4 Death at the Happiness Club (19 page)

Chapter 23 Catching up

Amaryllis knew from quite a distance away that it was Penelope Johnstone at the bus stop. Who else wore such an extravaganza of beige, and who else would top it off with an olive-green body warmer?

She'd be lucky if a bus came along at this time of day. Amaryllis hadn't had her own transport for some time now, and she knew from bitter experience how rare it was for the bus company to send one of their vehicles into the mean streets of Pitkirtly. It was always miserable standing at the bus stop, and even more so on a day like this, with rain blowing about and attacking you from unexpected angles. Penelope didn't seem to have an umbrella either.

Amaryllis looked at her watch. According to her reckoning, the next bus wasn't due for at least half an hour, and even then it could easily be somewhere between five and twenty minutes late. She resolved to approach Penelope by stealth so that the woman didn't get a chance to dodge away into the cobbled lanes that led to the harbour, or to dash into the butcher's shop and engage in a random conversation with him. Amaryllis and the butcher were currently in the middle of a feud that, though its origins were not entirely clear, had something to do with the boy Stewie, and she had been buying meat in the supermarket, although she knew if Jemima found out there would be hell to pay. Living in a small town was so complicated!

Just as Amaryllis was about to use the temporary cover provided by a builder's van illegally parked across someone’s driveway to shield her from Penelope's gaze while she darted down a short cut at the side of the nearest house which would take her out of sight, she noticed the other woman waving in her direction. She seemed to be calling too.

'Hello there! Amaryllis?'

The words came to her faintly, and, unsure of whether she had imagined her name, Amaryllis paused. Penelope waved more urgently and raised her voice to a shout. 'Amaryllis! May I have a word, please?'

Only Penelope would be so polite when shouting to someone across a busy road. There was something admirable about this, and Amaryllis found herself warming slightly to the woman. She forgot about stealth and instead marched boldly along the pavement to the bus stop.

'Penelope,' she said. 'How are you?'

'I'm fine, thank you,' said Penelope, 'considering that the police saw fit to keep me in custody for two nights for absolutely no good reason, and to deny me access to my family or a solicitor until this morning. I shall be making the strongest possible complaint in the highest of places.'

Amaryllis tried her best to look sympathetic, but Penelope obviously wasn't taken in by this. She continued, 'Of course, all that probably seems trivial to someone with your - um - experience. But that's why I'd like to talk to you.'

'About my experiences?' said Amaryllis, baffled.

'No, I - ,' Penelope began, breaking off as a very old man shuffled past very slowly, glaring at them. She glanced round, assessing the surroundings. 'Let's go somewhere else. It's too public here. People might overhear.'

'Eh?' said the old man, half-turning back to her.

'Nothing!' she said. She rolled her eyes. 'There aren't any secrets around here. Walls have ears… Mr Wilson isn't trailing along behind you somewhere, is he?'

'Aren't you waiting for a bus?' said Amaryllis, trying not to think of Christopher as a schoolboy trailing like snail reluctantly to school.

'A bus to nowhere!' said Penelope. She seemed larger than life today, but maybe this was just a temporary after-effect of her nights in the police cells. 'I mean - it doesn't matter about the bus. There's nobody waiting for me at the other end.'

'Do you want to know where Zak is?' asked Amaryllis.

Penelope shook her head, and compressed her lips. 'I can't talk about it here,' she said after a moment. 'Let's go round to Giulia's. We can have a coffee. It won't be busy at this time of day.'

Once again Amaryllis had to run the gauntlet of Giulia Petrelli's disapproval, although it was muted this time by Penelope's presence. The two women had clung together after their sons' activities had been brought into the public domain. With half her family in prison and most of the others permanently estranged from her, Giulia was lucky that her brother-in-law and his family had come over from Italy to help run the restaurant. Presumably with the Italian economy in a downward spiral, this had been a good move all round.

Amaryllis and Penelope sat in a table in the window and Giulia brought them coffee and home-made panettone.

'Where were you going? Home?' This was the least contentious thing Amaryllis could think of to open the conversation with. Penelope frowned and stared into her latte. It had an artistic swirl in the milky surface.

'I suppose so,' she said. There were lines between her eyebrows that Amaryllis hadn't noticed before, and even her hands seemed wrinkled and uncared-for suddenly. She looked up and met Amaryllis's eyes. 'I don't know,' she added. 'I don't really want to go home. It's funny - I love my house - our house. You can see all the weather in the Forth and the sunrise and sunset from our front room. I never thought I'd want to be anywhere else. But it's just so empty now.'

There was a pause, and then Amaryllis decided she might as well come clean about Zak. Penelope didn't look as if she was in the mood to throw a wobbly about it or accuse her of kidnapping as she might have done if she had been more like her usual self.

'Zak's at my flat,' she said. 'We both ended up at the police station with your husband -'

'Liam!' Penelope interrupted, wide-eyed. 'Sorry - go on.'

'Yes, we were with Liam when the police raided the Frasers' camper van. They let us go after a while but they kept him in custody. Zak came home with me - his friend Stewie's staying with me for a bit so it made sense for Zak to be there too.'

Penelope laughed out loud, but Amaryllis didn't sense any humour in it. She waited for the other woman to speak.

'Well, good luck with that,' said Penelope at last. 'I expect he'll be happier with you than he has been with me lately.'

'That isn't -' Amaryllis began.

