‘You know what I mean. You might as well hand it over now.’
‘You’re not getting me into that van,’ she muttered, wriggling and kicking. It was embarrassing but she was going to have to scream for help. She opened her mouth again, and then found the grip had already eased. The yapping and growling she had only vaguely heard, right at the edge of her consciousness, got dramatically louder and someone shouted, and then the street was crowded with people. She pushed forward away from the arms that were no longer effectively restraining her, trod on Young Dave’s toes on purpose and faced her would-be captor. She didn’t recognise him at first, but after a moment her brain processed the image of his small moustache and little brown eyes, and knew. Beyond him she saw Charlie Smith and Jock McLean – that explained the yapping and growling. Then there were the dogs. She laughed to herself.
‘It isn’t funny, Amaryllis,’ said Jemima from somewhere behind Young Dave.
The man she had recognised as Keith’s Murray Williamson dived sideways and flung himself into the back of the van, which accelerated away violently with the doors still ajar.
Amaryllis turned back to Young Dave. His namesake had him under control, with a bit of help from Jemima.
‘Somebody’d better call the police and get him taken away,’ said Jemima’s Dave. ‘Before I strangle him.’
‘It’s all under control,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘Keith’s on his way.’
Amaryllis stared at his dog, which had flattened itself against his legs, apparently thinking there must be something to apologise for. ‘Thanks,’ she told it solemnly.
‘He never bites,’ said Charlie. ‘I don’t know what got into him.’
‘He was protecting me,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Amazing, isn’t it? I didn’t even know I needed protecting.’
She was irritated to note a quaver in her voice. It wasn’t that she had been scared, of course. The quaver was one of anger that she hadn’t been able to resist capture on her own instead of having to be helped out by a dog which had always seemed like a sub-standard example of its species.
Somewhere on the periphery of her vision, Jock McLean was patting the wee white dog, who had also played a part, although Amaryllis suspected that one’s talents were more of the vocal kind.
‘Thanks,’ she said to no-one in particular.
‘Do you want to sit down, Amaryllis?’ said Jemima. ‘The café’s just here.’
Somehow she and Jemima found themselves inside at a table where they could look out the window and watch what happened next. After a while, a police car came roaring up, sirens going and lights flashing. Young Dave was bundled into it, while Keith Burnet hopped out and chatted to the men outside for a few minutes. The car drove off, again at speed.
It was all wrong. Amaryllis tried to get to her feet to go out and join the others, but Jemima pushed her back into the chair. ‘The scones are just coming. You don’t want to miss them, do you? They’ve got brie and blueberry in them today.’
The bell on the café door jingled and Keith came in. He sat down with them.
‘What was all that about?’
‘Would you like a scone, Keith?’ said Jemima as someone brought a tray over with coffee cups and a plate of scones.
Keith eyed the scones critically. ‘What’s in them? Is that a blueberry?’
‘They’re too exotic for you, Keith,’ said Amaryllis.
‘I’ve been to Tenerife on holiday, you know,’ said Keith. ‘Nothing’s too exotic for me.’
‘It was your Murray Williamson,’ said Amaryllis.
‘I thought so,’ said Keith. ‘Charlie got the van number. We’ll catch up with him.’
‘Young Dave will sing like a canary when you start interrogating him,’ said Jemima.
‘Sing like a canary?’ said Keith.
The doorbell jingled again and Charlie, Jock and Jemima’s Dave came in.
‘No dogs,’ said someone.
‘Those are personal assistance dogs,’ said Charlie.
‘You still can’t bring them in here... But if they’re really assistance dogs you can put them out the back just this once.’
Charlie and Jock disappeared with the dogs and Dave came over and sat down.
‘I can’t question her with all you lot about,’ complained Keith.
‘We’re not leaving her on her own,’ said Dave, crossing his arms.
‘Quite right, dear,’ said Jemima, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Have you ordered anything? Would you like a scone?’
