4 Death at the Happiness Club (22 page)

'You were quite good, considering,' said Amaryllis.

'You both did real good,' said Maisie Sue firmly, and started to pour the drinks.

Chapter 26 The secrets of happiness

The landlord of the Queen of Scots hosted a tea-dance in memory of Sean Fraser and the Happiness Club. Amaryllis had never imagined she would get the chance to attend such a glittering occasion. It was a real eye-opener.

Christopher was running late because he had been seeing off Caroline, Faisal and Marina, who had stayed the weekend with him. He didn't know yet that he had missed out on hearing some vital information at the Queen of Scots, where everything worth talking about was brought to the tables in the saloon bar sooner or later.

As Jemima and Dave waltzed past in a slow and stately manner, Amaryllis turned back to Chief Inspector Smith, whom she planned to grill mercilessly about all the details of Sean's death and the fate of the sisters. He hadn't wanted to tell her anything at first, but she had plied him with Old Pictish Brew and now she felt he was ready for revelations.

'This is all in the strictest confidence, of course,' he said, leaning forward so that their foreheads almost clashed over the table. 'I don't want you running off to the papers with it, mind.'

'I'm hurt that you even think I'd do that, Charlie,' said Amaryllis.

'I suppose the trickiest part about this case was all the people who were always milling about, getting in the way,' he mused. 'Present company excepted. You and your friends were the least of my worries, for once.'

'Good,' she said encouragingly.

'The fact that it was Mr McLean who blew up the boat, for instance - glad he's making a good recovery, by the way.' Mr Smith looked pointedly across to the bar where Jock McLean, balancing on one crutch, talked with animation to Trisha Laidlaw at one side of him and Rosie from the cattery at the other. Had he actually invited them both to come to the tea-dance with him? Amaryllis wondered idly.

'Yes, it was the fact that Mr McLean's pipe was apparently the chief culprit that distracted us from the more important question: why did the boat fill up with gas in the first place? Once we re-focussed, we realised that was the first attempt to kill Sean Fraser.'

'Once Dilly had confessed to everything, you mean.'

'Yes, well… They had planned to let the gas out of the heater into the cabin, then get everybody else off the boat and send Sean back for something. Two things went wrong for them. First of all, as soon as everybody got on to the island, Sean was button-holed by some old lady who wouldn't stop talking to him… I know the feeling... Secondly, Mr McLean sent the whole thing up with a carelessly dropped match.'

'It was always going to be a bit chancy though, wasn't it?' said Amaryllis.

He nodded. ‘Chancy for them, and dangerous for anybody else who got in the way. As you probably know, both the Johnstones then got in the way of our investigations into the shooting. Mrs Johnstone – Penelope -made herself so visible that we had to pull her in for questioning. The Happiness Club neighbours were insistent she was the only person they'd seen anywhere near the place.'

'Sorry I'm late,' said Christopher breathlessly, sliding into a chair next to Amaryllis. 'Have I missed much?'

'Only two rounds of Old Pictish Brew,' said Amaryllis with mock severity. She was irrationally pleased to see him, despite the fact that his presence would interfere with her plan to get Chief Inspector Smith to reveal all in return for the vague promise unspecified female favours, or at least the chance to partner her in a slow foxtrot. ‘Charlie’s just telling me how he worked everything out.’

‘I didn’t think – I mean, that’s interesting,’ said Christopher.

‘Then of course there was Mrs MacPherson herself. We did have our suspicions about her, because we knew her husband had a gun, but apparently he’s overseas now.’

‘In Gdansk with a blonde floozy,’ added Amaryllis.

‘Yes. She was due to be deported but they changed their minds at the last minute,’ said Mr Smith casually. Amaryllis glanced round to see if Maisie Sue was within earshot, as she would undoubtedly have got very upset to think of her near miss, but she was waltzing quite energetically with the man from the fish shop. He didn’t look like her type but you never knew when and where romance would blossom. Amaryllis didn’t really believe in romance, but if people wanted to convince themselves it would make their sad boring little lives better, that was their own lookout.

‘So Maisie Sue came on to your radar,’ Amaryllis prompted.

‘Yes. She seemed to have been the last person in the office before Mr Fraser was shot: her application form for the Happiness Club was right under his body on the desk and got saturated with blood. It was still quite legible, though. Interesting that she’s fond of Labradors. Can’t stand them myself – unbelievably stupid.’

‘But on closer questioning,’ he continued after a slight pause – surely he didn’t expect either of them to enter into a discussion of the merits of Labradors? ‘On closer questioning it turned out she had heard the gunshot on her way towards the building. She thought it was a car back-firing. It’s nothing like that, of course, as you know, but that’s what most people think.’

‘So where was Sean Fraser before he was face-down on the desk?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Ah, that’s where traditional detective work came in. We did a fingertip search of the whole Happiness Club premises, and we found the bullet and a strand of Dilly Fraser’s hair that had got caught in the cupboard door hinges. He was actually killed in the cupboard in the office. Mrs MacPherson heard a noise from there as she went into the office, but the sisters must have kept themselves and Sean Fraser’s body hidden until she had put the form on the desk and left. Then they brought him out and dumped him at the desk for a few moments deliberately to get his blood on the form.’

‘That was a bit weird,’ Amaryllis observed. ‘Why didn’t they just go straight out to the Porsche with him?’

‘We think they were thinking ahead, trying to incriminate Mrs MacPherson and confuse us about the time of the shooting.’

‘If there was anything that involved thinking ahead, it must have been Dee Fraser who did it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Dilly didn’t seem capable of thinking past the end of her nose.’

