he needs transport.’
‘Very organised,’ said Amaryllis. She hoped he didn’t sense any criticism in her tone. It would have been more fun to wind the landlord up a bit, have a shouting match with him and then produce the Range Rover at the eleventh hour. She sighed.
‘Still feeling restless?’ he said.
‘Restless isn’t the right word,’ she said, frowning. ‘Dissatisfied, maybe.’
‘Dissatisfaction’s all right,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes people do something to improve things.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You could always use this time to work out what to do about it,’ he said. ‘Do some brainstorming, mind-mapping, maybe a SWOT analysis…’
She glanced sideways at him. ‘Have you been on one of these management training courses again?’
‘Not for a while,’ he said defensively. ‘OK, well, two weeks ago.’
‘Where would we be if the hobbits had waited to do a SWOT analysis before they set off on their journey?’ she said.
‘That’s fiction, Amaryllis! Fantasy fiction, at that. For goodness’ sake don’t try and emulate it.’
‘I know it’s fiction, you idiot! I was joking!’
They stood glaring at each other, and Amaryllis suddenly realised they had reached Jemima’s doorstep. The door opened and Jemima looked at them quizzically.
‘Merry Christmas,’ she said.
Of course it was nice and homely being at Jemima and Dave’s for a few hours, sitting by a coal fire, eating great big chunks of home-made cake and drinking several too many cups of tea. Jemima offered sherry instead at one point, but they all turned it down in favour of tea, having sampled Jemima’s sherry before. The wind was getting up again and the lights kept flickering. Dave wanted to watch something on television, but the picture was terrible, and when Jemima tried the phone it wasn’t working at all.
‘I hear you want to go on an epic quest,’ said Jemima to Amaryllis.
‘Where on earth did you get that idea?’ said Amaryllis. ‘I might go somewhere exciting for a holiday. Thailand - Indonesia - Korea.’
‘Haven’t you been to all these places before?’ said Christopher.
‘That was work,’ said Amaryllis. ‘It was quite different.’
Yes, she thought, different in the sense that she had infiltrated a drugs ring that was helping to fund terrorism in Indonesia, she had followed a CIA agent into North Korea to see if he would lead her to the head of the secret government propaganda organisation, and she had waited in Thailand for the signal that would send her to rendezvous with a double agent in Beijing.
‘Would you not find it boring just having a holiday though?’ said Dave.
‘That’s a good question,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Maybe I should be looking at some sort of extreme sport.’
She saw Christopher’s expression of panic, and smiled to herself. But winding him up wasn’t really enough to amuse her for the whole day. She decided to browse online for extreme sporting opportunities when she got home. But somehow, sitting in the apartment on her own with the lights flickering and the internet only available in short bursts, she lost interest.
She opened the doors to the balcony and stood there for a while, feeling the freezing wind in her face and admiring the array of icicles that had formed on the overhang of the roof. One of them in particular caught her attention: it must have been at least 75 centimetres long with a diameter of around 10 centimetres. It would make a good weapon in an emergency, she mused. But hadn’t that idea been used in a famous murder mystery novel? That was the problem: everything she thought of had either been done before or wasn’t even necessary. In some ways she wished she had been young during the war, when she could have joined SOE and parachuted into occupied France, stolen the Enigma machine and got back in time to help invent the atomic bomb. Well, possibly not the last part. But she could have done something that would have made an obvious difference at the time. The things she had done during her career might have made a difference, but it was usually quite a small difference that took a while to have any effect.
Was she really trying to think of a way of achieving some sort of immortality? Or was she just missing the adrenalin rush of being in danger and finding a way of surviving? In the latter case, extreme sports would be the answer, but unless she practised a lot and became good enough to represent the nation in some international event, then the first part of it wouldn’t work at all. Even if she did win a gold medal at the Olympics, she knew it would soon be forgotten, and wouldn’t be all that important in the scheme of things.
She considered Mal’s big charity project. How did he feel about being a civilian after serving in combat and trekking through the Arctic under a military umbrella, so to speak? Would the charity thing be enough to satisfy him?
At last, becoming tired of thinking on a large scale, her mind wandered back to the jewel robbery in Pitkirtly. It seemed like a simple enough crime. Get some forensic evidence, fingerprints, DNA, whatever, and it would more or less solve itself. The police should manage it all right without her help. She wondered vaguely why Charlie Smith had wanted to speak to Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill. He hadn’t told them anything, of course, but maybe there was some connection with the robbery, since all the officers currently on duty were probably involved in the case. Would they be at work on Christmas Day? She pictured them all sitting round a small electric heater in the police canteen after a sketchy cold lunch of turkey sandwiches washed down by cranberry juice in lieu of wine. For the first time in her life she felt sorry for the police. They got all the hard work to do without the adrenalin or the trips to far-flung places she and others like her had experienced.
Amaryllis suddenly realised that she was still standing on the balcony and her feet were extremely cold. Knowing the weather was too bad even for her to go for one of her moonlight treks, she had taken off her Goretex walking shoes and big woolly socks when she got home. Bad enough having to wear them to avoid frostbite when she went out; there was no need to let her feet get all sticky in them in the flat, where she liked to prowl around in bare feet. She closed the doors, regretfully, and switched on a small electric heater.
Almost as if it had just been waiting for her to need electricity, the power supply chose that moment to give out altogether. It looked as though the latest wave of gales had finally brought the lines down. She remembered reading stories the previous winter about people waiting for weeks to get their power re-connected. Now she would find out what it was like. This really wasn’t the kind of epic she wanted to be involved in. The quest for power, although it might make a good title for a fantasy epic novel or even a whole trilogy, wasn’t going to be much fun to live through.
She wrapped her cold feet in a towel, fumbling in the dark to find one, put on the fleecy pyjamas she had been hoarding since she decided to come and live on the east coast of Scotland, added a jumper over them and went to bed.
About half an hour later, still in the dark, she got out of bed again and found her way to the wardrobe. She n
eeded an extra layer.
She shone her torch on to the clothes rail, looking for the old towelling robe she usually kept for visitors, but something else caught her eye, and she pulled it out and studied it thoughtfully. It was the pink bullet-proof vest someone had once given her. She turned it over so that she could see the back, although she already knew very well what the lettering said: Danger, PI at work.
Maybe the police would need her help yet again before long. Maybe she should try and find real paying clients, and turn this game into a business. It wouldn’t be world-shaking, but it would be something useful and enjoyable for her to do, in the absence of a wizard coming by with some bizarre story about a ring.
She put on the vest over everything else, found some long socks in a drawer and got back into bed. She couldn’t make a mind map by torchlight, but at least she could set her brain to work on it so that she would be ready to write it all down in the morning.
Adding the vest made all the difference.
Frozen in Crime Page 13