Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 32 Confessions of a minor peer

  After what seemed like a lot of time-wasting by the paramedics, although they were probably either waiting for more casualties or trying to find out which hospital to go to, Christopher and Lord Murray were whisked away by ambulance. It was an unnerving experience because, as they soon found out, ambulances didn’t handle any better than any other vehicle under these conditions. Christopher almost wished they could have gone by helicopter instead, although he knew he would only have embarrassed himself by being sick or having a panic attack.

  Neither of them was ill enough to justify the sirens, and the paramedic who was with them spent most of the journey leaning into the front of the ambulance and making jokes with his colleague who was driving.

  After a while Lord Murray pushed aside his oxygen mask and said, ‘You don’t think they’ll really be stupid enough to blow anything up, do you?’

  ‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He pushed aside his mask too, coughing as he did so. ‘Amaryllis will stop them.’

  ‘Good-looking girl,’ commented Lord Murray.

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. Even when he wasn’t actually coughing, his throat hurt so much he didn’t feel like speaking very much. It turned out, however, that Lord Murray did.

  ‘Never thought Malcolm would do something like that,’ he said, struggling to sit up and eventually flopping back on the pillow. ‘Wild boy – that’s why we put him in the army, you know. Couldn’t settle to anything… Did someone mention blowing things up?’

  Christopher tried a tentative ‘Mmm’ to see if that would hurt too. It wasn’t quite as bad as forming words. Unfortunately Lord Murray took it as a prompt to continue with Mal’s life story.

  ‘He got into a bit of trouble with that before,’ continued his lordship dreamily. ‘Playing with explosives in the tunnels under Pitkirtly Island. I heard a couple of the local girls drowned. We had to put him in the army after that. Save the family name. That sort of thing.’

  ‘The family name?’ said Christopher incredulously. He hadn’t removed his oxygen mask so he didn’t think anyone would notice his tone of voice, and perhaps they hadn’t even heard the words.

  ‘Bit of a hero in Afghanistan,’ added Lord Murray, wheezing a little. ‘He and his friend went in all guns blazing to rescue some local people from one of the warlords… He found out afterwards they didn’t even want to be rescued – extraordinary.’

  It didn’t sound all that heroic to Christopher; he even caught himself feeling smug about having seen through Mal at a very early stage in their acquaintance. He had always known it wasn’t natural to want to go on these major quests. Doing good by stealth or in small ways was the better option. Not that you always got any thanks for it.

  He started to cough again and the paramedic was at his side in a couple of moments, adjusting the oxygen mask and then listening to his chest.

  ‘Better keep quiet for a while,’ he advised.

  Christopher started to explain that he wasn’t the one who had trouble keeping quiet, but the paramedic just shooshed him and turned to Lord Murray.

  ‘We don’t just give you these masks for fun, you know,’ he scolded. ‘Try and keep quiet – give your lungs a rest.’

  ‘Nothing the matter with me,’ said Lord Murray, trying to wriggle into an upright position while struggling against a paroxysm of coughing. The paramedic put one hand on his chest and gently pushed him back down.

  ‘I don’t want to hear another word from either of you,’ he said. ‘You’re distracting the driver with all this coughing. It’s not easy getting along at all under those conditions, you know.’

  Christopher considered pushing aside his mask again to say something sarcastic about the conditions, but the paramedic gave him a look.

  They lay there silently for a while, one at each side of the ambulance. The paramedic resumed his conversation with the driver. A few minutes later there was a bump, and the whole vehicle shuddered and lurched. Christopher braced himself: he could picture them skidding along on two wheels, heading for the nearest ditch. But they suddenly made a 180 degree turn and came to a halt. The driver was swearing under his breath. Somehow that made it seem much worse than if he had shouted obscenities into the frosty air. But he probably wasn’t allowed to do that while he had passengers.

  ‘Everybody all right back here?’ asked the paramedic, picking himself up from the floor. ‘There’ll be a slight delay while we regroup. Try not to talk amongst yourselves.’

