6 The Queen of Scots Mystery (14 page)

Even thinking about this made him cough.

‘All right?’ said Inspector Armstrong, still with that cheeriness that surely must be completely false.

‘I’m fine,’ wheezed Christopher. ‘Maybe – allergic to – bicycle oil. That must be it.’

The inspector laughed. ‘No such thing as allergies. It’s all in the mind. People are much too sensitive these days. Present company excepted, of course.’

‘Mmm,’ said Christopher, sitting back down in his chair and staring out of the window so that he didn’t have to watch Inspector
Armstrong leaning fondly over his bicycle and in the process putting even more of a strain on the Lycra cycling shorts. ‘Have a seat, inspector. How may I help you?’

For a moment he worried that he sounded like a shop assistant in a mobile phone shop who had recently failed an exam in customer service; then he sat up straighter, told himself he didn’t even know the meaning of the phrase and turned to look the inspector in the eye, man to man.

Instead of sitting down, the police officer wandered over to the window and stared out for a moment.

‘Nice view,’ he said.

Christopher knew it wasn’t a nice view. Even last winter when everything had been covered in a picturesque but deadly layer of snow and ice, it hadn’t been pretty out there in the car park. On a nondescript spring day like this all you could see was tarmac and concrete, with a tantalising glimpse of sky above the flats they had built on top of the supermarket. He couldn’t quite work out what the inspector wanted. He was hoping it wasn’t something embarrassing when Mr Armstrong turned back into the room and said,

‘What about Charlie Smith, then?’

‘What about him?’ said Christopher, taken aback.

‘Can you alibi him?’

‘Alibi?’

Some part of Christopher’s brain told him ‘alibi’ wasn’t a verb. Another part told the first part to stop
being so pedantic and answer the question as a normal person would. The first part retorted that it wasn’t a verb in the original Latin so it couldn’t be a verb in English – so there!

‘Was he staying with you at the time of Mr Johnstone’s death?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Christopher.

‘Is it possible,’ Inspector Armstrong continued without apparently waiting for Christopher’s reply, ‘that he could have been so disturbed by his suspension that he went berserk and murdered Mr Johnstone?’

Christopher gasped and wheezed at the same time.

‘Take all the time you need,’ said Mr Armstrong, with a short laugh that somehow suggested he thought Christopher was trying to cover something up.

‘And Ms Peebles?’ he added, again without waiting for a reply. ‘Does she have something to hide? Could she be playing for the enemy?’

‘Just a thought,’ he added before Christopher even opened his mouth. ‘
You can park it for a while if you want.’

‘I wouldn’t want to get a parking ticket when I haven’t even got a car,’ Christopher replied, wondering at his ability to make a joke – albeit a limp one - under such adverse circumstances.

Inspector Armstrong waved his arm around, as if to say he wasn’t bothered either way.

‘All right then, f
roth it around your mind for a while – come and see me in a day or two if any of it rings a bell.’

‘
Froth? A bell? Playing for the enemy?’ With a gargantuan effort Christopher stopped himself from cycling back through the inspector’s words. Cycling! He was becoming obsessed by it. ‘Right,’ he said, realising he had to get Armstrong out of his office before the man inflicted any more damage either on the English language or on Christopher’s own sanity. ‘I’ll definitely come and see you if it all froths up into a cappuccino. Or anything like that.’

‘With chocolate
curls on the top,’ nodded Inspector Armstrong.

‘Goodbye then,’ said Christopher. He
remained in his chair, swiveling round to the bookshelves behind him and taking down a dusty volume. He began to wheeze again as he opened it. Maybe he should make a doctor’s appointment.

But once the inspector had wheeled his bi
ke out of the room, Christopher felt much better.

Chapter 24 Crafty Interlude

The Cultural Centre was usually closed on Sundays, so Amaryllis was mildly surprised to see people going in and out of it until she remembered the craft fair. As she got closer she noticed someone had put up a big banner over the front door. Christopher wouldn’t like that. Then she saw him up a ladder, apparently struggling to fix one end in place. She smiled.

Amaryllis had never been to a craft fair before, but she thought this one might be quite amusing.

‘Do you want a hand?’ she called to Christopher once she got within a couple of metres of him. She had deliberately not shouted too loudly in case she caused him to fall off and injure himself – she didn’t think the paramedics would appreciate having to come out to Pitkirtly again so soon after Jock McLean’s escapade – but he gave a start and the ladder wobbled alarmingly. She put out a hand to steady it.

‘Careful,’ said Christopher, sounding a bit squeaky.

‘I’ll hang on here until you’re finished.’

‘What if I fall on top of you?’ he said.

‘You’ll have a soft landing, and I’ll crawl out from under you and die quietly in the gutter.’

There was a bang from
somewhere above her, and then he started to climb down, perhaps a little more quickly than he would have otherwise.

‘Is there anything else I can do?’ said Amaryllis.

They stood there while he mulled this over. Then the banner fell down again and draped itself artistically round their shoulders.

‘You could stand there for a couple of hours holding that,’ he suggested.

