Frozen in Crime
Cecilia Peartree
Digital Edition
©Cecilia Peartree
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Chapter 1 White World
Christopher stared out across the car park. A layer of ice had formed where the compacted snow had been polished by car treads and people’s feet, and since lunchtime he had already witnessed two minor collisions and seen an ambulance arrive for someone who had fallen on the zebra crossing and couldn’t get up. The sky was darkening already, and he suspected it would snow again before nightfall.
Worst of all, he had Jock McLean in his office wittering on about something or other.
‘… to the Canary Islands, so she can’t get anybody else over Christmas at short notice, and I’m going to go up there and help.’
The word ‘help’ didn’t feature very prominently in Jock’s vocabulary - particularly when it came to him helping someone else - so Christopher glanced away from the window, frowning. ‘Who’s this you’re planning to help? And do they know about you?’
Jock sighed, flung himself into Christopher’s swivel chair and spun it round. His feet didn’t touch the ground. ‘I knew you hadn’t been listening again. Well, I don’t see why I should waste my time talking to you! I’m off to the Queen of Scots. Last time this year.’
‘The last time this year? But - the Hogmanay Party?’
The Queen of Scots Hogmanay Party was a legend for miles around. People still talked in hushed tones about the good old days and how the army had once been called in to break up a particularly vicious arm-wrestling contest between the women of Pitkirtly and those of Torryburn.
‘Hmph!’ Jock commented. ‘If you’ve seen one Hogmanay Party, you’ve seen them all. Anyway, Rosie’s got a few friends coming round. They know how to party in those remote places.’
‘Ah,’ said Christopher, unsure if Jock had the right end of the stick about rural partying customs. Still, at least he now knew Jock was heading for the cattery, run by Dave’s niece Rosie, so he wouldn’t have to go right back to the beginning of the story. ‘What about Darren? Doesn’t he work there any more?’
Jock gave a long-suffering sigh, and swung his feet to and fro. He looked small and hunched in the chair. ‘I knew you hadn’t been listening. Darren’s away to the Canary Islands. He won a prize in a competition. In some cat magazine. He’s going off with his mother.’
Christopher still didn’t know what to make of this. Was Jock’s plan to help at the cattery a way of getting his own back at Darren’s mother, Tricia Laidlaw, whom he always thought Jock fancied more than a little, or could it be that he had tired of Tricia and decided to make a play for Rosie instead? Or was he just making a bid for martyrdom by having to work over Christmas?
Where was Amaryllis when he needed her? Jock’s romantic life, apart from being an area Christopher preferred not to think about and was wary about entering at all, was far too complicated for anyone who hadn’t been a secret agent to understand. Apart from that, Christopher had been hoping she would pop in today as she sometimes did on a Friday, and instead he had got stuck with Jock.
Christopher turned back to look out of the window again. Even then he could see Jock’s reflection shining in the glass. There was no escape from him.
Something banged sharply outside. He peered out. There was a commotion near the supermarket at the far side of the car park. People running away, screaming, falling over in a heap. After a moment, two figures in black ran round the end of the building and dodged in and out among the cars. It had started to snow again, and it was hard to see any detail, but they seemed to be heading towards the Cultural Centre. He held his breath.
Yes, they were definitely coming in his direction. He suppressed the urge to dive for cover, and kept watching them.
‘What’s so interesting out there?’ Jock growled, getting down from the chair.
‘Just stay where you are,’ said Christopher, turning back into the room slightly. Almost at once he had the insane urge to look at the car park again. This time the running figures were much closer. Too close for comfort, in fact. He now saw one of them was limping quite badly, perhaps because of a fall on the ice. More haste, less speed, thought Christopher, nodding to himself.
Suddenly one of them came almost right up to the window and stared in. He was wearing a balaclava but Christopher just caught a glimpse of dark, angry eyes in a pale face, before Jock caught him by the arm and pulled him down to the floor.
‘Don’t look!’ muttered Jock in his ear, and then something slammed against the window and they both jumped.
‘It won’t break - it’s triple-glazed,’ said Christopher, and then, ‘Oh, my God, the front door! They could get in that way. What if Andrew or Mollie - ?’
‘Don’t stand up,’ said Jock.
They crawled across the office to the door and risked opening it. Out in the corridor, Christopher went from a crouching start into a run as he looked for his staff.
Andrew and Mollie were both in the Folk Museum explaining to a small group of mothers and toddlers how hand-loom weaving worked. It was quiet and calm in there, a relic of a by-gone age in many senses. Christopher didn’t waste time telling them the Cultural Centre might be under siege. He sprinted off down the hall to the foyer, dived through the glass doors and pulled the big wooden front door shut and locked it. There had been two men standing just outside. He didn’t care whether they were bank robbers, tourists or local people who wanted to come in out of the cold for a bit. Nobody else was getting into the building.
‘I didn’t know you could move so fast,’ said Jock McLean at his elbow.
Faintly from somewhere outside they heard the sound of sirens. Reinforcements had arrived.
Christopher breathed deeply. He couldn’t remember having breathed at all since he had met the angry eyes of the man in the balaclava.