  He swung past them and jumped out through the back doors, closing them behind him, while Christopher heard the driver, still swearing, open his door and get out. Various bumps, thuds and shouts came from outside.

  ‘We’re not going to make it to hospital,’ wheezed Lord Murray, having removed the oxygen mask again. ‘Might as well have stayed at home.’

  ‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He hoped they wouldn’t have to spend the night here in the ambulance. Surely that wouldn’t be very good for smoke inhalation. He supposed they couldn’t have stayed at Lord Murray’s with the fire going on, but maybe if he asked the ambulance crew nicely they would drop him off in Pitkirtly and he could rely on the restorative properties of Old Pictish Brew instead of modern medicine.

  He suddenly felt suffocated by the oxygen mask – was this even possible? - and moved it away from his nose and mouth again. He decided to compromise by not speaking.

  Lord Murray succeeded in pushing himself up into a sitting position. ‘I’d better be getting back home to find out what Malcolm’s up to. You never stop looking out for your little brother, do you?’

  Christopher glanced at him uneasily. He knew aristocrats sometimes seemed a bit weird to normal people like him, but he wasn’t keen on being trapped in a snow-bound vehicle with one who was having a funny turn. He decided not to confess that he didn’t have a brother, just a sister. He didn’t want to talk about Caroline. Even now that they were on good terms again, he couldn’t entirely forget the past.

  ‘Been covering up for him for years,’ continued Lord Murray. ‘Lying – cheating – stealing.’ He glanced round furtively, as if convinced there was another paramedic hiding in the dark space behind the door. ‘He stole the golden peacock, you know.’

  ‘From the jeweller’s?’

  ‘Before that – long before that. He was the one who replaced it with a fake. Years ago. It was a family heirloom – my father would have been furious if he’d found out.’

  ‘Did you know it was a fake all along?’

  The minor peer’s eyes, small, pale and cunning, met Christopher’s.

  ‘Not until Malcolm told me. And that was after I’d taken it down to the jeweller’s. I needed the money, you know. House doesn’t pay for itself. Grounds – deer park – roof crumbling.’

  ‘Can’t you get a grant for the repairs?’ said Christopher. They had both discarded their oxygen masks. Christopher was so engrossed in the story he forgot to cough.

  ‘Ha! Grants!’ said Lord Murray. ‘Council poking about, can’t be bothered with all that. They’re a bunch of lefties anyway – keep haranguing me about the deer park. Think I shouldn’t be keeping deer in captivity. It’s a perfectly natural environment for deer. The grounds wouldn’t look right without them.’

  ‘So what happened – when Mal told you the golden peacock was a fake?’

  ‘Got him to steal it back,’ said Lord Murray. He glared at Christopher as if to pre-empt any censure. ‘I didn’t know he was going to take a gun and frighten people! I told him to do it discreetly.’

  ‘Rob a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the afternoon when people were doing their Christmas shopping – discreetly?’

  The wrongness of it made Christopher feel faint. He lay back on the pillow and lifted the oxygen mask to his face again, more to hide his expression than because he really needed it now.

  ‘I couldn’t have the family name brought into disrepute,’ said Lord Murray. He paused, as if thinking, and then added,
‘Suppose it is now – in disrepute I mean. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe it was a mistake to ask him to do that. I knew he would steal other things as well once he got into the safe. He wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.’

  He stared in Christopher’s direction, but his eyes were looking at something in the distance, perhaps in that different universe inhabited by his kind, where it was normal to have a deer park, and where roof repairs were a matter of historic importance and not just a way to prevent water from dripping on to your pillow.

  ‘He doesn’t take drugs, you know. He’s got a big project to help people in Africa. He’s the black sheep of the family, but he isn’t all bad… You don’t think he really will blow anything up, do you?’ he added in a plaintive tone. ‘The family would never live that down.’