She sighed with an attempt at a long-suffering expression. She took hold of the banner, lifted it over Christopher’s head and climbed the ladder with it. It was the work of a moment to hook one end over the ornamental clock that adorned the front of the Cultural Centre.

She came down holding the other end of the banner, moved the ladder, climbed it again and hooked it over the place where the guttering was coming away from the wall.

‘Great,’ said Christopher. ‘Now the whole place will come down with it the next time. The maintenance man from the Council told me not to do that.’

She snapped the legs of the ladder together. ‘Where do you want this?’ she asked him.

‘It belongs in the library corridor. But somebody might need it for the fair. I have no idea what they’re doing. They might be hanging stuffed penguins from the ceiling for all I know.’

‘Aren’t you in charge, though?’

‘Only in theory,’ he said gloomily. ‘Maisie Sue and Jan from the wool-shop have taken over the place. It’s a coup d’état.’

‘A velvet revolution,’ said Amarylli
s in an attempt to cheer him up. ‘Or is it a chintz one?’

They progressed into the building, Christopher’s steps slowing as they went. There were ten or so tables crammed into the foyer, and Amaryllis could see more down the corridor leading to the Folk Museum. The door to Christopher’s office was jammed open and people were inside taking things out of boxes and squabbling over who
was entitled to which table. The noise was deafening. Amaryllis considered it much worse than the Fun Day they had both taken part in a couple of years before. She frowned at the memory. That had been the day the old village hall caught fire. But surely it would be too much of a coincidence for something else disastrous to happen on the same day as a local event. Then she remembered the Pitkirtly Homecoming Day, and sighed.

Jan from the wool-shop, wearing a far-away expression, was arranging knitted toys on her table.

‘Did you make all those yourself?’ said Amaryllis casually, picking up a doll dressed as some sort of Tudor queen. Jan almost snatched it out of her hands.

‘Be careful with that! It’s got pearls stitched down the front of the dress. It took me ages to get it right.’

Amaryllis hurriedly put the doll back in its place. She had never known Jan be quite so grumpy. In fact she wondered if she had ever really known the woman at all. She had only ever encountered her in the alternate universe that was the wool-shop, where everything was defined in terms of its weight, shade and maker’s name, and where Jan ruled serenely as empress of all she surveyed, occasionally descending from her throne behind the counter to assist the lower orders with their tension problems and the like.

Tension! That was what the woman’s body language spoke of so loudly, and for which Amaryllis couldn’t even begin to guess at the reason. She decided to keep an eye on Jan as the craft fair progressed. It could prove interesting.

She wandered up the corridor, glancing at tables packed with small watercolours of Pitkirtly and its environs, scarves that were evidently hand-dyed or batiked in various glaring colour combinations, and varnished stones strung on threads of leather or fine steel. She hadn’t realised there were so many crafts available to choose from. Maybe she should take up dyeing for a living, she joked to herself. She was still smiling when she bumped into Maisie Sue and one of her acolytes.

‘Amaryllis! Do you have a stall today?’ said Maisie Sue, almost managing not to sound incredulous. ‘I guess not,’ she added immediately.

‘I can’t imagine anyone being interested in my knitting, that’s for sure,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Although I suppose some of my efforts could be mistaken for modern art.’

Maisie Sue smiled politely. ‘We aren’t exactly open to the public yet,’ she said. ‘But of course
, with you and Christopher being such good friends….’

‘Oh, I’m providing security cover,’ said Amaryllis. It was true in a way. She was definitely going to use the opportunity to do some informal investigating. It might not lead anywhere, but that was an
occupational hazard. Contrary to popular belief, intelligence work couldn’t be done quickly or easily.

Maisie Sue, whose former husband had been a CIA agent, piped down at once, as Amaryllis had guessed she would.
She re-folded a small quilt that didn’t seem to need re-folding, and then bustled off towards Christopher’s office.

Even before she had finished checking out all the stalls, Amaryllis was starting to get bored with the whole thing. But she was still determined to try and find out what was the matter with Jan. She wondered if Tricia Laidlaw or even Penelope Johnstone might come along once the craft fair opened. It would be interesting to observe any interactions amongst them. Even Maisie Sue, who seemed a bit on edge herself, might find time to chat to Jan as the day progressed.

She encountered Christopher again in the foyer. He was trying to adjudicate between two stall-holders who seemed to be in a dispute over the amount of space allocated to each. As she listened, it became clear that one of them had pushed a box of batik scarves a few inches into the other one’s territory. In the end Christopher got a piece of chalk from his office and drew a line on the floor to mark the boundary.

‘Do you always have chalk in your office?’ she enquired.

‘It’s for the notices,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a blackboard to tell people what’s happening in the Folk Museum.’

‘That’s a bit old-fashioned, isn’t it? Why don’t you have a smart-board?’

He gave her a look. ‘Museums are old-fashioned. Get over it.’

‘Do you need a drink?’ she
asked..

‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve been needing one since eight o’clock this morning.’

‘Have you been here all that time?’

‘Maisie Sue insisted,’ he said.

‘Do you want me to throw everyone out of your office so you can get some peace and quiet?’

