Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9)

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘Hang on a minute, Keith,’ said Charlie, bringing over a tray. ‘Was that tea or coffee, Mrs Wishart? Did you want milk with that? Any more orders?’

  ‘Do you have any scones?’ said Jemima.

  ‘Jam or honey?’ said Charlie, staring her down. ‘Plain or fruit?’

  ‘Oh – either would do, thank you very much.’

  ‘I think we’d better start,’ said Keith as Charlie marched across to the bar and began fussing about with little pats of butter and saucers of jam. ‘Is that all right with you, Charlie?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Charlie, his back to them. His dog, lying at Jemima’s feet, looked up at his tone.

  ‘OK,’ said Keith, shuffling his papers. ‘Thanks everybody for coming along today. We just wanted to make sure you were all aware of the current situation regarding recent events. I expect you know you can’t always rely on what you read about things in the papers. Mrs Ramsay has made several statements to the press, but some reporters have embroidered on what little they know, and in certain cases this has landed them in big trouble.’

  He took a breath. The Chief Inspector had warned him he might forget to breathe once he got started in on reading the opening speech she had written for him. She had gone so far as to write ‘breathe’ in red biro between paragraphs.

  ‘As some of you already know, we have made a number of arrests in connection with various crimes. Obviously we can’t divulge everything we know, but we wanted to try and explain the parts that affected each of you, because it wouldn’t be fair if you had to wait until the trials start to find out things that may help you to move on from this point. Normally we wouldn’t gather everybody together like this, but just for once we felt we had to do it, in order to present a coherent story.’

  ‘But is real life ever coherent, though?’ wondered Jemima, possibly to herself.

  Keith smiled at her, but with an effort. He was wondering if he might have been better to prevent her and Dave from joining this gathering at all. ‘That’s a good question, but I think you’ll find that we like to think of cases as meaningful narratives. Otherwise it’s near enough impossible to carry out a successful prosecution.’

  Charlie brought over a plate of scones and Jemima and Dave fell on them as if they hadn’t eaten for a week. At least that might keep them quiet for a while.

  ‘You could say this whole thing started with the minister and his Faces of Pitkirtly project,’ Keith continued. ‘But it started from other places too. One of the others was David Jackson being released from prison, another was Mrs Cockburn getting involved with a gang of drug-dealers from Cowdenbeath.’

  He paused to allow a murmur of shock to travel round the gathering.

  ‘The minister’s wife?’ said Jemima. ‘My goodness, how did that happen?’

  ‘Haven’t I always told you there’s something evil about religion?’ said Dave, nudging her.

  ‘My Gran was from Cowdenbeath,’ said Stewie. ‘Before she moved to Pitkirtly. I don’t think she was into drug-dealing... My cousin might be, though,’ he added darkly.

  To head off further revelations about Stewie’s family tree, Keith decided to move swiftly on.

  ‘She has admitted she became addicted to sleeping pills at first,’ he said. ‘Then the doctor refused to give her any more prescriptions so she looked elsewhere.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t refuse,’ Jemima suggested. ‘Maybe she just couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment in time.’

  ‘She could have gone to Russia for them,’ said Maggie Munro suddenly. ‘You can buy drugs over the counter there... So I hear.’

  She blushed as people turned and stared at her.

  ‘Apparently she didn’t think of that,’ said Keith. ‘Instead she asked somebody she was regularly visiting in prison at the time.’

  ‘Of course!’ breathed Amaryllis. ‘Young Dave. That’s where he came in.’

  Keith nodded. ‘He put her in touch with a couple of people who ran an operation – it was mostly to do with smuggling hard drugs, but they dabbled in prescription drugs too as a way of recruiting people who needed them.’

  ‘Recruiting people?’ It was the first time Christopher had spoken since the meeting began. He had his usual look of not fully understanding what was going on, but Keith knew him well enough by now to know that was a kind of mask he wore, intentionally or not, to cover up his intellect.

  ‘Yes – they wanted a network of people who owed them in some way. Not so much financially – the customers paid for their drugs, usually way over the odds – but in the sense that they could be forced to do things for the gang.’

