Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9)

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘He doesn’t like people hanging about getting in the way,’ he told her, speeding up his steps, perhaps because he mistakenly imagined she wouldn’t be able to keep up with a younger person.

  ‘I won’t do either of these things.’

  ‘Nobody’s meant to see the exhibition before it opens.’

  ‘Oh, really? Does he have an art world celebrity lined up to open it? Is he planning to hold a private view, and if so why haven’t I been sent a card for it?’

  He gave her one of his bemused looks. She at once, much against her will, felt guilty for teasing him. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. She should save it for El Presidente or Young Dave. They deserved it.

  She changed tack altogether.

  ‘What’s the stuff like anyway? Do you like what you’ve seen of it?’

  He looked even more bemused. ‘Don’t know. I just get the pictures ready to be hung up. I don’t have to look at them.’

  She mentally crossed ‘art historian’ off the list of possible careers for him. Not that it had really been on the list in the first place. Not that she even had a list. She was searching the far corners of her brain for a new topic of conversation when he said,

  ‘There’s some of you.’

  ‘Some what?’

  ‘Some pictures.’

  ‘That’s funny. I don’t remember sitting for my portrait,’ she joked, and then realised Stewie hadn’t understood. She sighed. With the best will in the world, it was exhausting just to be with him. It was only sheer stubbornness that made her persist in trying to steer him in the right direction. ‘What are they like?’ she added.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Make sure you point them out to me when we get there. I don’t want to miss seeing them.’

  ‘Mr Cockburn won’t want you to look.’

  They were back to square one again. But luckily they had just turned along the street where both the manse and the church were located. There was a limit to the tortuous dialogue they could have in the distance that was left.

  Two men walked past. For some reason they didn’t even look at Amaryllis and Stewie, which was quite unusual in Pitkirtly. Most people would give each other at least a passing glance to see if they were acquainted, in which case they would probably do some fast calculations to determine the size of smile or the warmth of the verbal greeting they wanted to exchange. Amaryllis turned to watch as they walked on. One of the men, the older one, had turned to watch her too, but he snapped his head back to face the front so quickly that she thought he might have given himself a crick in the neck.

  There was nothing particularly noticeable about either of the men, but all the same the non-encounter had made her feel obscurely uneasy.

  ‘He won’t like you asking him things either,’ said Stewie as they went up the path to the church.

  ‘Mr Cockburn seems to have quite a lot of things he doesn’t like,’ said Amaryllis just as the main door of the church opened and the minister himself came out.

  He smiled at Stewie. ‘There you are, young Stewart. Only ten more pictures to go.’ He glared at Amaryllis. ‘May I help you?’

  ‘Can we go inside? I’ve got something to ask you, and I don’t want to talk out here where anyone can hear.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t allow anybody in at the moment unless they’re involved in the Face of Pitkirtly project. It’s all under wraps until the opening. And possibly for a while after that, depending on....’

  ‘I understand,’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course. I wouldn’t let anyone in either, if I were you. I could be an undercover reporter, not just a concerned local citizen who is standing for the Council.’

  ‘For the Council?’

  ‘I left a leaflet with your wife. You can read it later.’

  ‘In that case I’m afraid you definitely can’t come in. And it would be inadvisable for me to speak to you. About anything. Religion and politics have a history of not mixing very well.’

  He turned on his heel and walked back to the church door. ‘Come on in, Stewart. Some of us have got work to do.’

  Amaryllis had never broken into a church before, as far as she could remember, although she had once broken out of the church hall via the kitchen window. This time she knew she had to break in if she wanted to find out any more. But later. Much later.

  She was standing on the pavement just outside the gate when the same two men walked past her again. This time one of them gave her a dark look, which she studiously ignored. The younger one said something as they went off along the street, and she heard them laugh together.

  Oddly enough, this didn’t unsettle her as much as the first non-encounter had.

  She was still standing in exactly the same place, sizing up the exterior defences of the building and looking to see if there were any skylights in the more modern section where she knew the church hall was, when Keith came along on his bike.

  ‘I thought I told you to keep out of this,’ he said. ‘People have died, you know.’

  ‘I might be just the right person to stop more people from dying, for all you know.’

  He ignored her as he padlocked the bike to the gate.

  ‘Have you found the girl yet?’

  He straightened up and glared at her. ‘Not yet. Have you?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She hesitated. She didn’t want to rush into telling him something that was based mainly on her intuition, and yet she was reluctant to withhold information if it did turn out to mean something. If he had shown any sign of being receptive to her ideas, she might have said something, but as it was she shrugged her shoulders and turned away.

  It would serve him right if she tracked the girl down first.

  Police work wasn’t a competition, on the other hand, and this was too serious to leave to a bunch of amateurs, or even one highly-skilled amateur, as she was. She half-turned back towards Keith and opened her mouth to speak. He wasn’t looking at her. He knocked on the door of the church, and someone let him in. He had lost his chance.