'It doesn't matter,' said Penelope, waving one hand, presumably to stop Amaryllis from going on to say something stupid. 'Do you know why the police took Liam in? Did he manage to kill somebody with that damned gun he's so obsessed by?'

'It wasn't quite like that,' said Amaryllis cautiously. She resolved there and then never to take on any cases involving divorces or marriages in her intermittent role as a private investigator. It definitely wouldn't be worth the hassle. 'What makes you think he did anything like that?'

'The Porsche was there. I heard a gun-shot. He was jealous.'

'Jealous?'

Penelope shook her head. She picked up her coffee cup and sipped daintily from it, then spoiled the ladylike effect by slamming it into the saucer so hard that liquid spilled into the saucer and a few drops even landed on Giulia's immaculate white table-cloth.

'He had no right to be, of course. I had already told him to leave before I even - before Sean and I -'

She lost her momentum somewhere in the sentence. She glanced at the spots on the table-cloth, picked up a paper napkin and started dabbing at them. Amaryllis waited. Penelope completed the task by blotting up the coffee from the saucer and setting aside the napkin. She continued,

'There isn't really anything between Sean and me. We were both lonely and needed a friend. I expect we can just move on now and go our separate ways.'

She looked searchingly at Amaryllis as if trying to work out whether Amaryllis believed her or not.

'So what happened that day at the Happiness Club?' said Amaryllis. 'I've heard about it from your husband's point of view - to cut a long story short, Zak and I came across him that same evening in the camper van and he told us you were around at the time of the gun-shot.'

'Yes,' said Penelope slowly. 'Yes, I was… I saw the Porsche in the yard as I was passing the Happiness Club, and I thought Liam must be in there making some sort of scene - I didn't really think about the gun until later. I was worried he would make a fool of himself - though heaven knows he's done that often enough before; you'd think I would be used to it by now. I saw the car was empty, and I was just standing in the yard, wondering whether it would help if I went inside or if it would make things even worse, when I heard the shot.'

'What did you do then?' said Amaryllis.

'I'm afraid I panicked a bit,' Penelope admitted. 'I thought it must have been Liam - I couldn't cope with that idea so I ran away… So childish. I don't know what came over me.'

'And then what?' said Amaryllis. Something didn't quite add up, but she wasn't sure what it was until Penelope continued her story. She noticed the other woman was blushing. What on earth could be so embarrassing?

'Then - this is even more childish, I'm afraid - I hadn't gone far down the road when I noticed Mrs MacPherson in the distance, walking in my direction,' said Penelope. 'I couldn't face seeing her - so I jumped over someone's garden wall at the other side of the road, and barged through their rose bushes.'

Her voice lowered almost to a whisper during this sentence, and she leaned across the table as if hoping nobody else overheard. Amaryllis wanted to laugh. Compared to some of the things she, and indeed some of her friends, had done in the past, this was chickenfeed in the childishness stakes. She thought of the time she, Christopher, Jock and Darren had hidden in someone's shed, of the kitchen window she had climbed out of in the church hall on the day of Jemima’s Homecoming event, and of the expression on the face of the man whose garden she had invaded only the other day.

'What's so funny about that?' said Penelope, her face now darkening to what seemed a dangerous degree. 'I'd have been mortified if anyone had seen me.'

'Sorry - it brought back memories, that's all,' said Amaryllis. 'Believe me, you aren't the first to barge through rose bushes. What happened next?'

She remembered Maisie Sue had said something about bumping into Penelope. But hadn't that been when Maisie Sue was on her way back from the Happiness Club?

'I waited until I thought Mrs MacPherson had gone past,' said Penelope. 'Then something awful happened.'

She paused. Amaryllis didn't believe in prompting people unnecessarily. She waited.

'The front window of the house opened,' said Penelope. 'A man shouted at me.'

Oh dear, oh dear, thought Amaryllis, resolving to take Penelope out on one of her nocturnal expeditions some time. Her education had been sadly neglected.

'I climbed back over the wall,' said Penelope. 'Then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it wasn't Liam who had done the shooting - maybe he was the one who had been shot. I thought I'd better go back and have a look. I was just hurrying back up the road when Mrs MacPherson came rushing down from the direction of the Happiness Club. I may have been a wee bit rude to her. I was getting quite het-up by that time.'

How could this woman have stayed married to the would-be ultra-cool Liam Johnstone for so long? Amaryllis asked herself. She was more like his mother than his wife, with her outdated vocabulary and low embarrassment threshold. Did anyone else ever get het-up these days? How did he put up with her? How did she put up with him? What was their secret?

'But when I got back up to the place and went round to the yard again, the Porsche nearly knocked me down, it was coming out so fast. I didn't even manage to see who was inside, except I thought there might have been a woman in the front passenger seat. But I was squeezing myself against the wall at the time, so I'm not sure.' Penelope paused for breath. She had obviously been re-living the panic and fright of that moment as she spoke. After a moment she recovered enough to continue. 'I still didn't know if Liam was involved. He could have been fleeing the scene in the Porsche after doing something terrible. But in that case, who was the woman in the passenger seat? And who was the victim? If there was one.'

'I think we've all been asking ourselves that,' said Amaryllis.

Giulia came over and asked Penelope if she was all right.

'I'll get you more coffee,' she said. 'More panettone? Biscotti? Ice-cream?'

After Giulia had vanished back into the kitchen, Amaryllis said,

'What did you do after that?'

'Nothing. Well - I went into the building by the back door and called to see if there was anybody there. Only there wasn't. Or at least no-one answered.'

'Did you look in the office or the front room?'