5 Frozen in Crime (17 page)

Christopher suspected Chief Inspector Smith had sent
him on a wild-goose chase to keep him out of the way in case anything went
wrong. At least he hadn’t suffered the ignominy of being packed off to the
cattery with Dave, Jemima and the dog. He plodded through the snow, keeping the
fence immediately to his left. After a while it curved round away from him, and
he followed it doggedly.

He was depressed to see the sky darkening and the
snow beginning again. What if Dave and Jemima got stuck at the cattery? Did Rosie
have enough food for all of them, or would they have to ration it - or start to
eat the animals? This idea amused him for about five seconds, and then he
started to worry again. Why had Amaryllis been away so long? Perhaps Lord
Murray had offered refreshments. He pictured the two of them sitting on hard
but elegant chairs, one at each side of a small fire, a worn but expensive
Persian rug between them, sipping Earl Grey tea from old-fashioned china cups.
There might even be cucumber sandwiches. He knew this was a trick by his mind
to divert him from more sinister thoughts. Amaryllis must have had her
suspicions that everything wasn’t above board at Old Pitkirtlyhill House, or
she would never have agreed to come up here in the first place.

He couldn’t quite work it out himself, unless she
thought Mal hadn’t been entirely honest with them when they had met him here.
Few things would have pleased Christopher more than finding out that Mal was a
crook, and yet contrarily, knowing this was just based on gut instinct and
jealousy made him more reluctant to accept it without evidence. He would have
thought her friend Jimbo was more likely to be in the frame for the murder of
the homeless man, since they had witnessed Jimbo speaking to the man as he went
up the hill at the end of Amaryllis’s cul de sac. And yet Jimbo was a bona fide
member of the  armed forces with a cast-iron reason for being in the vicinity.
Whereas they still weren’t sure how Mal had come to be in the old house….

The fence changed from being a tall structure with
spikes on the top which somehow made him think of dinosaurs into a low wooden
one, apparently much less threatening.  But he saw when he approached it that
it had a wire running along the top with a little sign saying it was electrified.
For one wild moment he entertained the idea of taking a run up and vaulting
over it.

At least this made him smile again.

He trudged on, still following the line of the
fence even when it led him through a bramble patch as it had done once or twice
so far. The snow was coming down more solidly now, and he couldn’t see more
than a few metres ahead because it was blowing right across his path. Even if
he had been able to see the house from this angle, which was doubtful in any
case, it would have been rendered invisible by this whiteout. He hoped Dave and
Jemima had got up the road to the cattery before it had developed fully.

It was at this point, isolated from the rest of
humanity by the blizzard, unsure of where he was going and of whether he was
due to walk into danger some time soon, that he reached into the pocket of his
parka and took out his mobile phone, on this occasion fully charged up and, as
he discovered when he switched it on, fully operational. He smiled again as he
replaced it in his pocket. At least this time he hadn’t left it on the kitchen
table. He had a live link to the outside world after all.

Almost as if the phone had been a lucky talisman, almost
immediately after this he came to a stile. In normal circumstances he would
have hesitated even then: but if Amaryllis was in trouble, which he had a
horrible feeling she was, he had to do something to help. He batted aside his
reservations about whether he would be any use against ruthless men, possibly
armed with guns, and his feeling that he might get in the way or even just
commit some hideous social faux pas. None of these thoughts were at all
relevant.

He heaved himself up on to the first step of the
stile. A deer stood at the other side, watching with what he could only think
of as derision. He clapped his hands in their heavy gloves.

‘Shoo!’ he called, and the deer left. It tiptoed
unhurriedly through the snow and eventually vanished from sight among the spindly
birches and rowans, which had only now themselves become visible in a gap in
the blizzard. He hoped it hadn’t gone to fetch reinforcements. He wasn’t sure
how many deer constituted a herd and whether he could just push through them or
if they would gang up on him.

