Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10)

by Cecilia Peartree

  Chapter 19 Baffled, of Pitkirtly

  Amaryllis was also awake at five on Sunday morning, but in her case she recognised the futility of lying awake thinking about things. Instead she decided to get up and get on with the day.

  She hadn’t even planned it, but somehow by five-thirty, after a strong coffee and a power bar she found her footsteps taking her up to the road junction where you could either turn down towards the shops, the Cultural Centre and eventually the Queen of Scots, or up the hill if you were heading for the derelict hotel, the garden centre and one of the routes out of town.

  She hesitated at this point. She didn’t want to risk being pulled in for questioning again, mainly because it would be such a waste of time. They might even keep her for longer the next time out of pure irritation that she had got under their feet twice in one weekend. On the other hand, she sensed that there was more to discover around the two scenes of crime, and no guarantee that the police would discover it all. She could go back down to Penelope’s and make a nuisance of herself there until the woman woke up, but the thought of the twitching net curtains put her off a bit.

  Amaryllis gave herself a little shake. All this hesitation was a sign she had become too cosy and comfortable in Pitkirtly. Perhaps she should contact the people she had once worked for to beg them for one last mission, if only to give her an incentive to get back the edge she knew she had been renowned for.

  She was only encouraged by the certainty that Christopher would be utterly horrified if she did anything of the kind.

  It was definitely time to confront her misgivings – Amaryllis wasn’t going to call them fears – and go up the hill again to revisit the gardens on the edge of town, preferably without being seen this time. This would have to act as a pale substitute for a new mission in terms of keeping her senses well honed.

  She got almost as far as the hotel before coming to a ‘road closed’ sign and seeing a lonely police car parked on the verge up ahead. Surely the police hadn’t been there all night? That would have been a very unusual event in the annals of Pitkirtly crime-fighting. She hoped nothing more had happened to cause this. But perhaps two suspicious deaths in the same neighbourhood within a few days had caused them to be on high alert.

  She ducked into the hotel grounds through a gap in the perimeter wall. She was almost confident she hadn’t been seen. Even if two police officers had been in the car all night, at least one of them was probably having a nap by now, and the other reading inspirational literature or something on his tablet.

  There was a shout from somewhere up ahead. Surely to goodness that annoying man from the house at the back hadn’t spotted her already. She broke into a run, hunching herself over by instinct to avoid enemy fire as she went, darting round obstacles and eventually flinging herself flat against the front wall of the hotel, near the old entrance, now boarded up.

  The sounds of at least two different voices, both raised in anger, reached her. She worked her way along the wall in the direction of all the noise. And came to a sudden halt as two men came round the corner.

  One was in police uniform and the other wasn’t. The policeman was marching the other one, a young man, along, but not without protest.

  ‘...pipe down, you wee scumbag, or you’ll be in worse trouble...’

  ‘...take your hands off me, police pig!’

  ‘Who are you calling a pig, you wee slimeball? Get a move on – we’re taking you in and that’s that.’

  ‘Who’s that over there?’

  ‘Don’t even try it, sunshine, I know all the tricks of your trade.’

  ‘No, really, who is that?’

  Of course the policeman had to look in her direction eventually, and even although Amaryllis tried hard to blend into the fabric of the building, she knew he would see her. He took one hand off his captive’s shoulder for a second to activate his radio, and she heard fragments of his report to his colleague.

  ‘... another one. Backup... urgently... Just get in here!’

  The captive took the opportunity to wriggle free, and darted away, back round the corner of the building.

  ‘Don’t go away! We’re coming back for you!’ the policeman yelled over in Amaryllis’s direction as he headed after the boy.

  A second police officer was just entering the hotel grounds as she dashed back in the direction she had come and headed round to the far side of the hotel. She didn’t know the layout as well here, but anything was better than being caught and marched away ignominiously like the young man. It would be such a waste of everyone’s time if she had to go to the police station and sit through another lecture from Sarah Ramsay. She was really saving the police force a lot of trouble by escaping.

  The hotel building went almost right up to the boundary wall of the property at this side, but there was room to squeeze through into a small bramble-filled yard outside a side entrance, and then out to the long-deserted parking area at the back. Amaryllis wished it wasn’t quite so deserted. How was she supposed to stay out of sight with nothing to shelter behind?

  She took a deep breath and ran across the empty space as fast as she could, heading for the place where she had crossed the fence a day or two ago into that annoying man’s back garden. By now he had probably had it electrified, but she couldn’t afford to let herself be slowed down by worrying about that.

  A shout from somewhere behind told her that she hadn’t shaken off the second police officer’s pursuit. Why on earth was he bothering?

  She dived over the rustic wood fence and dodged in amongst the trees. They were artistically arranged, quite sparsely, but Amaryllis was slim enough to hide among the denser ones at the back, whatever they were called. Perhaps she should study the different types of vegetation in a bit more detail. You never knew when it might be useful to know which shrubs and trees lost their leaves in winter, for instance.

