Chapter 21 Breakout
The dog continued to howl as Amaryllis ran towards it.
She hadn’t been along this way before on any of her previous visits to the police station, but she thought it led to a small number of police cells where suspects could be kept for short spells before being transferred as required to the prison at Auchterderran. It wasn’t exactly standard procedure for a dog to be kept in one of the cells, but she assumed it had come in with the homeless man and Charlie Smith had allowed them to stay together. He wasn’t unsympathetic by the standards of his profession.
She knew which cell it was from the way the door swung open, partially blocking the corridor. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find in there, but seeing the dog on its own was one of the better options she had imagined. It stopped howling at once and came towards her, wagging its tail.
‘Good dog,’ she said.
Christopher appeared, a little short of breath. She would have to instigate a fitness programme for him, otherwise he wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy the gold-plated pension he was no doubt entitled to as the employee of a public body.
‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘Where’s the homeless man?’
‘Gone,’ she said.
Charlie Smith came along the corridor, followed by the young police constable.
‘He’s gone,’ she told them, to avoid the tedium of hearing them repeat Christopher’s question.
‘Search the building!’ snapped Mr Smith. ‘Keith, take this end and the back yard, I’ll do the other end and the car park. He won’t be far away.’
‘When did you last see him?’ said Amaryllis.
‘About fifteen minutes ago - I brought his fish and chips along. And something for the dog,’ added Charlie over his shoulder as he set off back down the corridor, opening doors and slamming them again as he went. ‘You two get back to the kitchen!’ he called.
The constable went the other way and they heard him slamming doors too.
‘I wonder if there’s another way,’ said Amaryllis thoughtfully. ‘Windows? A hatch in the ceiling? An air duct?’
‘This isn’t Mission Impossible,’ said Christopher. ‘That man wasn’t all that agile, not with his bad leg. He’s probably walked out through a door that’s been left open. You can see they’ve got slacker because of Christmas and the weather - someone’s forgotten to lock up properly.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she admitted, and then loped off after Charlie Smith, who had now disappeared round a corner. She paused halfway along the corridor and tested a window. It swung open at a light push.
‘This is it,’ she said. When Christopher caught up with her again she was staring over the windowsill. There was a straggly hedge just outside but its snow-encrusted branches were broken and bent in the middle. ‘Someone pushed through there.’
She was climbing over the sill when the constable came back. ‘Nothing that way,’ he started to say, and then, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll disturb the evidence. Come back here.’
Amaryllis submitted, not very gracefully, to being dragged back into the building. After everyone had studied the spot where apparently the man had escaped, they all went round to the outside of the building to look at it from the other side. Amaryllis fidgeted and fumed meanwhile. Her usual procedure wasn’t to examine evidence in meticulous detail while the people she was pursuing got further and further away. But then, she told herself, she didn’t usually have to make a case stand up in court. She tried to be patient but eventually she couldn’t stand it any longer.
‘We’ll get going, then,’ she announced to the assembled police officers as they retired indoors to look for a camera to take some emergency scene of crime photographs. ‘It’s past Christopher’s bed-time and I need to get him home, otherwise he’ll turn into a pumpkin.’
Christopher blushed. Charlie Smith glanced round and said, ‘I hope you’re not going to go on the rampage round town looking for this man.’
‘Yes, I know that would be a very silly thing to do and I’d be endangering the lives of myself and others,’ she said.
‘You’re right, it would be. But that doesn’t mean you need to do it… I don’t suppose you feel like taking the dog home with you,’ he added,
‘No, I don’t. I know what dogs are like - they wreck everything they go near. I’m more of a cat person.’
‘Mr Wilson?’
‘I’m allergic,’ said Christopher. Amaryllis stared at him in surprise. She had never heard this before, so either Christopher had thought very quickly for once or there were things she didn’t yet know about him. Both possibilities were equally unsettling.
