5 Frozen in Crime

by Cecilia Peartree

  ‘No.’ Jemima shook her head, still staring blankly at the kitchen wall. ‘The only person he knows out that way is Rosie.’

  Amaryllis almost itched to get out there and start searching, but the rational part of her brain told her she couldn’t do anything on her own. On the other hand, looking after an old woman in distress was not her forte. She was a woman of action - someone who had actually been considering only the day before whether to give up on her comfortable, soft existence and try to do something that would make a huge difference to humanity.

  Now all she wanted to do was to help this one individual. From the sublime to the ridiculous, her more adventurous self sneered. Don’t call Jemima ridiculous! snapped back the more sympathetic, caring side of her nature that had come to the forefront since she had lived in Pitkirtly. The adventurous self rolled its eyes. Caring! Give me a break!

  It was just as well that Christopher arrived before the two sides of her personality went into a permanent huff with each other.

  Christopher took one look at Jemima and said quietly, ‘So you haven’t heard anything yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Amaryllis.

  She was absolutely not the kind of woman who expected a man to solve all her problems, from the small, such as how to catch a spider and put it outside where it could run free without causing her to have a heart attack, to the enormous - how to remove herself from the CIA’s most wanted list. But she couldn’t deny that she was pleased to have Christopher here to share the problem with.

  ‘Hello Jemima,’ he said, sitting down at the kitchen table opposite her. ‘Got any tablet? I need to soak up the Old Pictish Brew in a hurry if we’re going to go and dig Dave out of a snowdrift.’

  For some reason this brought Jemima back to reality with a bump. ‘That’s a silly question, Christopher. What sort of Scot would I be if I didn’t have tablet in the house with New Year just round the corner? Just you sit there and I’ll get you a cup of tea to go with it. You’ll need something hot inside you too if you’re away out in all this awful weather.’

  Amaryllis still wasn’t entirely sure that Jemima was quite herself yet, but this bustling Jemima who was ferreting around in the cupboard for tablet and a new packet of custard creams was a million times better than the one who had sat still as a statue and stared at the wall. What she’d be like if Dave never came back just didn’t bear thinking about.

  Amaryllis closed her mind to that possibility. But she drew Christopher aside and said to him in an undertone, ‘How are we going to find Dave in this weather without any transport?’

  ‘The landlord of the Queen of Scots,’ he said succinctly.

  ‘What about him? Has he got a team of highly trained huskies?’

  ‘Should he have?’

  ‘It’s the kind of thing he would have,’ she countered. ‘Or someone in Pitkirtly. Isn’t there anyone who does dog racing?’

  ‘Rosie used to have huskies before she gave it up and started the cattery,’ said Jemima, who hadn’t looked as if she was listening.

  ‘Never mind the huskies,’ said Christopher. He glared at Amaryllis. ‘They’re just a red herring… The landlord of the Queen of Scots has a Range Rover he’s offered to lend us.’

  Unexpectedly, Jemima started to laugh. ‘That old wreck of a thing! You’ll never even get it along the sea front, never mind up the hill out of Pitkirtly.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Dave always said it was a wreck,’ said Jemima. ‘He couldn’t understand why the landlord didn’t get a pick-up truck like his. It would be much better for getting stuff from the Cash ‘n’ Carry.’

  ‘The landlord probably doesn’t hate Fiat Pandas as much as Dave does,’ muttered Amaryllis. She had been going to say that he didn’t have a death-wish either, but that didn’t seem entirely tactful under the circumstances.

  ‘Why can’t Jock and Rosie go and have a look for Dave from their end?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Rosie’s van was blocked in by a snowdrift the last time I spoke to her,’ said Jemima. ‘So they don’t have any transport.’

  The door-bell rang.

  Jemima and Amaryllis raced each other to the front door.

  ‘Dashing through the snow, on a one-horse open sleigh,’ came a small chorus of out-of-tune voices from the front doorstep. Amaryllis slammed the door in the carol-singers’ faces, but Jemima wrenched it open again and gave them a handful of sweets from a jar she kept in the hall.

