4 Death at the Happiness Club

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘It was lucky there was nobody left on board,’ said Christopher vaguely.

  ‘So they think it was sabotage, do they?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘It sounds like it to me,’ said Jock. ‘But how could anybody fix that? It was pure chance I forgot my pipe and had to go back for it.’

  ‘They could have thrown a lit cigarette in the window or something,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Sean Fraser smokes,’ said Dave suddenly. ‘I remember him lighting up that day. One of his sisters told him off. He wasn’t very happy about it. Said something quite nasty.’

  ‘Were they together all the time?’ said Amaryllis, apparently going off at a tangent.

  ‘I think so,’ said Jemima. ‘They seem to do everything together – it must be a very close family.’

  ‘Claustrophobic,’ said Christopher. The others all stared at him. ‘I mean – I wouldn’t like to get that close to my family. It would drive you nuts.’ He said it with feeling, having such recent experience of being at close quarters with Caroline in a tent. ‘At least they don’t live in a tent,’ he added.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Amaryllis. ‘They’ve got a camper-van. I saw Dilly there one day. Sweeping the steps.’

  ‘Do they live in it all the time?’ said Jemima.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Amaryllis. ‘They weren’t there last night. Maybe it’s just a base they can use while they’re working at various venues. Maybe they’ve got a house somewhere too – or a house each. Maybe they’ve each got their own family, two point four children, three cats, a dog and so on, to go back to.’

  'They seem very close, all the same,' said Jemima doubtfully.

  'What are you suggesting, Jemima? Incest?' said Amaryllis.

  'Sssh, the boy might hear you,' said Jemima.

  'I think you'll find the boy knows more about sex than you do,' said Jock McLean to Jemima, who unexpectedly took offence.

  'I think you'll find he doesn't,' she said. 'Oh dear - that didn't come out the way I meant it to.'

  'Never mind, love,' said Dave, reaching a hand across Christopher to take hers. 'By the time you get to our age it doesn't matter.'

  As often happened, nobody knew what he was talking about, but at least his words calmed things down.

  Later, walking up the road with Amaryllis, Zak trailing behind at a safe distance, Christopher said, 'Sorry about what happened in the larder.'

  'Ha! At least the spider didn't try to smother me,' she said, but added in an undertone, 'Thanks for trying to help, anyway. I shouldn't be so ungrateful.'

  It wasn't like Amaryllis to worry about what she should or shouldn't do. He resolved to take her up on it some time, but of course it had slipped his memory within the hour.

  Chapter 22 Entrepreneurial activity

  Maisie Sue hadn't meant to take Amaryllis's advice, but after letting it marinate in her mind for a while she started to wonder if it would be a good idea in this case.

  She had always wanted to be a professional quilter.

  Well, no, that was an exaggeration: in junior school she had wanted to be a film star, then in high school a veterinarian, then after school she had gone into hospitality work. So to be strictly honest - which Maisie Sue tried hard to be - running a quilting business came quite far down her list of priorities. But as long as she had to start over with her life, she had decided there were few things she would rather do than spend the time making quilts. Of course she hoped to become a world-famous quilt artist and make Pearson wish he had stayed with her instead of going off with the blonde floozy, but even if that didn't happen, if she started a business employing at least two people, she might get the chance to stay in the UK, according to the website she had consulted following her chat with Amaryllis.

  She had discounted Jemima's suggestion of tracing her family history for the moment, on the grounds that it would take too long. She wasn't that interested in going back beyond her pioneering great-grandmother who had crossed the Rockies by covered wagon. She knew all she needed to know.

  She had already started creating a business plan and it was only ten a.m. The day stretched ahead of her, ripe with possibilities. She would go down to the Cultural Centre soon and do some research in the Folk Museum. If she started out making quilts with traditional Scottish patterns, she might even be able to become a Scottish citizen once independence came. Heck, she could even fight for independence just as at least one of her ancestors had done. That side of her family history had the power to excite her, even if she didn't want to poke about in the records of poor-houses and prisons like the people she had seen on television.

