Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10) (12 page)

Chapter 20 Is there an artist in the house?

‘I don’t know if she’ll want to see you,’ said Mrs Petrelli, standing squarely in front of the door to the stairs that led up to her flat. ‘She was very upset by what happened in the spring. She says she’ll never want to create anything again.’

‘That’s understandable,’ said Christopher, secretly thinking that it might be a good thing if certain young artists were too traumatised to produce any so-called art. Or at least, anything with the potential to cause chaos in the Cultural Centre. ‘This has nothing to do with all that. But it might help her get back into art. We want her to draw something for us, you see.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Petrelli, frowning.

‘She could meet us somewhere else to do this,’ said Jemima. ‘It doesn’t have to be here.’

‘She doesn’t go out much,’ said Mrs Petrelli. ‘Not at all, really.’

The door behind her opened and Stewie came out in his usual furtive way, peering through a small gap first and then squeezing round it. He suddenly noticed the four visitors and jumped backwards slightly, tripping over his own feet as he did so. He had started to turn in preparation to go back upstairs when Mrs Petrelli stopped him, holding the door open. ‘How is Sammy today? Does she need anything?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ he muttered.

‘Stewie?’ said Christopher. He only knew the boy from seeing him with Amaryllis. He had no idea why she had more or less adopted him, but if she saw something in him worth encouraging then he was willing to overlook his doubts. ‘We wondered if Samantha might draw something for us. If she has time.’

‘We’ve brought some paper,’ said Jemima, producing a quilted shopping bag from behind her back and jiggling it enticingly. ‘And pencils. We got them from the workshop at the Cultural Centre.’

Christopher wished she hadn’t said that. But there was nobody here to give away the fact that he had raided the educational supply cupboard after Jemima, Dave and Jock had asked him to come with them to try and talk Sammy round. It wasn’t his fault there wasn’t an art materials shop any nearer than Dunfermline, or that by the time they had gone there and back on the bus with its rambling route it would have been late that evening at best. If the last bus had been cancelled, as happened occasionally, it could have been the next morning. He shuddered at the thought of sleeping on a bench at the bus station.

‘You all right, Mr Wilson?’ said Stewie, evidently misinterpreting his expression and body language.

‘I’m fine,’ said Christopher. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’ll ask her,’ said Stewie. He wrenched the door away from Mrs Petrelli and slammed it behind him.

He was back five minutes later. ‘She says it’ll probably be cool. You’ve to come up and talk to her.’

‘Don’t you wear her out now,’ Mrs Petrelli warned them.

Sammy looked smaller than before, and oddly younger. But she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and she offered to put the kettle on for them.

‘I can do that,’ said Stewie, glaring at her in a manner which could have been protective or threatening. There was no knowing with Stewie.

‘What we need,’ said Christopher, who seemed to have appointed himself spokesperson without really intending to, ‘is one of these pictures the police draw if they need help with identifying somebody.’

‘The kind you see on the television,’ said Jemima. ‘Only we need two of them.’

Once they had explained it all a bit more, Sammy seemed to understand. Her eyes became more animated as they discussed what they wanted, and she reached out for a pencil before they had even finished. Maybe this really would help her. It would be nice to think so, anyway.

‘So both of you saw this woman,’ she said, starting to draw a generic face shape in the sketchpad they had brought. ‘But you don’t know if it was the same one both times. And then there was another woman too?’

Christopher and Jemima looked at each other. Christopher couldn’t work out whether Jemima thought they should tell Sammy exactly what had happened, but in the end he said, ‘The police asked me if I could identify somebody. There was a body up in the woods. But that definitely wasn’t the woman I met who said she was Jane Blyth-Sheridan.’

He was glad he had come out and said this. Sammy didn’t seem to be unduly upset by the news, but then she would be reading it in the papers or seeing it on Twitter before very long in any case.

‘You’d better go in the other room,’ she said to Christopher. ‘Then I can do the two drawings separately.’

‘Three drawings,’ said Stewie, who had been listening attentively. ‘In case there are three of them.’

‘There could be three different women, I suppose,’ said Christopher. ‘But it seems a bit unlikely.’

‘There was another one too,’ said Jock McLean, who must also have been listening more attentively than usual. ‘The woman with the dog who found the body.’

‘But she had nothing to do with it,’ said Christopher. ‘She just happened to be there.’

‘No such thing as coincidence,’ said Jock in the tone Christopher always found most annoying, particularly in this case where he knew Jock was doing it on purpose.

‘It’s going to take a wee while,’ said Sammy. But her gaze went back to the page and she doodled a little body with arms and legs under the oval she had started with.

‘I’ll stay here,’ said Stewie.

‘Are you all right, Jemima?’ said Dave. ‘I can go in the other room with those two. Keep an eye on them.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Jemima.

Christopher, Dave and Jock went into Mrs Petrelli’s sitting-room, across the hall from the kitchen, which was dominated by a huge landscape painting of a seaside scene, in bright sunlight.

‘I guess we’re not in Pitkirtly any more,’ said Jock, gesturing towards it.

‘Do you think that’s somewhere in Italy?’ said Dave.

