5 Frozen in Crime (18 page)

When he opened his eyes, Charlie Smith thought he
had fallen through a warp in the space-time continuum into another dimension.
He was sure he could hear a helicopter - or was it just the buzzing in his
head? As he struggled to his feet Amaryllis said in a satisfied tone, ‘Jemima
and Dave are behind this!’ He was so befuddled that he found himself straining
his eyes to see if he could spot Mr and Mrs Douglas lurking in the bushes at
the other side of the helicopter as it decanted a small group of armed, uniformed
men who went straight into a classic formation, fanning out to cover the whole
area around the house.

‘What?’ he asked blearily, and coughed.

‘Take it easy, you may have inhaled some smoke,’
Amaryllis warned him. She didn’t seem to be rushing to join in with the
operation, whatever it was, but was fussing over Christopher and another man
who had both collapsed in the snow not far away.

There were sirens in the distance. In his
befuddled state Charlie struggled to distinguish between police and ambulance,
police and fire service.

‘Good, they’re on their way,’ said Amaryllis. She
pushed Christopher back down as he tried to stand up. ‘Stay there until the
paramedics have checked you out.’

‘I didn’t - I forgot to call,’ said Christopher,
hoarse and gasping for breath.

‘Sssh - you might need some oxygen,’ she said. ‘It
looks as if Jemima and Dave called for backup.’

The other man wasn’t so determined to get up. He
lay with his eyes open, watching them and wheezing.

‘This is Lord Murray, by the way,’ said Amaryllis
to Charlie. ‘I don’t think this is the best time to speak to him. But you might
catch him later on. Once all this is finished.’

‘What was that about Pitkirtly and fireworks?’
said Christopher suddenly.

‘Did you hear it too?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Was there
something else about setting charges?’

He nodded, set himself off coughing again, and
gave up trying to speak.

Amaryllis frowned. ‘There’s something funny about
all this… I thought the setting charges bit must be to do with what they did in
there -’ she waved her hand towards the back of the house, where the smoke had
died down a bit but, even more ominously, flames now shot out through the door,
and as they watched, a window caved in and they saw fire inside the room too.
Charlie shuddered as he thought about what might have happened. But Amaryllis
didn’t seem to want to waste time worrying about that. She continued, ‘Are you
sure they said Pitkirtly?’

‘Well it might have been Timbuktu, I suppose,’
said Christopher, in the middle of a coughing fit, with a trace of his usual
sarcasm.

‘Don’t try and talk any more,’ Amaryllis told him
brusquely. ‘I don’t know… Jimbo told us he was guarding Longannet against a
possible terrorist attack. It did seem a bit unlikely at the time, and what’s
that got to do with fireworks anyway?’

Her voice tailed off as one of the uniformed men
approached. She took him aside, out of earshot, and Charlie saw her talking
with great animation and many gestures. At first he seemed to be listening in
patient resignation, but after a while he became alert, like a dog pricking up
its ears, and eventually he and Amaryllis went off together. Charlie felt
suddenly tired, leaned against a tree and closed his eyes. By the time she came
back he was more or less asleep on his feet.

‘They’ve found ski tracks. They’ll take the
chopper away and look for the two men,’ she told Charlie.

‘Oh, God, I’m tired,’ he said, yawning.

She gave him a look. ‘Don’t you want to know about
the island?’

‘Oh, all right, what about it?’

Christopher, still coughing, sat up with a
struggle, and seemed to be listening. Lord Murray was still just lying there.

‘There’s been a ransom demand,’ she told them. ‘They
think it’s to do with Longannet – the power station. Unless we give them lots
of money and a safe conduct they’ll detonate charges they’ve planted in the old
mine tunnels and blow it up.’

There was a stunned silence. Then Christopher started
to cough and wheeze in alarm. Charlie felt a shiver of panic ripple through his
body. He noticed how stupid Christopher looked as he turned a shocked gaze on
Amaryllis, and decided to make an effort not to appear quite so stupid himself.
He thought of an intelligent question.

