6 The Queen of Scots Mystery

by Cecilia Peartree

  She had a pleasant enough voice and manner. He thought he might have seen her with Penelope Johnstone once or twice. They must be contemporaries, and he could imagine Penelope knitting, so she would be a natural customer for Jan's shop.

  ‘Not for a while yet, I’m afraid,’ he said politely, and started to walk on.

  He didn’t look back. He was afraid he would find her watching him. Some women seemed fascinated by men they thought of as a bit dangerous. He didn’t really think of himself like that, but maybe she did.

  The paper shop was opening up. He might as well buy a paper to see if anything had happened outside the tiny claustrophobic world he had inhabited since all this had kicked off.

  There was nobody else in the little shop as he browsed the selection of papers. If he were to return to Christopher’s later he wouldn’t want to be seen with some of the traditional tabloids. Headlines a foot high on each of them, and all vying with each other to shoehorn dodgy wording into their text. He chose one after quite a lot of thought. It was quite unusual for him to have the luxury of time to read a paper, never mind time to hang around in front of the news shelves working out which one to buy.

  ‘That’s twenty pence, then, Neil,’ said Jackie Whitmore, materialising at the till.

  ‘Hello, Jackie, I didn’t know you worked here,’ he said without thinking.

  She frowned. ‘I didn’t use to. I’m only here working for my dad on a temporary basis, until you re-open the Queen.’

  ‘It’s your dad’s shop?’

  She nodded, holding out her hand for the money. Suddenly it didn’t seem enough. He bought some chewing-gum too.

  ‘Sorry about the pub. The police haven’t let me re-open yet. You’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘Have they told you anything?’

  ‘Told me? Oh. Nothing really.’ Neil tried to sift through what he knew about the case, but he couldn’t remember what he had found out from which source. There seemed to be so many diverse groups of people working on it from so many angles.

  A large man appeared from the back of the shop, lifting bundles of newspapers and magazines around. He nodded to Neil. ‘They’ve let you out, then.’

  He didn’t seem to approve of the decision.

  ‘Have they arrested anybody else?’ said Jackie, giving Neil his change.

  The large man – presumably Jackie’s dad – made a snorting sound.

  ‘Like they’d tell him if they had! Get us a cup of coffee, dear. I’ll take over here for a bit.’

  Jackie went through into the back of the shop. The large man turned on Neil.

  ‘Now listen to me, Neil Macrae. I haven’t decided yet if my Jackie’s going to come back and work in your pub or not, so it’s no use coming round here harassing her. She’s not stupid, and she can do better for herself than working as a barmaid.’

  Neil almost lost his temper and said something rude about people who worked in paper-shops being no better than those who worked in bars, but in the end he couldn’t be bothered getting into an argument. He felt very tired.

  He nodded instead of saying anything, and left the shop. He didn’t know what he had done to incur Mr Whitmore’s wrath, apart from having a dead body on his premises without knowing about it, so it was easier to walk away. He fell over a bicycle as he turned to go on down the road. It had been propped against the shop front, and had toppled over in front of him. He picked it up carefully, recognising it by its shiny mudguards and fresh red paint as brand new.

  Jackie erupted out of the shop, a coffee mug still in her hand. ‘What are you doing with my bike? Leave it alone.’

  He completed his task of standing it up again, straightened and glared at her. ‘You need to watch where you leave that. I nearly hurt myself falling over it. Why don’t you take it round the back?’

  She muttered something and took hold of the handlebars. ‘I’ll take it there now. So just chill, Neil. You won’t see it again.’

  He wondered, walking off out of her way, whether he would see her again. He had only taken her on at the Queen of Scots temporarily last autumn, because she had seemed so desperate for a job of any kind. He had thought the Job Centre people, for whom he had little time, must be on her back, so he had felt sorry for her. But she hadn’t been that great as a barmaid, he had to admit. She got people’s change wrong, and she could be rude to customers she felt were asking too much, and she left it much too late to go round collecting glasses so that they were always short at busy times, and she was often late for work, claiming she had to help her dad with the papers.