  That nice boy Andrew would help her. And Christopher might be there too.

  After opening a spreadsheet on the computer with the intention of designing a book-keeping system, then staring into space for fifteen minutes, Maisie Sue was so bored with the whole idea of starting up a business that she had to get out of the house. She would go and walk by the river for a while to get inspiration. It was something she had avoided doing since Pearson left, because they used to walk there together and up to now she had been scared it would bring back memories and set her off getting all upset again. But now it was time to make a fresh start, accept that her relationship with Pearson was now ancient history, and get on with her life.

  She sighed heavily as she put on the woolly hat, scarf and padded coat that were essential for walking along the river front at Pitkirtly even in July. Especially in July, if last summer's weather had represented a typical Scottish summer. A glance out the window confirmed that it was indeed raining rather heavily. She collected an umbrella in the hall-way on her way out.

  Mid-morning and nobody else had braved the rain. She guessed they were all either at work, staring gloomily out and alternately wishing they were out there and feeling glad they weren't - Maisie Sue had been a wage slave too in her time - or at the shops, pausing for cups of tea in cosy tea shops or spending hours in the wool shop working themselves up to buying the latest cashmere blend at some ridiculous price. Of course, that was one thing that might stop her from building a quilting empire: the cost of raw materials. She would probably need to invest quite a lot upfront. She wondered if someone whose stay in the UK was literally hanging by a thread could get a bank loan in order to start a business.

  Down near the harbour, the rain was blowing about so that one minute it was in your face and the next minute it started to trickle down the back of your neck. It was a good thing there was nobody else about, thought Maisie Sue, trying hard to convince herself. She would only get talking to them about this and that, they might all go for a coffee together in one of the cosy little tea shops, and before she knew it the morning, and all her quilting business plans, would have gone, never to be recaptured.

  She put her hands in her pockets and plodded along the road a bit. Then she wondered if it would help to cross the railway line, which she almost never did, and walk along the other side, where there was a sort of beach, although personally she wouldn't have called it by that name. The word beach suggested Long Beach or Miami Beach, where there were endless stretches of golden sand, frilly white waves and almost constant blue sky. In Pitkirtly the beach consisted of rocks, pebbles and then endless stretches of mud-flat which disappeared twice a day when the tide came in. Sometimes she had seen people digging in the mud-flats. Christopher had told her they were digging for shellfish, but she hadn't believed him until she saw someone bringing a bucket of mussels across the shingle.

  She found a place where there was a gate to allow pedestrians to cross the railway track - which in her opinion was extremely dangerous, and she only brought herself to use it because she hadn't seen a train here for several months and she couldn't see or hear any sign of one now.

  The railway line was up on a kind of embankment, and when she had crossed it, she had to walk down a slope on to the beach, such as it was.

  Very much to her surprise, someone was sunbathing a little way out on the mud-flats.

  Well, at
first she thought they were sunbathing - what else did it mean when someone lay on a beach? - but it only took minutes for her to work out they couldn't be. For one thing, the sun hadn't come out at all today, and no-one could have expected it to. For another, the man - she saw it was a man as she got closer - was fully clothed. And another thing - she stopped in her tracks as she realised this - was that he wasn't moving at all. Maybe not even breathing.

  A dead man on the beach! Oh my!

  She tiptoed across an expanse of mud to get closer still, afraid to make a sound in case he was sleeping after all and she might wake him up. His clothes looked very wet. He didn't look at all well.

  She realised he was definitely dead at about the same time she recognised him. It was Sean Fraser.

  Sean Fraser! If Maisie Sue had ever imagined herself finding a dead body on the so-called beach at Pitkirtly, she would have pictured herself either fainting or throwing up nearby, both actions equally embarrassing. She would never have thought of herself studying the body to try and work out what had happened, or walking all round it to see if he still had his shoes on.

  She must have been spending too much time with Amaryllis and her friends.