‘So was Longannet mentioned in the demand?’

‘Not exactly. They just said they would blow the
whole place sky-high and the fires would be seen for miles around.’

‘The whole place?’ Charlie queried.

Amaryllis shrugged.

‘They assumed it was about Longannet – nothing
else around here would have the same impact.’

‘So,’ said Charlies, ‘this demand - how did it
come in?’

‘Mobile phone - not used before or since. Around
twelve today. They must have been quite confident of getting into position
before anyone did anything. They didn’t know they’d have to deal with us,
though. That was a mistake. They should have secured the perimeter before they
sent the demand.’

Her voice held a note of triumph which was,
Charlie thought, a little bit premature.

‘Not over yet,’ said Christopher, speaking with
difficulty.

‘Do they know what sort of damage that would do?’
asked Charlie in a low voice. He didn’t particularly want Christopher and Lord
Murray to overhear.

Amaryllis frowned at him. ‘Wait,’ she mouthed.

‘Damage?’ wheezed Christopher. ‘What about
Pitkirtly? How much damage?’

‘You need some help,’ said Amaryllis, fixing him
with a stare. ‘Hey!’ she called to a couple of paramedics who had just emerged
from a newly arrived ambulance. ‘Over here!’

‘But why?’ said Charlie. ‘Why would they want to
do that? What’s in it for them?’

The fire brigade arrived just then, making their
way through the snow with some difficulty; two fire engines skidded to a halt
by the back door of the house and the firemen began work.

Just when Charlie thought there was nobody left to
come along, a small van pulled up alongside them and the woman from the cattery
tumbled out of the driving seat, followed closely by Jock McLean from the
passenger side. By this time the paramedics had whisked Christopher and Lord
Murray away to the ambulance where they were receiving treatment for smoke
inhalation. Charlie felt he was fortunate not to have suffered too badly from
it, but then, according to Amaryllis he had been dumped close to the door and
she had got him out fairly quickly. She herself seemed immune to that kind of
thing.

‘Here, wasn’t that his lordship?’ said Jock
McLean, jerking an irreverent thumb towards the ambulance.

‘Do you mean Christopher?’ said Amaryllis.

Jock snorted in his usual inelegant way. ‘No,
course not. Lord Murray, that’s the one. He gave out prizes at the school every
year - until some idiot decided prizes weren’t fair. I can tell you what wasn’t
fair - depriving the whole school of the extra couple of hours of freedom we
got from going home early on prize-giving day.

Fortunately Amaryllis, who had received some sort
of a signal from one of the armed men - were they army or Special Branch?
Charlie asked himself - interrupted Jock’s random reminiscences. Otherwise
Charlie realised there was a good chance Jock would drive his companions to do
something desperate such as covering him with snow and leaving him to stand there
with his pipe still clamped between his teeth like a hideously moth-eaten
snowman.

‘Charlie - would you be ok to come with me in the
helicopter? I’ve hitched a lift – to help them spot Jimbo and Mal. And then to
see how it all works out.’

‘OK,’ he said, hoping he wouldn’t regret it later.

And so it was that he unexpectedly got an aerial
view of Pitkirtly and its environs as the helicopter defied gravity to lift
itself into the air and swing out over the trees, its occupants keeping their
eyes peeled for two men crossing the snow below. He hadn’t realised before how
many trees there were between Old Pitkirtlyhill House and the town of Pitkirtly,
but then of course he hadn’t had any reason to think about it before.

After what seemed like a lot of time-wasting by the
paramedics, although they were probably either waiting for more casualties or
trying to find out which hospital to go to, Christopher and Lord Murray were
whisked away by ambulance. It was an unnerving experience because, as they soon
found out, ambulances didn’t handle any better than any other vehicle under
these conditions. Christopher almost wished they could have gone by helicopter
instead, although he knew he would only have embarrassed himself by being sick
or having a panic attack.