This was so typical! He might have to face armed
robbers any minute and he was worrying about a herd of deer. Christopher
realised all over again that he really wasn’t suited to this kind of activity.
He thought back fondly to the time he had helped Jemima unravel her family
history in the library: that was where his strengths lay.

As he struggled over the top of the stile,
slipping on the steps and clinging on to the sides to stop himself falling, he
thought he heard a shout and a crash in the middle distance. Oh, great, someone
had spotted him. But, glancing over in what he fervently hoped was the
direction of the house, he found he could still only see about fifty metres
ahead, so it seemed unlikely anyone had seen him, unless perhaps the security
cameras happened to point over this way. But was this a fruitless quest anyway?
He wondered if he might be better to go back, call Dave and Jemima and see if
they had sent for reinforcements. After all, if the police did come along they
would need somebody on hand to guide them quickly to the house, and if he
stationed himself by the main gate…

But what would Amaryllis do?

He wouldn’t usually have bothered asking himself
this question. It must be the extreme weather that was making everything seem
urgent and somehow bigger, as if real life had suddenly turned into some sort of
Nordic saga, or Russian epic along the lines of War and Peace. He would have to
change his name to Kristoforovsky in the latter case, he joked to himself.

Somehow smiling propelled him onwards through the
tundra, instead of back over the stile in ignominious retreat. He didn’t think
he had the depth for a character from Tolstoy. Making himself smile would have
been frowned on, for a start.

He started as a face suddenly popped round a tree
trunk a few metres ahead - and relaxed as he saw it was another deer looking at
him. Would the police, when they came, find him wandering around in a state of
paranoia, convinced animals were watching him round every corner? There was
something about the snow and the deer and indeed the whole situation that made
him feel as if he were in a different world.

The falling snow had one big advantage, but he
didn’t realise that until it slowed to a few flakes and then stopped
altogether. It had hidden him from observers, but it had also concealed from
him how close he was getting to his target. He could now see the back of the
house through the remaining vegetation - and he knew anyone looking out from
there would be able to see him too.

He would have lurked for much longer at the edge
of the scrubland, except that two things happened in fairly quick succession as
he hesitated.

The first thing was that two men appeared round
the end of the house, carrying something between them. It seemed at first like
a sack of something heavy, because they were laboring over the task and it
sagged in the middle between them. As they came closer, he saw that it was a
person in a big jacket - a lot like Chief Inspector Smith’s big jacket, in
fact. Christopher weighed up the chances of someone else wearing Mr Smith’s
jacket and decided it was rather unlikely. So his hunch that something was
badly wrong had been correct, but that wouldn’t be of much use to him now.

One of the men walked unsteadily, with a bit of a
limp. His mind flew to Mal, who had been around the last time they were here.
The other looked vaguely familiar too. What was going on here? Crouching now
behind a Christmas tree that grew near the edge of the wild area, he rapidly
discounted the possibility that Charlie Smith had fallen accidentally somewhere
in the grounds and they were bringing him round to the back of the house for
medical attention. That didn’t leave very many other possibilities. If they
were desperate enough to attack a police officer, then he certainly didn’t want
to confront them.

He thought one of them had said something - or
maybe it was just Charlie Smith groaning.

Then he heard a couple of words - they sounded
like ‘Pitkirtly fireworks’, but that was so weird that he didn’t really believe
his ears.

Then loud laughter and ‘set the charges, then,’
from one of the man. Again, he didn’t know whether to believe the evidence of
his senses. He hoped they were deceiving him, since his mind leapt to
explosions, perhaps because he knew Mal at least had once been a soldier. That
was it. Now he knew it was all in his mind. He breathed a small sigh of relief,
but lurked behind the tree just in case. He wondered if the aristocracy planted
out their Christmas trees after using them just as some normal people did, in
the hope they would take root properly. He remembered his father once planting
out a Christmas tree and then having to chop it down a few years later because
it had grown so big and towered over his sweet peas.

Why was he even thinking about sweet peas at a
time like this? He peered out from behind the tree again. They had disappeared
into the cellars, if these were the rooms accessible through the open door he
could see. It must be confusing having doors at different levels like this. It
might be useful to have cellars, though.

