Closer to Death in a Garden (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 10) (4 page)

‘I’ll need to phone the police,’ mumbled Jock. ‘But I don’t know how to switch this thing on.’

He was waving Charlie’s spare mobile around as if he imagined this might activate it.

The police, thought Christopher as Jane Blyth-Sheridan took out some sort of remote control device and the heavy gates across the entrance to her property swung open. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to go in there with her, but it probably wasn’t a matter for the police – yet.

Chapter 4 Witness

The hotel had fallen into disrepair since it had been empty. Amaryllis didn’t follow local news – except for a brief spell when she had been standing for West Fife Council – so she didn’t know whether it was expected to re-open as a hotel or whether the building would be demolished and luxury flats built. She wasn’t in a position to complain about this, since she lived in a luxury flat in a small block that had been built on the site of the town gaol, a historic structure that she knew certain people had tried quite hard to save from being knocked down. But that had all happened before she even arrived in Pitkirtly, so she felt no moral qualms about it.

One of the doors round at the back was wide open, and someone had evidently been in trying to remove the fixtures and fittings. She saw that they had left an industrial scale kitchen sink half in and half out of the doorway, and an old toolbox lying on the ground just outside.

On closer inspection she found it wasn’t such an old toolbox. It contained a workman-like set of screwdrivers and assorted cables, neatly coiled, on the top layer. She didn’t want to get distracted by this, otherwise she would have investigated the layer underneath too. For all she knew, the tools were for fixing car engines. She had never been able to summon up much enthusiasm about the internal workings of engines. It was enough that they did more or less what they were designed to do.

As she walked on past it, she reflected that in a place like Pitkirtly it probably wasn’t the case that rough sleepers, squatters or travellers had colonised the hotel and its grounds, although she wouldn’t put it past some of the local youths to come up here and experiment with drugs or sex, or just to ride motorbikes aimlessly round and round annoying the neighbours. On the other hand, the neighbours weren’t all that close by.

She headed over to the fence that separated the hotel grounds from the alpaca farm. It was a sturdy structure with barbed wire laced along the horizontal struts at regular intervals. She doubted if it was electrified. But there was also a thick hedge of some prickly shrub just behind the fence. She looked ruefully down at her thin summer fleece – Amaryllis wouldn’t have dreamed of going out in a T-shirt and shorts, whatever the weather, but she had found a lightweight black fleecy jacket in the sales, while helping Jemima to get a new fawn cardigan to replace her old fawn cardigan, and bought it immediately. The sales assistant had tried to put her off it, claiming it wasn’t a summer colour and had been left on sale accidentally when it should have been stored away, ready for the dark days of autumn and winter, but Amaryllis had told her it was for a secret spying mission and that had done the trick. On her way out of the shop she had seen the girl whispering to the next assistant along, and then they had given her identical hard stares.

It was all part of the fun.

Amaryllis followed the fence round. She was hoping to find a weak spot.

There wasn’t a weak spot. However, she got into the garden that backed on to the alpaca farm quite easily, as it was bounded on the hotel grounds side by nothing more than a rustic wooden fence and some artistically arranged shrubs and small trees. Evidently the occupants of the low ranch style house either had nothing to hide or they were confident of their security in other ways. The two large dogs that appeared from nowhere while she was examining the back fence probably formed part of their defences, and she didn’t wait around to find out what other arrangements they had made. She hopped over the rustic fence at the other side of their grounds and found herself back at the garden centre.

This time there were two large greenhouses between her and the display area where Dave had been taken ill.

She couldn’t see much chance of getting into the alpaca farm from here either.

It seemed odd that the alpaca had escaped at all when the fences were so high and so sturdy. Someone must have been very careless, or alternatively very determined the animal should leave. Were there any animal rights campaigners in Pitkirtly? Amaryllis thought there probably weren’t. Perhaps someone had been trying to steal the animal. Perhaps...

‘You have two minutes to show yourself. Come out with your hands up.’

Amaryllis didn’t often experience the feeling of having jumped out of her skin, but on this occasion the voice that boomed at her, apparently from nowhere, had that effect.

She wasn’t frightened to the extent of being stupid, though, so she crept round the corner of one of the greenhouses and tried the door. She would feel happier under cover, and the greenhouse looked well enough built to stand up to attack from anything short of a tank assault. It was almost unthinkable that the garden centre owner had a tank stashed away among the ride-on mowers and assorted machines for trimming lawn edges.

The handle turned and she was inside, crouching behind the staging. There were plants growing densely on the floor under it as well as on top, and she saw another door at the far end. So far, so good.

‘I know you’re in there. Come out now – it’s your last chance.’