  ‘My God,’ Amaryllis murmured to Christopher. ‘I thought that was the police coming to tell us they’d found Dave.’

  ‘It could have been good news,’ said Christopher.

  ‘It’s never good news when they just come round,’ she said. ‘They always call first if it is.’

  ‘A one-horse open sleigh would just be handy at the moment,’ said Jemima to herself as she came back into the kitchen.

  ‘Right then,’ said Amaryllis, putting on her second jumper followed by a parka, a scarf, hat and gloves in quick succession. ‘We’d better not leave it any longer if we’re going to track him down tonight.’

  ‘Hadn’t we?’ said Christopher, not quite as keen as she was to wrestle with the landlord’s four-wheel drive monster. ‘Isn’t there another severe weather warning in force?’

  ‘Severe weather warnings are for wimps,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Has anyone got a map of the moors up behind Pitkirtly?’

  Jemima shook her head.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Christopher. He had grabbed a piece of tablet and put it in his mouth while she was putting on her layers, so his speech was slightly indistinct. ‘We’d better go up to the house first and have a look for it, I suppose.’

  ‘Jemima,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Just keep making tea. When we get Dave home he’ll need it. And the biscuits, so don’t eat them all yourself.’

  As she said all this, she wondered who they could ask to keep an eye on Jemima. Even if she was a tough old thing, this would be a great ordeal for her.

  Then she heard Christopher singing ‘White Christmas’ to himself under his breath. Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of that right away? Maisie Sue would keep Jemima’s spirits up if anyone could.

  On their way round to Christopher’s house they detoured to Maisie Sue’s. She was hosting a quilting bee, but when she heard about Dave she said at once, ‘Oh my, that’s terrible.’ She told all her fellow-quilters to leave, and promised to go straight up to Jemima’s and make her some pancakes. She was putting the maple syrup jar in a plastic bag as they left.

  ‘Don’t tell Charlie Smith where we’ve gone,’ said Amaryllis as an afterthought. ‘At least not until we’re well on our way - give it a couple of hours. He’ll only try and stop us.’

  At Christopher’s, he found the map quickly in his book-case, and they spread it out on the kitchen table. There seemed to be a lot of nothing in the moors up behind Pitkirtly. Quite a few woods, some farm tracks, a scattering of small farms and isolated cottages. Old mine workings.

  ‘We’d better steer clear of those,’ said Christopher with a shudder. She knew he was remembering the time he had come too close for comfort to an old mineshaft.

  Amaryllis traced the minor road down from the cattery with her finger. The map showed quite a lot of detail, and she could see some farm tracks leading off the road. Each of them had a little cluster of houses marked along its route. There was a ‘High Woods Farm’, and ‘High Woods Farm Cottages’. She put her finger on a house marked as ‘Old Pitkirtlyhill House’.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Christopher shrugged. ‘No idea. Name of a farm? House that’s a bit bigger than the rest?’

  ‘Can we get on the internet in less than fifteen minutes on your computer? We’d better look up some of these places, see if they’re still inhabited or if they’re just old ruins.’

  But as they were booting up the computer, the lights flickered a couple of times, and then the computer stopped in the middle of start-up and they had to switc
h it off and start again, and it proved impossible to get online.

  ‘Snow damage,’ said Christopher, nodding sagely. ‘I bet the phone lines are down too.’

  ‘What about the Folk Museum? The library?’

  ‘Do we want to waste time looking things up in a library at this point?’ he said doubtfully. ‘The longer we hang around, the more likely it is Charlie Smith’s going to catch up with us.’

  ‘You’re right - we need to get out there,’ said Amaryllis. For all her reservations about Christopher and his abilities when it came to this kind of situation, she was glad to have someone there with a second opinion when she needed one. She could usually rely on him to be sensible - as long as he didn’t go off into that other world he sometimes seemed to retreat to.

  ‘We’d better give the landlord a ring to let him know we’re coming for his car,’ she added. ‘What did happen to your mobile this time?’