He gave a small depressed sigh. ‘The time for peace and quiet is long past, I’m afraid.’

In the end she persuaded him to retreat to the staff tea-room, where they sat in a grim silence eating from the librarian’s special tin of posh biscuits and listening to the rise and fall of hostilities in the corridor outside. After a while Christopher recovered enough to venture out again, and Amaryllis decided she might as well take her position for an afternoon’s surveillance.

She was resigned to the fact that nothing interesting would happen for ages and that she wouldn’t recognise it when it did, but not long after the public were admitted, she was rewarded by
observing an encounter that made her think.

Penelope Johnstone and Jackie Whitmore came face to face in front of Jan’s wool and knitted toy animals stall. The two customers stared at each other blankly for a moment. Jan, re-arranging wools in a kind of rainbow, didn’t look at either of them at first.

Penelope said something to Jackie in a voice too low for Amaryllis to hear above the general noise of people asking for reassurance that baby clothes were made of pure organic cotton, commenting to their friends that a two-year-old could paint better than that, and asking if someone had to be fully qualified to use a pottery kiln.

Jackie responded by picking up a knitted version of the Loch Ness monster from Jan’s stall and throwing it at Penelope. Jan, unable to ignore them any longer, screeched her disapproval.

Jackie threw a knitted seahorse at Jan. ‘If you wanted him you should have tried harder!’ she shouted as Amaryllis arrived at the stall. ‘I don’t know what makes you think he’d notice you anyway.’ She picked up a knitted whale. Amaryllis reached out and grabbed it from her before she could do any damage with it.

‘
Stop it! Just stop it!’ screamed Jan.

By this time the general noise levels had abated as people started to realise what was going on. Maisie Sue abandoned her own stall and hurried over.

‘I can’t stand this any more!’ Jan continued, obviously on the verge of tears. ‘I’m going now.’

‘Oh, no, please don’t do that,’ said Maisie Sue. ‘You can get through this if you think positive thoughts.’

Jan said something very rude about positive thoughts and pushed past them all. They saw her forcing a path through the crowds towards the front door. Maisie Sue shrugged her shoulders.

‘I guess something upset her,’ she said. ‘Amaryllis, you don’t have your own table. It would be real neighbourly of you to look after Jan’s knitted goods until she comes back.’

‘Yes, I suppose it would be,’ said Amaryllis, who had been planning to follow Jan outside and interrogate her. ‘But I think Penelope could do a better job than me. You know my knitting skills aren’t up to much. And what I know about wool could be written on the back of a stamp.’

Jackie Whitmore muttered something and walked off, shoving Penelope aside.

‘Well!’ said Penelope. ‘That was all a bit unnecessary, wasn’t it?’

‘You could say that,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Thanks, Penelope.’

She started to make a dash for the exit, remembered the fracas had started with Jackie throwing something at Penelope, and turned back.

‘What did Jackie Whitmore say to you?’

Penelope blushed. Amaryllis had imagined anyone who had been married to Liam Johnstone would be incapable of being embarrassed, but it seemed not. She waited.

‘It was something about Neil. An unwarranted allegation.’

‘An allegation?’ Amaryllis considered this. It was inexplicable, as were the words Jackie had then shouted at Jan.

She might as well head for the exit while she thought about it.
Apart from anything else, she told herself, any security provider worth their salt would make sure whatever Jan and Jackie had against each other wouldn’t manifest itself in a brawl in the car park. She couldn’t exactly imagine Jan descending to that level, but Jackie Whitmore had seemed to be spoiling for a fight.

The first people she noticed in the car park were Jock McLean and Neil Macrae, walking slowly and deep in conversation.

‘Have you seen Jan from the wool-shop?’ said Amaryllis. Jan was the one she was more worried about: somehow the woman seemed vulnerable, which was a shock when Amaryllis at least had thought of her as capable and unflustered. But then, being unflustered about knitting didn’t mean you were naturally a calm person. She might have presented a false front to the world to conceal a churning cauldron of emotion.

‘Jan?’ said Neil, looking puzzled.

‘She went that way,’ said Jock, indicating the front of the supermarket. ‘She’s maybe heading for the wool-shop. You know Jan, don’t you?’ he said to Neil. ‘Wears those jumpers with the knitted flowers on them.’

‘I didn’t know you were interested in that sort of thing,’ Amaryllis commented to Jock.

‘The flowers can give you a nasty dunt if you brush against them,’ said Jock with feeling. ‘You’d be surprised.’

Amaryllis didn’t ask how he knew that
, but she didn’t think either of the men would be of any help in this situation. She left them standing there and headed off towards the High Street.

Jackie Whitmore was leaning against the supermarket wall, smoking. As Amaryllis approached she leant forward to try and re-light her cigarette, so she didn’t have time to run away. Amaryllis got right up to her before she raised her head.

‘You keep away from me!’ hissed the girl. ‘I know you think you own the place and you can do what you like, but I’m calling the police if you touch me.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Amaryllis coldly. ‘I want you to tell me who you
were talking about when you spoke to Jan in the craft fair about a man who would never notice her.’