‘Enough about the damn scones!’ said Keith, raising his voice and causing a deathly hush to fall over the whole place.
‘I’m not having you coming in here and shouting about my scones,’ said the waitress, looming up behind him. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them. You’ll put off my customers.’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Could you maybe bring us another plate of scones and a pot of tea?’ suggested Jemima. ‘Or does anybody want coffee?’
‘I think they might have been after the tablet,’ said Amaryllis to Keith in a voice pitched low enough to be just audible by him through the din caused by Charlie, Jock and Dave deciding whether they wanted tea or coffee.
‘Do you have any reason to believe that?’
‘The one who grabbed me – Murray Williamson – asked me where “it” was. I can’t think of anything else he might have meant. Unless he’d mistaken me for someone else. And Young Dave wouldn’t do that.’
‘Nobody would do that, believe me,’ said Keith. ‘How did they know you had the tablet?’ He lowered his voice a bit more. ‘It’s on its way to the forensic computer people. If they can retrieve any data from it we should know soon.’
Amaryllis considered his question. Jock McLean had been present when she found the tablet. She didn’t think either of them had mentioned it to Charlie Smith when they met him that same evening. She had been carrying it around in her backpack since then with all the election materials. Stewie might have seen it there... Stewie... She didn’t want to drop him in it.
Then she remembered the day they had been leafleting in Stewie’s Grannie’s street. She had taken the tablet out accidentally with a bunch of leaflets at about the time they encountered El Presidente and Young Dave.
‘El Presidente,’ she said slowly. ‘He was with Young Dave.’
Keith, who had been leaning towards her, jumped back so abruptly that his chair skidded out from the table and collided with another one at the next table, causing a minor diplomatic incident.
What with the fracas, and the arrival of another tray with more scones and various beverages, the moment was lost. Amaryllis didn’t think Keith would forget, though.
Sure enough, when they were leaving the café, having eaten enough scones to satisfy Jemima that the natural order of things had been restored, she found herself standing next to Keith on the street outside, his arm linked in hers in what could have been a friendly, supportive gesture but which she instinctively knew wasn’t, or at least that wasn’t its prime purpose.
Charlie and Jock had retrieved their dogs from the back yard and seemed to have come to the joint conclusion that all four of them needed to stretch their legs, so they trotted off towards the harbour.
Jemima hustled Dave on up the hill with a speed which probably wouldn’t do anything for either of their blood pressures.
‘I’d better go and let Christopher know I’m all right,’ said Amaryllis. ‘He might hear about this from someone else and start worrying.’
‘Not so fast, young lady,’ said Keith.
‘Young lady? I’m just about old enough to be your mother, you know.’
‘It’s a generic term for a female person,’ said Keith.
Amaryllis shook herself free of his restraining arm. ‘Not in my world, it isn’t. Anyway, I only popped out for a minute to see if Maggie was in the supermarket…’
‘She still hasn’t turned up, then?’
‘No. Christopher went to look round the res
t of the building. Perhaps he’s found her by now.’
‘Hmm.’ Keith looked even more worried than before, a reasonable reaction to things falling apart on his watch. ‘What were you saying about El Presidente again? I assume you meant Mr Prestonfield.’
‘I think he saw me with the tablet. He was there when I took it out of my backpack when we were leafleting. Or maybe it was just Young Dave who noticed.’
‘Mr Prestonfield can’t be tied up in this,’ said Keith. ‘His family have lived here for – well, forever. They run everything.’
‘That doesn’t mean there can’t be a bad apple in the barrel,’ said Amaryllis.
‘You’re not exactly impartial, are you?’
‘Should we really be having this conversation in the street?’ she countered as two old women pushed past them. ‘Why don’t we go back down to the Cultural Centre? Then we can kill two birds with one stone.’
