5 Frozen in Crime (5 page)

Charlie Smith had been so incensed with Christopher
and Amaryllis - mainly with Amaryllis, because he knew she must have been the
ring-leader - that he could see his junior officers watching him anxiously for
signs of a stroke or heart attack. At least one of them was likely to be
listing the signs and symptoms of each of these in his or her head in case they
had to call an ambulance.

But as he finished the phone call he was smiling. ‘Where’s
that list of stuff from the safe in the jeweller’s? I need to check something
out.’

‘It’s back in the office,’ said Karen Whitefield,
still apparently anxious about his welfare. ‘Are you feeling all right, sir?’

‘I’m fine, and I’ll be even more fine if one of
you goes and gets me the list instead of standing about staring as if I had two
heads,’ said Charlie. ‘And by the way, who was it that told an elderly woman
she’d have to wait until the morning before we’d go and look for her equally
elderly husband in a snowdrift at the side of the A985?’

The assembled officers shuffled their feet and
muttered. But he wasn’t going to press the point now. Better to follow up this
lead while there was still a chance of getting out there this evening. After
all, if Christopher Wilson could do it, then surely he could. Even without the
company of a best friend who was a retired spy.

Karen brought him the list and he glanced down it.

No, he hadn’t been imagining things. There it was,
in black and white, listed unobtrusively among Rolex watches (query fake) and
diamond pendants: one gold peacock richly decorated with diamonds, emeralds and
turquoises, purchased by private sale during the summer from the collection of
Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill. The jeweller had added a note explaining that the
egg was waiting to go to an important client in the Middle East and that he
thought it was an antique one made by Fabergé for some Russian aristocrat.

Charlie had intended to visit Old Pitkirtlyhill
House to question Lord Murray about this piece of jewellery. It seemed to him,
although he wasn’t an expert in the field, that a Fabergé animal must be equal
in worth to quite a number of Rolex watches, and he had a suspicion that it
might have been stolen and was being fenced, unintentionally or otherwise, by
the jeweller, although that did seem slightly far-fetched in a place like
Pitkirtly and in that case the jeweller could just have left it off the list.
Perhaps it didn’t really exist at all but was part of some sort of an insurance
scam. But he was reasonably sure the thieves had probably just worked out for
themselves that the most valuable stuff would be in the safe, so had
concentrated their efforts on that.

He hadn’t really envisaged trekking to see Lord
Murray through several feet of snow, but if he was going to have to go out to
rescue Amaryllis, Christopher and possibly Dave Douglas too, he might as well
justify the trip in terms of more useful police work. He didn’t actually want
to go out into the wilds in this weather. On the other hand he couldn’t in all
conscience send another officer, perhaps into danger. He frowned.

‘I’m going out,’ he said to Karen Whitefield. He
felt like adding ‘I may be some time,’ but he wasn’t sure she would get the
joke, such as it was.

‘Better take somebody with you,’ she said.

‘But I don’t –’

‘Take Constable Burnett, sir. And make sure you’ve
got your mobile and your radio and a torch and some blankets…’

It could be against the rules to allow a junior
officer to mother you, but Charlie found himself quite liking it, more so when
she made up some cheese and tomato sandwiches for him in the small kitchen, and
gave him a Mars bar from her own personal chocolate stash. Maybe she was
feeling guilty for not immediately volunteering to come out with him. But he
certainly wasn’t going to allow a woman officer to go out in these conditions.
He could hear the wind buffeting the flimsy prefabricated walls of the police
station. It had been built in a hurry following a minor crime wave in
Pitkirtly. Not long after Amaryllis’s arrival in town, needless to say.

He was checking out the police Land Rover, which
they didn’t often use because the police over at Kincardine were very
territorial about it, but which fortunately had been left at the station by
some oversight, when Constable Burnett, almost unrecognisable in a parka over
which he wore a hi-vis vest, materialized by his side.

‘Sir?’ he said. ‘Sergeant Whitefield says you’re
going out on your own?’

His voice held an accusing undertone.

‘Don’t tell me she’s made up sandwiches for you
too,’ said Charlie, noticing the package in the constable’s hand. ‘Well, you’d
better get in, I suppose.’

‘Sir? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to wait till
morning?’

