Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9)

by Cecilia Peartree

  He frowned as he put his phone back in his pocket.

  ‘Any news of those divers?’ said the man next to him.

  Keith had been in the living-room of the house where the artists lived with their parents, Bert and Cynthia Wishart, when he had received the call from the central control room. A fisherman had seen the van in the water and called it in, and naturally it was passed on to the Pitkirtly people because everybody imagined the place was a backwater and they didn’t have enough to do. This was despite several years when the murder rate there had been considerably higher than in other comparable areas across Scotland, including the worse parts of Glasgow.

  One advantage of being with the artists’ father was that he could immediately check the van registration, which the fisherman had written down and given to the control room. The much bigger disadvantage was that he had immediately had to break the news about the two bodies inside, and then pretend not to watch while the man fell apart in front of him.

  Another disadvantage was that the man had wanted to chain-smoke from that moment until now. Keith knew he shouldn’t have allowed him to do so in the police car, but he had stretched a point and opened all the windows. It seemed like the least he could do under the circumstances. Maybe nobody would notice, although Inspector Armstrong was famous for having a nose like some animal with a very sensitive sense of smell – the stress was getting to Keith at this point and he couldn’t think of any animal species – and was bound to find out sooner or later. If he ever got back from sick leave, that was.

  ‘The divers will be a wee bit longer, sir,’ he said. ‘Do you want to go and sit in the car?’

  ‘No. I need to be out here where I can see it – them... Are you sure there’s nothing we can do? I don’t mind getting wet.’

  Keith and the two constables who had been sent over from North Queensferry had already had to restrain him from jumping into the water as soon as he had seen the van. To be fair to him, it must have been very frustrating to know his children were almost certainly in there and not to be able to do anything about it, not even to see if they were there or not. Keith himself had got to the stage of pacing up and down. He had called the control centre twice to find out if there was anything they could do to speed up the divers.

  ‘They’ve got to make sure they’ve got the right equipment with them,’ the woman on the phone had said patiently. ‘It’s no use them getting there and then finding they have to go back for more oxygen or whatever.’

  Suddenly everything began to happen at once. A couple of police cars came along the minor road a bit too fast for Keith’s liking – it wouldn’t help if one of them went into the water too. Several uniformed officers got out and stood and stared at the parts of the van that were currently visible. Two of them saw Keith and began to walk up the slope to where he was standing. He had thought it wise to keep the artists’ father away from the water. He knew he shouldn’t have brought the man here in the first place, but it seemed only fair to give him the chance to be here. A helicopter buzzed into view and hovered over their heads. If that was the press... Keith mentally began to construct phrases composed entirely of swear words.

  After a few minutes, a man in diving gear was lowered down, and then another. A bundle of equipment followed. The helicopter swung away again and headed for the Forth Bridge.

  ‘Quicker than you thought, eh?’ said the artists’ father, throwing half a cigarette on the ground and stamping on it. He began to walk down the hill. Keith clutched at his arm.

  ‘We don’t want to get in their way, sir.’

  ‘Hmph! If that’s my son and daughter in there, I need to see exactly what’s happened to them,’ said the man. It sounded as if grim determination was the only thing holding him together.

  They encountered the two uniformed officers. One of them put out a hand to stop the father going on, but he shook it off, ignored them and continued.

  ‘What did you bring him for?’ said one of the officers. ‘He shouldn’t be anywhere near the scene.’

  ‘He’s their father,’ said Keith in a low voice. ‘He needs to know.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to see them now, before...’

  Keith knew what the officer meant. Before they were tidied up and made to look more acceptable to a grieving parent’s eye. But he also knew that there was nothing that could be done to make what had happened tidy and acceptable. Maybe it was better to acknowledge that, and to accommodate the father’s urge to know as much as he could about the last moments of his children. He had met people who closed their minds to it all, and those who wanted to know every last detail. It was hard to deal with in either case.

  It was the surprise that made this one harder, in the end.

  Things went more or less according to plan, if you could call it that, in the initial stages when the two divers were circling the wrecked van, presumably to try and establish whether they could get the doors open easily and recover the bodies, or whether the van itself would have to be recovered first.

  The first indication that there would be a surprise came with a shout from one of them.

  ‘Hey! Sergeant Burnet?’

  ‘That’s me!’ Keith called back, starting across the road towards the water’s edge.

  ‘What does he want?’ muttered the father, close behind him.

  ‘Let me speak to him first.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No – stay here with these two officers. I’ll let you know exactly what he says.’

  Hoping the other officers would grab the man or do something to distract him, Keith pressed on and stood on the grass verge at the other side of the road. One of the divers approached, standing up as he reached the shallow water. He pushed back his mask.

  ‘Two bodies in there.’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ said Keith. ‘A brother and sister.’

