The Christmas Puzzle (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 8)

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘You’re not thinking of rejoining the police, are you?’ said Amaryllis, sounding horrified.

  Don’t start, Jock silently pleaded with her. All he needs is for you to talk him out of it – he’ll be round at the police station hammering on the door to get in.

  ‘Good God, no,’ said Charlie, walking off with the glasses. ‘It’s a nightmare – working all hours, no time to call your own, people making demands all the time... Having your boat wrecked by hooligans.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said Jock. ‘Do you think he was joking?’

  ‘It wasn’t a very good joke,’ said Christopher. ‘Why on earth did you two take the boat in the first place?’

  ‘That’s all water under the bridge,’ said Amaryllis.

  Jock didn’t know if she was joking either. He hoped Dave and Jemima would be in soon so that he could re-calibrate his sense of humour.

  Some time later, completely re-calibrated, Jock left the pub to go home. Christopher, Dave, Jemima and Amaryllis had gone about an hour before, with stern admonitions to him not to stay out too late. Amaryllis was particularly vocal about that. He sensed that she was afraid of having put on his outfit the next day and transform herself into an even less convincing Santa than he was himself. He wished he hadn’t let her talk him into it in the first place. Not that she had really wasted time talking him into it. She had just told him he had to do it and he had meekly agreed.

  ‘Women!’ he said to himself as he crossed the road near Giancarlo’s kiosk, now transformed into a skate hire place but closed up for the night anyway. He suddenly found himself lying on his back, without any knowledge of how it had happened. He tried to get up, but his feet kept flying out from under him.

  He might have lain there for a while, vaguely wondering what had gone wrong with gravity, or whether he had drunk himself into a far worse state than he remembered, but he heard a dog yapping not far away, and for some reason that made him think he’d better find a way of getting up off the ground.

  He raised his head cautiously – it was spinning a bit, but not unpleasantly. Then he used his elbows to prop himself up. It was strange, but they seemed to want to slide out from under him too.

  That was when he finally understood that he was lying in the middle of the ice-rink. The anger he felt at that point was what propelled him to his feet. How dare those cowboy ice-rink builders leave the thing unattended in the dark without any proper barricade to keep people from stumbling on to it and slipping? Somebody could get seriously injured and sue them. Hadn’t they thought of that?

  His gaze wandered over to the pavement where the kiosk and the stalls were all shut up, and he saw that one of the flimsy barricades that surrounded the ice had fallen down or been pushed over. He must have managed to walk through the gap without noticing he was doing it. He rubbed his forehead. Had he really drunk as much as that?

  A dog yapped again. It seemed to be coming closer.

  He now saw the little white shape advancing out of the darkness from the direction of the harbour. It was dragging the darker shape of a man along behind it. As they came closer, Jock saw that it was the same little white terrier he had seen around town a few times lately. He supposed the man was the same too, but he hadn’t really taken much notice of the dog’s owner. It was only the dog that had attracted his attention, with all its noise and the fact that it reminded him of old-fashioned holiday postcards saying things like ‘Bonnie Scotland – wish you were here.’

  He made his way cautiously towards the pavement. He didn’t want to embarrass himself by falling flat on the ice again. He found that if he slid his feet forward instead of lifting them up, he could stay reasonable stable, although it felt a bit silly and childish, as if he were trying to make a slide in the snow as he remembered doing years before.

  ‘Evening,’ he said, arriving on the pavement just as the man and dog came along.

  ‘Evening,’ muttered the man. He didn’t sound as if he wanted to say any more. Good. Jock’s only aim now was to get home before anything else happened. But he fell into step with the man and the dog, if only because he didn’t think they would lead him back on to the ice, and he had to find his way up the road somehow.

  ‘Lively wee dog,’ he commented to fill a silence that had become awkward once they had negotiated the fallen barrier and crossed the road along at the Queen of Scots, where there wasn’t any ice.

  ‘Aye, he is that.’