Neither of them was ill enough to justify the
sirens, and the paramedic who was with them spent most of the journey leaning
into the front of the ambulance and making jokes with his colleague who was
driving.

After a while Lord Murray pushed aside his oxygen
mask and said, ‘You don’t think they’ll really be stupid enough to blow anything
up, do you?’

‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He pushed aside his
mask too, coughing as he did so. ‘Amaryllis will stop them.’

‘Good-looking girl,’ commented Lord Murray.

‘Yes,’ said Christopher. Even when he wasn’t
actually coughing, his throat hurt so much he didn’t feel like speaking very
much. It turned out, however, that Lord Murray did.

‘Never thought Malcolm would do something like
that,’ he said, struggling to sit up and eventually flopping back on the
pillow. ‘Wild boy – that’s why we put him in the army, you know. Couldn’t settle
to anything… Did someone mention blowing things up?’

Christopher tried a tentative ‘Mmm’ to see if that
would hurt too. It wasn’t quite as bad as forming words. Unfortunately Lord
Murray took it as a prompt to continue with Mal’s life story.

‘He got into a bit of trouble with that before,’
continued his lordship dreamily. ‘Playing with explosives in the tunnels under
Pitkirtly Island. I heard a couple of the local girls drowned. We had to put
him in the army after that. Save the family name. That sort of thing.’

‘The family name?’ said Christopher incredulously.
He hadn’t removed his oxygen mask so he didn’t think anyone would notice his
tone of voice, and perhaps they hadn’t even heard the words.

‘Bit of a hero in Afghanistan,’ added Lord Murray,
wheezing a little. ‘He and his friend went in all guns blazing to rescue some
local people from one of the warlords… He found out afterwards they didn’t even
want to be rescued – extraordinary.’

It didn’t sound all that heroic to Christopher; he
even caught himself feeling smug about having seen through Mal at a very early
stage in their acquaintance. He had always known it wasn’t natural to want to
go on these major quests. Doing good by stealth or in small ways was the better
option. Not that you always got any thanks for it.

He started to cough again and the paramedic was at
his side in a couple of moments, adjusting the oxygen mask and then listening
to his chest.

‘Better keep quiet for a while,’ he advised.

Christopher started to explain that he wasn’t the
one who had trouble keeping quiet, but the paramedic just shooshed him and
turned to Lord Murray.

‘We don’t just give you these masks for fun, you
know,’ he scolded. ‘Try and keep quiet – give your lungs a rest.’

‘Nothing the matter with me,’ said Lord Murray,
trying to wriggle into an upright position while struggling against a paroxysm
of coughing. The paramedic put one hand on his chest and gently pushed him back
down.

‘I don’t want to hear another word from either of
you,’ he said. ‘You’re distracting the driver with all this coughing. It’s not
easy getting along at all under those conditions, you know.’

Christopher considered pushing aside his mask
again to say something sarcastic about the conditions, but the paramedic gave
him a look.

They lay there silently for a while, one at each
side of the ambulance. The paramedic resumed his conversation with the driver.
A few minutes later there was a bump, and the whole vehicle shuddered and
lurched. Christopher braced himself: he could picture them skidding along on
two wheels, heading for the nearest ditch. But they suddenly made a 180 degree
turn and came to a halt. The driver was swearing under his breath. Somehow that
made it seem much worse than if he had shouted obscenities into the frosty air.
But he probably wasn’t allowed to do that while he had passengers.

‘Everybody all right back here?’ asked the
paramedic, picking himself up from the floor. ‘There’ll be a slight delay while
we regroup. Try not to talk amongst yourselves.’

He swung past them and jumped out through the back
doors, closing them behind him, while Christopher heard the driver, still
swearing, open his door and get out. Various bumps, thuds and shouts came from
outside.

‘We’re not going to make it to hospital,’ wheezed
Lord Murray, having removed the oxygen mask again. ‘Might as well have stayed
at home.’