  It was no use waiting around for Stewie to come out. He wouldn’t be able to answer her questions. Even if she had spelled out to him the questions she had wanted to ask the minister, he wouldn’t have been able to summon up the courage to ask them. He was good at doing what people told him to do, keeping in the background and never volunteering. Amaryllis wasn’t sure if these skills were very much in demand these days, but she was keen to find him a proper job eventually. If nothing else, that would remove the burden of looking after him from her shoulders. She told herself she would be hugely relieved by that.

  For now, Amaryllis would go home and gather her energy, ready to emerge in darkness like a creature of the night.

  Being out after dark didn’t frighten her. On the contrary, it gave her the soothing illusion that no-one could see her. There weren’t many other people about in the first place, due to the delayed arrival of spring in Pitkirtly and the fact that the temperature had dropped to a bracing 2 degrees Celsius since sunset. Amaryllis was glad she had put on her heavy boots and the fur-lined gloves she had bought when she was on an assignment in Moscow in November. She suspected they were made out of the skin of some endangered species, but she had long ago decided not to think about that.

  She approached the church with caution despite her earlier reconnaissance. It was always dangerous to relax in these situations. The unexpected risks were the deadliest.

  She had considered going in through the kitchen window she had once escaped from. There would have been an element of symmetry about it which appealed to her. On the other hand, there was an element of foolishness in it too. That window was overlooked by several houses, and although there were no lights in the windows facing on to the church hall, there was no knowing when somebody could randomly decide to go into one of the rooms and switch the light on, which she knew would flood the ground outside the kitchen with light.

  Instead she had reluctantly decided t
o use the skylight at one end of the roof. It was partly overshadowed by a couple of giant yew trees, which would provide useful cover. Amaryllis just wished she could shake the image of spiders lurking among the foliage and waiting to drop on her head as she was climbing into the hall. There was no logical reason to expect spiders to be in that particular tree. Unless they were the deadly tree-climbing spiders of Borneo, the other side of her mind argued.

  Ruthlessly shutting out the spiders, and bribing herself with the promise of chocolate to disarm the fluffy, feminine and sometimes downright silly side of her that most people never saw, she put her mind to the task at hand.

  There was a drainpipe she had ear-marked earlier as being possible to climb up, and she had brought a rope, tied round her middle in true secret agent fashion, in case she ran out of architectural features to use in her ascent or indeed in the subsequent descent.

  In the end she didn’t even need to consider the rope. Her old burglary skills came flooding back to her – just as well she had kept in practice even after retiring from the spy game by regularly breaking into Christopher’s and Jock McLean’s houses just for the hell of it.

  Opening the skylight just enough and sliding in through the gap were child’s play. The drop to the raised stage area inside wasn’t much of a challenge either. What really alarmed her was the noise she heard just after she had landed in a neat crouching position and straightened up to look around her.

  It was a noise that sounded very much like the outside door being kicked or battered in by a very determined and rather reckless house-breaker.

  Amaryllis took advantage of her limited knowledge of the place to head for the kitchen as fast as she safely could in the near-darkness. She sincerely hoped not to have to conceal herself in a cupboard, but she might be able to squeeze into a gap between the units or something. Her memory of the exact geography of the room was hazy.

  No sooner had she dived into the kitchen and slid into position just behind the half-closed door where she might be able to hear what was going on, than she heard the voices.

  ‘... silly,’ said one of them. ‘... no sign of anybody in here.’

  ‘...wants the place searched – that’s what we’re going to do...’

  A flash showed they had switched on a torch, and the moving beam gave her a rough idea of where they were – still quite some distance away, at the other side of the main hall.

  ‘... nowhere to hide in here.’

  ‘Not just this hall – all the other rooms. Church as well.’

  There was a long pause in which she could only hear footsteps, and they weren’t loud enough for her to deduce which direction they were moving in. The two men didn’t seem even to be trying to keep quiet. But then, nobody would hear anything from outside.

  ‘Does he really think she’s here?’

  ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t just have a look for himself.’

  ‘He likes to keep a low profile. You know that.’

  This last voice was louder than before, closer to her and – worst of all – rather familiar.

  Young Dave! Amaryllis almost groaned aloud. If he caught her...

  ‘He said she might have run to the minister,’ said the other man, not quite so loudly. He still must be at the far side of the hall.

  ‘That was just one of his ideas.’

  ‘Full of them, isn’t he? Can’t you think up any of your own?’ The other man almost sounded as disgruntled with young Dave as the PLIF people had been when he was revealed as a swindler. Amaryllis frowned. In her experience he hadn’t shown sufficient physical bravado to turn to more violent areas of crime, but then he hadn’t been in prison when she had known him before.

  A flicker of torchlight swept past the kitchen door.

  ‘What’s in here?’ said Young Dave, now surely just outside her hiding place.

  ‘... the kitchen. Not enough room to swing a cat.’

  ‘Door’s open.’ He pushed half-heartedly at the door and Amaryllis took a step backwards and sideways, away from the gap. ‘Maybe there’s somebody here, even if it isn’t her.’

  ‘... won’t be in there... What’s that?’

