Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10) (10 page)

Chapter 16 Orphans of the storm

Amaryllis had only found out about the second death by accident. Sergeant Macdonald had been signing her out after the Chief Inspector said she could go, when there was a phone call. Keith had come through to the front desk to take it, and hadn’t noticed her, because she was crouching down behind the partition to get a stone out of her shoe before heading for freedom.

‘Where was this?... Yes, I know the place. Just about opposite the garden centre. Patch of old woodland... The what? Can you spell that, please?... Got it. We’ll send a car up. Is there anything else you can tell me just now?... Uhuh. Hold on to that for us, please. Have you got somewhere safe you can wait – in your car? Great. Thanks.’

She heard the click of the receiver being replaced and, still crouched down, part of his conversation with Sergeant Macdonald.

‘I can’t believe this, but that was a member of the public – she’d been walking the dog, in that patch of woodland across from the garden centre and the place where they keep the alpacas, and the dog came across another body.’

‘Another one? What sort of state was this one in?’

‘Well, she said it was a woman, so it can’t have... What the hell are you doing here?’

Amaryllis glanced up and found Keith leaning across the desk just above her. He didn’t seem all that pleased.

‘I’m just going,’ she said. ‘There was a stone in my shoe.’

‘You shouldn’t have been listening to all that!’

‘I didn’t hear a thing, honestly.’ She spoiled the effect by laughing as she left the police station, throwing a careless, ‘Thanks, Kenny!’ back at Sergeant Macdonald because she knew it would annoy Keith even more than the discovery that she had been eavesdropping.

Jemima seemed unreasonably upset by Amaryllis’s revelation.

Christopher, on the other hand, was more or less resigned to this kind of thing.

‘There’s always more than one,’ he sighed. ‘It’ll either be a murder and suicide thing or somebody on a killing spree.’

Jemima shivered. ‘Goodness me, I hope not... Come on, Dave, we’d better get home for your rest.’

Amaryllis and Christopher stood staring at each other.

‘I don’t suppose you’re up for a walk in the woods,’ she said.

‘No, of course not!’ he snapped. ‘Haven’t you been in more than enough trouble with the police already this lifetime?’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I must say, I didn’t think Sarah would lock up her own left winger.’

‘I didn’t think you were all that left wing,’ he said.

‘No, it’s a hockey term.

‘Ah, I see.’

They were walking away from the police station when Keith Burnet came out and called after them. ‘Just a minute!’

‘I thought you’d finished with me,’ said Amaryllis.

‘I have,’ said Keith. ‘For now. It’s Mr Wilson I want – just as well you were just passing. It’s saved me a trip to your house to pick you up.’

Amaryllis enjoyed the range of expressions that gradually moved across Christopher’s face, starting with his normal ‘I told you so’ when she had done something he disapproved of, changing to mild surprise and from there to cold fear.

‘Um,’ he said, taking a step away from Keith, who laughed.

‘Don’t panic,’ he said. He lowered his voice. ‘This is highly irregular...’

‘Aren’t most things around here?’ said Amaryllis brightly.

‘I wondered if you might just have time to pop up to the woods and help us with an identification? Or not, as the case may be.’

‘Identification?’ said Christopher.

‘It would only be a preliminary one, of course,’ said Keith. ‘It’s more a case of eliminating a possibility. I shouldn’t really ask you, only I know you’ve seen this kind of thing before. And then maybe you can give us a hand with the animals.’

‘Animals?’

Really, thought Amaryllis, Christopher always managed to sound like some sort of idiot in these situations. If only he would stop repeating odd words from what Keith said.

‘Yes, you’ve had a bit of previous experience with them, I understand. It’ll take us a while to find an expert, but we can’t leave them roaming around up there.’ He glanced at Amaryllis. ‘You can come too if you want, but only to help catch them. You can’t do anything else.’

‘There’s no need to sound so stern,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of interfering with a crime scene.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s partly why we need somebody to get the animals out of the way.’

They went round to the back and got into a police car with a driver already in it.

‘Looks like rain,’ he said, making a tricky reverse manoeuvre much too quickly. Amaryllis noticed Christopher clutching the edge of the seat. He didn’t let go of it as they made the next turn and shot up the road.

‘Here, cool it,’ said Keith. ‘There’s no rush, and we don’t want to get caught on the speed camera – we’d never hear the end of it.’

‘We need to get there before the storm,’ said the constable, stubbornly refusing to ease off on the accelerator.