  ‘Murder?’ said Sammy, her voice quivering. ‘They made Mrs Cockburn kill my brother for them?’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that,’ Keith told her. ‘As far as we can tell, Mrs Cockburn didn’t kill your brother.’

  There was a sort of collective sigh of relief. Evidently the citizens of Pitkirtly, religious or not, weren’t quite ready to accept that a minister’s wife would be wicked enough to kill a young man in cold blood. Only Dave looked a bit disappointed.

  ‘No,’ Keith continued, ‘it seems that may have been an accident. The other man in the van with your brother was one of the gangsters. There’s no way they would have wanted to draw attention to themselves by committing a crime they knew the police would throw all their resources at...’

  He thought he heard hollow laughter from somewhere at this point. He glared at Charlie Smith and then at Amaryllis, the most likely suspects.

  ‘There were barbiturates in Craig’s body. And in the other man’s, though not in such high concentrations. We think Mrs Cockburn fed Craig doctored tea, just as she did in my case later on, and the other man drank some of it by mistake, and then set off to drive the boy to their headquarters in Cowdenbeath, but he took a wrong turning, misjudged the road conditions and drove over the edge on that narrow stretch.’

  ‘The road nobody ever goes down,’ said Dave with a satisfied look. ‘Now we know why.’

  ‘It would have been reasonably safe in daylight and if the driver hadn’t taken drugs beforehand,’ said Keith.

  ‘But why should they want Craig in the first place?’ said Maisie Sue. ‘I guess maybe he had something they wanted, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Keith. He was beginning to enjoy this now that the first bit was over. There was something satisfying about being the only one who knew the whole story and being able to answer everybody’s questions. ‘He had information. And that was thanks basically to Mr Cockburn and his Face of Pitkirtly project.’

  ‘The recording!’ said Sammy.

  ‘Yes – the recording you and Craig made of the drug dealers meeting Mrs Cockburn and Dave, and carrying out a transaction.’

  ‘But we didn’t mean to record that,’ she said, her voice beginning to shake again. ‘We were just trying out the equipment.’

  ‘They didn’t know that. They thought you were spying on them, deliberately. One of them saw the recording somehow...’

  Sammy put a hand up to attract his attention. ‘It was her,’ she said. ‘Mrs Cockburn. We took it to show the minister, and she was there. She didn’t say anything about the recording, just gave us some biscuits and said how she didn’t understand those modern things.’

  ‘But why didn’t Mr Cockburn recognise her?’ said Dave. ‘I’d recognise Jemima anywhere, even if the light was a bit dim. It’s her shape – the way she curves right out just here...’

  ‘Dave! That’s enough of that!’ said Jemima as he attempted to demonstrate.

  ‘He didn’t look at it properly,’ said Sammy. ‘He just kind of glanced at it and said it was very good and he was sure it would be the most popular thing in the whole show. I don’t know how he knew that. There are some much better things in it anyway – that series of pictures of her...’ She pointed at Amaryllis. ‘They’re dead good. But then, he’s nearly a professional artist.’

  ‘You know who painted them?’ said Amaryllis.

 
Sammy nodded. ‘Course I do. He’s gone now, but I bet he’ll be back though.’

  ‘OK, you can talk about it later,’ said Keith, noticing that Amaryllis had her mouth open to speak again. ‘I don’t think it’s all that relevant.’

  Maisie Sue stood up. She addressed Sammy directly. ‘Christopher told me about my quilt, and I want to say I don’t bear a grudge at all – whatsoever – in the slightest. It’s all water under the bridge. No use crying over spilt milk, as your English proverb says. And I’m very sorry about what happened to your brother.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sammy, but she huddled into her mother’s side, obviously embarrassed.

  ‘What does the quilt have to do with anything?’ said Jock McLean suddenly.

  ‘It was part of their artwork,’ said Keith. ‘They –um – soaked it in blood so it would shock people who came into the Folk Museum, and then they planned to film people being shocked by it and show the film as an artwork.’

