They strolled out of the kiosk.
‘It isn’t like you to be so unsure of yourself,’ he said.
‘I haven’t been myself lately,’ she admitted. ‘Either I’m getting too old for it, or this election’s warping my personality and draining away my intelligence.’
He laughed. ‘That explains some of the things politicians do once they get into power.’
Stewie materialised next to them. He must have been skulking round at the far side of the kiosk.
‘…leafleting?’ he mumbled.
‘I might do some later,’ said Amaryllis.
He shuffled his feet and looked guilty. Since this was his default expression, she took very little notice.
‘… got the leaflets with me,’ he said.
Amaryllis sighed. ‘I never thought I’d say this, Stewie, but you’re the voice of my conscience. I suppose I’d better do some now.’
‘You seem to be losing the urge to make a difference in local politics,’ said Charlie.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It would be fun to disrupt the workings of the Council, but it’s quite hard work trying to get elected. And El Presidente looks as if he’s going to walk it anyway.’
‘Better be a bit more positive, or you’ll upset the boy,’ said Charlie, nodding in Stewie’s direction.
‘It’s fine, Mr Smith,’ said Stewie in a surprisingly clear voice for once. ‘I don’t get upset.’
‘Just as well,’ said Charlie. ‘Working with her is quite likely to take you into some fairly upsetting situations.’
‘Hmph,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Just as well I don’t get upset by other people’s tactless disregard for my feelings, isn’t it? See you around, Charlie.’
She wasn’t sure but she thought he muttered, ‘Not if I see you first’ before pulling on the lead to encourage his dog to follow him in the direction of the harbour.
‘Spill the beans,’ said Amaryllis to Stewie. ‘Have you found out anything from Mr Cockburn yet?’
‘What?’ said Stewie.
‘Remember, when you said you were working at the church in the afternoons, putting up paintings, I asked you to try and find out if he’d seen Sammy and Craig?’
‘Oh,’ he said doubtfully, but after a moment’s thought he excavated the memory and added, with a grin, ‘Yes! I remember that!’
‘Well?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Did you ask him?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’
He showed signs of panic – eyes widening, fingers clutching the bundle of leaflets so tightly that they were crumpling as she watched – and she moderated her tone.
‘It’s all right, we can ask him later. Are you going round there again today?’
‘We’ve nearly finished,’ he said. ‘Just a couple more hours to do.’
‘When are you due there?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Any time after two.’
‘OK,’ said Amaryllis, ‘where haven’t we covered yet?’
‘My Gran’s old street,’ he said. ‘And up that way.’
‘Her old street? Doesn’t she live there any more?’
‘No. She’s dead.’
He didn’t sound particularly sad about it, but then Amaryllis knew Stewie’s Gran hadn’t been very nice. She had more or less had to rescue him from her at one point.
‘So you don’t stay with her any more then?’ It was a silly question, and she modified it by adding, ‘Or in her house?’
‘No. It had to get sold.’
She wondered where he lived now, and hoped it wasn’t the coffee kiosk. She didn’t like to think of the boy eating those cheese, mayonnaise and gherkin sandwiches, apart from anything else. But it wasn’t in her nature to ask people something as simple as where they lived. She preferred to work it out for herself, either by tailing them remorselessly until they gave up and led her straight home, or by deduction from other evidence, such as where she usually saw them or who they hung around with.
‘Do you still see anything of Darren and Zak?’ she enquired casually. She didn’t think Darren’s mother, Tricia Laidlaw, would leave a boy to sleep rough on the mean streets of Pitkirtly, particularly over the winter. Maybe he was staying at the Laidlaws’. He could do a lot worse.
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. This wasn’t going to be easy. The only places she had seen him lately had been around the supermarket, near the church and once walking down the road towards the Cultural Centre with Zak. Hmm. Maybe he was staying with Zak, who she knew had a rented flat further near the top of the High Street above the charity shop that now inhabited the premises vacated by the shiny furniture store. But Zak had a girl-friend, and surely wouldn’t want a lodger cramping his style. Amaryllis didn’t think the bonds of friendship between him and Stewie had ever been that close anyway. She knew Zak’s mother Penelope wouldn’t approve of Stewie, which was one reason Amaryllis had more or less adopted him once she found out how horrible his grandmother was.
‘OK,’ she said, deciding to follow up on this line of questioning at some later time when she had lulled him a bit. ‘Where was it your Gran used to live?’
‘Up near the other bus stop,’ he said. ‘She was in the top flat on the stair.’
‘Was she all right at getting up and down?’ said Amaryllis. ‘No trouble with her knees?’
He stared at her suspiciously. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Just friendly interest,’ said Amaryllis. Expressing friendly interest didn’t come easily to her, but she was cross that he had spotted the artificiality of it already. ‘We’ll go up there then. We can start up there and work our way down until we run out of leaflets or lose the will to live, whichever happens first.’
‘All right,’ he said. He carefully divided the bundle of leaflets in two and handed some over to her. ‘Here’s yours.’
