6 The Queen of Scots Mystery (16 page)

Chapter 27 Visitors re-visiting

When Christopher opened his front door later that evening, he didn't know who or what to expect. He had opened the door in a fit of absent-mindedness because he happened to be in the front hall when the bell went, on his hands and knees trying to sweep up dog hair from the carpet. It wasn't something he would usually bother to do, particularly after a day at work when the librarians had done nothing but complain about the mess left behind after the craft fair, and only the strategic application of a bag of doughnuts from the local bakers' had prevented them from possibly illegal, though morally justified  strike action.

It was Jock McLean. Christopher let him in, but carried on sweeping to demonstrate that he regarded Jock as one of the family. Jock, however, interpreted it as a sign that Christopher was turning into a fussy old woman.

'If you left it alone,' he said once Christopher had explained what he was doing, 'it would blend into the carpet and give you an extra layer of insulation. That's what I would do.'

'Just go and make some tea,' said Christopher wearily.

'I've got something to tell you, though.'

'Later. I need to get this done before Charlie comes back with the dog. In case he takes offence.'

Jock laughed. 'Takes offence? Do you mean Charlie or the dog?'

'Tea,' said Christopher.

The door-bell rang again while Jock banged about in the kitchen.
Christopher was tempted to pretend he wasn't in this time. After all, if it was someone he actually wanted to see, like Amaryllis, she would find another way into the house anyway. He couldn't think of anybody he did want to see, for that matter.

His knees creaked as he got up from the floor again. Galloping old age. That was all he needed.

Two men in raincoats stood on the doorstep. They seemed vaguely familiar. He hoped it wasn't  because they were the two Jehovah's Witnesses who had once caught him at an awkward time and whom he had chased down the front path waving a kitchen knife. If Mr Browning next-door had seen that he would have had a field day concocting an appropriate report for the police, but as far as Christopher could recall he had been away on holiday in the Lake District at the time.

'Can I help you?'

'May we come in for a moment, Mr Wilson?'

He peered at them.
The raincoats made them look like second-rate spies but….

He remembered. For a fraction of a second he wished he had a kitchen knife within reach.
Perhaps it was the flash of murder in his eyes that made them both step back a pace.

'What do you want?' he growled.

'We can't discuss it on the door-step, Mr Wilson,' said one of them, glancing over his shoulder anxiously.

'We've got to
talk in private,' said the other. 'Otherwise you'll have to come with us, and I can assure you that is only the last resort.'

Oh well, thought Christopher as he stood back to allow them to come into the house, at least Amaryllis isn't here.
That would be the last straw.

'Stop right there!' said Amaryllis. She was standing at the foot of the stairs,
with one hand up as a stop sign, and holding what seemed to be a light sabre in the other. Christopher remembered Faisal madly coveting the thing for a while and then forgetting to take it with him when Caroline moved away with the children. He wondered where she had found it.

One of the men started to laugh, then turned the sound into a cough when the other one kicked him. Christopher looked at the kitchen door. Somewhere behind it, Jock was making tea. For the first time ever, he wished there was a lock on the door. If anything could be worse than Amaryllis becoming involved in this situation, it would be Jock blundering around in the middle of it.

He shrugged his shoulders helplessly. It was beyond his control. Fate would decide.

'You'd better come into the front room,' he said to the two men. They sidled past Amaryllis with nervous glances. Once Christopher was in the front room with them, she positioned herself in the
doorway like some sort of bodyguard. Somehow the light sabre didn't look quite as ridiculous as it might have done.

'Mr Wilson,' said the more assertive of the men, the one who had kicked the other for laughing. '
The last time we saw you, we gave you certain information.'

'Yes,' said Christopher to fill the pause.

'We've been asked to tell you that we cannot under any circumstances divulge the reasons for giving you that information, or any further information relating to it.'

He paused again. Christopher couldn't think of anything to say this time. The silence persisted for several minutes. When it became clear that nobody had any more to say on the subject, the two men stood up.

'Thank you for your time,' said the less assertive one.

The other one frowned, as if the harmless words had been themselves covered by the Official Secrets Act. Perhaps time wasn't real at all, but a phantom construct with which they had all been brainwashed
. Christopher blinked. It hadn't even occurred to him until now to wonder why they had come to see him in the first place, if what they had done to Amaryllis was only a test. Had it been a test for him too? Had he passed or failed? Had they expected him to drop everything and go to her rescue, or make a huge fuss and start a petition for military action? He almost felt guilty for behaving like an archivist and waiting for something to happen so that he could write it down. Or not, in this case, as he would undoubtedly be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act if they found out he had written it all down for posterity.

