Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 34 Arguing in the Dark

  ‘What now?’ said Charlie, glancing around. They were right on the coast here but there was still a good layer of snow lying almost up to the edge of the mud flats. The tree they lurked behind was part of a small copse near a footpath right at the edge of the town. In front was the railway line, beginning to curve away from Pitkirtly at this point, and beyond that the River Forth and Pitkirtly Island, which of course wasn’t really an island but a peninsula. It was smaller than its very similar neighbour, Preston Island, and less industrial. But evidently that was all on the surface, for according to Amaryllis there was a rabbit warren of old mining tunnels under it.

  Amaryllis was consulting the maps on her phone again. He didn’t know how she could read the text without glasses, the screen was so small. It was one of the many things about modern life he just didn’t understand.

  ‘Was the dog there?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘The dog?’

  ‘I left it with them. Did they still have it?’

  She frowned.

  ‘Maybe. I think I heard something whining once or twice when I was on the phone to them… And Christopher told it to get down. Or at least I think it was the dog he meant. Might have been Lord Murray.’

  ‘So where do we go now?’ said Charlie. ‘Whatever we’re going to do, we’ll have to do it now. Otherwise they’ll be here and we’ll have no chance.’

  ‘They could be here already,’ said Amaryllis. Then she looked up and grinned. ‘But I don’t think so. Even if they did that first stretch quickly on skis, they’ll have slowed up when they got into the tunnel.’

  ‘But we don’t know where they went underground.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we do. Look.’

  She showed him the screen and he screwed up his eyes and pretended to be able to make sense of the map.

  ‘Look, here,’ she said eagerly. ‘There’s an entrance in the grounds of Old Pitkirtlyhill House. That’s where they’ll have gone in. The tunnel leads straight from there into Pitkirtly, and right under the town, and then under the island. But it’ll take them a while. Even if there aren’t any rock falls. But they may have checked that out beforehand. May even have shored up the tunnels with steel beams. That’s what I would have done.’

  ‘So they’ve been planning this for a good while? And it’s all going to kick off here, not at Longannet?’

  She nodded. ‘I think so.’

  Charlie got out his phone. ‘I’d better call it in.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘I don’t know – the station first. They can pass it on to anyone else who needs to know. The fire service. The army. Your lot.’

  ‘They aren’t my lot any more,’ said Amaryllis. He gave her a look. Once a spook, always a spook, as far as he was concerned. Not that he had actually seen her carrying out spook-like activities. Not for a while anyway.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m a PI now. And I’m on a case.’

  ‘You’re not going to find the proceeds of the jewel robbery down there in the tunnels,’ he said, trying to sound scathing. Of course, now that he had said that, they would probably go straight down the ladder and into an Aladdin’s cave full of treasure. The mental image made him smile, and he moved away from Amaryllis to make his call. It wouldn’t do for her to think he found this very serious situation amusing.

  He ended the call and glanced up to find she had already crossed the railway line and was waiting for him at the other side. She seemed to be staring hard at an old stone bridge that stood incongruously on its own in the middle of a patch of nettles and sticky willow. Maybe she thought there was a tunnel entrance there.

  ‘They were all heading for Longannet,’ he said, ‘but they’re going to send a contingent round this way, just in case.’

  ‘Hurry up, Jimbo and Mal will get ahead of us if we’re not careful,’ she said. She pushed through the undergrowth and led the way under the stone structure. He couldn’t decide if it was the remaining arch of a railway bridge, or part of an old sea wall.

  ‘What’s in here?’

  ‘One of the tunnel entrances. At least that’s what the map seems to be showing… Pity we don’t have a few aerial shots.’

  ‘Or a bigger map,’ he said as they walked under the arch. Suddenly there was a heavy-looking door in front of them with a new-looking padlock on a heavy steel chain.

  Amaryllis took something that resembled a Swiss army knife out of her pocket. ‘Look away for a minute,’ she told Charlie.

  There was a clunk and a bang, and when he looked back the padlock was lying on the ground. She unbolted the door and pulled it towards her.