  ‘Still, it gets you out of the house,’ said Jock.

  This didn’t seem important enough to justify a reply. The man hunched up his shoulders and marched briskly along, maybe because he was keen to get away from this lunatic who insisted on following him. Dogging his footsteps, thought Jock with an inner smirk. At least he hoped he had kept it inside his head and hadn’t let any sign of it seep out to his face.

  The man and dog suddenly began to veer off along the road that led out of town. It was dark and unwelcoming that way, but Jock knew there was a path that led to Pitkirtly Island after a hundred yards or so. It would be even darker once they were out of range of the street lights.

  ‘Going out to the Island?’ he said. He wasn’t very optimistic about getting a reply, but the man glanced up at him and said,

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Do you go that way every night?’

  ‘The dog likes it,’ said the man and headed off.

  Jock stared after them. His brain was still a bit befuddled, either by alcohol or by the fall on the ice, but he couldn’t understand why the man would want to take the risk of walking on the Island in complete darkness. He pictured the rocks where he and Amaryllis had foundered, and wondered what the chances were that the dog would lead its owner either into the water or down a hole like the one where Jackie Whitmore had been found. And the mysterious bone that had still to be identified.

  Still, he told himself as he turned up the High Street and headed for home, dog walkers were a law unto themselves. And maybe the police still had the whole place cordoned off anyway.

  Chapter 17 Entertaining visitors

  Christopher hoped he wouldn’t have to see Jason Penrose and the FOOP people that Monday morning. He wasn’t at all sure he could face Jason without laughing after hearing about his archaeological exploits, and in the case of Tamara he felt as if the discussion they had all taken part in about revenge would be reflected in his manner towards the woman. And of course it went without saying – or even thinking – that he really didn’t want to see Bruce at all. He didn’t need any reason for this. It was just the way things were.

  Luckily the only people waiting for him at the Cultural Centre when he arrived just before nine to open up were the police.

  His heart gave the usual anxious lurch, first in case they had come to arrest him for some crime he had no recollection of having committed, and second that they were the bearers of bad news about a family member – his niece and nephew always sprang to mind at those moments, as he had decided some time ago that his sister was indestructible.

  Once he had told himself firmly that the first two things were very unlikely, a third possibility popped into his head. Something terrible had happened at the Cultural Centre overnight and they were here to break the news before he went inside. It wouldn’t be the first time bad things had happened there, either.

  He braced himself as he walked towards the front door, fishing the keys out of his coat pocket.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Sergeant Macdonald, not adding the words ‘at last’ but somehow managing to imply them. ‘We thought you might be able to help us out with something.’

  ‘Of course I’ll do what I can,’ said Christopher, trying not to translate the Sergeant’s final phrase into ‘help us with our enquiries’.

  They hadn’t said anything about problems inside the building, so he opened the door, switched off the intruder alarm and ushered them inside.

  He opened the door to his office. ‘Would you like to come in and sit down?’ He recalled the hospitality onc
e shown him on a visit to the police station, and added, ‘I can put the kettle on if you want tea or coffee.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Sergeant Macdonald. ‘We just wanted to ask if you have copies of old local newspapers here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘But they don’t go back all that far. I think the Pitkirtly Chronicle only started publishing in 1899.’

  ‘We only expect to need the late nineteen-nineties and possibly the early two thousands,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You don’t happen to have them digitised, do you?’

  Christopher gave him a look. ‘Microfilm,’ he said. ‘They’re on microfilm.’

  ‘That’s a bit Double Oh Seven, isn’t it?’ said the other, more junior policeman with a defensive laugh. ‘Can we see it?’

  Christopher wished Jemima had been around to show Sergeant Macdonald and his sidekick how to operate the microfilm reader. She was an expert at it after scrolling through census records for hours on end during the early stages of her early family research. More recently she didn’t seem to bother as much with the official records, preferring to borrow books, according to Mollie, that dealt with her pet topics such as historic causes of death, plague pits and industrial injuries. It was a miracle Jemima was such a well-balanced, pleasant person after all that reading.

