Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 24 Octopus or shark?

  ‘He needs to go home and sleep for a week,’ said Amaryllis once they were safely outside. The Council snow-plough sat in the middle of the road. ‘I wonder why it’s taken them so long to get round to us.’

  ‘They may have forgotten about Pitkirtly,’ suggested Christopher. ‘We’re a bit off the beaten track here.’

  Amaryllis remembered thinking much the same thing when she had first arrived in town. Now - well, it wasn’t exactly the centre of the universe, even now. But she liked living here, and she felt at home, while accepting that nobody was truly at home in Pitkirtly until at least four generations of their family had lived there.

  ‘Come on, this way,’ she said, heading for the High Street.

  ‘What now?’ groaned Christopher. Evidently he thought he deserved to go home and sleep for a week too. We’ll see about that, thought Amaryllis, who liked to keep him on his toes.

  ‘We might as well go and have a word with the jeweller, now we’re so close by,’ she said.

  ‘We’re not that close by. And we’ll have to come up the hill again to get home.’

  Not for the first time Christopher reminded her of a whiny toddler. Only he was too big to lift up and physically move to where you wanted him to be. And much too big to wheel around in a baby buggy, even one of the ones built like tanks that took up the entire pavement and got in the way on the bus.

  ‘But once you get home, you’ll just fall asleep on the sofa with the 24 hour news channel on. Then you’ll grumble for the rest of the week about not knowing what’s going on in the world.’

  She couldn’t resist harking back to a time when Christopher had fallen asleep every time the words ‘Eurozone crisis’ were mentioned on the news, and then couldn’t understand why people were rioting in Greece the next time he paid attention. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have just let it go and not worried about it, but he was also the kind of person who prided himself on keeping up with current events. He insisted it was part of his job, which it wasn’t.

  ‘I don’t grumble,’ he said with misplaced confidence in his sunny disposition.

  By this time they were halfway down the High Street and she knew he had already forgotten what they were arguing about. She smiled to herself. Maybe he could help convince the jeweller that they were on the level and not scoping the place out for another robbery. Christopher had such a transparently honest face that people tended to believe him. She knew they didn’t always feel the same way about her, quite rightly in many cases.

  ‘What are we going to say to the jeweller?’ he asked. ‘And how will he know we’re not casing the joint?’

  ‘I don’t know if people say that any more,’ she said.

  After they had trekked all the way down the High Street they found the jeweller’s was closed.

  Christopher leaned against the wall next to the shop.

  ‘That was a waste of time,’ he complained.

  ‘I thought he might have re-opened by now,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Oh, well. It’s nearly lunch-time. Last one to the Queen of Scots is an overweight cissy?’

  ‘You know that’s always me,’ he said, not moving. ‘What did you want to ask him about, anyway?’

  ‘I just wonder if this gold octopus or shark Constable Burnett mentioned was stolen in the robbery.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it?’

  ‘Most brilliant brainwaves are,’ said Amaryllis. ‘And he was so embarrassed about telling us that, he must think it’s important.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Christopher. ‘He seemed a bit unsure about it. As if maybe he realised he wasn’t meant to tell us and changed his story halfway through.’

  Amaryllis was sceptical about this theory, and they bickered about it all the way round to the Queen of Scots.

  ‘Ah,’ said the landlord as they came in. ‘There you are. I was just telling Alan here you’d be round in a bit.’

  The landlord, whose name they could never remember although, Amaryllis thought, they probably should after wrecking his Range Rover, wasn’t usually so loquacious. There was a man she didn’t know standing at the bar, a glass of whisky in front of him. She hoped they weren’t going to get dragged into some pointless conversation with him when they could spend the time deciding where to go next with the shark-octopus clue.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. Christopher, behind her, murmured something.

  ‘Those are the two I was telling you about, Alan,’ said the landlord. ‘Amaryllis Peebles and Christopher Wilson. They go around solving things. A bit like the Famous Five, except there are only two of them and they’re not really young enough to play games.’