‘Mmhm,’ mumbled Christopher. He hoped they wouldn’t
have to spend the night here in the ambulance. Surely that wouldn’t be very
good for smoke inhalation. He supposed they couldn’t have stayed at Lord Murray’s
with the fire going on, but maybe if he asked the ambulance crew nicely they
would drop him off in Pitkirtly and he could rely on the restorative properties
of Old Pictish Brew instead of modern medicine.

He suddenly felt suffocated by the oxygen mask –
was this even possible? - and moved it away from his nose and mouth again. He
decided to compromise by not speaking.

Lord Murray succeeded in pushing himself up into a
sitting position. ‘I’d better be getting back home to find out what Malcolm’s
up to. You never stop looking out for your little brother, do you?’

Christopher glanced at him uneasily. He knew
aristocrats sometimes seemed a bit weird to normal people like him, but he wasn’t
keen on being trapped in a snow-bound vehicle with one who was having a funny
turn. He decided not to confess that he didn’t have a brother, just a sister.
He didn’t want to talk about Caroline. Even now that they were on good terms
again, he couldn’t entirely forget the past.

‘Been covering up for him for years,’ continued
Lord Murray. ‘Lying – cheating – stealing.’ He glanced round furtively, as if
convinced there was another paramedic hiding in the dark space behind the door.
‘He stole the golden peacock, you know.’

‘From the jeweller’s?’

‘Before that – long before that. He was the one
who replaced it with a fake. Years ago. It was a family heirloom – my father
would have been furious if he’d found out.’

‘Did you know it was a fake all along?’

The minor peer’s eyes, small, pale and cunning,
met Christopher’s.

‘Not until Malcolm told me. And that was after I’d
taken it down to the jeweller’s. I needed the money, you know. House doesn’t
pay for itself. Grounds – deer park – roof crumbling.’

‘Can’t you get a grant for the repairs?’ said
Christopher. They had both discarded their oxygen masks. Christopher was so
engrossed in the story he forgot to cough.

‘Ha! Grants!’ said Lord Murray. ‘Council poking
about, can’t be bothered with all that. They’re a bunch of lefties anyway –
keep haranguing me about the deer park. Think I shouldn’t be keeping deer in
captivity. It’s a perfectly natural environment for deer. The grounds wouldn’t
look right without them.’

‘So what happened – when Mal told you the golden
peacock was a fake?’

‘Got him to steal it back,’ said Lord Murray. He
glared at Christopher as if to pre-empt any censure. ‘I didn’t know he was
going to take a gun and frighten people! I told him to do it discreetly.’

‘Rob a jeweller’s shop in the middle of the
afternoon when people were doing their Christmas shopping – discreetly?’

The wrongness of it made Christopher feel faint.
He lay back on the pillow and lifted the oxygen mask to his face again, more to
hide his expression than because he really needed it now.

‘I couldn’t have the family name brought into
disrepute,’ said Lord Murray. He paused, as if thinking, and then added, ‘Suppose
it is now – in disrepute I mean. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe it was a mistake
to ask him to do that. I knew he would steal other things as well once he got
into the safe. He wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation.’

He stared in Christopher’s direction, but his eyes
were looking at something in the distance, perhaps in that different universe
inhabited by his kind, where it was normal to have a deer park, and where roof
repairs were a matter of historic importance and not just a way to prevent
water from dripping on to your pillow.

‘He doesn’t take drugs, you know. He’s got a big
project to help people in Africa. He’s the black sheep of the family, but he
isn’t all bad… You don’t think he really will blow anything up, do you?’ he added
in a plaintive tone. ‘The family would never live that down.’

Christopher wondered if this man had a wife and
children stashed away somewhere, or whether he was the last of his line, the
only person standing between his ancestral home and the developers who would no
doubt move in after him to turn the place into a luxury hotel or old people’s
flats. He tried to think of a tactful way of asking this, without hinting at
feelings of surprise or even revulsion that the man had bred.