He must be speaking through a megaphone. Or maybe he was in the shop area and there were speakers out here. His voice reverberated across the whole site.

A pause. She crawled along to the other end of the greenhouse. At least that might confuse him a bit. She reached up and tried the door. Damn! It seemed to be locked.

‘I’ve got a gun, and I’m not afraid to use it. I’ve had enough of all this harassment.’

That part was a bit strange. Amaryllis could understand him being cross with someone who had made their way into the place after hours and who might be intent on causing damage, but her intrusion couldn’t be described as harassment by any stretch of the imagination.

There was a bang, another one and a strangled cry, and silence.

It seemed so artificial and contrived that Amaryllis wondered for a moment if someone nearby had inadvertently turned up the volume on their television and let the latest murder mystery or thriller action boom out over surrounding area.

She crawled back to the door she had come in at, and peered round it. She waited a few moments and then scurried to the shelter of the second greenhouse, from where she had a view of part of the garden centre display area. There was something lying on the ground – she couldn’t quite see what it was.

Then, incongruously, Jock McLean appeared round the corner from the direction of the car park, shoes crunching on the gravel, and stood irresolute on the paving, staring downwards.

Amaryllis didn’t know whether to shout at him to get out of the way. Wouldn’t that just attract unwanted attention from whoever had fired the gun, if it was a gun? Would they come back and shoot down Jock? She shuddered, rose to her feet and flung herself forward into the display area, by which time Jock had turned away and was retreating fast and didn’t see her.

Apart from the fact that there was a man lying there on the paving stones near the petunias and quite likely bleeding to death, everything seemed perfectly normal.

She hurried over to him, intent on trying to stop the bleeding. Presumably Jock had gone for help, although it would take a little while for any help to arrive. They couldn’t rely on the ambulance turning up in a timely way twice in the same day.

It was too late to stop the flow of blood from the large wound in the man’s shoulder. She saw that almost at once. In fact there was hardly any visible blood at all. It must have stopped a while ago. Had he been moved after being shot? There hadn’t been any time for that before Jock’s arrival. Amaryllis was still frowning over this when the first reinforcements arrived. It was only Charlie Smith and an obviously reluctant Jock McLean, but they were better than nothing.

‘Keith Burnet’s on his way,’ said Charlie. ‘Are you OK?’

‘I didn’t know you were there,’ said Jock accusingly. He had gone a bit pale, as almost anyone would after the kind of discovery he had made.

‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ said Charlie, leaning down towards the man, though from a distance, and staring intently at him.

‘Yes, in fact...’ Amaryllis paused. She hadn’t yet got her thoughts in order, and she was oddly reluctant to make an idiot of herself in front of Charlie over this. It was unusual for her not to feel as if she were in control of the situation, even when she wasn’t.

‘What?’ Charlie straightened up and turned to her.

‘I was here all the time,’ she said slowly. ‘I heard the shot being fired, and yet...’

‘What is it?’ said Charlie.

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work. But I’d better wait and tell Keith.’

She had almost forgotten, and she suspected Charlie had forgotten too, that he wasn’t a police officer any more. It must have been hard for him not to get involved now that he was on the scene of a very obvious crime.

‘Do you know him at all?’ asked Charlie now, gesturing to the dead man.

‘No,’ said Amaryllis. At least that was something definite.

‘Never seen him before,’ said Jock.

‘We’d better secure the scene,’ said Charlie. ‘As best we can.’

‘Difficult,’ said Amaryllis. ‘It’s easy enough to get into the site from that way.’ She indicated the way she had arrived. ‘You just have to climb over from the next garden. There are dogs, though... I couldn’t get into the alpaca farm after all. Solid fences all round. With barbed wire. And a hedge of something or other.’

‘I couldn’t get in either,’ said Charlie. ‘I tried the gate and then I went down the road a bit and just inside the hotel grounds to suss out the fence, then I came back up and bumped into Jock. There might have been a shot, but I couldn’t hear anything much above the mowing. Those people around here certainly like to keep their lawns well under control...The hedge is probably berberis, by the way,’ he added.

Amaryllis shook her head in disbelief. ‘First the forsythia, now this. I can’t believe you picked up all the garden language in the police.’

‘You’d be surprised what I picked up,’ he said.

‘Christopher’s managed to get into the alpaca place,’ Jock interrupted. ‘He’s there now.’

‘How did he do that?’ said Amaryllis. ‘No, don’t tell me – he charmed his way in. I could never get the hang of that.’

Jock laughed. ‘He was being towed along by an alpaca last time I looked. If that’s got anything to do with charm... Oh, and there was a woman too.’