  He might not take her on again even if he did re-open the pub. He noticed the element of doubt that was creeping into his thoughts. Wouldn’t it be better to start all over again elsewhere after this fiasco? He didn’t have anything to keep him around Pitkirtly. He did have some misplaced sense of loyalty to some of his customers, who would be lost for somewhere to go if he closed up permanently – as they were at present with the temporary closure. He wondered if anybody else would be mad enough to take on the licence, or whether he would only be able to sell the place to a ruthless property developer who might convert it into offices for a ruthless financial services company or the like.

  But that wasn’t his responsibility. And neither was Jackie Whitmore.

  He passed the turning that led to the police station. They hadn’t been back to question him again yet. Maybe they’d firmly ruled him off their list of suspects. Or maybe they were biding their time and would catch him out when he least expected it.

  He almost jumped when Christopher’s voice called out from somewhere behind him.

  ‘Neil! Wait a minute!’

  He turned slowly and with some reluctance. He hoped he wouldn’t get dragged into a scene like the one he had come upon in the kitchen. But Christopher was walking down the High Street with Zak at his side. Apart from the fact that Zak looked like an aristocrat going to his death at the guillotine, there was nothing to worry about there. No women around to complicate things.

  Christopher waved a set of keys at him.

  ‘Here – I’d forgotten I had these. It’s the keys to Jock McLean’s house. He won’t mind you staying on there while he’s in hospital. That’s where you’re supposed to be, isn’t it? In case the police want to speak to you again?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Neil, accepting the keys gratefully. ‘Thanks for thinking of that. I can keep an eye on Jock’s place for him too.’ He looked from Christopher to Zak. ‘Off to work?’

  ‘I’m dropping Zak off at the police station first,’ said Christopher unexpectedly. ‘He’s got some information for them.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ said Neil to Zak, trying not to sound too pessimistic.

  Zak gave a half-hearted smile.

  ‘He’s going in on his own, voluntarily,’ said Christopher, ‘but I’ve told him to ask for one of us, or a lawyer, if he needs to.’

  ‘How does his mother feel about that?’ said Neil.

  The others both smiled.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with her,’ said Zak. ‘I’m twenty-one. It’s time I handled things myself.’

  ‘Hope that works out,’ said Neil. He found young people rather immature these days. By the time he was twenty-one he had been living away from home for five years, had spent a year travelling in Europe on his own and had got married to Andrea. On the other hand, maybe the feeling he had was envy rather than scorn. He might not have been stupid enough to marry Andrea if he’d waited until he was a bit older before getting himself trapped like that. But he would never have had the money to buy the pub if he hadn’t started working for himself at a young age either.

  He asked himself, as he walked round to Jock McLean’s house with the keys in his pocket, if he really wanted owning the Queen of Scots to be the crowning achievement of his life.

  And what did he need a crowning achievement for anyway?

  Chapter 19 Amaryllis Feels Left Out

  It had been her own idea for Chr
istopher to be the one to take Zak up to the police station. Amaryllis could have gone with them, but he didn’t need both of them along; they knew he wouldn’t have to be manhandled as he had made up his mind to go in and speak to them. The main thing was that it shouldn’t be Penelope who accompanied him in case she accidentally talked him out of it on the way instead of reinforcing his decision.

  Now Penelope had gone off to see if she could catch Tricia and ask if she could stay with her at least for the night, until she knew what would happen to Zak. Charlie had gone off home with the dog to see if there was any post there. She knew what sort of post he expected, and thought of offering to go with him, but he of all people would object to having his hand held, no matter how much he wanted it.