They were on their way out of the house when Amaryllis struck. Literally. She prodded one of the men between the shoulder-blades with the light sabre.

'Tell your supervisors from me that if you ever drag Christopher Wilson into your stupid little games again I will personally make it my life's work to turn this child's toy into a real weapon that will slice your head off.'

Her voice became very slightly louder on the last phrase but she was still very calm and controlled - and dangerous.
She drew the end of the thing along the back of his neck. Christopher couldn't repress a shiver as he watched.

After the two men had left the house and he had watched them hurry down the path, trying not to break into a run, Christopher turned and saw Jock McLean watching from the kitchen doorway.

'Just as well she didn't have a bunch of flowers,' said Jock inexplicably. 'She could have done them some real damage.'

Chapter 28 Put out

Neil didn’t want to say anything to Jock McLean about the note. Although the older man was as resilient as the hills, he had looked a bit tired
in the few days following their futile trip to the Queen of Scots, and in Neil’s opinion should have gone for a lie-down instead of arguing with Amaryllis for what seemed like hours that evening about whether to go out for a takeaway or not. Amaryllis had tried to persuade Jock to take it easy, and that was enough to convince Jock he was fit to run along the coast to Limekilns and bring a takeaway back with him. But fortunately he was defeated at last by his own body, and now lay on the settee in his front room snoring as an accompaniment to one of these glorified talent shows that seemed to crowd into the schedules. Neil was quite glad he didn’t usually have time to watch television.

The note had been shoved through the letterbox while Jock was in the kitchen. It was lucky Amaryllis had got bored and gone home by then, otherwise she wouldn’t have rested until she had wormed all the information she could out of Neil, and no doubt offered him unsolicited advice on what to do about it. From what he had heard, she would quite likely have wanted to ride shotgun, as he thought the expression went, on his expedition to the old railway yard. Unless, that is, the tales about her previous exploits there were true, in which case she wouldn’t want to set foot in the place
ever again.

The
memory of what was said to have happened there gave him pause for thought, but he carried on with what he was doing anyway. The circumstances were quite different, he told himself. He doubted if he would come across someone mad and vengeful there, and he was pretty sure they wouldn’t be armed. No, this was more of a white-collar crime, as far as he could tell.

Of course nobody expected to die. Liam Johnstone hadn’t expected it when he lay laughing on the Queen of Scots cellar floor
. Neil frowned as he considered that. But he wouldn’t be in any danger of suffocating on carbon dioxide in the open air.

He
made his way down the dark streets of Pitkirtly without too much trepidation. He was curious more than he was apprehensive. And he had decided he wanted his computer and account books back now after all. Even if Charlie didn’t follow up on his vague idea of buying the pub, Neil would still need the accounts for the reckonings with the tax authorities that couldn’t be postponed forever. He didn’t think they would be very happy to hear all the information had been stolen. And he had gone to quite a bit of trouble to make sure the figures added up in the first place.

He stopped in his tracks. Gradually the meaning of the half-formed sentence at the back of his mind took a more definite shape and came to the forefront.

He didn’t understand accounts, but he did understand the concept of being robbed. And only a few people in the world would have had the opportunity to do it.

For a moment he re-considered waking Jock and bringing him along on this expedition.
But he still couldn’t bring himself to do it, for some of the reasons that had already crossed his mind. He wondered whether to go down to Christopher’s and try to get him to come out – or Charlie, for that matter. Charlie might insist on bringing the dog, which could be an advantage or a nuisance. It seemed to be docile enough most of the time but a bit on the nervy side with strangers.

In the end he decided not to bother anyone else. He had always been a bit of a lone wolf, he supposed. That was probably why his marriage hadn’t worked out and why he had
wanted to run the pub on his own. He would have preferred not even to employ a barmaid, but Jackie Whitmore had come and asked him for a job and he had thought it wouldn’t do any harm to give it a try.

Wouldn’t do any harm!
How deluded had he been?

