5 Frozen in Crime (12 page)

‘OK, and the dog.’

Charlie had plenty of time to wonder if he was
doing the right thing as they trekked back up through the town. It had seemed
sensible enough in the Queen of Scots - as did many far-fetched ideas - but in
the cold bright light of day he started to get an uneasy feeling about it.
Still, the snow might be gone any day now. Then he could turn out the man and
his dog on to the streets again with a clear conscience.

He popped into the pet shop on the way, and bought
a misshapen dog chew that they were selling at a reduced price.

‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, presenting it to the
dog.

Christopher was surprised to see Chief Inspector
Smith walking up the road with the homeless man and the dog. Amaryllis had told
him about giving away her big parka - he chose to interpret this gesture as a
sign that she was becoming more human, something she hotly denied - so he wasn’t
too taken aback by seeing the man wearing it. He found the scene outside the
pet shop rather puzzling, however. Surely the Christmas spirit hadn’t entered
into Charlie Smith too?

Because he had nothing much to do with the
Cultural Centre closed for the holidays, he followed Mr Smith and the homeless
man up to the police station and observed that they all went in together,
including the dog. He knew this was the kind of thing Amaryllis would have
done, which made him worry they were spending too much time together because of
the wintry weather. Oh, well, when the thaw came they could get out from under
each other’s feet.

He imagined she would have followed up by mounting
an attack on the police station to break the man out, since she was so friendly
with him, but Christopher couldn’t bring himself even to attempt this.

He told himself not to tell her about this latest
development, but as usual this resolve didn’t last long. They met Jemima and
Dave in the Golden Peach for dinner that evening, and because nothing much
seemed to have happened, what with Christmas and the snow, which they were fed
up talking about, the topic of homelessness came up. Amaryllis confessed to
having given the man her parka, and was duly scoffed at by Dave, although
everyone present knew he was such a big softie that if he had encountered the
man he would have incurred Jemima’s wrath by inviting him home for tea.

‘It’s the animals I feel sorry for,’ said Jemima
cryptically.

‘The animals?’ said Amaryllis.

‘He’s got a dog, hasn’t he? I saw them snuggled up
together in the doorway of the wool shop - the day before the snow came.’

All life in Pitkirtly, Christopher reflected, was
now divided into the era before the snow and the time of the snow: he supposed
this must be what it would be like if there were a major catastrophe that
affected everyone on earth. An Ice Age - not that this was in the same
category, of course. It just felt like it some nights, when you couldn’t get
warm in bed or when the lights went out.

‘Why do you feel sorry for them?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Dogs
were made to follow people around doing what they do. The homeless man’s dog is
just doing the same.’

‘But what if something happens to the man?’ said
Jemima. ‘Aren’t homeless people more likely to die than normal people are?’

‘‘Everybody’s likely to die,’ said Dave blithely,
crunching prawn crackers.

‘You know what I mean,’ said Jemima. ‘He could
even die of hypothermia - here in our town. Under our noses. And we haven’t
done anything to stop that happening.’

‘Charlie Smith has,’ said Christopher without
thinking.

They all stared at him.

‘What’s Charlie done?’ said Amaryllis. ‘He hasn’t
deported him to Rosyth, has he?’

Christopher laughed. ‘He’s taken them to the
police station. The man and the dog.’

Amaryllis frowned. ‘He’s arrested them?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Christopher. ‘But I saw
them all going in there together earlier - about lunch-time.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’d
better find out what’s going on.’

‘When you say we’d better find out, do you mean -?’
asked Christopher, hoping she didn’t.

‘We can pop round to the police station when we’ve
finished in here,’ said Amaryllis.

Christopher immediately made up his mind to order
dessert followed by coffee followed by liqueurs. The fact that he had once
tried a Golden Peach dessert and felt as if he had eaten a foam-filled pillow
was neither here nor there. He just wanted to put off the moment when Amaryllis
made an idiot of both of them at the police station, not for the first time
either.

‘Are you sure you should interfere, dear?’ said
Jemima.

‘I don’t want them harassing him,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Have you ever known Charlie Smith harass anybody?’
said Christopher. He knew anything he said was only going to be a token
protest. He knew, and he knew Amaryllis knew, that he would feel bound to
accompany her and share in the embarrassment.