‘We’re an emergency service, constable, not a team
of accountants. We could be too late by then. Dave Douglas must be seventy-five
if he’s a day. God knows why nobody’s stopped him driving before now. He’s
dangerous enough at the best of times, never mind in a blizzard with six inches
of solid ice under the wheels. If something’s happened to him, we’re not going
to leave him lying overnight to die of hypothermia – we can still get to him in
time if we go now.’

‘But is there any chance of getting through?’

‘There’s always a chance,’ said Charlie, finishing
the basic checks and looking to see if there were any thermal blankets in the
back seat.

‘Do you want me to drive, sir?’ said the
constable, sounding terrified.

Charlie sighed. He didn’t really fancy driving in
these conditions, but he didn’t necessarily trust a young tearaway like Keith
Burnett either.

‘I’ll have first go, Keith,’ he said. ‘When I’m
reduced to a gibbering wreck by the sight of whirling snowflakes you can take
over.’

‘That was very poetic, sir,’ said Keith Burnett,
and got into the passenger seat.

The snowflakes were indeed whirling all round
Charlie’s head, and if anything they were whirling faster and thicker than they
had been five minutes before. There was an increasing danger of drifting, especially
on higher ground. He knew all the stock phrases. The Met Office had already
issued a severe weather warning, and the police were advising people not to
travel unless their journey was absolutely necessary. He knew without even
checking with a higher authority that it was no use expecting a rescue
helicopter to take off tonight. They could be Dave Douglas’s only chance, not
to mention Amaryllis’s and Christopher’s as well. He set off into the blizzard
with a huge weight of responsibility resting on his shoulders.

The windscreen wipers were only just powerful
enough to clear most of the falling snow, and even so there were small drifts
building up in the corners. He didn’t look forward to the time when he would
have to get out of the Land Rover and sweep them away manually.

The radio crackled.

‘Earth calling Chief Inspector Smith,’ said
Sergeant McDonald’s voice, his accent distorted by the transmission into
something much stronger than usual.

‘Don’t tell me Dave Douglas has turned up?’ said
Charlie Smith, steering into a skid as he had learned at police driving school.
They landed on the pavement, facing the wrong way. He hoped he had imagined
Constable Burnett’s terrified gasp.

‘No, sir, I’m afraid not. It’s just to say the Met
Office have issued another severe weather warning specifically for the West
Fife coast. It’s for gale force winds and driving snow, sir.’

‘You must be joking!’

‘No, sir. You’ll hear the same on any radio
station just now.’

‘Hm,’ said Charlie, turning the Land Rover back to
face the right way along Sunk Causeway. He might as well go for it and try to
get up the hill out of Pitkirtly before it got any worse. Not that it looked as
if it could get much worse. On the other hand, surely freshly fallen snow must
be that bit easier to drive in than snow that had been compacted down to ice by
other traffic. On the other hand again, he reasoned, it would be worse if it
blew into drifts all over the place and blocked the roads. Oh well, there was
no point in worrying about it. Either they would get through or they wouldn’t.

‘Onwards and upwards,’ he said to Keith Burnett as
he pointed the Land Rover’s bonnet right at the hill and drove at it like a
maniac.

‘Or sideways,’ said a small voice beside him as
the vehicle lurched drunkenly on to the grass verge.

By some miracle they had both survived the crash,
and even with all the broken glass around Amaryllis couldn’t see any blood. She
had to talk Christopher out of the Range Rover, of course, since he was
clinging to his seat with a sort of death grip.

‘Inspector Smith said we should stay in the car,’
he said stubbornly.

‘I’m saying we need to get out of it now, and find
somewhere better to shelter,’ she told him. She lifted down Christopher’s
rucksack and heaved it over her shoulders. She didn’t have her own personal rucksack
with her, which she now regretted: it was a lucky charm which she considered to
have helped her survive various life-threatening incidents on the borders of
unfriendly nations. She supposed she might include the USA in her personal list
of these: she wasn’t confident of a welcome there since the Pearson MacPherson
fiasco.

At last she talked him out of the Range Rover.

‘The landlord’s going to be a bit annoyed,’ he
said, looking at the damage.

‘It’s all cosmetic,’ she said casually, starting
to lead the way.

He stopped in his tracks before they had gone
twenty metres.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Don’t ask me - I’m just as lost as you are. Maybe
even more.’

‘What did we bump into just now, anyway?’