‘Of course there was,’ said Amaryllis. She glared at Jock. ‘Did you hear the shot, or was it muffled by the cry of a lonely owl?’

‘An owl?’ said Jock. ‘Of course I heard the shot. I was going to turn back but I heard voices as well, and I thought they must be doing target shooting or something.’

‘Voices?’

‘Well, a voice. I couldn’t hear what he was saying though.’

‘I heard it,’ said Amaryllis grimly.

They had moved away from the man on the ground. It seemed wrong not to cover him up, but Amaryllis was well aware that they mustn’t do that. Charlie would have stopped them in any case. She hoped the police wouldn’t be too long.

‘What’s Dave’s car doing out there?’ said Charlie suddenly. ‘We should really get it moved. It could be vulnerable, on the edge of town here.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I’ve got the keys.’

‘The keys? How did you get those?’

‘Dave gave me them,’ said Amaryllis airily, brandishing the car keys in front of Charlie’s nose.

‘He said you could drive his car?’ said Jock incredulously.

‘Sort of,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Jemima and I followed the ambulance.’

Charlie and Jock exchanged a glance.

‘He’s not going to be pleased,’ said Charlie.

‘Can I get a lift home with you?’ said Jock.

Amaryllis decided it was time to change the subject.

‘Did you call an ambulance too?’ she said to Charlie.

‘It’s all under control,’ he said.

Amaryllis doubted that very much.

Chapter 5 Alpaca Central

Algernon didn’t want to go back into his pen. Christopher could see why the woman had needed his help. Surely she wasn’t on her own in this whole alpaca operation? As they wrestled with him, one pushing and one pulling, a few more hairy heads appeared over the line of doors further into the depths of the stables.

‘Just – one – more push!’ puffed the woman. He was reluctant even to think of her by name in case the act of remembering it etched this whole episode permanently on his brain. ‘There – I think we’ve done it!’

Algernon broke away at the last minute and made another bid for freedom. Jane Blyth-Sheridan – Christopher’s resistance had given way – grabbed at the rope and stopped him in mid-flight.

‘Come here, you little bastard!’ she snapped.

‘Not all that little,’ muttered Christopher. He didn’t feel qualified to comment on whether the animal was a bastard or not. He supposed all animals were, technically.

As Ms Blyth-Sheridan slammed the door to the stall shut, and moved a bolt into place, he took a couple of steps back in case Algernon recognised him as a captor and mounted some sort of attack. But instead he saw the alpaca turn and lick the woman’s hand.

‘Oh, yes, that’s all well and good,’ she said to him in the crooning voice some women kept for babies and kittens. ‘It was a different story five minutes ago, wasn’t it?’

She gave him a final pat on the nose and added, to Christopher, ‘I need a drink. Would you like something?’

‘Well, I’m with some...’

‘Or would you rather meet the family?’

Judging by the sweeping hand gesture which took in the whole interior of the stables, she didn’t mean her human family.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said, thinking he would compromise and just have a cup of tea. Jock and Charlie would be all right for five minutes, and he had no doubt Amaryllis would turn up. In fact, he felt a bit silly for dashing up here thinking she needed help when he knew perfectly well she was better able to look after herself than anybody else of his acquaintance.

Jane Blyth-Sheridan led him past the four other alpacas and out through a door at the other end of the stable. They had arrived at the entrance to the house, a modern-looking building with a balcony that ran round the top floor. A double garage, the doors closed at present, was built on to it at an angle.

‘It was all done back to front, so the front door’s round at the other side,’ she said as she led him into the house, ‘and I expect you’re wondering why the stables are so old and the house is so new.’

He hadn’t really noticed the age of the stables, distracted as he had been by the animals inside.

‘We had to knock down the old house when we bought this place,’ she continued, heading from a sort of lobby into a huge utility room with a built-in clothes airer thing and from there into a massive kitchen with gleaming units and completely clear work surfaces. Even living on his own, Christopher couldn’t manage to keep the worktops clear. He sometimes wondered if someone – Amaryllis was the chief suspect – was breaking into his house at night just to confuse him by moving things around in the kitchen, taking bread out of the bread-bin and cheese and lettuce out of the fridge and leaving it lying around. Or maybe he was walking in his sleep and doing it. Or he wasn’t quite as obsessively tidy as he imagined.

‘What would you like?’ she asked, breaking into his ruminations just as ruthlessly as Amaryllis broke into people’s houses. ‘The brandy’s through in the drawing-room, but there’s wine in the fridge. Or I could put the kettle on.’

‘Coffee would be nice,’ he said weakly.

‘Hmm. I’m not sure I can work the machine. I don’t suppose instant would do, would it? Just this once?’