‘There’s always a first time,’ said Amaryllis
darkly.

‘You’re right there,’ said Dave, digging into the
egg fried rice again. ‘My motto is, never entirely trust the police.’

Jemima glared at him. ‘You might have told me that
before we got married! I’ve always tried to live within the law.’

‘Ah, but the police and the law aren’t always on
the same side,’ said Dave. ‘Does anybody want more Singapore noodles?’

Christopher dragged the meal out for as long as he
could, which was until Dave said with a chortle, ‘Trying to put off your trip
to the police station, then?’ and he realised he had made it much too obvious.

‘You didn’t really want that extra cup of coffee,
did you?’ said Amaryllis to him as they left the restaurant.

‘Yes,’ he said stubbornly. ‘In this weather you
need more hot drinks than usual - it’s a scientific fact.’

Jemima and Dave headed off home, while Amaryllis
turned her steps in the direction of the police station, and Christopher
followed her. Being there with her was preferable to the alternative, which was
having to go round there later to bail her out after she had been arrested for
causing a disturbance or worse.

The front door was closed, of course, but
Amaryllis ignored the fact that it was well past the time when the police
station could reasonably be expected to be open for customers, and leaned on
the bell. After a while someone spoke on the intercom.

‘It’s Amaryllis Peebles,’ she announced. ‘I have
to see my client.’

‘He’s not your client,’ murmured Christopher.

‘How do you know?’ she said, and added, into the
intercom, ‘Chief Inspector Smith knows about it.’

One more strangled phrase came out of the speaker,
and after a few minutes’ pause the door swung open. Sergeant McDonald appeared,
a chunk of bread in one hand and a glass of what might have been Ribena but
which looked suspiciously like red wine in the other.

‘We’re closed,’ he said. ‘We’ve been on shift
continuously for four days, and we can’t be catering to people who choose to
make demands in the middle of the night.’

Before Amaryllis could enter into a debate with
him on the subject, he was pushed aside unceremoniously by Charlie Smith, who
had a tomato ketchup bottle in one hand.

‘We’re just about to have our meal,’ he said. ‘But
you can come in for five minutes. Five,’ he repeated, holding up his free hand
with all the fingers spread out, just to make sure they understood.

Christopher suspected he had only decided to let
them in because his fish supper was getting cold and he knew how long Amaryllis
could spin out an argument.

Mr Smith ushered them into what must be the staff
kitchen. There were fish suppers all round, and a bottle of red wine in the middle.

‘We’ve been stuck in here for days,’ said Sergeant
McDonald defensively, seeing where Christopher’s gaze lingered. ‘We’ve had to
eat frozen sprouts. And microwaved Christmas pudding.’

‘Not in the same dish, I hope,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Can
I see my client now?’

Mr Smith gave her a look. He and Sergeant McDonald
sat down at the table with Karen Whitefield and a uniformed constable.

‘I seriously doubt that he’s your client,’ he
observed, scooping fish and a share of the chips on to his plate and deluging
the whole lot with tomato ketchup. ‘Unless it’s the dog that’s the client, and
the man is just a kind of optional extra.’

‘Have you arrested him?’ said Amaryllis.

Chief Inspector Smith gave a hollow laugh. ‘Can
you just imagine the fuss if I arrested a dog over Christmas? Quickest way to
start a Twitter campaign, or what?’

‘Not the dog, the man,’ said Amaryllis.

‘OK, tell you what,’ said Mr Smith, in the
interval between shoveling chips into his mouth and taking a large swig of red
wine. ‘If you can tell me his name, I’ll accept he’s your client. Otherwise I’m
going to have to send you on your way.’

‘Tell you his name? What is this, an audition for
Rumpelstiltskin?’ said Amaryllis.

The police officers all laughed. Christopher
wished he could teleport out of here. Surely something would happen that would
stop this charade.

Just as the thought crossed his mind, he heard a
blood-curdling sound. It was a kind of howling sound, and it came from further
down the corridor, beyond the kitchen. As it rose and fell, he saw that the
officers at the table had apparently gone into suspended animation: Mr Smith
with his mouth open ready to receive a forkful of chips, Karen Whitefield with
a glass halfway to her mouth, Sergeant McDonald in the middle of munching a
large piece of bread and the young constable in the act of retrieving a bit
more fish from the parcel in the middle of the table.

