Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10) (15 page)

Chapter 26 Expert witness

Amaryllis wasn’t a big fan of the internet in general. She had always preferred to find things out for herself in real life, usually while someone was chasing her with a gun. There was a certain urgency about research in those circumstances that got her adrenalin going.

However, she had found a use for Google on this occasion. She didn’t know how long it might have taken her to locate the animal rescue organisation without it. Once she had obtained the number and contacted them, it was easy enough to convince them of her credentials as an international expert on alpacas, and therefore the perfect person to go in and rescue the alpacas from their home next to the garden centre. She arranged a rendezvous at the Blyth-Sheridan’s gate with someone from the organisation that very afternoon. Apparently the police had passed on a set of keys for use in rescuing the animals.

‘Thanks very much indeed for calling,’ said the woman at the other end of the line. ‘I don’t know how we’d have managed otherwise. We haven’t been able to find anybody else locally who knows anything about them, and it’s getting quite urgent. Of course we have temporary accommodation here that will do for them to be going on with, but apparently catching them can be a wee bit problematic.’

Oh, yes, thought Amaryllis, she might not strictly speaking be an international alpaca expert, but she knew about the difficulties of catching them all right. She was sort of hoping they would turn out all to be shut in the stables when she went in to catch them, and not roaming free around the garden. But either way, she would cope.

The man from the animal rescue place was waiting when she got there. He had a horse-box with him, parked on the grass verge by the entrance.

‘I hope this is big enough,’ he said. ‘We’re not quite clear about how many there are.’

Amaryllis looked at it with what she hoped seemed like a practised eye. ‘Oh, you can get several of them in there,’ she said airily. ‘Have you got the keys?’

‘Yes – I thought we’d go and check out the place first, then when we’re sure the animals are all securely shut in, I can take the horse-box right in and we can lead them into it, one at a time... Is that what you would advise?’

‘Oh, definitely.’

It sounded so easy when he said it like that.

Half an hour later, she wasn’t so sure. One of the alpacas had rushed out of the stables while they were leading another one into the horse-box, and started rampaging round the grounds, then another one had made a bid for freedom while being led in, dragging the man from the animal rescue place behind it as if he weighed almost nothing.

‘Is there anything we can tempt them with?’ he said at last. ‘Any special delicacy that alpacas are particularly fond of?’

He sounded a bit sarcastic – almost as if he suspected she wasn’t quite as international an expert as she had purported to be – but Amaryllis had Googled alpacas while she was searching for the contact details for the animal rescue place, and she knew the answer to this.

‘Chopped fruit and raw vegetables,’ she said, getting the plastic bag out of her rucksack. When she dug into it and gave him a handful of chopped pineapple, lettuce and carrots, she knew he had given in and decided to believe her. She had been fortunate that the corner shop near Jemima’s house sold packets of chopped and washed fruit and vegetables.

Eventually the last alpaca was tucked away in the horse-box, and the man prepared to get in and drive off.

‘I’ll hand these in at the police station, shall I?’ she said, dangling the bunch of keys in front of his nose.

‘That would be great,’ he said. ‘I don’t really want to have to manoeuvre this lot down the High Street and it’ll be a good bit quicker going along the back road. Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?’

‘No, I’m passing that way,’ Amaryllis assured him.

She gave him a cheery wave as he drove away. She could hardly contain her glee. Things had worked out exactly as she wanted.

Swinging the keys from her hand, she wandered round to the stables. From here, she intended to carry out a full-scale survey of the perimeter of the grounds, with a view to finding a weak spot in the fence through which a murderer might have got into the garden centre, or indeed made his or her escape from it after committing the crime.

She had the whole of the rest of the day, after all. The police weren’t to know she had the keys now. She could take her time about handing them in.

First she would look for a concealed way of getting in and out of the garden centre without being seen. Having found it, she would go through it to the garden centre and get into the building where she was convinced the sound system was housed. The thought crossed her mind that it had probably been taken away by the police, but she told herself they might not have understood its significance. You had to have been there really.

She began by heading to the right from the entrance gates, which she locked behind her as a precaution. At least that would delay the police a little if they did decide to take an interest and arrive to have a look round. It might also delay her escape if anything went wrong, but it was no use setting out with the idea that something would go wrong. That was a recipe for failure. And Christopher wasn’t here to nag at her about taking risks.