  For once the distant, rapidly approaching sound of police sirens was music to her ears.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ snapped Young Dave, but footsteps retreated from the kitchen. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  As they scurried away, Amaryllis quickly stuck her head round the door. The sirens had stopped, but flashes of blue light reflected off windows along the side of the building nearest the street, and there were shouts and running footsteps outside. It was time to use her old escape route again. She wasn’t going to find out anything tonight. Interesting, though, that Young Dave seemed to be mixed up in this.

  The minister hadn’t done anything to improve security since she had last climbed out of window in the tiny larder a few years before. There was no time to worry about the light that had just come on in a nearby house. Amaryllis just hoped the people in the house were busy gawking at the police cars, and wouldn’t notice her antics.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ said a voice nearby as she hit the ground. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘What are you doing round at this side?’ said Amaryllis crossly. ‘You should be going after those two.’

  Keith Burnet smiled. ‘Just thought I’d better make sure none of the villains knew about the dodgy window.’

  ‘Well, they didn’t. Satisfied?’

  ‘Not quite. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t lock you up with the rest.’

  ‘Do you know you sound just like Charlie Smith used to?’

  ‘Now I know why he gave up on police work,’ said Keith. He got out some handcuffs and jingled them in front of her nose.

  ‘I don’t do anything kinky,’ she said.

  ‘You still haven’t given me a reason.’

  ‘All right – someone told me there are portraits of me in here, and I wanted to see them before anyone else did.’

  ‘Ha!’ he scoffed. ‘That’s a bare-faced lie if ever I heard one.’

  ‘It’s quite true. In my position I’ve got to be very careful of my public image. If these portraits turn out to depict me in an unflattering light, I’m going to be asking for them to be removed from display.’

  ‘In your position I would have thought you’d be more careful not to get locked up,’ said Keith. ‘Come on, let’s go and see those famous portraits of yours.’

  He took her by the arm and led her round to the door Young Dave and his accomplice had smashed or kicked in. There was a uniformed constable standing guard there now. Stable door, horse, she thought, only just stopping herself from rolling her eyes.

  There were three police cars outside on the road, and the minister and his wife were standing talking to two more uniformed officers in the gateway. They glared at her in what she could only think of as a very unchristian way.

  ‘Where did all this lot come from?’ she asked Keith. ‘I thought you were always complaining about being understaffed.’

  ‘Reinforcements,’ he said. ‘They’d only just arrived when we got the call in. Handy, wasn’t it?’

  Amaryllis narrowed her eyes to try and identify the couple who were just walking past on the other side of the road at that moment. She found it suspicious that they didn’t even glance over to see what was going on. It would have been hard to miss all the police activity.

  The woman walked with a slight limp which Amaryllis felt should be familiar. The man had his hand under her elbow and seemed to be hurrying her along.

  Keith gave her a little push towards the door of the church hall.

  The couple vanished into the darkness between the street lights. Amaryllis couldn’t help staring at the police cars. It wasn’t often you saw three at once in Pitkirtly. She had begun to wonder if the drivers knew the way into town.

  She couldn’t see the face of the second person in the back of one of the cars, but someone only too familiar stared b
ack out at her from the near side, extreme malice in his expression. Young Dave lifted a hand and drew a finger across his throat. She stuck out her tongue at him.

  ‘What was that for?’ said Keith. ‘I suppose you’re planning to use the second childhood defence when your case comes up in the sheriff court.’

  ‘Sheriff court?’ said Amaryllis. ‘I was hoping for a proper trial in the High Court.’

  ‘You’ll get a proper trial all right, one of those days,’ said Keith. ‘Come on, let’s get this charade over and done with so I can finish up for the night.’

  They went into the church hall. This time there was no jumping lithely down through the skylight and letting her eyes get used to the dark before going on. Keith just put out a hand and switched on the main lights. Amaryllis blinked.

  ‘So where are these portraits then – oh!’

  Keith came to a stand-still in the middle of the room. Amaryllis gazed round in wonder.

  There was a whole wall of portraits of a woman dressed all in black, her dark red hair standing up in spikes. The one on the far left included great detail, down to the zip on her leather jacket, and the little diamond studs she usually wore in her ears. The next one along was a bit more minimalist, as if the artist had been in a hurry, and so on until the rightmost portrait was only a suggestion in a few lines of a woman and her rather menacing hair-do.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Keith.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Amaryllis, scanning the pictures from left to right and then back the other way. ‘I’ve seen something like that by Picasso.’

  ‘Picasso painted pictures of you?’

  ‘No, it was a bull. It started out with lots of detail and he reduced it down to a few lines. The technique isn’t quite as good here, obviously. But it tells a good story.’

  ‘It’s only good if you want to be reduced to a few lines,’ said Keith. But he was obviously envious. ‘When did you sit for those?’

  ‘I didn’t. It seems I have a secret admirer.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Keith.

  That more or less summed up the whole evening, as far as Amaryllis was concerned.

  Chapter 12 Keith wants to be alone