  Christopher got the microfilm threaded on to the cylinder at the fifth attempt, and wound it to the start of the newspaper. Sergeant Macdonald had chosen a range of newspapers from ten to twenty years ago, taking up three rolls of microfilm.

  ‘It’ll take you a while to get through all those,’ Christopher warned him. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a cup of tea before you start?’

  ‘Can’t afford to stop for tea,’ muttered the Sergeant. ‘Headquarters on our backs. They’re threatening to send a replacement Inspector, if we’re not careful.’

  So that was why Sergeant Macdonald had ventured out of the police station for a change. Christopher had only ever seen him either behind the reception desk or in the tea-room up to now. He left them to it and went into his office.

  Being at his desk reminded him of his rudeness to Bruce, and also, inevitably, of the McCallum archive. He wondered idly if the police would be interested in reading the letters around the dates for which they were consulting the old newspapers. But they probably didn’t want to plough through all the stuff about the cat being out late. If anything had been referred to in the letters but not in the local paper of the time, it probably wasn’t important enough to interest them.

  He wondered whether to while away the morning by looking at the letters again and working out a methodical way of cataloguing them. But one staffing crisis followed another as Mollie from the library phoned in sick, and then Zak hobbled into the office complaining that he had fallen off the kerb on his way into work, and he thought his ankle might be broken. Christopher thought it probably wasn’t, as the boy was still walking on it, but he sent Zak off to the doctor’s for the eleven o’clock queue for extra appointments. If he missed that he would have to go to Dunfermline and wait to be seen at the hospital. Christopher was convinced this had been introduced as a way of filtering out the really ill from the pretenders, except that it was a bit like drowning witches. If you were fit enough to get yourself to the hospital then you probably didn’t need to be there. If you weren’t fit enough then you would maybe be lucky enough to become ill enough at some point to need an ambulance. Not that the ambulance was always going to turn up, of course, as Christopher knew only too well from some of his past experiences.

  He took a tray of coffee and biscuits into the computer room where the microfilm readers were. He caught the Sergeant and his assistant in the act of trying to wrangle a roll of microfilm on to the cylinder without fitting it into the slot which would ensure that it stayed in the right place when you turned the handle.

  ‘Why don’t you take a coffee break while I do that?’ he said pointedly, placing the tray on a table at a safe distance from the equipment.

  ‘It’s all right, Christopher, I’ll fix it,’ said Jemima, suddenly emerging from behind a computer monitor in the far corner. He now saw that Dave was asleep in one of the swivel chairs, his feet up on a table. This was strictly against the rules, of course.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he said to the policemen.

  ‘We can’t really say,’ said the junior one, with a sidelong glance at his superior officer.

  Sergeant Macdonald got up from his chair and stretched. ‘It’s a long process,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure we’ll spot the story we’re looking for even if we come to it.’

  ‘It would be easier if it was on the computer,’ grumbled the junior officer. ‘If it was all indexed we could just run a search.’

  ‘Maybe Jemima could help,’ suggested Christopher.

  The Sergeant helped himself to a biscuit. No pink wafers here, or custard creams. Christopher had banned them all. It was either plain digestives or some sort of oatmeal concoction made by Penelope Johnstone and brought in on Mondays by Zak.

  ‘I’m not sure she and her – um, husband – should even be here while we’re conducting an investigation,’ said Sergeant Macdonald, crunching away.

  ‘You can confiscate the microfilm reader and take it and the rolls of film away with you if you prefer,’ said Christopher crossly. ‘Personally I think it would be a lot less trouble to stay here and accept the tiny risk that Mr or Mrs Douglas might have the slightest interest in whatever you’re doing.’

  Sergeant Macdonald gave him a hard look for a few minutes and then said, ‘You’ve been spending too much time with Ms Peebles. It isn’t good for you.’

