5 Frozen in Crime (13 page)

The call came in just as Charlie was getting ready
for bed. Because the alternative was the floor of the staff kitchen, he elected
to sleep in a cell. He had threatened dire consequences if anyone locked him
in.

Sergeant McDonald came down the corridor fast, his
heavy tread making him sound like a whole herd of rhinos charging down to a
waterhole somewhere in Africa.

‘Mr Wilson’s just called,’ he said. ‘You haven’t
got your radio on, sir. I was just about to go home.’

‘Sorry,’ said Charlie, glancing round to see where
he had put the radio. There was no sign of it. He hoped Amaryllis hadn’t taken
it while he wasn’t looking. It was just the kind of thing she would do. ‘What
did he want this time?’

‘They’ve found a body.’

Charlie sank down on the bed and put his hands
over his eyes to shut out reality. ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘I don’t believe it. What
have those two got against me? How did they know I was just about to fall into
bed?’

‘Suspected foul play. Ambulance called but he said
there’s no sign of life. Looks like our man. He’s wearing the parka Ms Peebles
lent him… I’ll be surprised if the ambulance can get through – we’d maybe
better alert the duty doctor.’

Charlie pulled himself together. ‘I’ll go. Better
get Keith to come with me. You go home and get some sleep. You’ll be no use to
anybody if you’re half-dead on your feet. And when you say your prayers, just
ask for an overnight thaw.’

He pictured Sergeant McDonald on his knees, hands
folded, eyes closed, beside a high, old-fashioned bed and he smiled in spite of
the gravity of the situation. The dog, which had been snoozing in the corner of
Charlie’s chosen cell, opened its eyes suddenly and lifted its head.

‘Go back to sleep,’ Charlie told it. Tomorrow
would be soon enough for the dog to find out it was orphaned, or whatever the
appropriate term was.

Charlie and Keith, the latter bleary-eyed because
he had already fallen asleep at the kitchen table, wrapped up as warmly as they
could and went out again. It seemed even colder than before. Was it always
colder just before a thaw? That didn’t seem right. But weather could do all
sort of strange, unexpected things. A bit like women.

‘So what do you think? Will it thaw overnight?’ he
said heartily to Keith, mostly to deflect his thoughts from a path he knew
would only end in tears.

Keith Burnett looked at him as if he’d taken leave
of his senses.

‘No way, sir,’ he said. ‘This lot’s going to
freeze over and then we’re in for more snow in a couple of days. It said on the
radio.’

‘More snow?’ Charlie had been too preoccupied to
listen to any weather forecasts, and he was aghast at the idea of this
situation continuing indefinitely.

They slipped and slithered down the slope towards
the spot where Amaryllis and Christopher stood guard over a motionless shape
that obviously no longer needed guarding.

‘We can’t get an ambulance into the town,’ said
Charlie. ‘We’re calling out the nearest doctor. But I’m guessing there isn’t
any big rush now,’ he added, crouching over the body.

‘There’s blood,’ said Amaryllis.

She seemed unnaturally upset by her standards. She
must have seen blood before, and in far worse circumstances than this. At least
this body wasn’t crushed and broken like some of the victims of road traffic
accidents he’d been unfortunate enough to see over the years. Of course, this
one was closer to her home territory than most of the others had been. He stood
up slowly and said, ‘It’s him all right.’

‘Maybe he slipped on the ice and hit his head on
something,’ said Keith Burnett, as if trying to make things seem a bit better.

‘Not unless he slipped in such a way that he
twisted round and accidentally shot himself in the back of the head,’ said
Charlie Smith.

Keith Burnett took a big step back.

‘Is it murder, then?’ he asked quietly.

‘Of course it’s murder!’ snapped Charlie, and then
felt sorry for raising his voice. He wasn’t really angry with Keith but with
himself for failing to protect this man. He had taken him and his dog in off
the streets to try and do just that, and he had just made things even worse.

He looked across at Christopher and Amaryllis. ‘Did
you see or hear anything?’

Christopher shook his head. ‘We’d just come back
from a walk round the town. We came down the road and he was lying there. No
sign of anybody else around.’

He wondered why Amaryllis hadn’t spoken for the
two of them as she often did. Then he saw that she was trembling and that
Christopher had his arm round her shoulders, which could have been the only
thing keeping her upright.