  Christopher wondered if this man had a wife and children stashed away somewhere, or whether he was the last of his line, the only person standing between his ancestral home and the developers who would no doubt move in after him to turn the place into a luxury hotel or old people’s flats. He tried to think of a tactful way of asking this, without hinting at feelings of surprise or even revulsion that the man had bred.

  ‘Is your wife - away?’ he ventured at last.

  ‘Oh, Marion left me years ago. Lives on the Riviera with a Lottery millionaire. Kids grown-up – skiing over Christmas. I see them sometimes.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Christopher.

  He suddenly thought of the homeless man and wondered if he had ever been married and had children, or whether his dog had been his only companion in the world ever. He supposed Mal and Jimbo must have killed the man because they thought he knew too much about them and their activities. They had got rid of him with the same insouciance as most people would swat a bluebottle.

  He lay there and pondered on the various consequences of Lord Murray’s urge to protect his family name.

  Until there was the sound of a car engine outside, and a low growling voice that he recognised.

  ‘… give you a hand to get that moved?’ said Dave.

  Christopher cast aside the oxygen mask, struggled to his feet and flung open the back doors of the ambulance. He stumbled round the side of the vehicle and came to a snowdrift, in which the front wheels were embedded. Dave and the paramedics were assessing the situation by staring at it and shaking their heads. Beyond them sat the Land Rover, Jemima’s uprightness in the front seat only threatened by the dog, which stood on her lap glaring at the group of men. When it saw Christopher it started to bark. He chose to believe it was pleased to see him, but he didn’t test out that theory by going anywhere near it. Instead he waved to Jemima, and approached Dave and the others.

  ‘What are you doing on your feet?’ said one of the paramedics.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Christopher. He tried hard not to cough, but the freezing air got into his throat and he began to wheeze.

  The driver indicated the snowdrift in front of the wheels and said, ‘Where do you think we’re going?’

  ‘I could pull you out,’ Dave offered.

  Christopher stared at him. Dave was a big man but even so…

  ‘With the Land Rover, I assume,’ said the paramedic who had been looking after them.

  ‘Haha,’ boomed Dave. ‘Hear that, Jemima? I could still do it on my own, mind you. We used to have a tug of war team years ago. I had to give up after a while – the others didn’t think it was fair having me in the team. Discrimination, I suppose you’d call it nowadays.’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t let you tow us out, sir,’ said the driver after a brief consultation between the paramedics. ‘It’s against the rules. We have to call it in and wait for a replacement ambulance.’

  ‘I could take them home,’ said Dave, sweeping his arms around to encompass Christopher and Lord Murray, who had appeared beside the ambulance.

  ‘They’re supposed to stay with us,’ protested one of the paramedics. ‘They should really be in hospital. At least overnight.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Dave cheerily. ‘A bit of smoke never hurt anybody.’

  ‘I’d rather go home than hospital,’ said Christopher. ‘And it’s much nearer.’

  ‘Not sure if the house is habitable,’ muttered Lord Murray. ‘Might have burned down by now.’

  ‘Take him as well, and you’ve got a deal,’ said the driver, addressing Dave. ‘But make sure you keep them indoors and call out a doctor if they get worse. I’ll give them a couple of inhalers to calm down the coughing. And at least they’re on their feet now, so it’s doubtful if they’d be kept in hospital anyway.’

  He turned to Christopher. ‘It’s at your own risk,’ he warned. ‘Against medical advice.’

  Christopher shivered. He couldn’t see that the risk of going off with Dave to a nice warm house, where Jemima would undoubtedly bring them hot cups of tea and refilled hot water bottles every ten minutes as well as producing some hitherto unheard-of Scottish delicacy that had the twin effects of curing smoke inhalation and causing a dangerous leap in cholesterol, was any worse than the risk of standing around here in the cold while the paramedics argued about how to get the ambulance out of a snowdrift.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  Lord Murray nodded agreement.

  ‘Good,’ said Dave. ‘Jemima’s got some pease brose on the go.’

  Christopher smiled to himself, and happily followed Dave to the Land Rover.