  ‘Dropped it in a snowdrift,’ he muttered.

  ‘That’s very helpful.’ She took two mobile phones out of her parka pocket, gave him one and used the other to call the landlord of the Queen of Scots. He sounded resigned to them borrowing his vehicle, and even offered a bottle of brandy as his contribution to the search and rescue effort.

  ‘That’s all very well, but where are we going to find a St Bernard at this time of night?’ she said, and rang off.

  ‘A St Bernard?’ said Christopher.

  ‘It was a joke,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Hang on to that phone, by the way. It’s my old work one so it’s got some important numbers in it.’

  ‘Should you have kept it after you retired?’ said Christopher.

  ‘Theoretically not,’ she said. ‘Bring the map. Have you got a spare parka? Spare gloves? Hat?’

  She knew she wasn’t Christopher’s mother, but it was difficult not to worry about him.

  ‘I made a couple of sandwiches and a flask of soup while you were on the phone,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘It’s in this rucksack.’

  She was pleasantly surprised. She hadn’t expected him to show any initiative.

  Chapter 6 Nightmare drive

  Christopher hadn’t imagined anything worse than being driven back from North Queensferry by Dave in the pick-up truck, but he soon realised that being in a previously untried Range Rover driven through the snow by Amaryllis was ten times more frightening. She had only recently got her licence back, and she barely adjusted her speed to the road conditions, which were dire on the way up to the main road from Pitkirtly, just passable on the short section of the main road before the cattery turn-off, and almost impossible after that.

  As she skidded round the corner into the side road that led up the hill, ending up facing a stone wall, he said, as mildly as he could manage, ‘Careful!’

  ‘I’m being careful,’ she said. ‘It’s safer to drive at a normal speed in those conditions. It’s slowing down that causes accidents.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. Not being a driver himself, he didn’t want to cast doubt on her expertise, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to sit still in the front seat and refrain from kicking and screaming with terror.

  ‘What if Dave’s truck’s in a snowdrift up here somewhere? We don’t want to risk running into it.’

  ‘But it’s steep - I’ll have to take a run at it.’

  She turned the Range Rover round, away from the wall, and accelerated hard. The wheels sounded as if they were spinning. Christopher resigned himself to walking the rest of the way. There were a few streetlights at the road junction, although they flickered like candle flames in a draught. It was only a matter of time before they stopped functioning altogether. And up the hill where they were heading, it was dark, the only dim illumination coming from the heaps of snow at the sides of the road. He shivered at the idea of getting out and walking any distance. The light of Amaryllis’s torch, though powerful, wouldn’t help much and there was no knowing how long the batteries would last. But if Dave were stuck in a drift, or if the pick-up truck had broken down or anything, he might be sitting waiting for help - or he might have got out of the truck and be wandering, lost, somewhere in this unnaturally white still landscape. He could wander on to the site of the old mine workings and fall down a hole, or fall and break a bone and lie there becoming more hypothermic by the moment. They just had to find him.

  ‘He’s probably got back to Pitkirtly another way by now,’ said Amaryllis, knowing, as often happened, what was in his mind.

  ‘Jemima hasn’t rung.’

  ‘You’ve got my phone switched on, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course I have.’

  ‘There’s no of course about it. You and mobile technology just don’t get on with each other.’

  She reversed grimly, halfway across the main road and took another run at the hill. This time it worked. Up to a point. They got stuck twenty metres up the lane and she had to repeat the whole process.

  ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘This is a nice country lane when there isn’t any snow. Why can’t it just all go away and let things get back to normal?’

  ‘You’ve got to deal with things as they are, not how you’d like them to be,’ said Christopher.

  ‘But why?’ she said, her face set into lines he hadn’t seen before as she pressed her foot harder on the accelerator.

  ‘Maybe if you didn’t try quite so hard -,’ he suggested tentatively.

  She didn’t speak, but he noticed she did ease off the pedal a little, and they inched upwards, gaining ground as painfully as if the snow were an enemy and they were fighting a war. The wheels alternated between spinning and gripping. Christopher felt as if his stomach might be doing the same.