‘You might as well go indoors,’ he said to them. ‘Your
flat’s just along here, isn’t it?’

Amaryllis nodded, teeth chattering. Of course, she
didn’t have her big parka any more. Charlie didn’t think she would want it back
now though, even if he had been able to give it to her.

‘Be careful,’ he added suddenly. ‘Do you want
Keith to go with you?’

Christopher met Charlie’s eyes. ‘Do you think that’s
necessary?’

‘Could be,’ said Charlie, trying to sound casual
despite a horrible thought that had just crossed his mind. What if the killer
had been waiting for Amaryllis here, and had imagined she was the one wearing
the big parka? What if, realising his mistake, he had then moved to wait in or
near her apartment? It wasn’t worth taking the risk. Normally she would have
been the best person to deal with any intruders or masked gunmen in the
shadows, but she didn’t look up to that in her present state.

Reason re-asserted itself. The man had been shot
in the back of the head, and there was no sign he had been wearing the hood of
the parka up at the time. Anyone who had seen him without it would have
realised at once that he wasn’t Amaryllis. You couldn’t mistake that spiky
tangle of dark red hair for anyone else’s. Unless she was unknown to the
killer, of course.

He pulled himself together, conscious that the
others were all looking at him.

‘OK, Keith, go along there with them. Come back
once they’re safely shut in. The doctor should be down in a minute. Then we’ll
need to get Karen to bring the Land Rover. Give her a call now.’

He didn’t want to have to wake up Karen, who hadn’t
had any more sleep for the past few nights than the rest of them, but she was
younger than Sergeant McDonald and would recover faster, even if she was likely
to grumble a bit more at the time.

There were some grim things to do next, and he
wished the time had passed in a blur so that he could blot them out of his
memory quickly. But it all seemed very real, from the wait for the doctor,
through the unpleasant task of loading the body into the police Land Rover and
then transporting it to the premises of a local undertaker who hadn’t been best
pleased to be woken up either. Rushing to store it like this had made Keith
raise his eyebrows, but they couldn’t leave the man out in the snow in case the
longed-for thaw should arrive in the middle of the night. It wasn’t done
according to standard procedure, but as they had driven a coach and horses
through the regulations over the past few days, nobody was about to lose any
sleep over it. Apart from anything else, they couldn’t afford to lose any more
sleep what with all that had been going on.

They disturbed the body as little as was humanly
possible, but something odd happened as they were leaving the undertaker’s.
Karen, who was driving, put her bag down behind the seat and picked something
up off the floor. It gleamed gold in the light from the street lamp just
outside.

‘Look - what’s this, sir? It looks like some sort
of bird. With a long tail,’ she added, turning it over in her fingers. ‘It’s
very pretty. Where did it come from?’

Even after recent events, Charlie Smith still had
the capacity to be surprised.

‘The golden peacock,’ he breathed. ‘Well, who’d
have thought it?’

Amaryllis’s spare room was stark, but comfortable.
Christopher had slept well when he eventually got to bed, which was long after
his usual time. The process had involved making cocoa and lots of toast for
Amaryllis, who didn’t seem to want to sleep, and then eating most of the toast
himself. In the morning one of his first thoughts was to hope she hadn’t now
run out of bread, because he was looking forward to making toast for breakfast
in her space-age kitchen.

He spent a few moments lying in bed and reproaching
himself for feeling so up-beat after the experience of the previous night.
Maybe he’d been spending too much time with Amaryllis lately and had become
blasé about violence and death; on the other hand she herself had seemed to be
unusually upset by what they had seen. Was it because she had imagined she
might be in danger? He didn’t think so. That kind of thing usually brought out
the best in her.

‘How many slices?’ called Amaryllis through the
half-open door.

‘Two would be fine, if you can spare them,’ said
Christopher. He wasn’t sure if she had minded him staying overnight. He usually
managed to leave and go home to spend the night in his own bed, even in times
of serious crisis, but on this occasion, with a mad gunman possibly wandering
around outside and with both of them so exhausted that they would probably have
slept through the Texas chain-saw massacre, it had seemed like the only
possible option.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked as he eventually wandered
through to the kitchen, trying to flatten his hair down with his hands so that
he didn’t look as if he’d had a major fright.