He knew his thoughts were rambling to avoid
focussing on the crux of the matter.

The other man had looked vaguely familiar. He
pictured Jimbo as he had last seen him, climbing the hill outside Amaryllis’s
flat sideways on his skis in that clever way that skiers had. And talking to
the homeless man. This time an alarm bell definitely rang in Christopher’s
mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in coincidence - he came across evidence
of random occurrences being related to each other every day - but suddenly all
the unusual things that had happened in Pitkirtly over the past few days had
linked themselves together in a pattern. He couldn’t quite work out what
pattern they were making, but it was almost certainly a dark, sinister Gothic
one and not just a harmless Paisley.

He heard voices again, and kept well behind the
tree for a few minutes until he judged that they were now coming from further
away. He peered out again. The two men were walking away round the corner of
the house, leaving a new set of tracks in the snow. No sign of Charlie Smith
now. He wondered if the men were planning on returning to the back of the house
any time soon.

It took him a while to get himself out from behind
the tree. He knew Amaryllis would have done it much more quickly. He pushed the
thought of Amaryllis further down in his mind. It wouldn’t help if he got
emotional about this; he had to think rationally.

Then he heard a muffled bang from the back of the
house, and reason went out the window.

He sprung out from behind the tree and headed out
into the open, trying to run across the snow but failing miserably as his feet
in their winter boots sank into it, collecting ice on their soles and weighing
him down. He flung himself at the wall of the house when he got to it, clinging
on and trying to merge into the stone. There was smoke now billowing from what
he imagined was either the back door or a separate entrance to the cellars.
Pushing all his instincts aside, he headed straight for it.

As he went in, he bumped into someone heading out.
Someone who was dragging a dead weight behind her.

‘Help me with Charlie,’ she said irritably. ‘I’ve
got to go back for Lord Murray.’

He pushed her aside and went on into the smoke.

‘Just get out,’ he said over his shoulder,
coughing. ‘I’ll be back.’

Amaryllis hated not knowing what was going on, and
she hated even more that Mal had overpowered her and left her lying around the
wine cellar like a substandard bottle of claret. But as soon as she came round,
she became determined not to stay there long enough to get covered in cobwebs.

‘Lord Murray? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, but he’s tied me up, I’m afraid.’

Amaryllis, trying to move, realised for the first
time since regaining consciousness that she was also tied up, and groaned.
Although being tied up was only a nuisance and not a disaster, it would hold
her up in any attempt to get out of here.

‘Just a minute,’ she said, resigned. ‘I’ll just get
myself free and then we can see about forcing that door.’

‘That door’s six inches thick,’ said Lord Murray. ‘How
are you going to get through that? It’s one of the original doors. And there’s
one of these slit windows somewhere but no-one could possibly wriggle through
it..’

Just don’t start on original features and
mullioned windows and planning permission, thought Amaryllis, using a technique
she had learned during her professional career to loosen and finally break free
of the rope that was tied round her wrists. She undid her ankles too and, after
wiggling her hands and feet about to restore full movement, she went over to
Lord Murray. She tried not to puzzle over what was really happening here;
instead she concentrated for a few minutes on getting him on his feet. He had
been tied to an old empty wine rack, and she realised as he lumbered to his
feet that he must have been in that position for some time.

‘Better do a few stretches now,’ she advised, and headed
for the door to make a preliminary assault on it.

Yes, it was old and thick, but she was confident
she could find a way through.

After a while she was conscious that he was so
close behind her that he was almost breathing down her neck. She couldn’t
exactly complain he was standing in her light, since the available light was so
dim it was almost negligible, but she definitely felt crowded. She turned
towards him and said, ‘Would you mind taking a step back, please? I need a bit
of space to do this.’

‘What are you doing? You do know that’s an
original door, don’t you? I don’t want it damaged.’

