6 The Queen of Scots Mystery (17 page)

Chapter 29 Amaryllis follows up

Amaryllis was furious with herself for not having stopped Neil’s attacker before things got out of control. She had been
following the girl all evening to see what would happen. The girl had left her father’s newsagents around seven, as he shut up shop for the night. She walked round to Jock McLean’s house and put something through the letter-box. She went to the fish and chip shop and came out with a bag of chips, at which point Amaryllis very nearly mugged her just to get something to eat. She went down to the harbour and walked along the river front for a while, eating. That was when it started to get interesting.

The girl had then doubled back to the newsagent’s, let herself in with a key and come out a few moments later with an armful of folders, which she carried with her down towards the railway line and into the yard. Once there she left the folders neatly piled up at one side by the wall where the coal bunkers had once
been, while she trudged round towards the sliver of beach between the sea wall and the mud-flats.

Amaryllis
, not knowing how long the girl would be, used the opportunity to dart over to the pile of folders and skim-read parts of the contents with the aid of her torch. When she realised what the papers were, she removed a handful in case she didn’t get another chance. She darted out of the way again when she heard footsteps returning.

The girl constructed a great mound of assorted debris. Amaryllis puzzled over what she was planning until it was too late to stop her. Once the flames leaped up, Amaryllis had to retreat to avoid being seen. Peering out from behind what was left of the old workman’s hut, she saw the girl ripping pages out of the folders and throwing them on to the blaze, then stuffing the folders themselves into the heart of the flames. Fingerprints, Amaryllis thought, the folders wouldn’t burn but would the fingerprints be lost?

Only minutes after that she saw Neil Macrae stepping into the circle of light that spread out from the bonfire. The girl had vanished.

Amaryllis was about to break cover to warn him not to go too close when someone came up behind her and said in a low voice, ‘What’s going on here?’

She hadn’t realised until then that Christopher, taking Charlie Smith’s dog out for a late evening walk, had seen Neil on his way from Jock’s house and had decided to follow him.

‘You idiot!’ she hissed. ‘You nearly gave us both away.’

‘Look out!’ squeaked Christopher.

She turned back to the scene by the fire in time to see Neil tumbling towards it, head first. They both ran forward to grab
him, one on each side, and pull him upright again.

Somewhere at the periphery of her consciousness, Amaryllis heard footsteps running away, but she knew her focus had to be completely on saving Neil. The girl could wait. They would catch up with her later.

After the ambulance came the police: Constable Burnet and Sergeant Whiteside by car and the ubiquitous Inspector Armstrong on his bicycle. They weren’t allowed to question Neil on the spot, so Keith Burnet and Karen Whiteside were dispatched to follow the ambulance while the inspector conducted an impromptu interview with Amaryllis and Christopher. He seemed a bit cross.

‘Isn’t that the dog?’ was his first question.

‘It’s a dog, certainly,’ said Amaryllis, trying to ignore the inspector’s lycra cycling shorts.

‘Is it yours?’ he asked Christopher.

‘Look, inspector, the dog has nothing to do with it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘What you need to do is to go and arrest Jackie Whitmore right now, before she does any more damage.’

‘Mmhm,’ said the inspector. ‘I think
you’ll find I’m the one to decide who to arrest around here.’

‘I think you’ll find Jackie Whitmore’s the one who killed Liam Johnstone, and who has just attempted to murder Neil Macrae,’ said Amaryllis.

The inspector sighed in a long-suffering way which reminded her strongly of the way Charlie Smith used to sigh before he got to know her. There was still time for Inspector Armstrong to get to know her, but she really hoped he wouldn’t bother. She didn’t think she wanted to know someone who went around in lycra cycling shorts.

‘All right, I suppose we’d better go up to the station and sort this out,’ he said.
‘I can’t go and pick up Miss Whitmore without any evidence.’

‘Evidence!’ said Amaryllis. She pointed to the fire, still burning behind them. ‘There’s your evidence. Better recover as much as you can before it all goes up in smoke. And here’s more,’ she added, taking
a few sheets of paper from the pocket of her jeans, and handing them to him. 'I got these out of the files before they were thrown on the fire. Sorry I couldn't get hold of any more.'

‘These should be in an evidence bag,’ he said, not taking them. ‘If they’re evidence, that is. I’ve only got your word for it so far.’

‘Have you got one with you?’

‘One what?’

‘An evidence bag.’

He sighed heavily. Then he ferreted around in a container at the back of his bike and came up with an official-looking plastic bag.

‘In there,’ he told her. ‘We’ll have to take your prints too for elimination purposes.’

‘I think you’ll find you’ve already got them,’ said Amaryllis, conscious that she had already been fingerprinted and eliminated from practically every crime that had taken place in Pitkirtly in the past couple of years.
‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

She started to walk away.

‘Is it all right to bring the dog?’ said Christopher. ‘Or will I pop round by my house and leave him there?’

‘Wait a minute,’ said the inspector. ‘Can someone give me a hand to
put this fire out? I don’t think we’d better wait for reinforcements. They’d have to come from Lothian and Borders. There’s already an incident going on in Cowdenbeath.’

The inspector and Christopher stamped out the fire between them, retrieving bits of half-melted plastic folder in the process.

‘What are these anyway?’ said the police officer, poking at the plastic with a stick. He shone his torch down at them.

‘Neil Macrae’s books,’ said Amaryllis. ‘The evidence in the case.’

‘And what do you mean by that, Miss Peebles?’ he said.

‘It’s Ms,’ said Amaryllis. ‘They’re evidence that somebody was tampering with the accounts and was desperate not to be found out.’

‘Somebody?’

‘Allegedly Jackie Whitmore.’

‘Who exactly alleges that?’

‘Well, I do, for a start. When are you going to let us tell you all we know?’ Amaryllis demanded.