‘Fine,’ said Amaryllis, sounding surprised. She
presented him with a cup of coffee from her complicated machine and took a jar
of marmalade out of the cupboard. She sat down at the table opposite him. She
certainly didn’t look any different from usual, her startlingly blue eyes
watching him with amusement as they always did, her dark red hair apparently
bristling with its own energy. Even the way she sat there was energetic; she
twitched and tapped her feet, ready to spring into action at any moment.

He groaned inwardly, and then realized he had
actually groaned out loud too.

‘Are you all right?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Didn’t you
sleep?’

‘There could have been a maniac with a gun
wandering around nearby and he might be after you – why shouldn’t I sleep?’ he
said. ‘Actually, I did sleep all right. I’m just wondering what you’ve got
planned for today.’

‘Are you sure I’ve got something planned? Don’t I
sometimes surprise you with my spontaneity?’

‘I wouldn’t say surprise is the right word,’ he
said.

‘What is the right word, then?’

He considered this, sipping his coffee. ‘Terrify?’

‘Ha ha. Well, I’m planning to go round to the
police station to offer a witness statement of my own free will, if you must
know. You’d better come too - we’re both in this together.’

‘OK, that sounds reasonable,’ said Christopher. ‘And
I suppose you’re going to risk arrest by snooping around inside the police
station to try and find out more?’

‘It isn’t a big risk,’ said Amaryllis confidently.
‘They’ve got bigger fish to fry than me. And Charlie knows I’m on their side.’

‘Hmm,’ said Christopher. ‘So we’re snooping for
clues. Keeping our eyes peeled and all that.’

‘We aren’t the Famous Five,’ said Amaryllis
primly. ‘Apart from the fact that there are only two of us and we don’t have a
dog. We’re going to see if we can pick up any chatter while we’re being good
citizens and sharing our valuable information with the police.’

Christopher thought about this. ‘We could be the
Famous Five if Jock came back and we roped in Jemima and Dave,’ he pointed out
after spreading marmalade on his toast.

‘But we still wouldn’t have a dog,’ said
Amaryllis. ‘Unless we -’

‘Unless we what?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

Christopher knew she was at her least trustworthy
when she said the word ‘nothing’ in this context. His heart sank. She was going
to offer to adopt the homeless man’s homeless dog, and then regret doing so the
first time she had to take it for a long walk in the rain, or when it savaged
some harmless child or poodle. There would be tears before bedtime.

As it turned out, things didn’t unfold in that way
at all.

Charlie Smith, looking somewhat more grey and
lined than usual, opened the door to them personally at the police station. He
had a piece of toast in his hand and the dog at his heels. He explained as he
ushered them through to an interview room that he had sent Sergeant McDonald
home to get a good night’s sleep, and that the sergeant hadn’t surfaced yet.
Constable Burnett would take their statements. He didn’t mention the dog.

Even young Constable Burnett looked greyish.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ Christopher enquired
politely.

‘I’m grand,’ he said, obviously exaggerating
wildly. ‘Now, it’s irregular for both of you to give me your statements
together, so who wants to go first? Who actually discovered the body?’

‘I was first on the scene,’ said Amaryllis. ‘But
only by minutes. We were together the whole time.’

Constable Burnett sighed. ‘OK, then, we’ll just do
this all in a oner. I’ll sort it out later. Don’t tell the chief.’

They ran through what had happened. It didn’t take
long, and Christopher felt guilty that they hadn’t noticed a dark figure
running away from the scene, or found some amazing clue that had melted away
before the police got there. The young policeman went through it all twice and
there was still nothing, even when he started to ask what ground they had
covered before deciding to go down to Amaryllis’s apartment.

It wasn’t long before Amaryllis got bored with
being interviewed and decided to turn the tables.

‘So does Mr Smith have any theories?’

‘Theories?’

‘About why somebody should shoot a homeless man in
the back of the head? Was it the same person who helped him to escape?’

‘Um,’ said Constable Burnett. Obviously he hadn’t
been in the police force long enough to know that he would have to be downright
rude to Amaryllis to stop her. Anything less, and she would persist until he
gave in. It was no use warning him, Christopher thought, he would just have to
work it out for himself.