  ‘Amaryllis is one of our closest friends,’ said Jemima reprovingly from behind the microfilm reader. She gave it a little pat. ‘There – that’s it done. Until you break it again, that is.’

  ‘We didn’t break it!’ said the junior police officer, but under his breath.

  Obviously Jemima had more authority around here than he did, Christopher realised. But he was fine with that.

  ‘Have you got much more to go through?’ he enquired.

  ‘Only to the end of the year.’

  ‘I thought you’d have police records going back to the nineties,’ Christopher mused aloud.

  Sergeant Macdonald frowned. ‘There’s an unfortunate gap,’ he said. ‘But I’d appreciate you not mentioning that to anybody else.’

  ‘They were sent to storage when the new police station was being built,’ said the junior officer, slurping at his coffee. ‘Somebody stole them from there.’

  ‘We don’t talk about that,’ hissed Sergeant Macdonald. ‘Better get back to it, then,’ he added to Christopher.

  Back in his office, drinking his own mid-morning coffee, Christopher speculated on why somebody would steal police records from storage. More likely they had just been misplaced, he thought. As a former archivist he knew how easily that could be done. Even these days in his current job, he still saw it happening. Only the week before, one of the Folk Museum volunteers had put away the photographs of Pitkirtly in wartime in the wrong box before going away on holiday, and it had taken Zak and Harriet two days to unearth them for the memorial display. Not that there were many pictures of Pitkirtly in wartime, and the ones there were showed very little evidence of global conflict, except that a man later identified as Dave’s Dad had been spotted in one of the photos wearing a tin hat and some sort of official arm-band.

  He wondered if all the police records had been stolen, or just the ones for a particular time-span, as one of the officers had implied. Surely there were copies kept elsewhere, or on a computer or something. It was hard to believe information stored as recently as twenty years before had gone missing altogether. But the fact that the policemen were here searching through old newspapers suggested it had.

  Strange that random letters like the McCallum archive should survive, lovingly collated and kept over the years, when an official record had got lost.

  He wandered over to the fili
ng cabinet and took out the letters again, suddenly curious about whether one of the McCallum correspondents had happened to be around at the time of Tamara’s daughter’s death, and what they might have written about it. Of course, he should have been filling in those figures the Council had asked for a few weeks ago, but they could wait a bit longer. The deadline wasn’t until – he glanced at the computer screen where the relevant email was visible – last week. They hadn’t sent a reminder yet, so that was all right.

  He made a mental note to himself not to mention to Amaryllis what he was doing. He didn’t want to give her any more excuses to interfere in the Jackie Whitmore case, or to pursue a vendetta against Tamara, to whom she seemed to have taken a dislike even before finding out about the daughter.

  Of course as soon as the thought crossed his mind, she appeared in his office, as if he had conjured her up. How did she do that?

  ‘What are the police doing here?’ she said, looming over him.

  ‘How do you know they’re here?’ he countered.

  ‘Police car outside. What do they want?’

  ‘Well, it was nothing to do with Charlie Smith’s boat,’ he said. ‘So there’s no need to worry about that.’

  ‘I wasn’t worrying about it. Charlie wouldn’t turn in a friend.’

  ‘There might be circumstances where he would.’

  ‘I won’t land in those circumstances,’ she told him. ‘You know I’m on the right side of the law really – don’t you?’ There was something uncertain about her voice as she spoke, something oddly endearing. Then she added, ‘I’ll never get caught on the wrong side of it, anyway.’

  The spell was broken. She was just as irresponsible as she had always been. Christopher shuffled the papers in his hands, wondering what on earth would ever make her grow up.

  On the other hand, if she did grow up wouldn’t she lose the fizzing vitality that defined her – that made her the person everybody knew and love – here Christopher’s anchor of caution caught up with the careering speed-boat of his thoughts and made him substitute ‘liked a lot’.