She was so elated by her re-discovered talent for getting what she wanted that she almost skipped along by the fence that bordered on the hotel site. She didn’t care what was happening in there. It might have been easy to pin the blame for the murders on some illegal migrant or tramp who was squatting in the old hotel, but she had a gut instinct that there was a more complicated story behind it than that. What had really convinced her was the knowledge that another woman had impersonated Jane Blyth-Sheridan. Amaryllis didn’t have enough information yet to work out the details, but she knew it was the key to everything.

No sound today from the hotel. Good, because she didn’t want to be distracted.

As she moved further round and reached the point where the Blyth-Sheridans’ garden backed on to that of Mr Kilpatrick, formerly known as the unpleasant man with the dogs but now ensconsed in Pitkirtly legend as the man who stole the maps, she got an unwelcome but familiar sensation somewhere at the top of her spine.

She was being watched.

At first her imagination conjured up Mr Kilpatrick himself, observing her from behind a tree in his garden, and then she turned suddenly to look back at the Blyth-Sheridan house. The front windows were at this side, along with a front door that must have been more or less ornamental, as any callers would have reached the back of the house first. It was an odd design, she thought, staring at the windows for any sign of movement that would give away the presence of an intruder. But if there was anyone there, they were too clever to let themselves be seen.

It couldn’t be the police. They would have no hesitation in making themselves visible and probably audible and tangible too. The back of Amaryllis’s neck prickled. It could be someone who had already killed twice.

She cut quickly across the corner of the garden and pushed into the hedge. At least she wouldn’t be such an easy target there, even if the pruned ends of the branches were sticking into her like needles. Another push took her right through the hedge and up to the fence behind it. She could see hinges and, about three feet further along, a bolt. A gate!

Another burst of glee almost made her shout aloud. She had been right about this too.

She calmed herself down by thinking of the watcher she hadn’t yet pinpointed. If she were right about that too...

There was a padlock on the gate, but a little key she hadn’t noticed before on the key-ring opened it smoothly, and once she slid the bolt across, she was able to open it a little and slide through. She stood at the garden centre side, waiting to see if anything happened. Had the watcher followed her? Would they show themselves? She held her breath for a few long moments.

Chapter 27 Online and offline

Christopher spread all the printed sheets out on the table in the research room. There was still more spilling out of the printer, and Jemima was hunched over one of the computers, maybe coaxing even more information out of it.

Somebody needed to start collating and analysing all this lot, otherwise they wouldn’t be any better off than they had been before their search session.

‘What we need,’ he said slowly, considering the amount and variety of results they had received from the search engines and archives, ‘is to make a timeline.’

‘Timeline?’ said Jock McLean suspiciously. ‘That’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? I thought those were only for history, and geology and that.’

Christopher stared at him in some irritation. Nobody would imagine Jock had ever been a teacher if they heard him now that he’d been retired for a while. He seemed to like his public persona, insofar as he actually had one, to be that of an out-and-out Philistine.

‘You don’t have to have a huge range of dates to make a satisfactory timeline,’ he said. ‘In this case I doubt if we have more than a decade to think about.’

‘Don’t speak too soon!’ Jemima called from across the room. ‘I think I’ve got something here, but it’s from the nineteen-seventies though.’

‘That’s all right too,’ said Christopher hastily. ‘The more the merrier.’

He drafted a timeline on a big piece of paper, starting with the nineteen-seventies and ending with the day before yesterday. The difficult part was going to be getting the scale right. But this was just a rough outline. He could always start again if he got it completely wrong. He picked up one of the felt-tip pens he had persuaded the librarians to part with from their box of children’s craft stuff, and hummed to himself as he coloured in a couple of circles representing events of different types.

‘Hey, can I do some of that colouring in?’ said Dave.

Before long Jock wanted to join in too.

By the time Jemima had finished her research on the computer, they were all leaning over the table wielding different-coloured pens, and arguing about what colour to use for events to do with the garden centre. Christopher favoured brown, for earth, but the other two wanted dark green for trees, except that Jock had already used bright green, inexplicably, for newspaper reports about certain families.