Amaryllis rephrased her questions. ‘Does he have
any suspects? Any good lines of enquiry?’

‘Come on, Ms Peebles,’ said Chief Inspector Smith,
coming into the interview room with the dog hot on his heels. ‘You know I can’t
tell you any of that. And neither can any of my officers.’

‘I’m just a concerned member of the public,’ said
Amaryllis. ‘I only want to help - but I need to know a few more facts if you
want me to do that.’

‘Not only do I not want you to help,’ said Mr
Smith, ‘but if the roads were open, I would strongly advise you to go and stay
in another town for a few days, until we clear this up. For your own safety, of
course.’

The words ‘and to get you out from under my feet’
hung in the air, unspoken.

The dog barked suddenly. It was on the alert,
listening. A moment later, Sergeant McDonald popped his head round the door of
the room.

‘They’ve ploughed the road right into town, from
the top. The guy from the Council’s just been in to tell us. He’s off to do the
other side now. We should be able to get cars in and out this morning.’

‘Thanks, Sergeant,’ said Mr Smith, and looked at
Amaryllis.

‘I haven’t got a car,’ she said, ‘and I bet it’ll
be a while before the bus comes round this way.’

‘Hmph,’ said Mr Smith. ‘I suppose I’d better go
and have a word with the people out there. Don’t go anywhere.’

Christopher knew this was all she needed to make
her go and break out through the window the homeless man had escaped from. But,
although she wriggled a bit as if her body was urging her to get out, she
stayed where she was. Evidently she still imagined she could get more
information out of Constable Burnett.

After Mr Smith and the dog had left, and Sergeant
McDonald had lumbered away in their wake, she started again.

‘So will you have to hand the case over to someone
else now, Constable Burnett?’

‘Probably,’ he said. ‘For a while, anyway. We all
need to go home and get some sleep. We should be able to get a couple of
officers in from Rosyth to cover for us for a few days. Now that we’ve worked
over Christmas and everything.’

‘Have you had to sleep in the police station?’

‘Me and the chief inspector have. In the cells.’

Constable Burnett’s expression showed that he didn’t
think much of this arrangement.

‘Next-door to the homeless man?’

‘Not exactly next-door.’

‘I hope he didn’t snore. Or talk in his sleep,’ said
Amaryllis, perhaps hoping the opposite of what she said.

The constable laughed, with an undertone of unease
as if he didn’t know where this was going.

‘Was he a kind of guest in here?’ said Amaryllis. ‘You
didn’t lock him in, did you? Did you search him when he first came in?’

The constable shook his head. ‘No reason to search
him. It was a pity we didn’t, considering -’

He stopped in mid-sentence. Amaryllis pounced.

‘Considering what? Did they find something at the
crime scene? A gun?’

Constable Burnett laughed. ‘Of course not. It was
a silly bit of costume jewellery.  Karen found it in the car.’

‘What kind of jewellery?’ asked Amaryllis. She
used the voice that was supposed to fool people into thinking she didn’t care
much about getting an answer, but Christopher could see the hair at the back of
her neck quivering with excitement.

‘What kind of jewellery? Oh - um -,’ said the
constable. He blushed suddenly. ‘I think it was a gold - octopus. Or maybe a
shark?’

‘Interesting,’ said Amaryllis, and got to her
feet. ‘We’d better be going now. Come along, Christopher.’

‘But Mr Smith said we weren’t to go anywhere,’
Christopher protested.

‘Since when did we ever bother about what Charlie
Smith said? Let’s get going. No time to lose.’

‘Are you planning to leave town?’ said Constable
Burnett. ‘Make sure you sign your statements before you do - I’ll have them
ready by this afternoon. Or maybe tomorrow. Just pop back in.’

His words followed them down the corridor - none
of the doors were locked - and out through to the reception area, where Mr
Smith and Sergeant McDonald were in conversation with a man in a hi-vis jacket
with ‘West Fife Council’ written on the back. The dog was circling round
restlessly behind the little group.

‘Hey, you two, we haven’t finished with you yet!’
said Mr Smith as they passed. But Christopher thought it was a half-hearted
attempt to stop them. Charlie Smith had burnt himself out.