  The diver shook his head. ‘Two men.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure as can be without actually getting them out... One’s got a kind of wee ginger beard and the other one’s got a dark moustache and a shaved head.’

  Keith frowned. ‘So they might not be his kids at all?’

  ‘There’s no knowing. Could be two completely different men. Or one of his kids and somebody else. That side of it’s up to you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No problem. We’ll get on and get them out then. Better get transport to take them away.’

  ‘What about the van?’

  ‘It’ll be low tide in a few hours. Should be able to winch it out then.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Keith trudged back to where the others were waiting, one of the police officers with a hand on the artists’ father’s arm to detain him. In a frivolous moment that almost made him giggle, he thought he might say, ‘Well, there’s good news and bad news...’

  No. That would mean the long walk to the Job Centre. Not that he particularly liked his current job at moments like this anyway.

  ‘It’s them, isn’t it?’ said the father. He tried to wrench his arm away from the officer. ‘Let me go and have a look.’

  ‘You won’t get near the van, sir,’ said Keith wearily. ‘It’s still in several feet of water. But the tide’s going out.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said the father. ‘Do we really have to wait for that to happen?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ said Keith. ‘The divers are hoping to have them out just now. There won’t be much longer to wait.’

  ‘But is it them?’ said the father, trying to light up another cigarette but messing it up because his hands were shaking too much to bring the lighter anywhere near the cigarette. He threw them both down on the ground in frustration. ‘Can they see anything – you know – through the windows?’

  ‘Did – does your son have – um – facial hair of any kind, Mr Wishart?’ said Keith, not sure if he was being tactful enough.

  The man nodded glumly. ‘Silly wee ginger beard. I don’t know why he bo
thers.... Oh, God, does that mean...?’

  He burst into tears at last. Probably the best way, Keith decided.

  One of the other police officers patted Mr Wishart clumsily on the shoulder. ‘You’d better come and have a seat in the car,’ he said. The man allowed them to lead him away. They wouldn’t let him smoke in their car, Keith was sure of that.

  It was a long day, and it didn’t end with the recovery of the bodies from the van, with the tearful identification of one of them by Bert Wishart, or with the dispatch of the father, accompanied by two police officers including the statutory female who always had to break bad news, back to his house to tell his wife what had happened, or even with the winching up of the van and its removal on the back of a truck which only just made it along the narrow road without going over the edge into the water. Keith still had to write up his report, to institute a missing person enquiry to try and find the other twin, and to placate his girl-friend, who had been hoping for a meal out to make up for having their last evening out interrupted.

  He didn’t have the time or the energy to think about any of it properly until well into the following morning. And even then the thoughts came to him courtesy of a phone call from Amaryllis.

  ‘I was going to break into your house and leave you a note,’ she said, ‘and then I remembered I had your mobile number.’

  ‘You sound quite disappointed,’ he said.

  ‘Obviously I need to know what happened yesterday. We saw the truck bringing the van up to the police station. Will forensics be round later to look at the inside?’

  ‘You know I can’t tell you anything about that.’

  ‘Jemima says there was only one twin in the van after all.’

  ‘How the hell did Jemima find out...?’

  There was a pause while Keith wondered if he could stab himself to death with his standard police issue pencil. He jabbed it into his side to see what happened.

  ‘Aha!’ said Amaryllis. ‘Only one. So that means the other one is either still at large or lying about in a ditch or somewhere... Was it the boy or the girl?’

  ‘Don’t push your luck!’ he snapped. He couldn’t ever recall snapping at a member of the public before. Although Amaryllis didn’t really count. He remembered Charlie Smith nearly tearing his hair out during one of the cases she had got involved in. Was it the one with the tramp and the dog, or one of the others? They had all started to blur into one now in his head.

  ‘I know where there was somebody lurking the other night,’ said Amaryllis.

  She had that smug ‘I’ve got a secret’ tone in her voice.

  ‘Lurking? I don’t think that’s at all relevant.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe it was the missing twin.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Keith lied. ‘I just want you off my back. So stay out of this case or I’m going to have to get a restraining order.’

  ‘You can’t restrain a law-abiding member of the public.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I can. But you’re a different matter.’

  She laughed. ‘I like to think so... Anything else I can do for you?’

  ‘Go away.’

  He rang off decisively. She was impossible. He didn’t know what a usually sensible and mature man like Christopher Wilson saw in her. Unless it was the red hair. Some men liked it.

  For just a moment he stood there considering how exciting it might be to go out with somebody so unpredictable and so liable to take you right to the edge of the law – maybe even beyond the edge on occasion – instead of with a girl who probably already had both their lives planned down to the last detail. For just a moment he experienced a kind of resentment about all that planning, and then he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and came back to reality. Because you had to live in the real world, at the end of the day. Visiting la-la-land was all very well for a wee while at a time, but he liked his feet to stay on solid ground.