‘That could be Vesuvius in the background,’ Christopher suggested. ‘Look, there’s a swirl of smoke coming out of it.’

They soon exhausted the possibilities of the painting. But after a while Mrs Petrelli brought them a tray of coffee and cake, and by the time they had finished with that, Jemima came in to join them.

‘Your turn now,’ she said to Christopher. ‘It was more difficult than I expected, mind.’

Christopher expected it to be very difficult. He didn’t consider himself at all artistic, and not all that observant, but somehow Sammy coaxed more information out of him than he knew was there, and together they produced a drawing that at least bore a resemblance to the woman he had seen.

‘Of course they use computer software to make this kind of thing easier nowadays,’ Sammy commented as they stared at the picture. ‘They could give her a different hairstyle just by pressing a button. Maybe a different nose too... What was that about the third woman?’

‘Can I see Jemima’s one first?’

‘No – it’s better if we start again from the beginning.’

Sammy wrote Christopher’s name at the top of the one she had just finished, and tore out a new piece of paper.

Christopher frowned. To be honest he hadn’t looked at the dead woman for very long, because he had found it disturbing and a bit intrusive to be staring at her when she couldn’t stare back. Or at least, she could, but only with the expressionless dead eyes that he knew couldn’t see the sky and the trees above her head, or anything ever again. He closed his eyes.

‘They were blue,’ he said.

‘What – her eyes? That’s a start then.’

He managed to overcome his distaste and again they produced some sort of a drawing, although there were some blurry bits where he must have been too freaked out to look properly.

In the end she smiled.

She fished around in the pile of discarded sheets of paper on the floor and pulled out another drawing with ‘Jemima’ scrawled at the top.

‘Look – what do you think?’

‘They’re the same woman,’ he said almost instantly.

‘Seem to be,’ she said.

‘So the woman I saw is the odd one out?’

‘That’s the way it looks.’

They called the others back in. Jemima was quite upset that the woman she and Dave had seen might now be dead. Jock asked why they hadn’t drawn the woman with the dog.

‘The police already know who that is,’ said Christopher. ‘They’ve got her name and address. She’s going to go in and give them a statement.’

‘It doesn’t mean she couldn’t have been involved in something bad,’ said Jock.

‘But she isn’t the same one I met though,’ said Christopher. ‘Otherwise you’d have recognised her from the drawing.’

Jock shook his head stubbornly. ‘It still seems a bit fishy to me.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Jemima to Dave, ‘there’s a nice bit of lemon sole in the freezer – let’s get it out later and have it for our tea.’

Chapter 21 Two heads good, six heads better

Charlie Smith insisted Amaryllis should stay with him for the rest of Sunday in case he got into trouble with the police for releasing her back into the wild too soon.

‘You’re going to end up with an electronic tag and a curfew one of these days,’ he predicted as he cleared up after the lunchtime rush.

‘I bet Jock McLean gets one first,’ she said, carrying a handful of glasses over to the bar for washing.

Almost as if she had conjured him up, Jock came into the bar, followed by Christopher.

‘What will I get first? Any chance of a pint?’ said Jock.

‘It’s a pub – of course there’s a chance,’ said Charlie. ‘The usual?’

He moved round behind the bar, welcomed by a small sound from the dog, and got busy with the Old Pictish Brew.

Christopher put some sheets of paper on the bar. ‘We’ve been making our own Identikits.’

Amaryllis frowned. ‘I thought they were called artists’ impressions now. And why would the police let you take them away with you?’

‘Aha,’ said Christopher, trying to be mysterious.

The effect was of course spoiled immediately by Jock, who said, ‘We’ve been round at the Petrellis’ – the wee girl did them. Sammy.’

‘Let’s have a look, then,’ said Amaryllis. She leafed through the sheets, wishing she had thought of this. Of course she had had to go and get into trouble wandering about people’s gardens instead. Hadn’t her mentor in the security services always told her to think before acting? Well, no, he hadn’t actually. Action had been at a premium in her particular job. Thinking came last, when you had to try and justify what you’d done. She vaguely supposed there were people doing the thinking in some back office somewhere, not that they always made a very good job of it.

‘What do you think?’ said Christopher.

‘Two different women,’ she said slowly. ‘But which is the real one?’

‘They’re both real women,’ said Jock, grabbing his pint and taking a long draught. ‘That’s better. It’s thirsty work, all this detecting... We should have drawn the fourth one too, though.’

Christopher looked as if he was almost at the end of his tether. Spending too long with Jock McLean could do that to you. He was so relentless.

‘So which is the one you saw, Christopher?’ Amaryllis enquired.

He pointed to the sheet of paper. Amaryllis studied it.

‘This would be a good time to try and catch Penelope,’ she said.

‘Why Penelope?’ said Jock.

‘She knows the woman. The real Jane Blyth-Sheridan, that is.’

Charlie Smith turned from where he was filling ice-cube trays to where they were all grouped round the end of the bar, and said, ‘I know this isn’t going to be a popular point of view, but this would be a good time to show the drawings to the police.’

‘Why should we?’ said Jock. ‘Let them do their own donkey-work.’