‘A minute ago it was just rain,’ said Keith. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

Just then they turned a corner and saw a massive dark grey cloud hovering ominously overhead – a bit like an alien spaceship waiting to rain down terror on Pitkirtly, Amaryllis thought fancifully. It would be worse than when the darts team came along from Charlestown that time and went on an improvised victory march through the town, causing a near-riot.

‘Thunder cloud,’ said the constable.

‘All right, all right,’ said Keith. ‘You don’t even know if it’s coming this way or not.’

‘That’s the direction thunder always comes from around here,’ said the constable. They were nearly at the hotel already. An alpaca was sitting on the grass verge just ahead, chewing amicably.

‘Is that the same one?’ said Amaryllis.

‘I don’t know – I’m not an expert,’ said Christopher.

‘Yes, but is it the same colour?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You’re not going to be much use to the police, are you?’

‘Well, at least I won’t get under their feet and annoy the neighbours for miles around,’ said Christopher, retaliating at last.

The car stopped.

‘Maybe we can pick this one off right away,’ said Keith eagerly. He got out of the car and approached the alpaca. It waited until he was about two feet away and then got to its feet in a leisurely way and wandered off across the road. ‘Maybe it’ll go straight home,’ he said to the others.

Amaryllis had always known Keith was too optimistic for his own good.

There was another car parked further up the road. A woman got out of it, holding back a large brown dog with white patches. It was wriggling about in her grasp as if trying to get away. It began to bark.

‘Sorry!’ she called. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute. I don’t want him frightening the alpaca.’

‘That’s all right, Mrs Black, you just take your time,’ Keith told her. He leaned into the car and said to the constable, ‘You get that animal under control before it causes an accident. We’ll go into the scene with Mrs Black. There are suits in the back.’

‘Now remember,’ he said earnestly to all of them once they had put on the white suits and were walking cautiously forward into the woods, ‘nobody’s to touch anything. Except if you get the chance to grab an alpaca... How many did you say there were, Mrs Black?’

‘Oh, at least five,’ she said. ‘The one out there and four more. The dog flushed them out of the undergrowth. He’s very good at that. It’s what they’re bred for, you know.’

They passed one alpaca before they got very far, but it was too fast for them. It dashed ahead, deeper into the woods.

Mrs Black came to a stop. ‘It – she – she’s over there. In among the rhododendrons – nasty foreign things. I don’t know why the Council haven’t cut them back this year.’

She stood back with Amaryllis while Keith led Christopher forward.

Amaryllis heard Keith telling Christopher to take his time and think hard before he spoke. Hmph! No need to tell that to Christopher, of all people. The amount of time he usually spent thinking, it was a miracle if anyone got any speech out of him at all.

There was a pause. She couldn’t see them past the tallest rhododendron, a monster of a shrub that must have stretched for at least eight feet in all directions, so she didn’t know if Christopher had nodded or shaken his head. He hadn’t said anything. Perhaps he was still thinking.

Mrs Black, next to her, stirred uneasily. ‘It’s taking them a while. I don’t think there’s any doubt about her identity. I found her bank card, you know.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Amaryllis, keeping her voice low and trying her best to sound as if she wasn’t all that interested.

‘Yes – it’s Jane Blyth-Sheridan. She owns the alpacas. I don’t know her by sight, but my husband heard her give a talk at the last Rotary Club dinner, all about how she came to run the rescue organisation.’

‘So she rescues alpacas?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Oh, yes, it’s quite unusual, isn’t it?’

‘No worries,’ Keith was saying as the two men came back. ‘We’ll see if we can work it out another way.’

An alpaca passed within reach at that moment, and it wasn’t until she had caught it by the mane – if that was what it was called – and wrestled with it a bit that she saw the expression on Keith’s face.  He was downcast. He must have expected Christopher to be able to identify the woman, but Christopher had failed.

The rain started, in that sudden way it always did at this time of year, straight from nothing to huge drops cascading down through the trees. If they had been out in the open it would have been like standing under a waterfall.

Keith spoke quickly on his mobile, asking for urgent backup, and a doctor, and all the rest.

Amaryllis said to the alpaca, ‘Let’s get you back in your pen, and see if we can find your friends.’

It wasn’t like her to talk to the animals, but she felt the circumstances were exceptional.

Chapter 17 Failure

Christopher didn’t know why Keith had expected him to be able to identify the victim. He had been happy to help, more or less, and very relieved to see that the body had evidently not been lying there for days or anything. But he had definitely never seen the woman before in his life.

He did wonder about the alpaca connection. But he didn’t have long to think about that before he realised that Amaryllis was leading one of the animals out of the woods, and that another one had just walked past him, and Keith would want him to try and catch it.