  There was a final splutter of static from the policeman’s radio not far away. Then a rustling in the undergrowth, and for a moment the young man emerged quietly beside her, grinned widely in a conspiratorial manner and rushed away again, running faster than even she could have managed, sliding round trees and bushes as he came to them. Now that she saw him properly, there was something vaguely familiar about him and his ready smile. Of course, it might just be that she was getting to the age at which all young men began to look familiar.

  It seemed to make sense that he would go right round to the front of the house and made a speedy exit to the street and away, but she stayed where she was and listened for a few moments more. No footsteps rustling through the undergrowth, no heavy breathing just behind her, no hand on her shoulder.

  Nothing except the agitated barking of two large dogs as they rushed through the trees and bushes towards her.

  This time Sarah Ramsay didn’t even bother to ask any questions. She just sighed in the same long-suffering way that Amaryllis remembered Charlie Smith using in the bad old days when he had worked in the police force, and opened the door of the police station wide.

  ‘Just go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got plenty of other fish to fry. I don’t want to see you again this lifetime.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Amaryllis complained, and then glanced at her old hockey team-mate’s face and felt a tiny twinge, in an infrequently-visited part of her mind, of what even she recognised as remorse. Sarah didn’t look older than her years, or more haggard or anything. She just looked extremely tired, as if she had been on a treadmill all night and didn’t expect to be released from it any time soon. The way Amaryllis had felt that time in Tibet after she had been swept down a river, battered by the current and bumped against rocks every few metres. ‘Sorry,’ she added. ‘I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Don’t even...’

  ‘All right. I won’t do it again.’

  A half-smile broke through Sarah’s exhaustion. ‘I know you won’t. Until the next time. I’m only asking you to give it a rest. Don’t go rampaging through that man’s garden again. Don�
��t go anywhere near the hotel grounds. Don’t go anywhere near a street where there’s a Neighbourhood Watch. Don’t interfere. Think of this as a final warning.’

  Amaryllis was tempted to say something about Sarah needing her help sooner or later, but she decided at the last moment to leave well alone. She lifted a hand in a half-hearted wave and headed away decisively.

  Charlie Smith, into whose unofficial custody she had been released, and to whom she was lucky not to have been handcuffed, followed her down the road with his dog.

  Chapter 20 Is there an artist in the house?

  ‘I don’t know if she’ll want to see you,’ said Mrs Petrelli, standing squarely in front of the door to the stairs that led up to her flat. ‘She was very upset by what happened in the spring. She says she’ll never want to create anything again.’

  ‘That’s understandable,’ said Christopher, secretly thinking that it might be a good thing if certain young artists were too traumatised to produce any so-called art. Or at least, anything with the potential to cause chaos in the Cultural Centre. ‘This has nothing to do with all that. But it might help her get back into art. We want her to draw something for us, you see.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Petrelli, frowning.

  ‘She could meet us somewhere else to do this,’ said Jemima. ‘It doesn’t have to be here.’

  ‘She doesn’t go out much,’ said Mrs Petrelli. ‘Not at all, really.’

  The door behind her opened and Stewie came out in his usual furtive way, peering through a small gap first and then squeezing round it. He suddenly noticed the four visitors and jumped backwards slightly, tripping over his own feet as he did so. He had started to turn in preparation to go back upstairs when Mrs Petrelli stopped him, holding the door open. ‘How is Sammy today? Does she need anything?’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ he muttered.

  ‘Stewie?’ said Christopher. He only knew the boy from seeing him with Amaryllis. He had no idea why she had more or less adopted him, but if she saw something in him worth encouraging then he was willing to overlook his doubts. ‘We wondered if Samantha might draw something for us. If she has time.’

  ‘We’ve brought some paper,’ said Jemima, producing a quilted shopping bag from behind her back and jiggling it enticingly. ‘And pencils. We got them from the workshop at the Cultural Centre.’

  Christopher wished she hadn’t said that. But there was nobody here to give away the fact that he had raided the educational supply cupboard after Jemima, Dave and Jock had asked him to come with them to try and talk Sammy round. It wasn’t his fault there wasn’t an art materials shop any nearer than Dunfermline, or that by the time they had gone there and back on the bus with its rambling route it would have been late that evening at best. If the last bus had been cancelled, as happened occasionally, it could have been the next morning. He shuddered at the thought of sleeping on a bench at the bus station.

  ‘You all right, Mr Wilson?’ said Stewie, evidently misinterpreting his expression and body language.

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Christopher. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ said Stewie. He wrenched the door away from Mrs Petrelli and slammed it behind him.

  He was back five minutes later. ‘She says it’ll probably be cool. You’ve to come up and talk to her.’

  ‘Don’t you wear her out now,’ Mrs Petrelli warned them.

  Sammy looked smaller than before, and oddly younger. But she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and she offered to put the kettle on for them.

  ‘I can do that,’ said Stewie, glaring at her in a manner which could have been protective or threatening. There was no knowing with Stewie.

  ‘What we need,’ said Christopher, who seemed to have appointed himself spokesperson without really intending to, ‘is one of these pictures the police draw if they need help with identifying somebody.’