  ‘That’s....’ Jock seemed, unusually, to be lost for words. ‘Unbelievable,’ he added after a moment. ‘They thought they could call it art?’

  He shook his head and muttered to himself.

  ‘Art can be expressed in lots of different ways,’ Jemima explained to him and to anybody else who was still paying attention. ‘There’s a lot of this video stuff about now. Some folk call it time-based media.’

  ‘It may have a fancy-dancy name,’ said Dave, ‘but they shouldn’t have used Maisie Sue’s quilt as part of it. She’s never going to be able to get the blood-stains out.’

  ‘I’m creating a new one,’ said Maisie Sue with dignity. ‘And of course I’ll include what happened to the original quilt in the storyboard for this one.’

  ‘It’ll all be history one day,’ nodded Jemima.

  Keith began to feel a certain sympathy for Jock McLean’s attitude to the creative arts. Quilts with storyboards, indeed. He remembered his mother knitting socks. She hadn’t needed a storyboard to work out how to make the cable pattern down one side. In fact he wished she hadn’t added the cable pattern at all, as it tended to result in socks that were too thick and didn’t fit in his shoes.

  But pondering the mysteries of socks wouldn’t get this story told, that was for sure.

  ‘So is that it?’ said Sammy’s mother, Cynthia Wishart. ‘My son died by accident, and there’s nothing more anybody can do about it.’

  ‘He was my son too,’ said her husband. For a moment Keith wondered if there was going to be an unpleasant scene, but they looked away from each other and neither of them spoke again.

  ‘Oh, there’s a lot still to be done about it,’ said Keith. ‘We’ve got most of the people involved, as far as we know, and we think we’ve got the evidence we need. Some of them could be looking at long prison stretches once they’re convicted. It’ll all take a while to work through the system, though.’

  ‘Will they be kept on remand until the trial?’ enquired Charlie Smith. His question must have been for the benefit of the others, since he undoubtedly knew the answer himself.

  ‘Yes, except...’ Keith knew what he was about to say would be considered as either bad news or extremely unfair by many of these present. But Mrs Ramsay had told him to mention it, so he went ahead. ‘Well, Mrs Cockburn has been bailed. So you might see her about. But we’ve advised her and her husband to go away for a while. They don’t need to stay around here getting in people’s faces. There’s a slight danger that more villains will come out of the woodwork anyway, and we might have to take them somewhere safer.’

  ‘More villains?’ said Jemima, bristling.

  Keith didn’t think any villain worth his salt would want to come up against her, especially with Dave constantly in the background, but he tried to say something reassuring.

  ‘We’re fairly confident that we’ve rounded them all up, unless there’s some other dimension to this case that nobody’s thought of yet.’

  He thought he saw Amaryllis’s eyes glinting in the middle distance, but it could have been his imagination.

  ‘What about the Face of Pitkirtly?’ said Christopher. ‘Will it still go ahead?’

  ‘Craig and I can’t use our entry,’ said Sammy. ‘Unless you want to show some of the movie footage in the Cultural Centre, Mr Wilson.’

  ‘No!’ said Keith. He didn’t realise how loudly he had spoken until several heads turned his way and he saw a few shocked expressions. He moderated his tone a bit. ‘The movie footage is a vital piece of evidence. Even after the trial we may not be able to release it. You do realise there are laws to protect people from being filmed without their knowledge and consent, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, there are laws to protect people from being drugged and kidnapped and killed, too, aren’t there?’ said Sammy’s mother, standing up and pulling her winter coat round her more tightly. ‘But that didn’t help my Craig.’

  ‘Our Craig,’ said Bert Wishart, but he didn’t get up.

  ‘Does anybody have any further questions?’ said Keith hastily as Sammy’s mother stamped out of the bar, taking Sammy with her but pointedly leaving her husband behind. They had been brought to the meeting in a police car, so he thought they would probably wait outside for their lift home.

  As the others began to get to their feet and pull on their coats in preparation for leaving, Amaryllis sidled up to him.

  ‘What about El Presidente?’ she muttered.

  ‘What about him?’ said Keith.

  ‘Have you locked him up too, or will he live to fight another Council election?’