As often happened, Amaryllis was first off the
mark, wrenching open the kitchen door and haring off down the corridor before
any of the others had moved. Christopher followed at a pace he considered
sensible. He felt only a small pang of guilt at letting her confront the
situation first. He knew that she was the one best qualified to cope with
anything from slipped stitches to mass murder.

The dog continued to howl as Amaryllis ran towards
it.

She hadn’t been along this way before on any of
her previous visits to the police station, but she thought it led to a small
number of police cells where suspects could be kept for short spells before
being transferred as required to the prison at Auchterderran. It wasn’t exactly
standard procedure for a dog to be kept in one of the cells, but she assumed it
had come in with the homeless man and Charlie Smith had allowed them to stay
together. He wasn’t unsympathetic by the standards of his profession.

She knew which cell it was from the way the door
swung open, partially blocking the corridor. She wasn’t sure what she expected
to find in there, but seeing the dog on its own was one of the better options
she had imagined. It stopped howling at once and came towards her, wagging its
tail.

‘Good dog,’ she said.

Christopher appeared, a little short of breath.
She would have to instigate a fitness programme for him, otherwise he wouldn’t
live long enough to enjoy the gold-plated pension he was no doubt entitled to
as the employee of a public body.

‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘Where’s the homeless
man?’

‘Gone,’ she said.

Charlie Smith came along the corridor, followed by
the young police constable.

‘He’s gone,’ she told them, to avoid the tedium of
hearing them repeat Christopher’s question.

‘Search the building!’ snapped Mr Smith. ‘Keith,
take this end and the back yard, I’ll do the other end and the car park. He won’t
be far away.’

‘When did you last see him?’ said Amaryllis.

‘About fifteen minutes ago - I brought his fish
and chips along. And something for the dog,’ added Charlie over his shoulder as
he set off back down the corridor, opening doors and slamming them again as he
went. ‘You two get back to the kitchen!’ he called.

The constable went the other way and they heard
him slamming doors too.

‘I wonder if there’s another way,’ said Amaryllis
thoughtfully. ‘Windows? A hatch in the ceiling? An air duct?’

‘This isn’t Mission Impossible,’ said Christopher.
‘That man wasn’t all that agile, not with his bad leg. He’s probably walked out
through a door that’s been left open. You can see they’ve got slacker because
of Christmas and the weather - someone’s forgotten to lock up properly.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she admitted, and then
loped off after Charlie Smith, who had now disappeared round a corner. She
paused halfway along the corridor and tested a window. It swung open at a light
push.

‘This is it,’ she said. When Christopher caught up
with her again she was staring over the windowsill. There was a straggly hedge
just outside but its snow-encrusted branches were broken and bent in the
middle. ‘Someone pushed through there.’

She was climbing over the sill when the constable
came back. ‘Nothing that way,’ he started to say, and then, ‘Don’t do that, you’ll
disturb the evidence. Come back here.’

Amaryllis submitted, not very gracefully, to being
dragged back into the building. After everyone had studied the spot where
apparently the man had escaped, they all went round to the outside of the
building to look at it from the other side. Amaryllis fidgeted and fumed
meanwhile. Her usual procedure wasn’t to examine evidence in meticulous detail
while the people she was pursuing got further and further away. But then, she
told herself, she didn’t usually have to make a case stand up in court. She
tried to be patient but eventually she couldn’t stand it any longer.

‘We’ll get going, then,’ she announced to the
assembled police officers as they retired indoors to look for a camera to take
some emergency scene of crime photographs. ‘It’s past Christopher’s bed-time
and I need to get him home, otherwise he’ll turn into a pumpkin.’

Christopher blushed. Charlie Smith glanced round
and said, ‘I hope you’re not going to go on the rampage round town looking for
this man.’

‘Yes, I know that would be a very silly thing to
do and I’d be endangering the lives of myself and others,’ she said.

‘You’re right, it would be. But that doesn’t mean
you need to do it… I don’t suppose you feel like taking the dog home with you,’
he added,

‘No, I don’t. I know what dogs are like - they
wreck everything they go near. I’m more of a cat person.’

‘Mr Wilson?’