She wished he hadn’t asked her that. ‘Um - a
pick-up truck.’

‘Dave’s?’

She nodded, trying to minimise the panic by not
putting it into words.

‘So - where’s Dave?’

‘Not in there, that’s for sure.’

Christopher stood still for another moment,
obviously thinking hard. Or maybe his expression had just frozen in place. This
was always a possibility in his case: he reminded Amaryllis of her grandmother,
who used to say if she looked cross the wind might change and she would be
stuck like that for ever. Only in Christopher’s case it was a permanent air of
bewilderment that was programmed into his features.

‘Don’t stand there too long, you’ll freeze to the
spot,’ she warned him, stamping her feet.

‘Can’t we follow his tracks?’

‘Covered up. I had a quick look. While you were
deciding whether to get out of the car or not.’

‘Are there any houses near here? Can you see any
lights?’

‘No, but we might not see them through the snow.’

‘Should we give him a shout in case he’s somewhere
around?’

‘If you like.’

They stood and called Dave’s name a few times, but
they quickly felt ridiculous.

‘We should have borrowed a search and rescue dog,’
said Christopher.

‘I don’t know where we’d have found one of those
at short notice.’

The snow was falling hard again, and Amaryllis was
seriously worried that they wouldn’t find any shelter. She saw that snow had
already accumulated inside the Range Rover, driving in through the shattered windscreen,
and of course Dave’s pick-up truck had been completely covered, though it must only
have been a matter of hours since he had left it there.

‘Come on - there’s a wood over this way. We’ll get
a bit of shelter in there as we go along.’

She didn’t wait for him to come to life, but
headed off towards the pine trees she could see just a little further along the
track that led off the road they had driven up - she guessed it was a rough
forestry track since the snow lay in ridges along it as if covering furrows
made by tractor wheels or something similar. She looked over her shoulder a few
minutes later and found him trudging along a few metres behind her, head down.

It was indeed more sheltered under the trees,
which were quite densely packed - Amaryllis guessed this was a miniature
plantation rather than a natural wood - but to make up for the shelter, there
was a constant danger of large clumps of snow falling on them from the heavily
loaded branches. She followed what seemed to be a path that led more or less in
a straight line. If they had plunged in among the trees they might have been
better protected from the wind and the snow, but there was an increased risk of
getting lost if they did that, and the dense darkness would make it more
dangerous even to walk along.

After what seemed like a long time, they came to a
fence.

‘Deer fence,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Hope it’s not
electric. It’s a good sign, otherwise.’

‘Why? We can’t get through.’

‘We could if we had to,’ she said. ‘But let’s walk
along it and see if there’s a gate. Have you got the map?’

In the lee of a particularly bushy pine tree, they
unfolded the map and held it between them. It took several attempts to work out
where they might be, mainly because it was hard to see which way was up, but once
they were reasonably sure, Amaryllis held the torch steady so that they could
both see.

‘Pitkirtlyhill Wood,’ she said.

‘I thought it was bigger than this,’ said
Christopher.

‘I didn’t think you knew your way around here.’

‘No, I don’t, but there was some sort of local
saying about things being as big and dense as Pitkirtlyhill Wood.’

‘Was there a legend about the king being defeated
only if Pitkirtlyhill Wood should come to proud Longannet?’ enquired Amaryllis.

Christopher glared at her. ‘It’s unlucky to quote
Macbeth,’ he said.

‘I wasn’t exactly quoting it,’ Amaryllis pointed
out. ‘And you’ve just said the name, anyway! All the bad luck will land on you.’

He sighed in a long-suffering manner. ‘We’ll both
be unlucky if we get hypothermia standing out here arguing about Shakespeare,
won’t we?’

‘Hmm, that’s interesting,’ she said, looking at
the map again.

‘What?’

‘Hang on to that fold a minute… Look. There.’

Still holding the torch in one hand, she traced a
path with her other hand. It led straight to Old Pitkirtlyhill House.

‘Maybe we’ll go and visit the lord of the manor,’
she said.

It took a while to find the gate, since the fence
didn’t follow a straight line but seemed to curve round and then back in the
middle. At least the exercise should keep hypothermia at bay for a bit longer,
Amaryllis reflected. Every time she looked round to check on Christopher, she
found he was still trudging along in her footsteps, head down. She thought of
Good King Wenceslas but she didn’t think singing it would be very popular. In
any case whenever she opened her mouth it got filled with snowflakes and the
icy wind snapped at the back of her throat, which wasn’t at all pleasant.