  ‘There’s a tunnel. It looks as if it goes into a kind of bank first,’ she said. ‘There’ll be either a ladder or a slope before too long.’

  Or a deep dark shaft plummeting suddenly down to the centre of the earth, he thought suddenly in an uncharacteristic effort of the imagination.

  ‘We should wait for back-up,’ he said, but he knew it was only a token protest. Amaryllis was going into tunnel and he was going with her.

  It was a dark tunnel going into the bank, then sloping downwards. Amaryllis produced a torch that was much more powerful than it looked. Charlie experienced an odd feeling of envy mixed with guilt. Why wasn’t he, as a police officer, at least as well-equipped as her? It was no use blaming government spending cuts: he knew they had all the stuff they needed, but it was all back at the station or in the Land Rover, and he hadn’t thought to bring it with him. Of course, he had never been in the Cubs or Scouts. His parents’ irrational fears of uniformed organizations had a lot to answer for. How horrified had they been when he joined the police force?

  ‘You’d think they’d have blocked this off altogether,’ he said censoriously. ‘Anybody could come in here.’

  ‘I suspect the authorities think it is completely blocked off,’ said Amaryllis.

  The tunnel led them in a slow spiral downwards. The ground under their feet made a fairly smooth surface for walking on. Every so often the roof was strengthened by wood beams. Amaryllis turned the torch beam on to one place where this had happened.

  ‘They’ve been busy here. These are newly fixed – look at the bolts.’

  ‘Hmm, at least it’s a bit less likely we’ll be buried in a rock fall,’ said Charlie gloomily.

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s still the risk of firedamp,’ said Amaryllis. ‘So you don’t have to stop worrying altogether.’

  ‘There won’t be any firedamp down here, will there?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she said lightly.

  They came to a place where the tunnel divided.

  ‘One way leads out under the Forth and the other way goes back to Old Pitkirtlyhill House,’ said Amaryllis. ‘What do you think?’

  Charlie didn’t know what to think, since he had lost all sense of direction. He didn’t like being underground: it seemed to be preventing his brain from functioning properly. Maybe he was partly solar-powered. He smiled to himself at this fanciful idea, and suppressed the smile quickly when he noticed Amaryllis giving him a funny look. He didn’t want her thinking he’d gone nuts already from claustrophobia.

  ‘We could try one way for a bit and then go back and try the other,’ he suggested.

  ‘OK, I think this way goes towards the river so let’s have a look,’ said Amaryllis, choosing one option apparently at random and leading the way with the torch again. They had only gone about twenty metres when she stopped.

  ‘Water underfoot. That isn’t a good sign.’

  ‘There isn’t much yet. Do you think it’s from the river?’

  ‘Probably. Let’s try the other way.’

  He couldn’t see her face but there was a sort of frown in her voice. He wondered about that. She seemed disconcerted.

  They passed the junction and walked on for about twenty metres the other way. Then two things happened very quickly: the first was that Amaryllis fell over something and swore like a trooper, on
ly under her breath. The other thing was that when she stopped swearing, Charlie heard other people’s voices in the distance. It was hard to tell how far away they were because of the tunnels and the echo.

  ‘It’s them,’ he breathed, helping her up.

  ‘The torch!’ she whispered, leaning down to find it. They could see the beam from it spilling over the floor of the tunnel. She shone it down on the thing she had fallen over. It was a box shape covered with a tarpaulin. There were more boxes behind it, a line of them stretching along the tunnel as far as they could see.

  He tugged at her arm to get her to move.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got to get away. Back up to the surface.’

  ‘No!’ She lifted a corner of the tarpaulin to reveal a plain wooden crate. ‘It’s the explosives. We’ve got to stop them.’

  ‘But the reinforcements – they won’t be long. We should go up to the surface and wait. Show them where to come.’

  ‘The whole town could be blown sky-high by then!’ she said, raising her voice slightly. ‘We haven’t got time to wait for reinforcements – we have to do this ourselves.’

  ‘Sssh – stop arguing,’ he hissed. ‘They’re not going to blow anything up straight away – they’ll wait and see if they get the ransom money first.’