If they had had ropes or any kind of harness with them, it might have been possible. As it was, they just had to try and grab whatever part of the animals they could reach and attempt to steer them back towards their own garden. The security gates stood open, but he didn’t feel that helped very much, as the alpacas displayed quite a bit of reluctance to go through them. Maybe something had scared them away from there. Or maybe they were just making some sort of point.

While Keith summoned more help, Christopher, Amaryllis and Mrs Black milled around, grabbing and letting go of alpacas more or less at random. Amaryllis suggested getting the dog out of the car and training it to herd them, but Mrs Black said that would take far too long. Christopher hoped nobody would see them cavorting around the woods in their white suits almost like some sort of coven.

‘Can’t you round them up without all this trampling about?’ Keith complained once he was off the phone. ‘The Chief’s going to go ballistic.’

‘You just try it,’ said Amaryllis, a bit out of breath and more flustered than Christopher could ever remember seeing her.

‘Right then, I will,’ said Keith, and to everybody’s annoyance he managed to catch one of the alpacas almost right away and to take it across the road to its own garden, where he closed the gates on it. ‘Let’s take them one at a time. We might get most of them under control before the others arrive.’

Christopher didn’t think it was possible, but Keith turned out to have a hitherto unsuspected talent not just for rounding up alpacas but for organising other people, and he and Amaryllis were just leading the last animal into the garden when two more police cars screeched to a halt on the road outside.

‘We could put them back in the stables if you want,’ Christopher called over to Keith. ‘I know where they go.’

‘No, just leave them loose in the garden for now!’ Keith yelled. ‘We’re going to need to find out if there’s anybody at home, but I don’t want you anywhere near the house. If there isn’t anybody there we’ll have to get some animal handlers in. I suppose we’ll need to contact an animal rescue organisation later on as well, see what they can do if we can’t track down the owners... And you can give me back those white suits now too.’

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Amaryllis muttered. ‘I was beginning to feel as if we were all part of some weird cult, dancing around in the woods.’

This was so close to Christopher’s recent thinking that it made him a bit twitchy.

‘You’ll all need to come down to the station later on today and make some statements,’ Keith said, putting away the white suits. ‘Is that going to be convenient for you, Mrs Black?’

‘Yes, I expect so.’

Christopher noticed Keith didn’t seem all that bothered about whether it would be convenient for Amaryllis and him. Presumably he thought of them as part of the furniture, or possibly the wallpaper. Or maybe even the carpet, Christopher mused. Certainly he sometimes had the sense that people were walking all over him.

Amaryllis was very quiet as they finally left the scene, waved good-bye to Mrs Black and walked away down the hill. The empty hotel loomed to their left.

‘I wonder what’ll happen to it,’ said Christopher, making conversation.

‘They’re going to have to watch out,’ said Amaryllis. ‘All sorts of layabouts will start colonising it.’

She glanced back over her shoulder at the police cars, and, as if satisfied they were far enough down the road for Keith not to hear them, grabbed Christopher’s elbow and brought him a bit closer. ‘Mrs Black found Jane Blyth-Sheridan’s bank card at the scene,’ she hissed.

Christopher looked blank, which wasn’t exactly unusual. ‘She must have dropped it when we were catching the alpaca the other day,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Keith thought the victim was Jane Blyth-Sheridan. But you didn’t identify her, so he’s got to start looking for somebody else.’

‘Oh, I see, it’s all my fault,’ said Christopher. ‘I might have known.’

‘No, I didn’t mean that! But what if she was Jane Blyth-Sheridan and the woman you saw wasn’t?’

‘But she introduced herself,’ said Christopher indignantly. ‘And the name really suited her. I thought it did, anyway.’

‘I wonder if anyone else in town can identify her,’ said Amaryllis. ‘It seems like the kind of place where the neighbours keep to themselves – unless they’re looking out the windows waiting to pounce on a passing stranger, that is.’

‘Passing stranger?’ said Christopher, alerted by the apparently casual way she threw the term into her sentence. ‘You mean you?’

‘It wasn’t in the road that goes past the woods and the garden centre,’ said Amaryllis, the speed with which she rushed to explain sending him on to an even higher alert. ‘It was the one behind it... That’s where the coven is,’ she added darkly.

‘What were you up to?’

‘Just looking for some harmless information,’ she said.

‘Harmless? Ha!’

‘All right! I was trying to find out which neighbour lied about seeing me earlier on the day the man turned up dead in the garden centre, that’s all. They told the police I’d been lugging something into the grounds, and that was why the police dragged me in for questioning. Sarah Ramsay said she had to do it. I want to know why someone should lie about me, and why Sarah’s so scared of those Neighbourhood Watch types.’