‘Is your wife - away?’ he ventured at last.

‘Oh, Marion left me years ago. Lives on the
Riviera with a Lottery millionaire. Kids grown-up – skiing over Christmas. I
see them sometimes.’

‘Oh,’ said Christopher.

He suddenly thought of the homeless man and
wondered if he had ever been married and had children, or whether his dog had
been his only companion in the world ever. He supposed Mal and Jimbo must have
killed the man because they thought he knew too much about them and their
activities. They had got rid of him with the same insouciance as most people
would swat a bluebottle.

He lay there and pondered on the various
consequences of Lord Murray’s urge to protect his family name.

Until there was the sound of a car engine outside,
and a low growling voice that he recognised.

‘… give you a hand to get that moved?’ said Dave.

Christopher cast aside the oxygen mask, struggled
to his feet and flung open the back doors of the ambulance. He stumbled round
the side of the vehicle and came to a snowdrift, in which the front wheels were
embedded.  Dave and the paramedics were assessing the situation by staring at
it and shaking their heads. Beyond them sat the Land Rover, Jemima’s
uprightness in the front seat only threatened by the dog, which stood on her
lap glaring at the group of men. When it saw Christopher it started to bark. He
chose to believe it was pleased to see him, but he didn’t test out that theory
by going anywhere near it. Instead he waved to Jemima, and approached Dave and
the others.

‘What are you doing on your feet?’ said one of the
paramedics.

‘Where are we going?’ said Christopher. He tried
hard not to cough, but the freezing air got into his throat and he began to
wheeze.

The driver indicated the snowdrift in front of the
wheels and said, ‘Where do you think we’re going?’

‘I could pull you out,’ Dave offered.

Christopher stared at him. Dave was a big man but
even so…

‘With the Land Rover, I assume,’ said the
paramedic who had been looking after them.

‘Haha,’ boomed Dave. ‘Hear that, Jemima? I could
still do it on my own, mind you. We used to have a tug of war team years ago. I
had to give up after a while – the others didn’t think it was fair having me in
the team. Discrimination, I suppose you’d call it nowadays.’

‘I’m afraid we can’t let you tow us out, sir,’
said the driver after a brief consultation between the paramedics. ‘It’s
against the rules. We have to call it in and wait for a replacement ambulance.’

‘I could take them home,’ said Dave, sweeping his
arms around to encompass Christopher and Lord Murray, who had appeared beside
the ambulance.

‘They’re supposed to stay with us,’ protested one
of the paramedics. ‘They should really be in hospital. At least overnight.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Dave cheerily. ‘A bit of smoke
never hurt anybody.’

‘I’d rather go home than hospital,’ said
Christopher. ‘And it’s much nearer.’

‘Not sure if the house is habitable,’ muttered
Lord Murray. ‘Might have burned down by now.’

‘Take him as well, and you’ve got a deal,’ said
the driver, addressing Dave. ‘But make sure you keep them indoors and call out
a doctor if they get worse. I’ll give them a couple of inhalers to calm down
the coughing. And at least they’re on their feet now, so it’s doubtful if
they’d be kept in hospital anyway.’

He turned to Christopher. ‘It’s at your own risk,’
he warned. ‘Against medical advice.’

Christopher shivered. He couldn’t see that the
risk of going off with Dave to a nice warm house, where Jemima would
undoubtedly bring them hot cups of tea and refilled hot water bottles every ten
minutes as well as producing some hitherto unheard-of Scottish delicacy that
had the twin effects of curing smoke inhalation and causing a dangerous leap in
cholesterol, was any worse than the risk of standing around here in the cold while
the paramedics argued about how to get the ambulance out of a snowdrift.

‘Fine,’ he said.

Lord Murray nodded agreement.

‘Good,’ said Dave. ‘Jemima’s got some pease brose
on the go.’

Christopher smiled to himself, and happily
followed Dave to the Land Rover.