‘I’m allergic,’ said Christopher. Amaryllis stared
at him in surprise. She had never heard this before, so either Christopher had
thought very quickly for once or there were things she didn’t yet know about
him. Both possibilities were equally unsettling.

Charlie sighed. He didn’t look as if he believed
Christopher either. ‘Off you go, then,’ he said. ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

As soon as they were outside the police station,
gasping as the freezing night air hit them again, Christopher said, ‘We’re not
going to go looking for him, are we?’

‘You heard what Chief Inspector Smith said, didn’t
you?’ she countered.

Christopher sighed in his turn. ‘Where will we
start?’

She wasn’t sure she liked the idea that she had
become predictable, but on the other hand, it would save a lot of time if
Christopher didn’t bother to argue with her except when he felt really strongly
about something. Evidently he wasn’t going to dig his heels in over this.
Contrarily, she wondered what he would do if she just went on home to bed.

She discarded this idea before it was even
fully-formed. Life was too short to follow up on every possibility as if you
wanted to live in an infinite number of universes at once. But where had that
mind-boggling thought come from? Had her brain been adversely affected by the
extreme cold? Or had she been spending too much time with Christopher,
something she knew from experience could be dangerous in all sorts of ways.

‘Would you like to live in infinite universes?’
she asked him as they turned along towards the High Street again.

‘He won’t have come back here, will he?’

‘Who knows?’

‘Infinity’s always frightened the wits out of me.
I’d rather not think about it, if you don’t mind.’

‘We’ll try the shelter behind the war memorial
first. Then the garden huts further down, then maybe that old workman’s place
in the railway yard - you know.’

‘You don’t want to go there in the dark, do you?’
said Christopher incredulously.

‘Not really. I’m just thinking of places where he might
be able to shelter for the night.’

‘I think they may have demolished it anyway,’ he
said.

The homeless man, borrower of Amaryllis’s parka
and former dog owner, wasn’t in any of the places they looked. Christopher was
correct in his surmise about the workman’s hut in the railway yard, so they
didn’t even have to go too near the place which had such bad memories for both
of them. On the way back up the road they searched the yard behind the shop
where the Happiness Club had once had its headquarters, the giant wheelie-bins
behind the Golden Peach and the rather upmarket shed where they had once hidden
with Jock McLean and Darren Laidlaw.

‘I give up,’ said Amaryllis. She felt dispirited,
which wasn’t like her. She had somehow imagined she had a connection with the
homeless man. Even if only via the loan of the parka.

‘I wonder why he didn’t take the dog with him,’
said Christopher.

‘You’re right. It’s a bit odd.’

‘I suppose he couldn’t get it out the window.’

‘But how did he know he was going to escape through
the window?’

‘Maybe he’d seen it wasn’t shut properly earlier,’
suggested Christopher.

‘He could have lifted the dog over the windowsill,’
said Amaryllis, frowning. ‘It wasn’t that high up, and the dog’s quite thin. It
probably doesn’t weigh much.’

‘Oh well,’ said Christopher, yawning. ‘Better get
a good night’s sleep. I expect it’ll all seem clearer in the morning.’

There was the standard wrangle over whether he
walked her home or not, and in the end she was so tired she just agreed to it.

‘But you can’t come in for toast,’ she said. ‘I
haven’t got any bread. I need to go to the - oh my God!’

By this time they had turned down the road that
led to Merchantman Wynd, where Amaryllis’s apartment was. She stared ahead with
wide eyes and broke into a run, or the nearest approximation to a run she could
manage in the snow.

There was a dark shape in the snow in the road
just by the entrance to the Wynd. As she got closer, she knew it was exactly what
she had feared it was. A man’s body. A man wearing a thick parka.

She fell on her knees beside him and searched for
a pulse.

‘Will I call an ambulance?’ said Christopher,
suddenly at her side. He pulled out the phone she had lent him, dropped it in
the snow, retrieved it with clumsy gloved fingers and stared at the little
screen as if wondering what it was. She knew she was taking in these details to
get her mind off the fact that she couldn’t find any sign of life.

‘Police as well,’ she said.

Christopher must have charged up the phone for
once, she told herself. And even brought it with him. Wonders would never
cease. She wondered whether to start resuscitation. The man was cold, but it
might be that his temperature had dropped to the sort of hibernating level
where he could be revived. Then she saw the blood spots on the snow.