  Still she hesitated. The voices were coming closer.

  He tugged at her sleeve again. ‘Come on, we can’t let them catch us here. We can’t move the crates. It’s a no-brainer.’

  She stood still for another moment.

  ‘I know what we can do,’ she said suddenly. ‘Come on, let’s go along the other branch – to Pitkirtly Island and the Forth.’

  ‘No! We’ve got to get up to the surface.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were such a stubborn man, Charlie,’ she said as they started moving at last. ‘You can go on up to the surface if you like – I’ll go the other way.’

  ‘No! We’d be better to stick together – and what are you planning to do anyway?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  Her voice was grim. Their steps speeded up.

  ‘You know you said Christopher would kill me if anything happened to you?’ he said after a moment’s silence.

  ‘I was only joking,’ she said.

  ‘But all the same – I’d better keep an eye on you,’ he said. ‘We’ll both go towards the river. I’ll look the other way if you need to do anything bad.’

  They reached the fork in the tunnel where one way led up to the open air and the other out under the Forth. Amaryllis suddenly switched off her torch. Charlie heard the voices behind them much more clearly than before.

  ‘Is this how you left the tarp?’

  ‘Maybe… Do you think it’s been disturbed?’

  One of the men swore, and the other said, ‘There was a very faint light. Ahead of us. I thought I’d imagined it.’

  A pause, then the voices came loud and clear again.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘You know what? It’s that interfering friend of yours. I knew she was bad news.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. We left her in the house. How could she have got down here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Give me a hand and we’ll get the stuff out. No point in hanging about now. Let’s get on with it.’

  ‘I’ll go this way,’ Amaryllis whispered in Charlie’s ear. ‘Sorry, I’ll need the torch. You go on up to the surface – just follow the left hand wall and you’ll be fine. Hurry!’

  She gave him a little push and placed his hand on a wall of rock. He sensed her slipping away from his side. It did make sense for them to split up so that only one of them would get caught, but it was a hard thing to decide, and he wasn’t sure that he would have been ruthless enough to do it.

  As he climbed back up the tunnel as fast as he could, he heard one of the men say, faintly now, ‘Fireworks in the old town tonight,’ and laugh.

  His heart thudded so hard he was sure they would hear it. The rock wall began to feel slimy, cold and damp under his hand but he knew it was just the dampness of his own sweat. He had begun to doubt that he would ever find his way back to the surface when he glimpsed a hazy greyness ahead, encouraging him to speed up and reach the big door again.

  He burst out of the tunnel, half-closing the door behind him, and drew a deep trembling breath as if he hadn’t taken in any proper air since he had been underground. He emerged from under the archway and scanned his surroundings to try and locate the helicopter, or the back-up he hoped for. Everything was quiet, and white.

  Charlie felt a stab of guilt. He should have gone with Amaryllis. It was pointless having come out in the open when there were no rescuers to alert. He turned back towards the archway – and heard the door being flung open with such force that it seemed to rattle the old stonework around it. He just had time to think, that can’t be her, before diving for cover in a clump of brambles. He heard a shot, and cowered down even lower, trying to make himself impossibly small.

  When he dared to glance up through the brambles, he saw Mal’s head appear round the archway, and then quickly draw back, like a tortoise retreating into its shell. Charlie kept very still, even although an extremely prickly branch was digging into his leg, and another one seemed to have trapped a strand of his hair. His knees were starting to ache well before he decided it was safe to come out.

  He crawled backwards through the brambles, cursing under his breath as they snatched at his face, hands, legs and hair, and then at last stood up.

  A shot whizzed over his head. Mal must have miscalculated his height. He didn’t have time to look round for cover: he just flung himself to the ground, this time in a patch of icy mud. It was a stupid thing to do, of course. Mal would just walk forward and shoot him where he lay. He would have been far better to run... It was no use running now.