Christopher stopped in his tracks.

‘Ashley!’ he exclaimed.

‘I don’t think it could have been Ashley,’ said Amaryllis doubtfully.

‘No, I don’t mean it was her that lied to the police. I mean, she should be able to identify the woman. She was talking about her to Keith and me. Said she had been into the garden centre a few times. She seemed to know quite a bit about the alpacas... But do you think Keith would ask his girl-friend to do it?’

‘If he had to, he would. In any case, just because she’s pale and fragile it doesn’t mean she can’t cope with things. You should never underestimate women. The smallest ones are the deadliest.’

Christopher laughed, in spite of the seriousness of the topic of conversation. ‘Thanks for the tip. I always thought the red-heads were the worst.’

‘There must be someone else, anyway. A relative. An old friend or neighbour. Someone from their old life before they came here.’ Amaryllis suddenly gasped and clutched his arm very tightly. ‘Penelope! That’s it! I was talking to her about them just the other day. Jane and... I can’t remember the man’s name... Paul? Phil? Let’s go and see her now.’

‘I expect the police will get round to her if she’s really a friend of theirs,’ said Christopher doubtfully.

‘No, let’s go round there. Before we forget.’

They rang Penelope’s doorbell three times, and stood on the doorstep for so long that net curtains twitched in two neighbours’ windows. She was obviously out, although Amaryllis suggested she might be in the bath, an image Christopher had trouble accommodating in his brain.

‘We could try asking Zak,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. We don’t need to disturb half the town. If there’s a desperate rush, the police will take care of it.’

It took a while but he persuaded her to give up, temporarily at least. She might sneak back round to Penelope’s later, but that was not his problem.

After Amaryllis had gone her own way down to her chic modern apartment, Christopher had intended to go home and prune something in the garden, which was how he should spend summer weekends rather than chasing alpacas round the woods, but he found his steps inexorably taking him round to Jemima and Dave’s house to let them know what had happened. It would only be a kindly act, he told himself, to save them from dying of unsatisfied curiosity. He ignored the part of his brain that was telling him he was heading towards being one of these wrinkly old men who hung around in cafés all day picking up and regurgitating gossip, then catching buses on unnecessary journeys so they could talk it through with the bus driver as well. He had encountered such men on the bus before, and his heart always sank when he saw them.

‘Aha!’ said Jemima when she opened the door to him. ‘Come in and sit yourself down. I thought you might be round, so I’ve opened another packet of biscuits.’

‘Thanks,’ said Christopher, hoping this didn’t mean she and Dave considered him as some sort of vulture who went round feasting on the contents of other people’s biscuit tins.

In the familiar surroundings of Jemima’s kitchen, with the kettle on and the instant coffee ready in the mugs, he went over the events that had occurred since he last saw them – only a couple of hours ago, he realised, glancing at the big kitchen clock which as well as telling the time depicted a silly-looking stylised teddy-bear wearing a pale blue patchwork outfit. He wondered, not for the first time, if one of them had won it in a raffle.

‘Mmhm,’ said Jemima at the end of his account. ‘We saw her too, remember.’

‘Did you?’

‘Oh, yes. When we went up to the garden centre that first time, she was out in the road trying to catch one of her animals. She spoke to us. Very well-spoken – a wee trace of an English accent – and quite smartly dressed, considering.’

‘Yes, that sounds like her all right,’ said Christopher. ‘Although I suppose it could describe lots of people.’

‘Do you think Keith Burnet would like us to go up there and give him a hand with the identification?’ said Jemima uncertainly. ‘Only I always like to help the police if I can. He’d have to send a car for us though. I’m not sure Dave’s really fit to drive yet, whatever he says.’

Christopher was fairly certain that Keith would prefer it if neither Jemima nor Dave got under his feet, but he said diplomatically, ‘I think he’s probably following up other avenues just now. Her husband might be at home. Maybe there’s dental records or DNA at a pinch.’

‘That poor woman,’ said Jemima, shaking her head as she crunched her custard cream. ‘And what’s going to happen to those animals of hers?’

‘I’m sure alpacas are in demand somewhere,’ said Christopher. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. ‘I’d better be going. I just thought you’d want to know what happened.’

‘That was nice of you. It’s good to keep up with the local news.’

‘She’d never have forgiven you if you hadn’t told her,’ added Dave. ‘Imagine the shame of having to read about it in the papers before she knew it all!’

‘I don’t suppose any of us know it all yet,’ said Christopher. ‘Even Amaryllis seems a bit baffled.’