Jemima came over to the table with the final sheaf of print-outs.

‘Well, that’s a pretty picture,’ she commented. ‘Where does it start?’

‘This is the nineteen-seventies at this end,’ said Christopher. ‘The first thing that seemed relevant was the newspaper birth announcement.’

‘I’ve got something a wee bit before that,’ said Jemima. She had an unsettling smile on her face. Was she about to drop a bombshell?

‘How much before?’ said Dave suspiciously.

‘Oh, two hundred and fifty years or so. It’s in the horse tax records. Just an odd wee note.’

‘Do you often find odd wee notes in the horse tax records?’ enquired Jock sourly.

‘Not this kind of thing,’ said Jemima. She gave the printed sheet to Christopher and said, ‘Look, there in the middle. The whole area belonged to New Pitkirtlyhill Farm in those days. The farmhouse is long gone, of course. But one of those property articles we found in that colour supplement said the stables dated from the seventeenth century. Look, here it is.’ She pulled a section from a Sunday paper out of the pile of pages on the table. They had included in their research all the printed newspapers the library had to hand, on the off-chance there was something relevant to be found. ‘And these horse tax records show that there was a secret compartment.’

‘A secret compartment? In the stables?’ said Dave.

Christopher was glad somebody else seemed as baffled as he was. He stared at the sheet of paper. The handwriting on it was almost illegible. But then, Jemima had a lot of experience with this kind of document, so they had to trust she had interpreted it correctly.

‘They hid an extra horse in it,’ she said. ‘So they wouldn’t have to pay tax on it. But somehow the authorities found out about it. It was probably through the barleyman.’

‘Don’t ask,’ said Christopher to Jock, who was already forming his mouth into a ‘barleyman?’ sort of shape.

‘Of course, it may not be at all relevant,’ said Jemima modestly, though Christopher knew she was convinced it was the key to the whole thing. Dave patted her arm.

He drew some dotted lines to represent centuries where nothing much had happened – the nineteenth and most of the twentieth, so far – and added a not very good drawing of a horse looking over a gate to represent the horse tax records.

‘What’s that sheep got to do with anything?’ Jock grumbled.

‘So, what have we got here so far?’ said Christopher, ignoring him. He scanned the whole timeline. ‘The horse tax records from the late eighteenth century, telling us about the secret part of the stables – of course, even although they’re still standing, the layout might have changed over the years. Then the next thing we have is Philip Blyth-Sheridan’s birth announcement in the national newspaper for 1976. Not everybody announces births like that any more, although maybe that was more frequent at the time than nowadays.’

‘My son did,’ said Jock. ‘But that was in Milngavie, of course. It’s different through there in the west.’

He glared round at them, as if daring them to contradict his view that Milngavie was somewhere in an alternate reality.

‘It was announced by Mr and Mrs Blyth-Sheridan of New Pitkirtlyhill Farm,’ said Christopher. ‘It looks as if they owned the whole area at that time.’

‘But then we found this,’ said Jemima, putting her finger on a bright orange dot next to part of a printout Christopher had cut out from one of the sheets. ‘A big stooshie about planning permission a few years after the birth announcement.’

‘What was that for?’ said Jock, who seemed to have a very poor memory for detail.

‘They wanted to divide part of the land off from the rest and build a hotel,’ said Christopher. ‘Does that ring any bells?’

‘So that was part of the farm too, was it?’ said Dave. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea? It’s hard work, all this research.’

‘That’s what he always says,’ Jemima murmured. ‘As if he’s had to go through bundles of old newspapers getting his hands all inky instead of just watching me using the computer.’

‘Then,’ said Christopher, unable to keep the note of excited triumph out of his voice, ‘there’s the other birth announcement in 1982.’

‘Madeleine Blyth-Sheridan,’ said Jock, reading it off the printed snippet. ‘Posh name.’

‘Madeleine,’ said Christopher. ‘She mentioned Madeleine. I thought she must be talking about the au pair or something. The name even sounded a bit French. But it was one of the family all the time.’

‘Who mentioned Madeleine?’ said Dave.

‘The woman who wasn’t Jane Blyth-Sheridan after all!’ said Christopher.