‘I don’t know anything much,’ said Christopher.

Amaryllis resisted the almost irresistible urge to roll her eyes and say ‘What else is new?’

‘Yes, you do,’ she told him. ‘Inspector Armstrong will have to interview both of us together. Otherwise he won’t be able to work out the whole story.’

‘I’m not expecting to get anything like the whole story from you two
reprobates,’ said the inspector, taking another plastic evidence bag out of the container on his bicycle. ‘Damn! These bits are so hot they’re going to melt it. I’ll have to leave them in situ… Damn! Why the hell did I send Constable Burnet away?’

‘Because you wanted him to question Neil Macrae
as soon as he comes round?’ suggested Amaryllis.

‘I could wait here and look after the evidence until you can get somebody more official,’ said Christopher.

‘No! That would be completely irregular. We’ll have to do the interview here,’ said the inspector grudgingly. ‘The first thing I’ve got to say is, don’t tell anybody else what’s happened here tonight.’

‘Of course we won’t!’ said Amaryllis, putting on an indignant voice and inwardly repackaging the whole incident into a good story for Jock, Jemima, Dave and
above all for Charlie, who out of all of them would be the sorriest to have missed out on it.

‘We could go inside this hut or whatever it is, if you don’t want to stand around in the cold,’ said the inspector.

‘No!’ said Amaryllis quickly. ‘Well, not unless you think it’s a security risk – how likely is it that someone might overhear us out here.’

‘Jackie Whitmore might, if she’s still around,’ said Christopher.

‘There’s no sign of her now, though,’ said Amaryllis. She raised her voice a little and called, ‘Jackie! Come out, come out wherever you are!’

‘Don’t do that!’ said the inspector. ‘You could be letting her know she’s in trouble.’

‘I think she’s got a pretty good idea of that already,’ said Amaryllis.

‘OK, well, what happened here tonight? In your own time. But before dawn breaks over the mud-flats, if you don’t mind.’

‘Do you want me to record the interview on my phone?’ Amaryllis offered. ‘For the record.’

Inspector Armstrong sighed again.

‘I think this had better be off the record, Ms Peebles. It won’t stand up in court either way. Give me a ballpark overview of the situation.’

‘Ballpark?’ said Christopher.

Amaryllis kicked his foot.

Standing around the warm ashes of the dead fire, they filled him in quickly on the events that had led up to Neil Macrae being carted off in an ambulance.

‘But why? That’s what I want to know,’ said Inspector Armstrong when they had finished.

‘Why what? Why did she do it?’ said Amaryllis.

‘No – why did you do it? What made you follow her?’

‘I was suspicious,’ said Amaryllis. She found it hard to identify where her suspicions of the barmaid had begun. It was only when the Lawsons had turned out to be so boring that she had abandoned them and looked for someone else who might have more of a spark.
‘There was more to her than people could see on the surface,’ she added a bit lamely. ‘The new bicycle. The computer shop. Her interest in what was happening at the Queen of Scots. The fact that she had helped Neil with the accounts.’

‘But how does that add up to making a fire and pushing him into it?’ the inspector persisted.

‘It didn’t necessarily add up to that – but it could have given her a motive for killing Liam.’

‘Why could it?’

‘Because he knew about accounts,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Everybody always thought about guns when they thought of Liam, but I remembered Penelope telling me his job was actually in accounting and finance. Neil had asked him to have a look at the books, to make sure they were straight for the auditors. Jackie had been fiddling the books without Neil noticing, transferring money into her own account. She knew Liam would find out, being trained in that kind of thing. She couldn’t risk it. She would lose her job and, knowing Neil, she’d be turned into the police and prosecuted for fraud.’

‘But – a wee girl like that – how did she overpower a man the size of Liam?’

‘It was Zak who overpowered him in the first place,’ Amaryllis reminded him. ‘He left his father lying on the floor in the cellar, remember? He came and told you lot about it the other day.’

‘So she came along after that and knocked over the canister?’ said the inspector.

‘Yes. She knew about the carbon dioxide, of course. She did take a bit of a risk, because she could have got trapped in the cellar too, with Liam, but my guess is that she hit him while he was still lying there, found the canister and made a hole in it, then slipped out the door to the bar. It might only have been a slow leak, so she wasn’t in much danger as long as Liam didn’t come to properly.’

‘Hmm,’ said the inspector.
‘That’s one theory, I suppose.’ He turned to Christopher. ‘So can you add any supporting detail to this fantasy, Mr Wilson?’

‘I told you I didn’t know anything,’ said Christopher crossly. ‘
You already know about Neil and me seeing the girl come out of the computer shop, and about her interest in the future of the Queen of Scots.. Of course! It was when she found out about Neil possibly selling up that she realised she had to get the books out of the way, or she’d be found out. So that was when she stole everything from the flat… It was silly of her to think she would ever get away with it all. She must have known somebody would want to see the accounts at some point.’

The inspector shook his head. ‘You’d be amazed what people think they can get away with. Human nature, Mr Wilson. It’s the same every time. Still, it helps us to catch them so it isn’t all bad.’
He sounded almost like an old-fashioned policeman, more sorrowful than angry about the vagaries of his fellow-humans: no longer the young executive who thought in management-speak and no doubt prided himself on his soft skills.

His phone rang. ‘
Armstrong.. Yes… Yes. Thanks – better get yourselves back here to collect the evidence. It’s going to be a long night…’

Halfway through the call, Amaryllis started to tiptoe away from him. Christopher followed her example, and he thought even the dog was tiptoeing, although it was hard to tell in the darkness. By the time the inspector finished the call, they were almost at the railway line.

‘See you later!’ Amaryllis called to him. ‘You know where to find us!’

Perhaps fortunately, his reply was inaudible.