  ‘The kind you see on the television,’ said Jemima. ‘Only we need two of them.’

  Once they had explained it all a bit more, Sammy seemed to understand. Her eyes became more animated as they discussed what they wanted, and she reached out for a pencil before they had even finished. Maybe this really would help her. It would be nice to think so, anyway.

  ‘So both of you saw this woman,’ she said, starting to draw a generic face shape in the sketchpad they had brought. ‘But you don’t know if it was the same one both times. And then there was another woman too?’

  Christopher and Jemima looked at each other. Christopher couldn’t work out whether Jemima thought they should tell Sammy exactly what had happened, but in the end he said, ‘The police asked me if I could identify somebody. There was a body up in the woods. But that definitely wasn’t the woman I met who said she was Jane Blyth-Sheridan.’

  He was glad he had come out and said this. Sammy didn’t seem to be unduly upset by the news, but then she would be reading it in the papers or seeing it on Twitter before very long in any case.

  ‘You’d better go in the other room,’ she said to Christopher. ‘Then I can do the two drawings separately.’

  ‘Three drawings,’ said Stewie, who had been listening attentively. ‘In case there are three of them.’

  ‘There could be three different women, I suppose,’ said Christopher. ‘But it seems a bit unlikely.’

  ‘There was another one too,’ said Jock McLean, who must also have been listening more attentively than usual. ‘The woman with the dog who found the body.’

  ‘But she had nothing to do with it,’ said Christopher. ‘She just happened to be there.’

  ‘No such thing as coincidence,’ said Jock in the tone Christopher always found most annoying, particularly in this case where he knew Jock was doing it on purpose.

  ‘It’s going to take a wee while,’ said Sammy. But her gaze went back to the page and she doodled a little body with arms and legs under the oval she had started with.

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ said Stewie.

  ‘Are you all right, Jemima?’ said Dave. ‘I can go in the other room with those two. Keep an eye on them.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Jemima.

  Christopher, Dave and Jock went into Mrs Petrelli’s sitting-room, across the hall from the kitchen, which was dominated by a huge landscape painting of a seaside scene, in bright sunlight.

  ‘I guess we’re not in Pitkirtly any more,’ said Jock, gesturing towards it.

  ‘Do you think that’s somewhere in Italy?’ said Dave.

  ‘That could be Vesuvius in the background,’ Christopher suggested. ‘Look, there’s a swirl of smoke coming out of it.’

  They soon exhausted the possibilities of the painting. But after a while Mrs Petrelli brought them a tray of coffee and cake, and by the time they had finished with that, Jemima came in to join them.

  ‘Your turn now,’ she said to Christopher. ‘It was more difficult than I expected, mind.’

  Christopher expected it to be very difficult. He didn’t consider himself at all artistic, and not all that observant, but somehow Sammy coaxed more information out of him than he knew was there, and together they produced a drawing that at least bore a resemblance to the woman he had seen.

  ‘Of course they use computer software to make this kind of thing easier nowadays,’ Sammy commented as they stared at the picture. ‘They could give her a different hairstyle just by pressing a button. Maybe a different nose too... What was that about the third woman?’

  ‘Can I see Jemima’s one first?’

  ‘No – it’s better if we start again from the beginning.’

  Sammy wrote Christopher’s name at the top of the one she had just finished, and tore out a new piece of paper.

  Christopher frowned. To be honest he hadn’t looked at the dead woman for very long, because he had found it disturbing and a bit intrusive to be staring at her when she couldn’t stare back. Or at least, she could, but only with the expressionless dead eyes that he knew couldn’t see the sky and the trees ab
ove her head, or anything ever again. He closed his eyes.

  ‘They were blue,’ he said.

  ‘What – her eyes? That’s a start then.’

  He managed to overcome his distaste and again they produced some sort of a drawing, although there were some blurry bits where he must have been too freaked out to look properly.

  In the end she smiled.

  She fished around in the pile of discarded sheets of paper on the floor and pulled out another drawing with ‘Jemima’ scrawled at the top.

  ‘Look – what do you think?’

  ‘They’re the same woman,’ he said almost instantly.

  ‘Seem to be,’ she said.

  ‘So the woman I saw is the odd one out?’

  ‘That’s the way it looks.’

  They called the others back in. Jemima was quite upset that the woman she and Dave had seen might now be dead. Jock asked why they hadn’t drawn the woman with the dog.

  ‘The police already know who that is,’ said Christopher. ‘They’ve got her name and address. She’s going to go in and give them a statement.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been involved in something bad,’ said Jock.

  ‘But she isn’t the same one I met though,’ said Christopher. ‘Otherwise you’d have recognised her from the drawing.’

  Jock shook his head stubbornly. ‘It still seems a bit fishy to me.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Jemima to Dave, ‘there’s a nice bit of lemon sole in the freezer – let’s get it out later and have it for our tea.’

  Chapter 21 Two heads good, six heads better

  Charlie Smith insisted Amaryllis should stay with him for the rest of Sunday in case he got into trouble with the police for releasing her back into the wild too soon.