Charlie sighed. He didn’t look as if he believed Christopher either. ‘Off you go, then,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’
As soon as they were outside the police station, gasping as the freezing night air hit them again, Christopher said, ‘We’re not going to go looking for him, are we?’
‘You heard what Chief Inspector Smith said, didn’t you?’ she countered.
Christopher sighed in his turn. ‘Where will we start?’
She wasn’t sure she liked the idea that she had become predictable, but on the other hand, it would save a lot of time if Christopher didn’t bother to argue with her except when he felt really strongly about something. Evidently he wasn’t going to dig his heels in over this. Contrarily, she wondered what he would do if she just went on home to bed.
She discarded this idea before it was even fully-formed. Life was too short to follow up on every possibility as if you wanted to live in an infinite number of universes at once. But where had that mind-boggling thought come from? Had her brain been adversely affected by the extreme cold? Or had she been spending too much time with Christopher, something she knew from experience could be dangerous in all sorts of ways.
‘Would you like to live in infinite universes?’ she asked him as they turned along towards the High Street again.
‘He won’t have come back here, will he?’
‘Who knows?’
‘Infinity’s always frightened the wits out of me. I’d rather not think about it, if you don’t mind.’
‘We’ll try the shelter behind the war memorial first. Then the garden huts further down, then maybe that old workman’s place in the railway yard - you know.’
‘You don’t want to go there in the dark, do you?’ said Christopher incredulously.
‘Not really. I’m just thinking of places where he might be able to shelter for the night.’
‘I think they may have demolished it anyway,’ he said.
The homeless man, borrower of Amaryllis’s parka and former dog owner, wasn’t in any of the places they looked. Christopher was correct in his surmise about the workman’s hut in the railway yard, so they didn’t even have to go too near the place which had such bad memories for both of them. On the way back up the road they searched the yard behind the shop where the Happiness Club had once had its headquarters, the giant wheelie-bins behind the Golden Peach and the rather upmarket shed where they had once hidden with Jock McLean and Darren Laidlaw.
‘I give up,’ said Amaryllis. She felt dispirited, which wasn’t like her. She had somehow imagined she had a connection with the homeless man. Even if only via the loan of the parka.
‘I wonder why he didn’t take the dog with him,’ said Christopher.
‘You’re right. It’s a bit odd.’
‘I suppose he couldn’t get it out the window.’
‘But how did he know he was going to escape through the window?’
‘Maybe he’d seen it wasn’t shut properly earlier,’ suggested Christopher.
‘He could have lifted the dog over the windowsill,’ said Amaryllis, frowning. ‘It wasn’t that high up, and the dog’s quite thin. It probably doesn’t weigh much.’
‘Oh well,’ said Christopher, yawning. ‘Better get a good night’s sleep. I expect it’ll all seem clearer in the morning.’
Ther
e was the standard wrangle over whether he walked her home or not, and in the end she was so tired she just agreed to it.
‘But you can’t come in for toast,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got any bread. I need to go to the - oh my God!’
By this time they had turned down the road that led to Merchantman Wynd, where Amaryllis’s apartment was. She stared ahead with wide eyes and broke into a run, or the nearest approximation to a run she could manage in the snow.
There was a dark shape in the snow in the road just by the entrance to the Wynd. As she got closer, she knew it was exactly what she had feared it was. A man’s body. A man wearing a thick parka.
She fell on her knees beside him and searched for a pulse.
‘Will I call an ambulance?’ said Christopher, suddenly at her side. He pulled out the phone she had lent him, dropped it in the snow, retrieved it with clumsy gloved fingers and stared at the little screen as if wondering what it was. She knew she was taking in these details to get her mind off the fact that she couldn’t find any sign of life.
‘Police as well,’ she said.
Christopher must have charged up the phone for once, she told herself. And even brought it with him. Wonders would never cease. She wondered whether to start resuscitation. The man was cold, but it might be that his temperature had dropped to the sort of hibernating level where he could be revived. Then she saw the blood spots on the snow.
Frozen in Crime Page 21