  Oh dear, thought Amaryllis. Alan’s a lawyer and he’s going to sue us over the Range Rover incident. The landlord certainly didn’t sound too friendly. Then he suddenly laughed and said, ‘Only joking. They’re good citizens who help out with catching villains. Them and their friends. I think Jemima and Dave were in earlier, by the way.’

  ‘So can we help you, Alan?’ said Amaryllis politely to the other man, who had been waiting patiently for the landlord to finish rambling on.

  ‘Alan’s got a wee jeweller’s shop in the High Street,’ said the landlord.

  ‘Fantastic!’ said Amaryllis. ‘Can we get you another whisky, Alan? Let’s go and sit over there. Near the fire. It’s too cold to be standing around in a draught.’

  Now she understood why Alan looked so miserable. It must have been a shock to his system to be robbed at gun-point, particularly on Christmas Eve when things were winding down to the holiday. She steered him over to the table while Christopher got the drinks in.

  It was the perfect opportunity. She wondered if he actually wanted to hire her as a private investigator or whether the landlord had just been recommending her as an interested amateur for whom money didn’t matter. As it happened, the money itself didn’t really matter to her; the main advantage of being a professional investigator was that it gave her some sort of standing. Not that it would necessarily be accepted by the police as a good reason for her to stick her nose into everything, but it made her role unambiguous. She might just mention that once she’d spoken to him about the robbery, but without any aggressive marketing.

  By the time Christopher brought the drinks over, they had been through the boring preliminary chat; when she met someone new she thought this resembled the start of a chess game, with little pawns moving about before the main action took place. Of course as a chess player she was also aware that these moves could equally well lead to instant disaster, so she always tried to keep her wits about her even during casual conversation.

  ‘Alan was saying there was somebody in the shop choosing an engagement ring when the robbery started,’ she told Christopher. ‘That must have given her a terrible fright.’

  ‘She and her fiancé ducked down behind the counter,’ said Alan. ‘She gave him a telling-off afterwards for being such a coward. It sounded as if they were about ready to break off the engagement. They never did choose a ring,’ he added sadly. ‘I haven’t been open since then.’

  ‘But they couldn’t really go anywhere else for one,’ said Amaryllis, trying to comfort him. ‘The roads have been closed all this time and there isn’t another jeweller’s in Pitkirtly, is there?’

  He shook his head somberly. ‘Sam just told me the snow plough’s broken through. First thing this morning. But I can’t open up the shop yet anyway - the police are still treating it as a crime scene.’

  ‘Do you get much business at this time of year?’ said Christopher.

  ‘It builds up just before Christmas, but this is a dead time, between Christmas and New Year. I don’t do post-Christmas sales so people just don’t come in unless they’ve got something special in mind. To be honest, it doesn’t really make much difference not being able to open up the shop. I’ve been in a few times just to use the computer though. There are some things I have to do online or by phone. Speaking to po
tential buyers, that kind of thing.’

  ‘So do you ever find special things for potential buyers?’ said Amaryllis, seizing the opportunity. ‘Or source things to order?’

  She couldn’t imagine he would just have happened to have a golden octopus among his stock. It wasn’t the kind of thing someone would want unless they had a reason for it. Personally she found the idea of an octopus gave her the creeps since the incident in Anatolia. She shivered slightly just thinking about it.

  ‘Would you like to sit nearer the fire?’ said Alan, noticing.

  ‘No, I’m fine…’

  Just answer the question, she was screaming silently in her mind.

  ‘Do you have clients in other parts of the country, or overseas?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘Yes, a few. It’s the only way to survive these days. There isn’t much money in Pitkirtly. On the other hand, the business rates aren’t too bad. If it wasn’t for that and the online trade I might move to Dunfermline. Or even Edinburgh. Not to the city centre, though, I couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘So what exactly happened during the robbery?’ she prompted. He was a bit of a rambler, but she had learned not to be too impatient with people like that, at least not outwardly. Sometimes you could learn a lot from them. ‘The robbers rushed in, the engaged couple dived behind the counter – what did you do?’