  Amaryllis had the irrational feeling that she was deliberately being left out of things. If only she hadn’t been trapped in that cargo shed when everything started back here, she would have been in on it from the start and then she could have arranged the investigation her own way, instead of being one step behind all the time, relying on incomplete titbits from friendly policemen for information and unable to corral all the people involved in the case and get some sense out of them.

  But she wasn’t going to sit at Christopher’s kitchen table for too long considering what might have been. Action was obviously the answer, as it was to almost every question she could think of. Action would stir things up, force people to make mistakes and help her to leap-frog over everyone else and get to the finishing-line first.

  The question was, what action could she possibly take?

  It had to be something she could do in daylight, otherwise the frustration of enforced inaction until sunset would cause her to explode. It mustn’t involve a visit to Aberdour Breweries, where even she realised it would be unwise to go again without a proper police escort and not just Charlie Smith and his dog.

  Thinking about the breweries reminded her she had looked up their employees’ addresses online. She thought this over. Why had she done that? It was almost as if she had always intended to pay them a visit. What they had done to Jock McLean gave her conscience the way out that it always instinctively looked for before doing anything of dubious legality – or, as in this case, something indisputably illegal.

  Both Bill and Andrea Lawson would surely be out at work at this time on a weekday... It was as if going along to Aberdour and breaking into their house to look for evidence was something she was meant to do. She couldn’t fight against Fate. She was glad now that Charlie and the dog had disappeared. Charlie would certainly have tried to stop her, and she didn’t think he would have wanted to come out with her again either.

  It was with a slightly uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu, however, that she arrived at Aberdour station a couple of hours later. She imagined the breweries lorry driving past her along the main road, screeching to a halt as the driver saw her, and the two men getting out in order to resume their pursuit. But nothing like that happened. She walked briskly out of the station, along the road in the opposite direction from the brewery, turned into the cul de sac where she knew the Lawsons lived, and looked at the lie of the land. Ten minutes later she was sliding open a window on the ground floor of their house, and two minutes after that she was in their front hall, browsing through the correspondence they kept in a drawer. In her experience you could tell a lot about people from their bills and credit card statements.

  A few minutes later again, and she began to doubt her own experience. The bills and credit card statements all seemed to demonstrate the same thing: that the Lawsons were about the most boring couple anyone could possibly imagine. They hardly spent anything except on home décor, and they paid their bills with relentless promptness. Glancing round, she could see where the money went. The house, although outwardly a fairly standard seventies semi-detached, was a palace inside. There was a chandelier in the living-room, and looking through to the kitchen she noticed granite worktops with sparkly bits, and a quarry tile floor. The room appeared to lead to a massive conservatory that must take up at least half their garden space. No doubt their bedroom had a real antique four-poster bed with silken drapes, and the bathroom would contain a sunken bath with gold taps. She didn’t really want to know any more about them. This had been a terrible mistake.

  Just how much of a mistake she discovered ten minutes later when, after giving the other rooms a quick once-over, she stood in the kitchen, not suffering at all from granite envy.

  A shape appeared behind the glass panel in the front door, and the bell rang loudly. She didn’t think she was imagining the official nature of the ring. It was the ring of someone who had every right, if the door wasn’t answered quickly enough, to burst in, using a battering ram if necessary, arrest everybody inside and ransack the contents. Surely it couldn’t be Inspector Armstrong and some of his sidekicks. She couldn’t be that unlucky.

  She ducked down behind some kitchen cabinets just in case. She knew they would come round to the back of the house if they didn’t get a reply at the front. It seemed unlikely, on reflection, that they would break the door down, but if they had heard Jock McLean’s account of the events that had landed him in hospital, they would definitely want to find and question the Lawsons. Even if they didn’t know about Jock McLean’s experience they could well have found a reason to track down the couple as part of their investigation. Christopher had relayed Penelope’s story about Liam carrying on with Andrea Lawson, and that would give them reason enough to want to speak to the woman, and to her husband who would, after all, be the one with the prime motive for murder.