  It was at this point Maisie Sue remembered she hadn't brought her purse with her on this outing. Her mobile phone lived in a special little pocket in the side of the purse, and she hardly ever left home without it. The implications of this gradually sank in. Either she would have to wait here until someone else came along - which seemed unlikely since she had hardly seen anyone else along the whole river front from the harbour to the car park, and there was certainly nobody else on the beach - or she would have to abandon this poor man and go off in search of a telephone to call the police.

  She experienced the faint echo of a wish that Pearson were here to tell her what to do, and then she pulled her shoulders back and made up her mind. She would temporarily leave the scene to find a telephone. There was no time to lose: the police should certainly know about this as soon as possible. She wasn't sure if there was a public telephone in the area, but Mrs Petrelli, whom she had met at Cosy Clicks before all the trouble started up in the Petrelli family, would definitely let her use a phone if she got as far as the ice-cream shop without finding one. The tide, although she wasn't actually an expert in the tide times at Pitkirtly Bay, didn't seem to be coming in across the mud-flats, or at least not imminently. She shouldn't even attempt to move the body - that much she had learned from watching crime drama on television.

  She squelched back across the mud to reach the pebbled part of the beach, noting with distaste that her sneakers, which had started out silver-grey, were now coated up to the laces with horrible green-grey mud. Would it wash off? She crossed the railway line again and was absorbed in rubbing the edges of the shoes on the grass verge when she heard a car draw up nearby.

  Chapter 23 Catching up

  Amaryllis knew from quite a distance away that it was Penelope Johnstone at the bus stop. Who else wore such an extravaganza of beige, and who else would top it off with an olive-green body warmer?

  She'd be lucky if a bus came along at this time of day. Amaryllis hadn't had her own transport for some time now, and she knew from bitter experience how rare it was for the bus company to send one of their vehicles into the mean streets of Pitkirtly. It was always miserable standing at the bus stop, and even more so on a day like this, with rain blowing about and attacking you from unexpected angles. Penelope didn't seem to have an umbrella either.

  Amaryllis looked at her watch. According to her reckoning, the next bus wasn't due for at least half an hour, and even then it could easily be somewhere between five and twenty minutes late. She resolved to approach Penelope by stealth so that the woman didn't get a chance to dodge away into the cobbled lanes that led to the harbour, or to dash into the butcher's shop and engage in a random conversation with him. Amaryllis and the butcher were currently in the middle of a feud that, though its origins were not entirely clear, had something to do with the boy Stewie, and she had been buying meat in the supermarket, although she knew if Jemima found out there would be hell to pay. Living in a small town was so complicated!

  Just as Amaryllis was about to use the temporary cover provided by a builder's van illegally parked across someone’s driveway to shield her from Penelope's gaze while she darted down a short cut at the side of the nearest house which would take her out of sight, she noticed the other woman waving in her direction. She seemed to be calling too.

  'Hello there! Amaryllis?'

  The words came to her faintly, and, unsure of whether she had imagined her name, Amaryllis paused. Penelope waved more urgently and raised her voice to a shout. 'Amaryllis! May I have a word, please?'

  Only Penelope would be so polite when shouting to someone across a busy road. There was something admirable about this, and Amaryllis found herself warming slightly to the woman. She forgot about stealth and instead marched boldly along the pavement to the bus stop.

  'Penelope,' she said. 'How are you?'

  'I'm fine, thank you,' said Penelope, 'considering that the police saw fit to keep me in custody for two nights for absolutely no good reason, and to deny me access to my family or a solicitor until this morning. I shall be making the strongest possible complaint in the highest of places.'

  Amaryllis tried her best to look sympathetic, but Penelope obviously wasn't taken in by this. She continued, 'Of course, all that probably seems trivial to someone with your - um - experience. But that's why I'd like to talk to you.'

  'About my experiences?' said Amaryllis, baffled.

  'No, I - ,' Penelope began, breaking off as a very old man shuffled past very slowly, glaring at them. She glanced round, assessing the surroundings. 'Let's go somewhere else. It's too public here. People might overhear.'