Half an hour later, Amaryllis bitterly regretted coming to Stewie’s Gran’s street. All the homes were tenement style flats, and in order to deliver the leaflets to a reasonable number of them, they had first to get inside the communal front door in each case, and then walk up the stairs to the top flat and then come down again. The tenements weren’t that tall, only two or three storeys, but it took a long time to finish each building, and after doing one side of the street she wanted to go and lie down. Preferably in a darkened room, because many of the occupants of the flats had been at home and had opened their doors when she was trying to cram the leaflets through the most vicious letterboxes she had ever encountered, and they had either harangued her about junk mail or engaged her in political discourse. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
She learned nothing more about Stewie, and she was on the point of giving it all up for the day when she spotted two familiar figures approaching from the other end of the street.
El Presidente and his accomplice, Young Dave, were on a similar mission to hers, only they had brought along a shiny black car, its sleekness only partially marred by the election propaganda stuck all over the bodywork. Amaryllis hoped someone had inadvertently used superglue to stick the posters on so that it would require a complete re-spray once the election was over.
Stewie tugged at her arm. ‘Can we change over to the other side of the road now?’ he whispered.
‘I’m not going to run away from them,’ said Amaryllis sternly. ‘We just carry on as we’re going. They’ll have to work round us.’
She opened her backpack to get out more leaflets, and noticed the tablet she had found on the harbour wall and which she had fully intended to take along to the police station when it was open. She frowned. Could she fit that task into the day? Was the police station even open today?
She pulled the tablet out along with a bundle of leaflets and stared at it for a moment as if it might have the answers. She realised she hadn’t even tried to switch it on yet, so she had no idea if it was still working or not. But the others were getting closer and Young Dave’s gaze seemed to have homed
in on the gadget, so the answers would have to wait. She shoved it back in again, out of sight.
El Presidente was smiling as he approached. Amaryllis nodded as politely as she could manage. Young Dave scowled. She suspected he meant to look frightening, but actually he resembled a toddler on the verge of a tantrum.
‘So you’ve got leaflets as well as a poster?’ said El Presidente, sounding surprised. ‘Well done, well done.’
‘Some of the people along here don’t want any more junk mail,’ said Amaryllis.
‘Is that a threat?’ growled Young Dave.
‘Just a friendly warning,’ said Amaryllis. She pushed a leaflet through the door of the nearest house, a bungalow with its entrance straight on to the street. It came straight back out again, fluttering gracefully to the ground and from there on to Young Dave’s shoe.
The letterbox opened slightly and a woman’s voice said, ‘We don’t want your junk mail in here – you’re destroying the planet with your so-called election campaign.’
‘See what I mean?’ said Amaryllis.
‘Dave,’ said El Presidente.
Young Dave stepped forward and pushed one of his leaflets into the letterbox. It was a bit bulkier than the ones Amaryllis and Stewie were delivering, and he had to fold it a couple of times.
They all waited, watching for it to come out again. Nothing happened.
‘Ha!’ said Young Dave.
The front door of the house opened, and a man with tattoos came out, holding the leaflet.
‘Whose is this?’ he demanded.
‘Um,’ said Young Dave, backing away.
Amaryllis grabbed Stewie’s arm, and dragged him into the road. ‘We’ve finished for the day,’ she called back to El Presidente. ‘It’s all yours.’
There was a small fracas on the pavement and Young Dave’s voice was raised in terror. ‘You can’t do that! You...’
‘Don’t look,’ Amaryllis warned Stewie. ‘It’s not a pretty sight.’
Chapter 9 A Visit from the Family
Christopher was glad Keith Burnet hadn’t been in touch with him again. He wasn’t entirely happy with this new role as sounding-board for the police, and he had decided what he really wanted was to lock himself in his office, either with or without the Fotheringham Archive, and not come out until it was all over.
One thing that worried him slightly was that Amaryllis hadn’t been in touch either. In his experience this usually meant she was up to no good and he would be sucked into trouble sooner or later. But she was probably just delivering election leaflets, he told himself. Even she probably wouldn’t be able to cause mayhem doing that. Probably.
Sergeant Macdonald popped in soon after Christopher arrived, to say he could open the Cultural Centre again now. Apparently the scene of crime team wouldn’t need to re-visit the place. They must have a lot more to do after the discovery of the van and the two artists. But that was in the category of things he didn’t want to think about. Bad enough for one young life to be cut short but two at once...
He was grateful to Maggie Munro for interrupting his train of thought at this point.
‘Mr Wilson,’ she said, sticking her head round his office door, ‘would it be all right if my son had a word with you? And his Dad as well,’ she added as an afterthought. It was an odd way of expressing it, almost as if the father and son were not related to her at all.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Christopher, trying not to sound as reluctant as he felt.
What on earth did they want?
Two large men sauntered into the office. For one horrible moment he thought they had come to threaten him, and then Maggie’s smiling face appeared just behind them and he understood this was intended to be a friendly visit.
‘We just came to say thanks,’ said the younger man, holding out his hand for Christopher to shake. ‘For being good to Mum. She was in a bit of a state, thinking she’d be sacked, and then you calmed her right down.’
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ said Christopher. ‘I don’t really...’