  She strained her ears and heard the faint murmuring of voices. They were probably at the door of the conservatory, which was behind the kitchen. She fervently hoped Andrea and Bill always locked up securely before going out.

  After a while the front doorbell rang again. Someone rattled the letter-box.

  ‘Mr Lawson! Are you in there? Mrs Lawson? It’s Inspector Armstrong from Pitkirtly police station. I need to speak to you!’

  Amaryllis slid right down to the kitchen floor and wondered what to do next. The police would wait outside in their car until the Lawsons arrived home. She would have to get out before things got very much sillier.

  She was still considering her options when she heard the sound of a key clicking into the front door lock.

  Amaryllis got up and dived lithely into the conservatory, closing the door silently behind her. Thank goodness, the key was in the lock and she could get out to the garden.

  ‘Andrea?’ said a voice somewhere behind her as she dived out into the open air and flung the door closed. ‘Andrea – what are you doing home? Didn’t you have a late shift?... Stop right where you are! I’m calling the police.’

  Now it was déjà vu all over again as she raced for the garden fence, scrabbling over it and racing across the next couple of gardens. In the third, she startled a man who was hanging the washing out.

  She dashed past him, down the side of his house. Luckily there was a gate and she could get out to the street and away. She didn’t look back towards the Lawsons’ house to see if there was indeed a police car outside. As she ran along the pavement she almost dislodged a cyclist from his bike, swore at him and kept going.

  Up to the main road and along towards the station. There was a train standing at the platform – she didn’t care which way it was going. She could buy a ticket later.

  The train turned out to be the non-stop service to Kirkcaldy. That was the wrong direction, but she wasn’t fussy at that point, and heading away from Pitkirtly might keep Inspector Armstrong guessing. Once in Kirkcaldy, she decided to make her way home by bus. By the time she changed buses for Pitkirtly she had missed tea-time. By the time she got off the second bus it was starting to get dark. But she had to see Christopher.

  ‘I’m never going near Aberdour again,’ she announced, stalking into his front room and flinging herself into the nearest chair.

  They all stared at her, wide-eyed. It was
n’t until she looked round properly that she realised how many people were in the room. There were Penelope and Tricia Laidlaw sitting together on the settee, Charlie Smith standing behind it with a stern expression on his face, Christopher caught in the act of placing a tray of tea and biscuits on the coffee table, Jemima on a chair facing the other two women and Dave standing behind the chair. Not to mention the dog, which was stretched out flat, relaxed, right across the floor between the settee and the coffee table so that Penelope and Tricia had to sit with their legs bent uncomfortably to one side of him or the other.

  It looked like a council of war.

  Penelope broke the silence with a sigh. ‘I wish I didn’t have to either.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Aberdour all of a sudden?’ said Dave, puzzled. ‘It’s a really nice place. We used to go down to the beach at Silver Sands sometimes. You could get a good ice-cream at the kiosk there.’

  ‘You still can,’ said Penelope. ‘That isn’t why I never want to see the place again.’

  She was whiter in the face than she had been the last time Amaryllis saw her, but she had a redoubtable look about her now, as if she had geared up for battle. What had happened to Zak at the police station? Was she preparing to rush to the rescue? Amaryllis approved of the change, certainly. She had never been very good at dealing with tears, whether her own or anybody else’s.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ said Dave, grinning.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Well,’ she amended, ‘nothing that Charlie needs to hear, anyway.’

  ‘You’d better not tell us then,’ said Christopher. ‘Will I bring an extra cup, or do you need something stronger?’

  She relaxed. He was right: it was better not to tell them about her silly and pointless escapade. Better if they thought of her as invincible, and dangerous, and all these qualities that had seemed so essential in her previous life and were now so useless.

  ‘An extra cup’s fine,’ she said.

  He brought a cup in from the kitchen. ‘Charlie’s got to go for interview tomorrow, in Dunfermline,’ he said. ‘It’s part of the enquiry.’