  Amaryllis had the ability to conjure up quick-sands wherever she went.

  Chapter 8 The other half of the puzzle

  Amaryllis wasn’t sure what had made her conjure up a scenario in which one of the twins was missing. She didn’t believe in psychic power, so it wasn’t that. Some sort of intuition based on reality and not on the supernatural must have triggered this thought. After speaking to Keith, she ran through the events of the past few days in her mind like a movie. It wasn’t exactly in the horror genre, although it had looked as if it might go that way at first, what with all the blood, and it couldn’t really be a comedy now that at least one death had occurred. Instead it seemed to be shaping up to be some weird art-house effort that she would never have gone to see in a million years.

  That was appropriate, in a way, what with the arty people who had joined the cast.

  She frowned. It wasn’t very much, but it was something odd. She had reached the point in her replaying of events at which she and Jock and the wee white dog had been passing Giancarlo’s coffee kiosk, and something had happened… A sort of scrabbling sound.

  She got up from the chrome and leather chair that she was considering replacing because it wasn’t at all comfortable – although that was why she had originally bought it, thinking it would keep her alert and discourage her from falling asleep in the evenings – and put on her black leather jacket again.

  The coffee kiosk! It wasn’t far from the spot where she had found the tablet, and she knew she had heard something – or someone – inside it that afternoon. She slid the tablet into her jacket pocket and then out again. It seemed silly to risk damaging it more than it had been damaged already. She went into her bedroom, a white sterile-looking environment that was supposed to send her to sleep immediately because of the lack of visual stimulation. There weren’t even any cracks in the ceiling to think about in there. She slid the tablet under her duvet. There was no time to think of a more secure hiding place. In any case she was being ridiculously over-cautious even to imagine someone would break in here looking for it. Not only was her flat more secure than most bank vaults, but no-one knew she had the tablet in the first place. Even if it did have any of the significance she thought it did. Perhaps she should take it to the police first thing in the morning. On the other hand, Keith had been quite adamant that she shouldn’t bother him any more.

  It would be his own fault if he never solved the case.

  She walked downstairs and out to the street with a clear conscience, a spring in her step.

  It was a pity spring wasn’t in the air as well, she thought as she made her way down towards the kiosk. The temperature seemed to have fallen since the previous evening, and there were ominous dark grey clouds heading towards the town from somewhere beyond the Forth Bridges. Surely it couldn’t be about to snow.

  The coffee kiosk had acquired an abandoned look since Giancarlo left, although it was hard to work out what was so different about it. Just the fact that she couldn’t get expertly crafted cappuccino in this town any more, she told herself, unwilling to admit it was the barista himself she missed most.

  She shoved at the door in the side where he used to go in and out. It stuck a bit, probably because it had warped in the winter damp, but then gave way suddenly, so that she almost fell into the space within.

  She knew at once that someone had been here recently. There was a supermarket sandwich packet in the corner, and a juice carton behind it. Neither had been here long, as far as she could tell. The stick of charcoal, lying near where the serving hatch used to be, was a real giveaway. An artist. An artist with a weird taste in sandwiches, she decided, wrinkling her nose as she looked at the packet. Cheese, mayonnaise and gherkin. The last time she had been forced to eat that particular combination of flavours was on a Deutsche Bahn train from Cologne to Berlin. She wouldn’t have thought that kind of sandwich was even legal in Scotland.

  ‘Anybody at home?’ said a voice behind her.

  Amaryllis wasn’t easily startled, but at that moment she almost jumped out of her skin. She was horrified to think so
meone could have come at her with a knife or other weapon without her even knowing about it.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, turning to regard the intruder sternly. ‘You do realise I might have killed you with one blow without a second thought, don’t you?’

  Charlie Smith laughed. ‘You wouldn’t do that to an old friend. Or his faithful hound.’

  The dog huddled just behind him, almost as if it were embarrassed to be included in such a pointless conversation.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Charlie continued. ‘Were you hoping Giancarlo had left you something as a souvenir? A lock of his hair maybe?’

  Amaryllis ignored this remark. ‘Have you noticed anything happening around this kiosk?’

  ‘What sort of anything? Crowds of sobbing women tearing their hair out? Wreaths being thrown over the wall into the water?’

  She sighed. ‘No, not that kind of thing. I mean people looking furtive. Other people searching for someone. Gangsters with violin cases.’ She held up the sandwich packet. ‘I think someone’s been hiding in here.’

  ‘Hiding or just messing about?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s only an idea at the moment.’

  ‘Anything to do with these artists of yours? I hear one of them was found in a van in the water along that way.’ He indicated the direction with the hand that wasn’t holding the dog’s lead.

  ‘How did you know that? It’s confidential.’

  ‘Contacts,’ he said with a wink. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re already treading all over the evidence.’

  ‘Do you think it’s really evidence?’ she said.