‘Yes, you may be right. We’re not sure who did the actual shooting. Dilly seems to think it was her, and certainly she would be more likely to pull the trigger on the spur of the moment, for the hell of it, but if they planned it in advance then it was almost certainly Dee.’

'But why?' said Christopher.

'Why did they do it?' said Charlie Smith, and smiled in a particularly irritating way. 'Ah, well, I'm not sure I should be telling you this…'

'Oh, get on with it!' Amaryllis snapped. She saw his expression and added hastily, in what she imagined was a soft, feminine tone, 'I mean - the tea-dance will be over soon and we still haven't had our fox-trot.'

She saw Christopher's face register incredulity, followed by bewilderment.

'The key was in some information from Mrs MacPherson,' said Mr Smith. 'Statements made in her hearing by Dilly Fraser, about the other one.'

'The other one?' Christopher repeated. Amaryllis smiled, and enjoyed seeing him blush over his own predictability.

'The other one who kept coming back in Dilly's dreams,' said Mr Smith, nodding once again in that smug way that made Amaryllis want to take him on a mission with her and abandon him in the secret underground headquarters of a ruthless Middle Eastern dictator in the middle of a people's uprising, or on the banks of a river in Tibet surrounded by Chinese militia and perhaps menaced by the odd stray panda.

'Coming back from where?' said Christopher.

'Back from the dead,' said Mr Smith. 'Dee and Dilly killed someone.'

Amaryllis's fingers itched to cover up Christopher's mouth so that he couldn't provide an echo. She glared at him instead, and he closed his mouth.

'Yes, they knocked down a pedestrian in the camper van, coming along the coast road by Kinghorn on a wet night in the spring,' Mr Smith continued. 'Sean was asleep at the time and either Dee or Dilly was driving - they still haven't said which of them it was. According to Dee, Sean then helped them to dispose of the body by dropping it down one of those mineshafts near Lochgelly. About time the Council filled them in or put up sensible fences, if you ask me.'

'Have you recovered the body?' enquired Amaryllis quietly. Even she understood it wasn't exactly the right topic of conversation for a tea-dance, although as far as she was concerned it added a certain frisson to the occasion.

'Yes,' said Mr Smith in an undertone. He leaned closer to her. So did Christopher.

If anyone else invades my space I'll bang some heads together, Amaryllis vowed silently, leaning back slightly.

'I suppose that's why they moved on from wherever they were based before,' she mused. 'And then Sean got too friendly with Penelope and they were afraid he'd give the game away.'

'Exactly,' said Mr Smith. 'They got in a right old state. Dilly says she and Dee suggested moving on again, but he wouldn't hear of it. So they had to kill him, she said. Quite breezy and open about it, too. Not a sign of remorse. Their own brother.'

He sighed.

'That's sisters for you,' said Amaryllis, testing Christopher to see if he was still awake. She nudged him. He jumped.

'I can't imagine Caroline doing anything like that,' he said. 'I hope,' he added with a hint of uncertainty in his tone.

'Here's something funny,' said Mr Smith unexpectedly. 'You know how they made a big thing about computers matching people up?'

'Did they?' said Amaryllis, who hadn't paid much attention to that aspect since she didn't want to be matched up with anyone.

‘Yes, they made out it was some special program that analysed everyone’s replies to the questions and tested for compatibility. Well, anyway, there wasn’t a computer in the office, and we couldn’t find one anywhere among their stuff. In the end we asked Dee Fraser about it, and she said they had done it all themselves.’

‘Themselves? You mean by hand?’ said Christopher, showing some interest at last.

'She was quite proud of it - said they had a good laugh looking at people's answers, and they sometimes deliberately matched up completely incompatible people to see what happened.'

'I bet that worked just as well as using a computer,' said Amaryllis.

'So after they took Sean out to the Porsche?' she asked. 'What happened then?'

'They flung him into the boot and drove off. Having first put the gun away safely, as they imagined, in the motor-caravan. They weren't to know Mr Johnstone was already in there. They drove to the coast, stole a boat, dumped Mr Fraser's body offshore somewhere and kept the Porsche, thinking they could go back for the caravan later. There were one or two sightings of them driving around in the Porsche, but of course most people just thought it was Mr Johnstone. That's why we didn't pick up the car. It just wasn't on our radar.'

'But they hadn't reckoned on the tide coming in over the mud-flats,' said Amaryllis slowly.

'Or on Maisie Sue being on the beach at the wrong time,' added Christopher.

'You took a big risk going into the middle of that situation,' said Mr Smith sternly.

Amaryllis was slightly taken aback. If anyone was going to be stern, surely it should be Christopher, who cared whether she lived or died. Detective Chief Inspector Smith had no stake in the matter at all.

'Amaryllis takes risks the way most people eat breakfast,' said Christopher gloomily.

'Just as well I did anyway,' said Amaryllis. 'If I hadn't got Christopher to call and tell you where we were, the sisters might have killed Maisie Sue and got right away.'

They watched Maisie Sue waltzing. She looked as if she had completely forgotten the danger she had been in from Dee and Dilly.

'How do you think she'll get on with this quilting thing?' said Mr Smith.

'She's determined enough to make a go of it,' said Christopher with feeling. 'She was in the Cultural Centre yesterday, nagging away about me commissioning a community quilt. In the end I gave in just to make her go away.'

'Ah,' said Chief Inspector Smith. 'That's a woman's tactic if ever I heard one.'

'Present company excepted?' asked Amaryllis.

A deafening silence ensued.