  They passed a road end, but there was a snowdrift in the way and they didn’t notice it until it was too late to turn in.

  ‘Onwards and upwards,’ said Amaryllis through gritted teeth. ‘Can you have a look at the map? There’s a torch in my bag.’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Side roads. Farm tracks. Anywhere an idiot like Dave might have turned off this road.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done that, would he?’

  ‘He might have done, by accident. Or if the truck was about to break down. He might have thought he’d be better off stopping and calling somebody.’

  ‘Only he couldn’t call anybody,’ Christopher reminded her. ‘Not with his mobile on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ muttered Amaryllis. ‘Not that you need another one.’

  Christopher wrestled with the map, unfolding it clumsily with his gloved hands. He didn’t dare take off his gloves: it wasn’t even warm inside the Range Rover, and he was afraid of frostbite. He found Amaryllis’s torch and clicked it on.

  ‘Don’t use it for too long,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’ll need it when we get out and walk.’

  So that was really on the cards, was it? Well, at least he knew now. She couldn’t have been entirely confident of making the whole journey in the Range Rover after all.

  Just as he had found the road on the map, one of the mobile phones rang on the dashboard.

  ‘That’ll be Jemima to tell us Dave’s home,’ said Amaryllis, grinning.

  It wasn’t Jemima. It was Chief Inspector Smith.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he said to Christopher. ‘Nobody should be out in these weather conditions. Why didn’t you call us right away?’

  ‘I think you’ll find one of your officers said you wouldn’t do anything until the morning,’ said Christopher calmly. ‘Someone had to do something.’

  ‘You’re a pair of bloody idiots!’

  ‘That’s no way to speak to a member of the public,’ Amaryllis called across from the driving seat.

  ‘Now I’m going to have to send people out after you - when we’ve got a serious crime investigation going on. And you’re one of the witnesses too. Didn’t anybody tell you not to leave town?’

  ‘Not that I can remember,
’ said Christopher innocently.

  ‘Tell me where you are, and I’ll see what I can do.’

  Christopher looked at the map again. ‘Somewhere just off the - sorry, I can’t read the name of the road in this light. I think I’m going to need glasses soon. Just for reading, though. I’m fine with distance.’

  He could almost hear Charlie Smith’s temperature rising at the other end of the line. ‘Let me speak to her,’ said the police officer.

  ‘She’s driving. We’ve just turned off the main road. I think it’s the A985. It’s the turning just after you join the main road from Pitkirtly. We’re heading up a hill, past some woods. I think Old Pitkirtlyhill House might be somewhere nearby, but we’re not sure what that is.’

  ‘Hmm, interesting,’ said Charlie Smith, unexpectedly calming down a bit. ‘Maybe I’ll come out there myself after you. Don’t go any further - pull over to the side of the road or something. Wait. Play cards. Have a sandwich.’

  He rang off.

  Christopher relayed his instructions to Amaryllis, who shook her head. ‘No way. If we pull over we’ll definitely get stuck.’

  She revved the engine again, hard. The Range Rover stalled.

  She managed to get it going again but they had lost momentum, and rolled back some way.

  ‘Try, try, try again,’ she muttered, and the car suddenly jumped forward, shot up another section of the hill and crashed straight into something at the side of the road. There was a horrible grinding, screeching noise, and then they lurched over to one side. Christopher was pushed against the passenger door, and then showered with broken glass as the windscreen caved in on top of them.

  Chapter 7 Connections

  Charlie Smith had been so incensed with Christopher and Amaryllis - mainly with Amaryllis, because he knew she must have been the ring-leader - that he could see his junior officers watching him anxiously for signs of a stroke or heart attack. At least one of them was likely to be listing the signs and symptoms of each of these in his or her head in case they had to call an ambulance.

  But as he finished the phone call he was smiling. ‘Where’s that list of stuff from the safe in the jeweller’s? I need to check something out.’