The gate, when they found it, was large and solid,
with metal bars, and spikes on the top. Definitely designed to keep out
unwelcome visitors - or even welcome ones, presumably. They gazed at it
respectfully for a moment.

‘Do you think there’s a bell?’ said Christopher.

‘They wouldn’t let us in even if there was,’ said
Amaryllis. She took something out of the pocket of her parka. ‘We’ll just have
to go through the fence.’

‘How are we supposed to -?’ Christopher began, and
then he saw what she was doing. She was clipping a hole in the wire of the
fence with the wire cutters she presumably always carried around with her.

‘How do you know it isn’t electric? And what if
they have guard dogs?’

She laughed. ‘I’ll take both these chances. And
actually, I already know it isn’t electric. There we are. Do you want to go
first?’

‘But how would Dave have got in there?’

‘In one of several possible ways. The owner of the
house, or his gamekeeper or butler, if he has one, might have been passing in
his car and picked him up and offered him a bed for the night. Or the gate
happened to be open when Dave came along, and he wandered in, and he’s probably
even now sitting by a roaring fire and being offered port and cigars by some
old family retainer. Can’t you just picture the scene?’

‘No,’ said Christopher. ‘And there’s something
weird about the way you can always come up with at least two alternative
explanations for everything that happens.’

‘It isn’t weird,’ said Amaryllis, wriggling
through the hole in the fence. ‘It’s creative.’

Christopher followed, but she could tell it was
against his better judgement.

‘We’ll end up getting arrested,’ he grumbled.

Funny, she thought, although she would have imagined
Mal was the best person to have an adventure with, she was enjoying observing
Christopher’s reactions and appreciating his sardonic comments more than she
would ever have admitted. Maybe it was because he was so different from her,
whereas she had a kind of fellow-feeling for Mal, as if they were long-lost
twins or something. She had a suspicion that it might get boring and perhaps even
irritating to be with someone so like herself for long periods of time.

There was what seemed to be a drive under the snow
on the other side of the gate. They followed it round in a big curve between
more trees. The snow was petering out, and it felt even colder than before. It
would have been nice to be sitting by a roaring fire. But maybe when they
reached Old Pitkirtlyhill House they would be invited in to sit beside one.
Even better if Dave was indeed there. But, despite the positive images she had
sketched for Christopher’s benefit, she was starting to think it was unlikely.
Could he really have got into the grounds? Did he have the stamina to walk up a
long snow-covered drive?

‘Phew, I hope Dave hasn’t passed out somewhere if
he’s managed to get this far,’ said Christopher, glancing round with an uneasy
expression. ‘What if he’s under a pile of snow somewhere and we’ve walked right
past him?’

‘If he’s under a pile of snow it’s - oh, look at
that!’

They had turned another corner and emerged from
the shadow of the trees into an open parkland which made the perfect frame for
what looked like a classic Georgian house: good proportions, two rows of big
windows, one or two with lights on, a curving flight of steps leading up to
rather a grand front door under a portico with pillars. The clouds had blown
over, at least temporarily, and the moon now shone on everything, giving them
an excellent view of the building but casting an odd blueish light on the banks
of snow that had been built up at the sides of the drive.

Amaryllis didn’t usually waste time admiring
scenery - it had often been dangerous to stand still for too long in her past
career - but she took a couple of minutes to stare at the house and its setting.

‘No dogs yet,’ muttered Christopher. ‘What do we
do? Are you going to search the outbuildings?’

‘I think we’ll just walk up to the front door and
announce ourselves,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Then we’ll get some help to search for
Dave.’

Christopher still looked doubtful. ‘What if they
throw us out? Or call the police?’

‘Fine,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’ll go somewhere else.’

She marched on up the steps at the front of the
house. She heard Christopher breathing hard behind her.

She faced the front door - actually a double door.
There was a big old-fashioned bell to ring, as well as an ornate door-knocker.

‘A Christmas Carol,’ said Christopher in an
undertone.

‘What?’

‘Marley’s Ghost.’

She was half-turned to listen to his explanation
when the door opened suddenly.

‘Why, hello, Amaryllis,’ said Mal. ‘This is a
surprise. I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’