Keith sighed and glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t really have time just now. Ideally we should be going up to the police station anyway. You’d better come in tomorrow so we can get a proper statement. So don’t think you can make up your own rules.’
‘I won’t,’ she lied.
Chapter 15 Help from On High
It felt as if nothing had happened for days, and now everything was happening at once. Keith found when he got back to the police station that several kinds of reinforcement had arrived in his absence. Most of them were crammed into the tea-room where Sergeant Macdonald was brewing up as well as conducting an impromptu presentation on the perils and joys of police work in Pitkirtly. Mostly perils, by the sound of it.
‘... and if you make the mistake of tangling with her, you’ll live to regret it – if you’re lucky. She’s had training in armed and unarmed combat, she speaks about fifteen languages, she has a hotline to MI6 and the CIA, and she’s always trying to prove she’s better than us.’
Keith only agreed with about half of this analysis, but he didn’t want to steal Sergeant Macdonald’s thunder, so he lurked near the doorway and kept quiet. There wasn’t anywhere else to lurk. Uniformed officers, some of whom he recognised from last night, occupied all the chairs, and a tall burly woman wearing the kind of old-fashioned beige skirt suit that Keith’s granny would have been mortified to be seen in, loomed over everybody, probably waiting her moment to prod them all into action.
Sergeant Macdonald glanced round and saw him just as he had decided not to wait around and be prodded.
‘Ah, Keith, there you are,’ he said with quite uncharacteristic geniality. ‘Cup of tea?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Keith’s always out and about,’ the Sergeant explained to the tall woman. ‘He likes to keep his ear to the ground. Gather information. See what’s going on for himself.’
‘Great!’ said the woman, to Keith’s alarm. ‘That’s just the kind of police work there isn’t enough of these days. I’m going to need your local knowledge, Sergeant Burnet, to inform my strategy.’ Keith took a couple of steps backwards, and was almost out of the door before she added, ‘Don’t run away now, son. My bark’s worse than my bite, you know. Come right in and close the door.’
‘Is somebody watching the prisoner?’ said Keith.
‘After the last time? We’ve got three of Queensferry’s finest on guard down the corridor there,’ she told him. ‘We need to catch up on things. Have you got an office of your own?’
‘There’s the interview rooms,’ said Keith.
‘Get yourself a cup of something and let’s find somewhere less noisy.’
‘There’s a package for you,’ Sergeant Macdonald told him while he was grabbing a cup of coffee. ‘It came by courier. I think it’s from forensics or something.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Where is it?’
‘On the counter through there.’
Keith put down his cup somewhere. He would probably never find the right one again. He glared at the two officers from Queensferry who had their feet on the table, pushed past the three who were blocking his way as they argued amicably about football or something, and went to fetch the package. The tall woman followed him out to the front desk and then down the corridor to one of the interview rooms. It seemed incongruous to be speaking to her under those conditions, but it was better than being overheard by all the extra constables or by Sergeant Macdonald, for that matter.
It wasn’t until they were sitting opposite each other at the table that he realised he didn’t even know who she was.
‘Chief Inspector Ramsay,’ she said, holding her hand out to him. ‘Sarah Ramsay, on a good day.’
‘Yes, sir, ma’am.’
‘So are you going to open it or not?’ she enquired, glancing at the package in his other hand.
‘Um – it’ll just be forensics,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting for some results.’
‘Go on then. Let’s find out the worst.’
He opened the package gingerly. He didn’t want to look at the contents in front of her, but he sensed she wouldn’t be satisfied unless he did.
‘It’s the full report on the quilt and a preliminary summary on the bodies in the van,’ he said. ‘I’d already heard something about the blood on the quilt – they phoned me to let me know.’
There was nothing on the tablet yet, of course, and he had a feeling it might be the key to the whole thing.
‘Good. Tell me about the case.’
With a lot of hesitation, and some prompting from the Chief Inspector, Keith attempted to describe the case as he saw it.