  ‘Do you know of some reason why I should lock him up?’

  ‘Just for being an idiot?’ she suggested.

  ‘If I locked up everybody who’s capable of being an idiot,’ he said, ‘there would be a lot more people inside than there are out here.’

  ‘Present company excepted?’

  ‘Don’t push it.’

  ‘What if he’s Mr Big as well as El Presidente?’

  ‘There is no Mr Big,’ said Keith confidently.

  Chapter 23 Looking for Mr Big

  Amaryllis idly watched the small crowd dispersing after the meeting at the Queen of Scots. Jemima and Dave, arm in arm as ever, headed briskly along towards the harbour, from where she guessed they might go up to the fish shop in their apparently eternal search for a nice bit of lemon sole. Keith had arranged for a police car to come back and collect the Wishart family for their trip home to Rosyth. Amaryllis had a feeling Craig’s death might be a catalyst for the break-up of the family home. Sammy certainly didn’t seem all that happy with either of her parents, who were definitely at loggerheads with each other.

  A woman limped past her and went towards the supermarket car park. Did Maggie Munro have a cleaning shift at the Cultural Centre on Saturday?

  A thin, icy voice spoke just behind her. ‘I hope you’re satisfied, Ms Peebles.’

  ‘I hope you are, Mr Prestonfield,’ she said without turning round.

  He laughed coldly. ‘I don’t see what I have to be satisfied about. You’ve managed to get David Jackson arrested on some trumped-up charge, and now my team is one down with the election only a couple of weeks away. Well, if you think you have any chance of winning a seat on West Fife Council, I can tell you now that you’re sadly mistaken. Our canvass returns show...’

  ‘I’m not entirely satisfied,’ she admitted. She turned towards him at last. His eyes, pale as ice, were fixed on her face. She knew if he could have turned them into real icicles and stabbed her with them, that was exactly what he would have done. Fortunately he was just a man and not a wizard, even if he seemed to think he inhabited a sphere that was apart from normal people and their concerns. Maybe that was how you had to behave to be considered a proper politician. Amaryllis knew in that moment that she couldn’t enter that sphere.

  ‘In what way?’ he enquired, raising his eyebrows.

  She lowered her voice. There were still a few people about, and she didn’t want witnesses to anything she mi
ght say to him. ‘I think you know more about this than you’ve told the police, Mr Prestonfield. I might be a bit more satisfied if I thought you’d got your just desserts.’

  He held up his hands. ‘Who amongst us is without sin, Ms Peebles?’

  ‘They’ll catch up with you sooner or later, Mr Prestonfield. They’ll find out about your dealings with the people from Cowdenbeath.’

  For the first time he looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Cowdenbeath? I wouldn’t even know how to get there.’

  ‘Oh, really? You just get on to the A92 and follow the signs,’ she told him. ‘It isn’t all that far, as the crow flies.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ Now he seemed exasperated as well as puzzled.

  El Presidente was up to his neck in something. Amaryllis was no longer sure what it was. Maggie Munro, on the other hand....

  She swore, whirled round and stared after the woman.

  Maggie Munro! Amaryllis cast her mind back to the night she had broken into the church hall and the couple she had seen walking along the other side of the road as she and Keith had stood outside with the police cars waiting to take away Young Dave and his partner in crime. She tried to picture the scene in her mind and to work out which leg that woman had favoured.

  As she stood there, she saw that a man had come over to meet Maggie. The two of them turned and went off together, his hand under her elbow.

  What was it that had made her suspicious that night?

  ‘What are you staring at over there?’ enquired Christopher.

  ‘Has Giancarlo Petrelli made a miraculous return from New York?’ said Jock with a chuckle. The wee white dog gave a yap and wagged its tail furiously. ‘Calm down, you. There’s no more steak... Charlie gave them both a dish of meat to keep them busy while we were in there,’ he explained. ‘It’s put ideas in his head. Wait until Tricia comes back. It’ll be dog biscuits and water then,’ he added, addressing the dog.

  ‘It’s only Maggie Munro and her husband,’ said Christopher.