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said, calling
up her not very extensive reserves of patience. ‘If he comes back -’

‘Who, Mal?’ He laughed. ‘Mal’s just playing games
with us. He wouldn’t really hurt me. He’s got bigger fish to fry, anyway.’ He
seemed to think about it for a moment, then he added, ‘Maybe literally.’

What was the idiot talking about? She gave up on
the lock. She would have to kick the door in. Never mind not damaging it.
Amaryllis was more concerned about whether Mal would be back to damage her
again before she could get out of here. If Lord Murray didn’t believe his
brother would hurt him, he was welcome to stick around and find out.

‘Can you please stand back? I’m going to kick the
door, and I need more space.’

‘Kick the door?’ his voice squeaked to a
crescendo.

‘Go and stand over there. By the wine-racks. Don’t
move until I get the door open,’ she ordered him firmly. To her surprise, he
stumbled off again, his feet catching on aged flagstones as he went.

She tried a tentative kick. But tentative wasn’t
going to work, she knew that already. She took a deep breath, tensed her
muscles appropriately, and went for it with all guns blazing - figuratively. If
she had really had all guns blazing she could definitely have blasted her way
out of here a lot more quickly.

She jarred her leg almost unbearably against the
solid oak of the door. Paused for breath. Had anyone called for reinforcements
yet? She would be very happy if the cavalry - or its modern equivalent - were
to come galloping over the hill at this point.

She kicked the door again with her other foot in
annoyance, not putting much effort into it. The door swung open. The lock must
have been fatally weakened by that first, stronger kick.

As she peered out into the dim light that filtered
down the corridor from the back door, she heard voices, not far away. She was
sure she heard the word ‘fireworks’, but it wasn’t quite clear, and she couldn’t
think what its significance was. There was laughter immediately after this and
some more words to do with setting charges. But she didn’t really listen to the
words: the voice alone transfixed her. One of the men out there was her old
friend Jimbo, or at least someone who sounded very like him. The other one, she
thought, must be Mal.

They were approaching from outside, breathing
heavily as if they had been running. As she cowered back into the doorway of
the wine-cellar, they flung something down in the corridor. She had imagined
they might check on their captives in the wine-cellar, but they didn’t seem to
be lingering here.

Suddenly, while Amaryllis still lurked in the
shadows, there was a smallish explosion and smoke billowed along the corridor.
They must have thrown something in as they left: either a relatively harmless
smoke bomb - if you didn’t count the effects of smoke inhalation - or some sort
of small grenade, which could do worse damage.

She hissed in the general direction of Lord
Murray, who was still obediently loitering in the deep shadows, ‘Come on - we’ve
got to get out now.’

She didn’t wait for him, but headed for the door
to the outside world. Even if Mal and - possibly - Jimbo waited out there,
there was a chance that she could get past them. She didn’t want to wait for
another, more powerful explosion, which was what she would have arranged if she
had been setting something off, or to be overcome by smoke.

She thought she was close to the door when she
fell over something on the floor. It was soft, and groaned faintly when she
fell on top of it. It was Charlie Smith.

Almost as soon as she started to drag him towards
the open air, someone else ran in from that direction.

‘Help me with Charlie,’ she said brusquely. ‘I’ve
got to go back for Lord Murray.’

To her surprise, he pushed her out of the way,
muttered something like ‘I’ll be back’ and disappeared, coughing, into the
smoke. She had never seen Christopher put himself in danger with quite so much
determination.

She thought there was no point in all of them
blundering around in the semi-darkness and breathing in smoke, so she completed
her task of dragging Charlie Smith outside, put him in the recovery position
behind an overgrown Christmas tree at the edge of the scrubland, and was about
to return to the fray when two things happened.

One was that a helicopter came into view round at
the front of the house, and landed on what would have been the front lawn if it
hadn’t been covered with snow. The other was that Christopher emerged from the
back of the house, coughing like mad but managing to support a portly
middle-aged man in jeans and a holey jumper, who looked like a tramp but who,
she now knew, was a minor member of the aristocracy.