  ‘I asked them what they wanted,’ he said. ‘I was surprised at how calm I felt. If anyone had told me I’d have to face a man with a gun that day, I wouldn’t have bothered going into work… But they weren’t waving the gun around randomly. The man who had it – well, it looked like he’d handled one before. I didn’t think he would let it go off by accident or anything. The other one, the one without the gun, said they wanted me to open the safe. I couldn’t think of any way to stop them, or fob them off. It happened too quickly. Maybe I should have worked something out in advance, but –’

  ‘But you didn’t know there was going to be an armed robbery that day,’ said Amaryllis. For a moment it crossed her mind to wonder if he did know, and if the whole thing was going to turn out to be an insurance scam, but then she decided to carry on as if she believed him. She wouldn’t get very far with her questions otherwise.

  ‘No. I hadn’t even thought about it actually. Pitkirtly seems like such a sleepy place. Why would anybody have a gun in the first place?’

  ‘So you opened the safe,’ said Amaryllis. She had finished her drink. She was dimly aware of Christopher taking her glass away.

  ‘Yes. Then they just bundled everything out of the safe and into a kind of holdall they had with them, and then they took off. It was all over in minutes. I went after them for a bit, but then I heard the shots from outside and I - just went back in to see if the engaged couple were all right. And to ring the police.’

  ‘Very sensible,’ said Amaryllis, knowing that she wouldn’t have gone back inside but would have pursued the armed robbers to the bitter end. ‘Is there anything else you can tell me? And how can I help?’

  ‘There’s a special piece among the stuff that’s missing,’ said Alan.

  ‘An octopus?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘No, why should it be an octopus? It’s a peacock. A gold peacock set with sapphires and emeralds. Said to have been made by Fabergé - like the eggs, you know.’

  ‘A peacock? Are you sure it was a peacock and not a shark?’

  ‘Of course not! I don’t know much about wildlife but I do know the difference between an peacock and an octopus and a shark.’

  ‘What’s so special about it?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Apart from it being an antique, of course.’

  ‘That’s just the thing,’ said the jeweller.

  ‘What?’

  Christopher put a drink on the table in front of her. She was too intent on the conversational chase to take a sip from it.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Alan, ‘it wasn’t an antique after all. It was a fake.’

  ‘Are we talking about the octopus?’ said Christopher.

  ‘No!’ said Amaryllis and Alan at the same time.

  ‘What made you think it was an antique in the first place?’ said Amaryllis to the jeweller.

  ‘It’s quite embarrassing really,’ he said.

  ‘You can tell us anything,’ Amaryllis assured him.

  ‘It was Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill,’ he said. ‘He sold it to me personally a few weeks ago. Just appeared in the shop with it. Gave me a little piece of paper with the alleged provenance written on it in copperplate, and said it had been handed down in his family. Well, I’d been looking for something like that for one of my overseas clients so I jumped at it. I wasn’t quite as careful with my checks on it as I should have been. And I wouldn’t have wanted to contradict his lordship anyway. Of course, I’d have had to look at it very closely before sending it to Dubai. But when the robbery took place I’d only just finished examining it. That morning. And I found I’d been deceived.’

  ‘By Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Are you sure it was him?’

  ‘Well, yes. He had all the paperwork. There was nobody else it could have been. It was a modern copy - quite a good one, but a modern technique had been used that wouldn’t have been known to Fabergé, and the stones weren’t real.’

  ‘I still don’t know what you want us to do,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘I thought you might be able to look into the Lord Murray situation. Discreetly. See if he’s been involved in anything else dodgy, or if this is a one-off. I don’t want to take any action if he’s just some forgetful old man. Not that he’s all that old, as it happens. I thought maybe you could get up there and have a word with him. Of course, the weather makes it a bit more difficult.’

  ‘Up there? To Old Pitkirtlyhill House?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Yes, that’s where he lives.’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ she said, and heard a faint groan from Christopher.