He wanted to explain to them that he didn’t have the power to hire and fire on his own, but he had to clear all human resource issues with the Council department that looked after culture. But he discarded this little speech as being over-complicated. He didn’t like to take the credit for being more benevolent than he actually was, but maybe that was better than confusing the men with too much detail.
The older man shook his hand and said gruffly, ‘Much appreciated.’
‘If you ever need any help with anything, Mr Wilson,’ said Maggie, ‘just say the word. Heavy lifting, transport, anything like that. My boys don’t say very much, but they’re very willing.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ said Christopher. He almost wished he could think of something suitable for them to do right away, to even up the balance of gratitude, so to speak.
‘We don’t do anything violent, though, mind,’ said the younger one. ‘Or dangerous.’
‘Michael Munro!’ said Maggie. ‘Mr Wilson wouldn’t even think of asking you to do anything that was against the law. So you can put that idea right out of your head.’
She smiled at Christopher. Just as well she didn’t know about some of the things he had been involved in over the years.
The two men shuffled their feet in embarrassment, and the older one said, ‘Now, Maggie.’
‘It’s all right, Mal. He doesn’t mind us... We’ll let you get on, then, Mr Wilson,’ she said.
What was all that about? Once they had left, he shrugged his shoulders and tried to settle down to his self-imposed task of going through the Fotheringham Archive. But for some reason it didn’t hold his interest. Usually there was nothing he enjoyed more than imposing a structure on exactly this kind of collection of rambling letters, personal jottings and scrapbooks of miscellanea, but today he found himself wondering if the police had made any progress, how Amaryllis was getting on with her quest for votes, and even how long it would take for Jock McLean to follow through on his relationship with Tricia and ask her to marry him.
It was the last of these random ideas – they seemed to be scampering around his mind like meerkats and popping up in unexpected places – that made him decide it was time to get out of his office and survey the rest of his domain, if you could call the Cultural Centre by that name. He didn’t venture into the library section nearly as often as he should, partly because he was wary of some of the staff and sensed that not only did he not need to intervene in the running of the place but they would deeply resent if it he attempted to do so.
But today he overcame his hesitancy and strolled on through to the far end of the building.
There was a small flurry as he entered the library. It turned out to have been caused by Zak, who had knocked over a pile of periodicals in his haste to move away from his girl-friend Harriet. Christopher gave him a hand to pick them up. At least it gave him something to do, and broke the ice a bit, especially when he was also able to laugh at Zak’s effusive apologies and efforts to explain why he was there in the first place.
‘I’m glad you got my message about re-opening,’ said Christopher, speaking generally to all the staff who were there.
‘It wasn’t another murder, was it?’ said Mollie, the senior librarian, who as usual had a long-suffering air about her.
‘No, nothing like that,’ Christopher assured her. ‘There was an incident in the Folk Museum. We had to clean up a bit. It’s all over with now.’
‘Mrs Geddes at the Post Office said she saw police cars outside,’ said the assistant who worked part-time in the children’s section. ‘And men in those white suits they put on when there’s been a murder.’
They all stared accusingly at Christopher.
‘Well, yes, there were some police here. But it definitely wasn’t a murder. It was just an – incident... Zak, do you want to come in there with me now to check that it’s all right before we open to the public?’
They made a dignified exit f
rom the library, although he noticed that Mollie, Harriet and the assistant remained in a cluster round the enquiries desk to talk amongst themselves and presumably to share the gossip they had picked up in the Post Office, the wool shop, the supermarket and at other venues up and down the High Street. It crossed his mind to hang about for longer and listen to it all, but once he had told them he and Zak were going to the Folk Museum he was afraid to change his mind in case they saw it as a weakness.
‘It’s a murder, isn’t it?’ said Zak as they entered the museum area of the building.
‘No!’ said Christopher, and almost immediately contradicted himself. ‘Not here anyway. We don’t know yet what happened afterwards. There might have been some deaths...’
‘Some deaths?’ Zak exclaimed. ‘What kind of thing are we talking about here? A serial killer? A mass murderer?’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Christopher. He walked Zak through to the second room, which was slightly further away from the library. ‘Something happened in here. The police have been over, as you know, and the scene of crime team. They’ve taken a couple of things away. Everything else is fine.’
‘A couple of things?’ Zak made a circuit of the room, inspecting the contents of the glass display cases. ‘There’s a whole case missing from here – is it in the other room?’
‘I think they’ve had to take that one away with them,’ said Christopher.
‘What did they do with the contents? The Mary Winifred Bell collection of sea-shell creatures?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Christopher admitted. He had made a point of never even looking at the sea-shell creatures, because they had offended his sensibilities so much. He wasn’t sure if they had been part of the general carnage in the display case or not. His feeling was that they would probably have fallen apart if anybody had lifted a finger against them.
‘Oh, no, here they are,’ said Zak, bending to retrieve a plastic box from under a table near the window. ‘I think they’re all in the box. I’ll have to check for damage, of course.’
Christopher cleared his throat. ‘I wonder if we should – um – retire them from display for a while – rearrange the cases a bit to give visitors more room to move about.’
Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) Page 9