‘Pity Amaryllis isn’t here,’ said Jock. ‘She would have enjoyed this.’
Christopher knew Amaryllis would have rushed out after the men, probably sparking off another round of shooting from which someone would have emerged dead. He was grateful for her absence, and only hoped she hadn’t been caught up in anything out there.
His knees went weak and he staggered over to the reception desk and sat down on it heavily. It gave an ominous creak but withstood his onslaught.
‘You’ve gone a bit pale,’ said Jock critically.
‘You’d have gone a bit pale too if you’d seen him staring in at you,’ said Christopher.
‘What was going on out there anyway?’ said Jock, taking his pipe out of his pocket and absent-mindedly adding a bit more tobacco to the top of the pile.
‘You can’t smoke that in here,’ said Christopher automatically.
‘I know that!’ said Jock. ‘Thanks to the petty bureaucrats who can’t distinguish between filthy cigarettes and traditional healthy pipes, I’m doomed to be cast out wherever I am. It’s too cold to stand around outside in this weather – where am I meant to go?’
As usual, the smoking issue had triggered Jock’s deepest feelings and exacerbated the terrible burden of martyrdom he carried around with him.
‘What was going on anyway?’ he added.
‘It looked like some sort of a robbery. Over by the supermarket. They ran this way – the one that looked in the window at me was wearing black and had big dark eyes.’
‘That must have been really scary,’ said Jock. When Christopher glared at him, sensing sarcasm, he put on his injured innocent look.
‘It was scary,’ said Christopher. ‘I think he’d know me again. Then there was that banging on the window – do you think it was a shot?’
‘Either that or a snowball,’ said Jock darkly. ‘I
’ve been having trouble all week with the kids across the road.’
Both men jumped as something large battered on the outside door. Christopher wondered if Jock would ever let him hear the end of it if he took cover under the desk.
‘Police! Open up!’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ sighed Christopher. As he crossed the hall again he wondered how the police had found their way to the Cultural Centre so quickly. He hesitated just before opening the door. What if the robbers were outside pretending to be policemen? What if they rushed him when he opened the door? What if he was the only witness and they needed to silence him?
‘Come on, open the door!’ yelled a voice from outside. ‘We haven’t got all day here.’
‘That’s Karen Whitefield,’ said Jock. ‘You’d better open up. She hasn’t got a lot of patience these days. Since she was made a Sergeant you’d think she was the Queen or somebody.’
He sketched a bow as Karen Whitefield came in, accompanied by a very young police officer.
‘We’re after armed robbers,’ she told them. ‘We need to search the premises – a witness told us they’d come this way.’
‘I saw them outside the window,’ said Christopher, shivering in the draught from the open door. She gave him a critical stare.
‘You look a bit pale, Mr Wilson. Are you feeling all right?’
‘I’m fine. Look, I don’t think they can have got into the building. The fire exit only opens from the inside. We check it every day to make sure it’s secure, since the incident in the corridor. This is the only other door.’
‘Thanks, we’ll just have a quick look for ourselves then,’ she said. She and the younger officer hurried towards the library.
‘What’s going on?’ said Andrew, who had emerged from the Folk Museum as they passed.
‘Armed robbery at the supermarket,’ said Christopher. He was already getting bored with the story, and embarrassed when he recalled his part in it. ‘We’d better not let anyone leave yet. Where’s Mollie?’
‘She went back through to the library just now – she had some people reading the papers in there. She thought it was time to check up on them. In case they started cutting bits out.’
When Karen came back to the foyer Christopher confirmed with her that they mustn’t let anyone leave. ‘We’ll give you a shout when it’s all clear,’ she promised. ‘We don’t want anybody else out there until we know they’re well out of the way.’
‘Have you told Mollie?’
‘Yes, we saw her in the library. There are only a couple of people in there at the moment and they look like they’ll be quite happy to stay. Thanks for your co-operation.’
‘Any time, Karen,’ said Jock, nodding to her as she left. She gave him a look. ‘Sorry, I’m sure,’ he called after her. ‘Sergeant Whitefield, I mean… It’s a sad day when kids you once told off for writing notes in class get to the point of telling you off,’ he added for Christopher’s benefit.
After a while some of the mothers and toddlers came through to the foyer and made such a fuss about going to collect other children from school that Christopher had to let them out, even at the risk of getting into trouble with Karen Whitefield. Shortly after that, the young police officer returned to ask them why they were still there and to tell them part of the car park was now cordoned off so he hoped they hadn’t left their cars in that area. Two minutes after that, Amaryllis arrived, covered in melting snowflakes and seething with fury because Christopher hadn’t called to tell her something was going on.
‘I was only at the Queen of Scots,’ she said. ‘It isn’t a million miles from here - I could have got here in minutes.’
‘What were you doing at the Queen of Scots?’ said Christopher suspiciously. ‘It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘What sort of nothing?’
‘For God’s sake, Christopher, you sound like my mother!’
Christopher didn’t know whether to be annoyed at being compared to some old woman, or intrigued: Amaryllis had never mentioned her mother before, and he and Jock had occasionally speculated about whether she had actually been born of woman in the normal way or cultivated in a test-tube at GCHQ as part of an ill-fated government experiment to breed spies.