Normally Amaryllis would have sided with him, but if it was going to make the difference between being grounded and being allowed out...

‘We could go round by Penelope’s on the way to the police station,’ she said. Charlie coughed, and she added, ‘I mean, you could go round there. I need to stay and give Charlie a hand with something.’

‘They won’t be open today anyway,’ said Jock, taking another slurp of Old Pictish Brew. ‘You’ll have to wait for an alternate Thursday or whatever it is.’

‘Sarah Ramsay told me they would be working on this all weekend,’ said Amaryllis.

‘That doesn’t mean they want outsiders poking their noses in,’ said Jock.

At that point the discussion became redundant, because the door opened and Keith Burnet and his girl-friend, Ashley, came into the bar. A guilty silence fell.

‘Well, this is cosy,’ said Keith. ‘What are you up to?’

Ashley tugged at his sleeve. ‘You’re off duty, Keith! Just relax.’

Charlie Smith shook his head. ‘He can’t relax – he’s a coiled spring, just waiting to – um – spring on anybody who puts a foot wrong.’

‘Maybe I should go out and come in again,’ said Keith. ‘Pity that other pub closed down. We could’ve gone there instead.’

‘There’s always the bus along to Limekilns,’ said Jock. ‘It leaves in half an hour.’

Amaryllis glanced at Jock. The words could have been a joke, but his tone told her it wasn’t. She felt obscurely responsible for restoring good relations between the citizens of Pitkirtly and the police. Perhaps it was because she was conscious of having played a part in causing them to be somewhat strained, perhaps because despite everything she was still on the side of law and order and always would be.

‘Come on now, children, play nicely,’ said Charlie Smith, stepping into the breach before she could speak. ‘What’s everybody having? On the house. We’re all friends here.’

The awkward silence became a chaos of people’s voices saying ‘Thanks, Charlie’, ‘Old Pictish’ and ‘the usual’.

Keith glanced at the drawings, did a double-take and picked one of them up.

‘What the hell’s this?’

‘Just an experiment of ours,’ said Christopher. ‘Young Sammy helped us with it.’

‘You’ve involved young Sammy in your meddling?’ growled Keith. ‘After all she’s been through?’

Charlie’s dog growled loudly from behind the bar.

‘Ssh, now,’ Charlie told him. He said to Keith, ‘They were just about to bring them along to the station. We were talking about it when you came in.’

‘We’d better talk about it now,’ said Keith. He faced the assembled throng. ‘Look, if you thought we weren’t investigating this ourselves then I can tell you we are. It’s a serious and quite delicate situation, and we need to be left to get on with it. I can’t tell you the whole story at the moment but there’s more to it than meets the eye, and even telling you that much could get me drummed out of the force.’

‘So it isn’t just another common or garden murder, then,’ murmured Amaryllis.

‘It certainly isn’t,’ he said with a sigh. ‘And don’t forget, we could easily pull you in again as a suspect in the first death.’

‘Why not take the drawings anyway?’ said Charlie. ‘They might come in useful. You never know.’

Keith browsed through the papers on the bar. He held one up. ‘Yes, this is definitely the victim.’

Amaryllis rolled her eyes. The fact that the woman was depicted lying in the undergrowth staring up sightlessly might have been a clue.

‘So this one marked Jemima is the same one and is the woman Mr and Mrs Douglas saw on their way to the garden centre?’ said Keith.

‘Yes, and the one with my name on is the woman who claimed to be Jane Blyth-Sheridan when I met her and we caught the alpaca later on,’ said Christopher.

‘Hmm,’ said Keith thoughtfully. Ashley patted him on the hand. He smiled at her and took an absent-minded sip of Old Pictish Brew. He glanced round again, but in a less hostile manner this time. ‘Sorry I lost my temper just now. These are actually quite helpful.’ He held the drawing with Jemima’s name on it out to Ashley. ‘What do you think, Ash? Is this the woman you saw at the garden centre sometimes?’

Ashley gazed at the picture and nodded. ‘I think so. She didn’t come in very often though. But then, the garden centre’s only been there about six months. We were getting ready to open just after New Year.’

‘It must have been a bit annoying for them, having a garden centre opening right next to them if they just had open fields before,’ said Amaryllis.

‘They were still building that house then,’ said Ashley. ‘They didn’t move in until after the garden centre was open. So it wasn’t that they were used to having open fields or anything.’

‘How about the people in the gardens at the back?’ said Amaryllis. ‘What did they think of it?’

‘I don’t think they’d been there long either,’ said Ashley uncertainly.

Keith was frowning again. He didn’t seem to like the turn the conversation had taken.

‘We really can’t talk about this any more.’

‘And by the way,’ said Amaryllis, ‘I happen to know that Penelope Johnstone knows the Blyth-Sheridans, so she can probably help you. If you can be bothered going round and asking her about it.’

‘Sorry, folks,’ said Keith with an air of finality. ‘I know you’re interested and you want to help, but I mean it this time. Keep out of it. Don’t go near the place again. Find something else to do with yourselves.’

What does he expect us to find to do? Amaryllis thought indignantly. Start a tiddlywinks league?