Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) (8 page)

Chapter 8 The other half of the puzzle

Amaryllis wasn’t sure what had made her conjure up a scenario in which one of the twins was missing. She didn’t believe in psychic power, so it wasn’t that. Some sort of intuition based on reality and not on the supernatural must have triggered this thought. After speaking to Keith, she ran through the events of the past few days in her mind like a movie. It wasn’t exactly in the horror genre, although it had looked as if it might go that way at first, what with all the blood, and it couldn’t really be a comedy now that at least one death had occurred. Instead it seemed to be shaping up to be some weird art-house effort that she would never have gone to see in a million years.

That was appropriate, in a way, what with the arty people who had joined the cast.

She frowned. It wasn’t very much, but it was something odd. She had reached the point in her replaying of events at which she and Jock and the wee white dog had been passing Giancarlo’s coffee kiosk, and something had happened… A sort of scrabbling sound.

She got up from the chrome and leather chair that she was considering replacing because it wasn’t at all comfortable – although that was why she had originally bought it, thinking it would keep her alert and discourage her from falling asleep in the evenings – and put on her black leather jacket again.

The coffee kiosk! It wasn’t far from the spot where she had found the tablet, and she knew she had heard something – or someone – inside it that afternoon. She slid the tablet into her jacket pocket and then out again. It seemed silly to risk damaging it more than it had been damaged already. She went into her bedroom, a white sterile-looking environment that was supposed to send her to sleep immediately because of the lack of visual stimulation. There weren’t even any cracks in the ceiling to think about in there. She slid the tablet under her duvet. There was no time to think of a more secure hiding place. In any case she was being ridiculously over-cautious even to imagine someone would break in here looking for it. Not only was her flat more secure than most bank vaults, but no-one knew she had the tablet in the first place. Even if it did have any of the significance she thought it did. Perhaps she should take it to the police first thing in the morning. On the other hand, Keith had been quite adamant that she shouldn’t bother him any more.

It would be his own fault if he never solved the case.

She walked downstairs and out to the street with a clear conscience, a spring in her step.

It was a pity spring wasn’t in the air as well, she thought as she made her way down towards the kiosk. The temperature seemed to have fallen since the previous evening, and there were ominous dark grey clouds heading towards the town from somewhere beyond the Forth Bridges. Surely it couldn’t be about to snow.

The coffee kiosk had acquired an abandoned look since Giancarlo left, although it was hard to work out what was so different about it. Just the fact that she couldn’t get expertly crafted cappuccino in this town any more, she told herself, unwilling to admit it was the barista himself she missed most.

She shoved at the door in the side where he used to go in and out. It stuck a bit, probably because it had warped in the winter damp, but then gave way suddenly, so that she almost fell into the space within.

She knew at once that someone had been here recently. There was a supermarket sandwich packet in the corner, and a juice carton behind it. Neither had been here long, as far as she could tell. The stick of charcoal, lying near where the serving hatch used to be, was a real giveaway. An artist. An artist with a weird taste in sandwiches, she decided, wrinkling her nose as she looked at the packet. Cheese, mayonnaise and gherkin. The last time she had been forced to eat that particular combination of flavours was on a Deutsche Bahn train from Cologne to Berlin. She wouldn’t have thought that kind of sandwich was even legal in Scotland.

‘Anybody at home?’ said a voice behind her.

Amaryllis wasn’t easily startled, but at that moment she almost jumped out of her skin. She was horrified to think someone could have come at her with a knife or other weapon without her even knowing about it.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, turning to regard the intruder sternly. ‘You do realise I might have killed you with one blow without a second thought, don’t you?’

Charlie Smith laughed. ‘You wouldn’t do that to an old friend. Or his faithful hound.’

The dog huddled just behind him, almost as if it were embarrassed to be included in such a pointless conversation.

‘What are you up to?’ Charlie continued. ‘Were you hoping Giancarlo had left you something as a souvenir? A lock of his hair maybe?’

Amaryllis ignored this remark. ‘Have you noticed anything happening around this kiosk?’

‘What sort of anything? Crowds of sobbing women tearing their hair out? Wreaths being thrown over the wall into the water?’

She sighed. ‘No, not that kind of thing. I mean people looking furtive. Other people searching for someone. Gangsters with violin cases.’ She held up the sandwich packet. ‘I think someone’s been hiding in here.’

‘Hiding or just messing about?’

‘I don’t know. It’s only an idea at the moment.’

‘Anything to do with these artists of yours? I hear one of them was found in a van in the water along that way.’ He indicated the direction with the hand that wasn’t holding the dog’s lead.

‘How did you know that? It’s confidential.’

‘Contacts,’ he said with a wink. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re already treading all over the evidence.’

‘Do you think it’s really evidence?’ she said.

They strolled out of the kiosk.

‘It isn’t like you to be so unsure of yourself,’ he said.

‘I haven’t been myself lately,’ she admitted. ‘Either I’m getting too old for it, or this election’s warping my personality and draining away my intelligence.’

He laughed. ‘That explains some of the things politicians do once they get into power.’

Stewie materialised next to them. He must have been skulking round at the far side of the kiosk.

‘…leafleting?’ he mumbled.

‘I might do some later,’ said Amaryllis.

He shuffled his feet and looked guilty. Since this was his default expression, she took very little notice.

‘… got the leaflets with me,’ he said.

Amaryllis sighed. ‘I never thought I’d say this, Stewie, but you’re the voice of my conscience. I suppose I’d better do some now.’

‘You seem to be losing the urge to make a difference in local politics,’ said Charlie.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It would be fun to disrupt the workings of the Council, but it’s quite hard work trying to get elected. And El Presidente looks as if he’s going to walk it anyway.’