‘I could have caught these people and had them locked up half an hour ago,’ she said. ‘Now the police will wait until they’re over the border and then have to fill in all sorts of random paperwork to be allowed to chase them.’
‘The border?’
‘Between us and the rest of Fife. What did you think I meant?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Christopher. ‘Sometimes you operate on an international scale.’
‘Hm,’ she muttered, kicking the desk in front of her. ‘Not international enough lately.’
He supposed she was missing her overseas trips, which had certainly dwindled almost to vanishing point in recent months. It seemed to date back to her last visit to America and her dealings with the CIA afterwards. Perhaps someone in one of the intelligence services had blocked her from travelling any more. His heart sank. His instinct told him that Amaryllis would get bored very quickly if she were trapped in Pitkirtly, and he knew from experience that a bored Amaryllis was a dangerous Amaryllis.
‘So what were you doing at the Queen of Scots?’ asked Jock.
She shrugged. ‘Waiting for a friend of a friend. But he didn’t turn up.’
Christopher thought about the people scattered on the ground after the shooting started, and hoped Amaryllis’s friend’s friend wasn’t one of them by some dreadful coincidence.
Two scruffy old men came along the corridor followed by Mollie, the librarian. ‘I’ve locked up in there,’ she said. ‘You should be getting home, Christopher - you’re looking a bit pale.’
Amaryllis peered at him. ‘I don’t know, he’s no worse than usual,’ she said.
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Christopher.
She laughed. ‘Come on, let’s get along to the Queen of Scots before you fade away altogether.’
‘Not much chance of that,’ said Jock McLean. ‘He looks pretty solid to me.’
‘Don’t you have a bus to catch?’ said Christopher.
‘No, Dave’s running me up there.’
‘What, on these roads? In the pick-up truck?’
‘No, he’s hired a snowmobile and I’m cadging a lift on the back,’ said Jock. ‘Yes, of course he’s taking the pick-up truck. He’s delivering Rosie’s Christmas presents as well.’
‘Today?’ said Christopher, looking doubtfully out at the snowflakes that were bigger and closer together than ever, alternately whirling around in impromptu ceilidh dances and driving down at an angle finely calculated to hit you in the face as you walked along.
‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Jock. ‘I’ve got plenty time for a pint.’
‘I’ve got to finish locking up here,’ said Christopher. ‘You two go on ahead and I’ll meet you in the usual place.’
Andrew was just ushering the rest of the mothers and toddlers out. He and Christopher made sure everyone else had gone. The cleaners wouldn’t be in tonight because of the holidays, so Christopher sent Andrew home and spent a few moments on his hands and knees sweeping up debris from the weaving project before locking everything up, setting the alarms and leaving. They had been due to close at five today anyway, and he couldn’t imagine very many people having such an urgent wish to use the Cultural Centre that they were prepared to trek through this blizzard to reach it and run the risk of being stranded somewhere on the way, so he felt justified in closing at ten to four.
The landlord of the Queen of Scots had added mulled wine to his repertoire since the snow came, and it was rumoured that favoured customers could get him to make hot chocolate, but he hadn’t yet installed a new-fangled coffee machine. Christopher didn’t see him as a continental-style barista somehow. And wasn’t barista the female version anyway? In which case, what would a man who made co
ffee be called? A barrister, perhaps, although that job title was already taken.
These random musings had taken him, plodding, to the door of the pub. He stamped his feet just outside to rid them of the caked-on snow. If it carried on like this Dave might not be able to get the pick-up truck to Rosie’s, which was some way out of Pitkirtly and, Christopher thought, a good bit higher and more remote. But Dave would have a good try - he didn’t like to give up easily, particularly when driving.
He heard laughter as he opened the door. Male laughter.
‘What are you having, Christopher?’’ asked Jock McLean, pausing as he carried a pint glass and a bottle of wine away from the bar.
But Christopher wasn’t listening. There was a man sitting in his usual chair at the table in the corner. And Amaryllis, in her own usual chair, was staring at the stranger, wide-eyed and fascinated. He had never seen that expression on her face before. His heart plummeted.
Chapter 2 A Stranger in Town
Amaryllis hadn’t known what to expect from Jimbo’s friend Mal. Yes, she knew he had trekked to the North Pole a couple of years before with a group of army colleagues in aid of something-or-other, and that he had been injured in Afghanistan rescuing hostages some time after that, but she was rather hazy about why he had turned up in Pitkirtly so close to Christmas when most people headed home to be with their nearest and dearest - well, nearest, anyway.
She was pleasantly surprised when he at last arrived at the Queen of Scots. He was tall, good-looking in a kind of military way, with short cropped hair, a slightly weather-beaten face and army-style boots which looked just right with jeans, and he reminded her a bit of an ex-boy-friend who had been in the US Marines. Instead of talking about himself and his exploits all the time, which would have been forgiveable under the circumstances, he showed a flattering interest in her and her life. Only a few moments into their conversation, while Jock McLean was getting the drinks in, he said unexpectedly,
‘So tell me, what made you choose Pitkirtly, out of all the places you could have ended up?’
5 Frozen in Crime Page 1