  'Eh?' said the old man, half-turning back to her.

  'Nothing!' she said. She rolled her eyes. 'There aren't any secrets around here. Walls have ears… Mr Wilson isn't trailing along behind you somewhere, is he?'

  'Aren't you waiting for a bus?' said Amaryllis, trying not to think of Christopher as a schoolboy trailing like snail reluctantly to school.

  'A bus to nowhere!' said Penelope. She seemed larger than life today, but maybe this was just a temporary after-effect of her nights in the police cells. 'I mean - it doesn't matter about the bus. There's nobody waiting for me at the other end.'

  'Do you want to know where Zak is?' asked Amaryllis.

  Penelope shook her head, and compressed her lips. 'I can't talk about it here,' she said after a moment. 'Let's go round to Giulia's. We can have a coffee. It won't be busy at this time of day.'

  Once again Amaryllis had to run the gauntlet of Giulia Petrelli's disapproval, although it was muted this time by Penelope's presence. The two women had clung together after their sons' activities had been brought into the public domain. With half her family in prison and most of the others permanently estranged from her, Giulia was lucky that her brother-in-law and his family had come over from Italy to help run the restaurant. Presumably with the Italian economy in a downward spiral, this had been a good move all round.

  Amaryllis and Penelope sat in a table in the window and Giulia brought them coffee and home-made panettone.

  'Where were you going? Home?' This was the least contentious thing Amaryllis could think of to open the conversation with. Penelope frowned and stared into her latte. It had an artistic swirl in the milky surface.

  'I suppose so,' she said. There were lines between her eyebrows that Amaryllis hadn't noticed before, and even her hands seemed wrinkled and uncared-for suddenly. She looked up and met Amaryllis's eyes. 'I don't know,' she added. 'I don't really want to go home. It's funny - I love my house - our house. You can see all the weather in the Forth and the sunrise and sunset from our front room. I never thought I'd want to be anywhere else. But it's just so empty now.'

  There was a pause, and then Amaryllis decided she might as well come clean about Zak. Penelope
didn't look as if she was in the mood to throw a wobbly about it or accuse her of kidnapping as she might have done if she had been more like her usual self.

  'Zak's at my flat,' she said. 'We both ended up at the police station with your husband -'

  'Liam!' Penelope interrupted, wide-eyed. 'Sorry - go on.'

  'Yes, we were with Liam when the police raided the Frasers' camper van. They let us go after a while but they kept him in custody. Zak came home with me - his friend Stewie's staying with me for a bit so it made sense for Zak to be there too.'

  Penelope laughed out loud, but Amaryllis didn't sense any humour in it. She waited for the other woman to speak.

  'Well, good luck with that,' said Penelope at last. 'I expect he'll be happier with you than he has been with me lately.'

  'That isn't -' Amaryllis began.

  'It doesn't matter,' said Penelope, waving one hand, presumably to stop Amaryllis from going on to say something stupid. 'Do you know why the police took Liam in? Did he manage to kill somebody with that damned gun he's so obsessed by?'

  'It wasn't quite like that,' said Amaryllis cautiously. She resolved there and then never to take on any cases involving divorces or marriages in her intermittent role as a private investigator. It definitely wouldn't be worth the hassle. 'What makes you think he did anything like that?'

  'The Porsche was there. I heard a gun-shot. He was jealous.'

  'Jealous?'

  Penelope shook her head. She picked up her coffee cup and sipped daintily from it, then spoiled the ladylike effect by slamming it into the saucer so hard that liquid spilled into the saucer and a few drops even landed on Giulia's immaculate white table-cloth.

  'He had no right to be, of course. I had already told him to leave before I even - before Sean and I -'

  She lost her momentum somewhere in the sentence. She glanced at the spots on the table-cloth, picked up a paper napkin and started dabbing at them. Amaryllis waited. Penelope completed the task by blotting up the coffee from the saucer and setting aside the napkin. She continued,