Well, he would definitely learn from his mistakes this time. It was always safer to work on your own and to insulate yourself from the demands and even the beneficent contribution of others. When he went to Spain, he would make sure he did that. He realised he was now definitely thinking in terms of going there. And why shouldn’t he? He had nothing to keep him here, as he had already told some of the others. He wasn’t in the business of running some sort of social enterprise to give old people somewhere to go. Let the council take care of them with bingo clubs and bowling afternoons. They could even go tea-dancing if they wanted. It was nothing to do with him.

In this spirit of angry resentment he covered the ground between Jock’s house and the railway line in practically no time.

The darkness was much deeper once he had crossed the line, pushing the little gate aside swiftly and with determination. He instinctively looked both ways before crossing the tracks, although he knew that trains only came along once in a blue moon and certainly not at night. He could feel a
cool breeze coming in off the river, and he could smell the salty muddy smell you got when the tide was out, and overlaying that the woody smoke of a bonfire. It was early in the year for people to have garden bonfires: maybe it was a barbecue. He wondered if he would miss these things once he lived in the warmth of Spain where the scents and sounds were quite different and foreign.

He was surprised to see the flames as he pushed past the flimsy wooden gate that attempted to bar the way into the yard these days. If somebody else was about it could make things tricky.

He half-expected to see a group of teenagers capering about by the fire or slumped drunkenly on the ground, more like. It was the kind of thing they would find exciting. But as he approached more closely there was no sign that anyone else was in the yard at all. A shiver ran down his spine. Who had started the fire, and why? What was the note about? Why hadn’t he told anyone where he was going?

Neil wasn’t interested in religion of any kind, but for some reason, perhaps because the night was so dark and the place seemed so remote, although it couldn’t have been more than fifty metres from the nearest inhabited house, his mind jumped to the topic of pagan festivals. He had very little knowledge of them, but didn’t fire play a large part in some of them? He vaguely recalled a horror film he had once seen.

He walked forward anyway. No pagan was going to scare him away.

Almost at the edge of the fire, he started and swore and grabbed at something that was too hot. Surely that was one of the folders he used for all his paperwork? He leaned down, picked up a stick from outside the flames and poked it into the fire, trying to dislodge the folder, but its cover
only sizzled a bit and started to melt into little bubbles. The papers inside would be ruined. He wondered if he could get down to the river for water in time, but he didn’t have anything to carry it back in.

He was leaning down to try and find another stick that wasn’t burning, when something struck him hard in the middle of his back and then he was falling fast towards the fire. He instinctively put out one hand to save himself, but it plunged into the red-hot centre of the flames.
Someone squealed. He didn’t know if it was him or not. Something was trying to push his legs out from under him, but he kicked back with one foot and heard a grunting sound.

Then he heard a shout and he was suddenly grabbed round the waist and dragged backwards and upright in one movement. Pain from the hand that had been in the fire made his head swim, and the sleeve of his jacket was smouldering.

A dog barked nearby.

‘Get his jacket off!’ said Amaryllis’s voice. ‘Come on, Christopher, make yourself useful.’

He found himself lying on the ground on his back, without really knowing how he had got there. Amaryllis was leaning over him and Christopher was stamping on something nearby.

‘Water,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We need water. And an ambulance. In that order.’

‘You run up to that house at the corner,’ said Christopher calmly. ‘I’ll stay here and call an ambulance.’

‘I can walk,’ said Neil, but when he tried to sit up his head swam again and he felt sick.
The dog came and licked his face. He couldn’t even be bothered to push it away.

Amaryllis was already moving, but she called over her shoulder, ‘Bet you haven’t got your mobile with you, Christopher.’

Something flew towards Christopher out of the darkness. He fumbled the catch and Neil saw him looking for it on the ground. He picked up the phone triumphantly and made the call.

‘My phone’s on the kitchen table,’ he told Neil after that. ‘She knew that.’

‘What? How…?’ said Neil. He wanted to know what had happened, but his brain couldn’t form the right questions.

‘Don’t worry about any of
it for now,’ said Christopher.

‘Thank you,’ said Neil, and closed his eyes. If he could go right off to sleep maybe his hand wouldn’t bother him so much.

After a while something cool was placed on his arm that made his hand feel a little better, but he didn’t open his eyes to see what it was. After another little while he heard sirens somewhere in the background, then they were very close and if he opened his eyes just a slit he saw a blue flashing light, too bright to watch for very long.

A bit later, after some more fuss, he
went very woozy. Let them all look after themselves now. He was leaving.