‘I can’t work out if it’s one case or several,’ he confessed at the end of his effort. ‘There’s been random odd stuff happening, and it doesn’t seem to tie in but it might do, if you see what I mean.’
‘What do you think your top priority should be at this point?’
‘The missing girl,’ he said without hesitation. ‘But I can’t see how…’
‘I agree,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you’ve got on that, without letting the other things get in the way.’
‘Some of this has come from a member of the public,’ he said. ‘So it may not be all that reliable. Or useful.’
He felt vaguely disloyal to Amaryllis as he spoke. But he thought the Chief Inspector should be aware of what he was up against. Her eyebrows rose as he spoke.
‘But surely we are always reliant on the public to pass on information to us,’ she said. ‘Why are you reluctant to believe it in this case?’
‘It’s from somebody who interferes in things on a regular basis. She used to work in the security services and I think she sometimes thinks she knows better than any of the rest of us.’
‘Security services. Hmm. Tell me about the missing girl anyway.’
For Chief Inspector Ramsay’s benefit he ran through the wreck of the van and the unidentified body, the discovery of the tablet, the suspicious noises in the old coffee kiosk and the sandwich wrapper. The more he talked about it, the flimsier it all seemed as evidence. Except that the tablet could yet yield up its secrets and give them a few more clues. If it was the right tablet, that was. And if the forensic computer wizards could recover its data.
‘Right,’ said the Chief Inspector. ‘Now what’s your next priority after the girl?’
‘Investigating the deaths of the two men in the van.’
‘And the next one?’
‘Working out what happened in the Folk Museum. And the church hall. And what Young Dave has to do with it all.’
‘There,’ she said, and sat back with a satisfied smile on her face. ‘That was relatively simple, wasn’t it?’
Simple if you hadn’t been tangled up in the middle of it for days like some sort of Sleeping Beauty, Keith thought. Not that he had been sleeping – far from it.
‘So what have you done to find the girl so far, Sergeant Burnet?’ she said.
‘Um – I’m not sure.’
‘That isn’t the kind of answer I want to hear.’
‘I’ve be
en trying to establish whether she’s actually missing or what.’
‘Marginally better – but not quite good enough, is it?’
Was the woman trying to make him squirm?
‘No, sir, ma’am.’
‘I want you to get some posters organised, and teams of men searching the area,’ she said. ‘Start with known associates and places we know she’s definitely been to. Do we have a photograph of the girl? If not, send somebody to get one from her parents. Put it out on social media. If necessary we’ll make copies and go house to house.’
An unexpected and colossal wave of relief rolled over Keith. Somebody else was taking charge. Somebody who hadn’t wasted much time blaming him or telling him off – so far – but who had almost instantly grasped the essentials and made a plan.
‘There’s a photo. I got one from her parents when I last spoke to them.’
‘We’ll start up an incident room. Do you have a big enough space here?’
‘The main office might do,’ he said happily.
‘I’m going to treat the whole thing as one incident for the moment. It’s beyond the bounds of possibility that all these events aren’t connected.’
Keith opened his mouth to contradict here – this was Pitkirtly, after all, where random events occurred with startling frequency – but decided he had better not rock the boat. Instead of arguing, he said, ‘I’ll get a whiteboard set up.’
‘You should have enough men now, but speak up if you haven’t. I’ll get more sent over from somewhere. Pitlochry. Shetland. Kyle of Lochalsh. There’s never any crime in those places... Sergeant Burnet?’
‘Yes, sir, ma’am.’
‘After you’ve done the posters and got the search teams set up, I don’t want you to leave the station until you’ve written down all you know or think you know about any of this. I’m sure you’ve spent your time interviewing local people and getting the flavour of what’s happened. It’s time to write all that up so that we all get the benefit of it.’
An incident room – a whiteboard – paperwork. Keith hadn’t been looking forward to the day ahead so much since Charlie Smith was in charge.
Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) Page 14