  The buzz of the helicopter came at the same time as the sound of running feet in heavy boots, and the shouting of terse commands. After a moment he raised his head to look. The helicopter was right overhead, and a small group of uniformed policemen had crossed the railway line and were heading right for him. He pushed himself up and turned round. A small flotilla of grey boats had arrived in the bay, and men in combat gear were disembarking from them and swarming on to the island. Back-up had arrived.

  Where was Amaryllis? Had Mal gone back underground?

  ‘Fireworks,’ he managed to say to the first lot of policemen. ‘They’re going to blow the place up.’

  There wasn’t time to stop them. Charlie had to turn everyone back: they were all right in the firing line.

  ‘Get back!’ he said, feebly at first and then with more emphasis. ‘Get back!’ He shouted it to the other men too, gesturing wildly. And where was Amaryllis?

  ‘We can’t go back,’ said Inspector Farmer, putting a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Are the explosives down in the tunnel?’

  Charlie nodded. He heard his voice saying, ‘I’ll show you,’ although the last thing he wanted to do was to go back down into the darkness.

  A small party quickly assembled including, he thought, some naval explosives specialists who had come off the boats. He led the way through the archway to the door, now hanging open, and down the tunnel. Several people had powerful torches. They didn’t bother with stealth or whispering.

  As they approached the junction in the tunnel, there was a roaring sound from the branch that led out under the river, almost like –

  ‘Water!’ somebody yelled.

  The first wave knocked one of the policemen off his feet, and would have swept him away if another man hadn’t grabbed him and hauled him back to safety. They all moved up to what seemed like firmer ground as the water rushed past them into the other part of the tunnel, where the two men and the explosives presumably still were.

  Charlie thought again of Amaryllis. Was this her doing? What had happened to her?

  A drenched figure staggered round the corner from the other bra
nch of the tunnel, splashing through the water, coughing and spluttering. Two of the officers grabbed at him, just as another wave came down and threatened to sweep him away. The water lapped at their feet. It seemed like a good time to move upwards again.

  ‘Mal,’ gasped the man. ‘The water – help me. Mal’s still in there.’

  You must be joking, thought Charlie. He thought back to what Amaryllis had said about not needing to know what she planned. He thought he knew now what she had meant. But had she really sacrificed herself to save the town? If she had been in that tunnel when the water swept in, she might not have been able to get out in time. He thought about the prospect of Christopher killing him. It may have been a joke, but it was beginning to seem slightly more serious than that.

  He turned and began to push his way through the group of people and make his way to the surface. If she had got out, she must be on or close to Pitkirtly Island, wherever the tunnel ended. In this weather she would need to be rescued before she got hypothermia at the very least.

  He heard someone behind him call his name, but he pressed on. He had to find her. This time he didn’t even pause to breathe at the entrance. He turned in the direction of the island and kept walking.

  A little cluster of the men from the boats had formed round something, out on the mud-flats at the point where the yellow-grey of the winter sky met the green-brown water of the river which had started to ripple over the greenish-grey mud as the tide turned, and just in the spot where the remains of a low circular stone wall had always been visible at low tide. He plunged down on to the pebble beach that surrounded the island, quickened his pace as the pebbles turned to mud, broke into a run at the end, slithering on the wet surface. She wasn’t moving… she was moving. She stood up, helped by one of the men, just before he got there.

  ‘Amaryllis!’

  Her dark red hair had turned even darker and was plastered down flat against her head. She was wet and muddy from head to toe. She must be freezing; someone had a space blanket they were about to wrap her in. But her teeth gleamed white in a huge grin even as they chattered violently.

  ‘I did it!’ she said as he arrived.

  ‘I know,’ said Charlie. He didn’t intend to fling his arms around her and hug her, but he found he had done it anyway. If Christopher ever found out he would have another reason to kill him. One of the soldiers pushed him out of the way so that they could wrap her up warmly.

  He looked down at the dark slimy hole in the ground from which she had emerged like a very unglamorous Venus. He didn’t ask for details of what she had done. They would keep for another day.

  Someone said the word ‘hospital’ and Amaryllis laughed. ‘What I need is to get myself to Jemima’s as soon as I can. She’s bound to have some weird Scottish dish on the go that cures all known ills.’