‘Better be a bit more positive, or you’ll upset the boy,’ said Charlie, nodding in Stewie’s direction.

‘It’s fine, Mr Smith,’ said Stewie in a surprisingly clear voice for once. ‘I don’t get upset.’

‘Just as well,’ said Charlie. ‘Working with her is quite likely to take you into some fairly upsetting situations.’

‘Hmph,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Just as well I don’t get upset by other people’s tactless disregard for my feelings, isn’t it? See you around, Charlie.’

She wasn’t sure but she thought he muttered, ‘Not if I see you first’ before pulling on the lead to encourage his dog to follow him in the direction of the harbour.

‘Spill the beans,’ said Amaryllis to Stewie. ‘Have you found out anything from Mr Cockburn yet?’

‘What?’ said Stewie.

‘Remember, when you said you were working at the church in the afternoons, putting up paintings, I asked you to try and find out if he’d seen Sammy and Craig?’

‘Oh,’ he said doubtfully, but after a moment’s thought he excavated the memory and added, with a grin, ‘Yes! I remember that!’

‘Well?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Did you ask him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

He showed signs of panic – eyes widening, fingers clutching the bundle of leaflets so tightly that they were crumpling as she watched – and she moderated her tone.

‘It’s all right, we can ask him later. Are you going round there again today?’

‘We’ve nearly finished,’ he said. ‘Just a couple more hours to do.’

‘When are you due there?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Any time after two.’

‘OK,’ said Amaryllis, ‘where haven’t we covered yet?’

‘My Gran’s old street,’ he said. ‘And up that way.’

‘Her old street? Doesn’t she live there any more?’

‘No. She’s dead.’

He didn’t sound particularly sad about it, but then Amaryllis knew Stewie’s Gran hadn’t been very nice. She had more or less had to rescue him from her at one point.

‘So you don’t stay with her any more then?’ It was a silly question, and she modified it by adding, ‘Or in her house?’

‘No. It had to get sold.’

She wondered where he lived now, and hoped it wasn’t the coffee kiosk. She didn’t like to think of the boy eating those cheese, mayonnaise and gherkin sandwiches, apart from anything else. But it wasn’t in her nature to ask people something as simple as where they lived. She preferred to work it out for herself, either by tailing them remorselessly until they gave up and led her straight home, or by deduction from other evidence, such as where she usually saw them or who they hung around with.

‘Do you still see anything of Darren and Zak?’ she enquired casually. She didn’t think Darren’s mother, Tricia Laidlaw, would leave a boy to sleep rough on the mean streets of Pitkirtly, particularly over the winter. Maybe he was staying at the Laidlaws’. He could do a lot worse.

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. This wasn’t going to be easy. The only places she had seen him lately had been around the supermarket, near the church and once walking down the road towards the Cultural Centre with Zak. Hmm. Maybe he was staying with Zak, who she knew had a rented flat further near the top of the High Street above the charity shop that now inhabited the premises vacated by the shiny furniture store. But Zak had a girl-friend, and surely wouldn’t want a lodger cramping his style. Amaryllis didn’t think the bonds of friendship between him and Stewie had ever been that close anyway. She knew Zak’s mother Penelope wouldn’t approve of Stewie, which was one reason Amaryllis had more or less adopted him once she found out how horrible his grandmother was.

‘OK,’ she said, deciding to follow up on this line of questioning at some later time when she had lulled him a bit. ‘Where was it your Gran used to live?’

‘Up near the other bus stop,’ he said. ‘She was in the top flat on the stair.’

‘Was she all right at getting up and down?’ said Amaryllis. ‘No trouble with her knees?’

He stared at her suspiciously.  ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Just friendly interest,’ said Amaryllis. Expressing friendly interest didn’t come easily to her, but she was cross that he had spotted the artificiality of it already. ‘We’ll go up there then. We can start up there and work our way down until we run out of leaflets or lose the will to live, whichever happens first.’

‘All right,’ he said. He carefully divided the bundle of leaflets in two and handed some over to her. ‘Here’s yours.’

Half an hour later, Amaryllis bitterly regretted coming to Stewie’s Gran’s street. All the homes were tenement style flats, and in order to deliver the leaflets to a reasonable number of them, they had first to get inside the communal front door in each case, and then walk up the stairs to the top flat and then come down again. The tenements weren’t that tall, only two or three storeys, but it took a long time to finish each building, and after doing one side of the street she wanted to go and lie down. Preferably in a darkened room, because many of the occupants of the flats had been at home and had opened their doors when she was trying to cram the leaflets through the most vicious letterboxes she had ever encountered, and they had either harangued her about junk mail or engaged her in political discourse. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

She learned nothing more about Stewie, and she was on the point of giving it all up for the day when she spotted two familiar figures approaching from the other end of the street.

El Presidente and his accomplice, Young Dave, were on a similar mission to hers, only they had brought along a shiny black car, its sleekness only partially marred by the election propaganda stuck all over the bodywork. Amaryllis hoped someone had inadvertently used superglue to stick the posters on so that it would require a complete re-spray once the election was over.

Stewie tugged at her arm. ‘Can we change over to the other side of the road now?’ he whispered.

‘I’m not going to run away from them,’ said Amaryllis sternly. ‘We just carry on as we’re going. They’ll have to work round us.’

She opened her backpack to get out more leaflets, and noticed the tablet she had found on the harbour wall and which she had fully intended to take along to the police station when it was open. She frowned. Could she fit that task into the day? Was the police station even open today?

She pulled the tablet out along with a bundle of leaflets and stared at it for a moment as if it might have the answers. She realised she hadn’t even tried to switch it on yet, so she had no idea if it was still working or not. But the others were getting closer and Young Dave’s gaze seemed to have homed in on the gadget, so the answers would have to wait. She shoved it back in again, out of sight.