‘So there was a brother and a sister,’ said Jemima thoughtfully.

‘There’s a family picture here,’ said Dave, rummaging about in some of the printouts. He held up a grainy black and white image of people grouped round a pony. ‘It’s the Pitkirtlyhill Pony Club gymkhana – is that how you pronounce it?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Christopher. He gazed at the picture, thinking more about the fact that he would have to get somebody who knew how to do these things to order a new printer cartridge than about the people in the reprinted photo. He noticed something a bit odd, and peered more closely at the sheet. ‘It isn’t Madeleine. The girl on the pony. The caption say it’s somebody called Jane Lawson. I wonder who she was – and where Madeleine was.’

‘Maybe she didn’t like horses,’ Jock suggested. ‘Maybe she was allergic to them.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Christopher, shrugging his shoulders. He carried on along the timeline. ‘Death notices for the parents. They must have died together, maybe in an accident or something.’

‘No, it was overseas,’ said Jemima, waving a piece of paper at him. ‘There’s a whole story about it in the local paper archives... It’s a pity we can’t find their will, though. That might have helped.’

‘I didn’t know you could get those local papers online,’ said Christopher. He continued along the sheet of paper, his finger tracing a path. ‘Planning permission again. Philip Blyth-Sheridan sells off some more land and knocks down the old farmhouse.’

‘There was no mention of him or his sister in between times,’ said Jemima. ‘Maybe his whole family went overseas for a while.’

‘Maybe they just didn’t do anything that got into the papers,’ said Dave. ‘It does happen.’

‘He was married by then,’ Christopher pointed out. ‘But that wasn’t in the news either.’

‘They’ve got into the news now, all right,’ said a voice from the doorway.

Christopher was amused by the way they all gave guilty starts, more or less in unison. Jemima even tried to cover up the timeline sheet with random pieces of printer paper.

But Keith Burnet wasn’t fooled as easily as that. He strode on into the research room.

‘What have we here? A community project? Brilliant.’

‘Yes, that’s what it is,’ muttered Christopher.

‘I like the way you’ve coloured it in,’ Keith commented. ‘Very tasteful.’ He held up the newspaper he was carrying. ‘Looks like you’ve spent so much time ferreting about in the past that you haven’t even seen today’s news. Just as well I brought this with me.’

Keith had acquired an unpleasantly commanding tone since he became a Sergeant, Christopher mused. He regretted the loss of the younger, more carefree Keith who would have turned a blind eye to their antics while Charlie Smith and later Inspector Armstrong raged at them.

He took the paper from Keith and turned it over to view the front page in all its glory.

‘POLICE HUNT DOUBLE KILLER IN TOWN OF DEATH,’ shouted the headlines. The sub-heading was slightly more subdued but equally upsetting. ‘Curse of Pitkirtly Strikes Again.’

‘Town of death?’ said Jemima, peering over Christopher’s shoulder. ‘Curse of Pitkirtly? That’s not very nice of them. Pitkirtly’s such a peaceful wee place.’

Christopher scanned the small amount of text they had found room for under the headlines. ‘You’ve identified them, then.’

‘It’s the Blyth-Sheridans,’ said Keith. ‘Mr and Mrs. The garden centre manager identified them in the end, although I have to admit your drawings helped a bit. He seems to have been one of the few people to have known them by sight around these parts. They didn’t go out much...We think they were probably killed by the same person. Whoever the killer is, he’s still on the loose, and quite likely extremely dangerous. I just wanted to make sure you knew all that before you start poking about anywhere. We’re looking for the other woman – the one you met, Mr Wilson – so that we can warn her too...’ He glanced round the room as if looking for something or somebody. ‘Where’s Amaryllis?’

‘Amaryllis?’ said Christopher. ‘Um... We haven’t seen her for a while. Have we?’ He challenged the others to back him up.

They all shook their heads. ‘Not a sign,’ said Jock.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Keith. ‘I suppose I’d better call for back-up. She’ll be at the garden centre, of course.’

It wasn’t even a question, but a statement. He marched out of the room again, shaking his head.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Jock said, ‘I never knew he was so psychic. That should come in handy for him in his line of work.’