‘It’s fine, thanks.’ Christopher was horrified to think she expected him to want anything but instant. But the coffee machine, a fearsome and very shiny thing, was in keeping with the rest of the kitchen. There was no sign that it had ever been used. Maybe Mr Blyth-Sheridan, if there was such a person, couldn’t work it either.

‘If Madeleine were here she could work it,’ said Jane Blyth-Sheridan. ‘But it’s her day off.’

Madeleine’s day off? Christopher could tell he had inadvertently wandered into a different social stratum from the one he usually inhabited.

Once the kettle was switched on, she invited him to sit at the table – scrubbed pine, naturally, and free of any scratches, dents or mysterious stains – and they tried not to catch each other’s eyes while they listened to the water heating up. After a while he couldn’t cope with the silence any more.

‘How long have you had them?’ he enquired.

‘Them? Oh, the alpacas!’ She laughed as if she was surprised he would even ask the question. ‘Only a few months. It was one of his business ideas. But he isn’t the one who has to go and catch them when they stray, needless to say. Typical!’

‘Um,’ said Christopher, hoping the kettle would boil and distract her from this minor rant. He guessed that ‘he’ was Mr Blyth-Sheridan.

‘No,’ she continued, ‘he’s the one who jets around the country claiming to be looking for buyers for the wool. As if we’re going to get any kind of commercial interest in such a tinpot operation. We’d need a whole farm of them before we could actually sell any of the stuff. And I certainly didn’t sign up for that!’

Christopher began to rise to his feet, convinced now that she had forgotten all about the coffee and that he had better get out before she started on any personal revelations.

She waved him back down, getting to her feet instead. ‘But I’m forgetting about the coffee. I’m so sorry.’

He relaxed for a moment as she made the coffee, took down a replica Coronation souvenir biscuit tin from a shelf and stared into it, presumably in the hope of finding biscuits. ‘I bet Madeleine’s had them all. She wanders about, you know, in the middle of the night. Looking for something to eat and anything else she can find.’

The coffee was terrible, and Christopher had a sudden desperate longing for toast to go with it. Or at least, he had a desperate longing to be somewhere else, eating toast with somebody else. This made him think of Amaryllis. He really should try and find out if she was all right.

Before he could make his apologies and leave, there was a bleeping sound. His hostess picked up her mobile phone, which had been lying on the table, read the message and abruptly jumped up from the table again and left the room without speaking.

He waited a few minutes. Maybe he could sneak out before she came back. Would that be a horrendous breach of etiquette? Did he really care if it was?

More minutes passed. They could turn into hours, and he’d still be sitting there, trapped by his own indecisiveness.

At last Christopher stood up, his chair scraping on the floor despite his efforts to move silently. That would bring her back if anything did. He waited, one hand hovering above the kitchen table. Nothing happened. He moved as quietly as he could back through the utility room and into the lobby by the back door, which he now saw she had left open. He tiptoed past the stables, afraid of causing the alpacas he knew were inside to stampede and make a concerted bid for freedom.

Still moving forward, he cast a glance back over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being followed, either by Jane Blyth-Sheridan or by a stray alpaca.

He caught a glimpse of something moving, and paused for a moment. Had somebody just darted between the stables and the house? He had the impression that it had been a young man with dark hair, but he hadn’t had time to take in any details.

‘Hey, watch where you’re going!’ said a man’s voice, seconds before he turned his gaze to the front again and found he was just about to collide with a uniformed police officer. He skidded to a halt, making marks in the gravel.

‘Sorry.’

‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ said the policeman.

‘Nowhere! I mean – I’ve got to meet some friends out there.’ He gestured towards the road, where he hoped Charlie and Jock were waiting.

‘Friends?’

Was it Christopher’s imagination, or was this police officer less amiable than the average law enforcement person around Pitkirtly? Maybe he had been trained by Inspector Armstrong or something.

‘Yes. Charlie Smith and Jock McLean. We were looking for somebody.’

‘Another friend?’ said the policeman sternly.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘You’d better come with me,’ said the policeman. ‘Is there anybody else in here?’

‘Anybody? Well, Mrs Blyth-Sheridan was here a minute ago, but she went off somewhere.’

‘We’ll find her,’ said the police officer with confidence.

They walked to the gates together. Christopher realised Ms Blyth-Sheridan had forgotten to lock up after they had brought in the alpaca.

‘There you are!’ said Amaryllis, who was standing by Dave’s car, her hand on the bonnet as if she owned it.

‘Is this your other friend?’ said the policeman in a resigned sort of way.

‘Yes,’ said Christopher. He wished he and Amaryllis were sitting at his own kitchen table eating toast at this very moment. He wondered if he was about to be arrested for being in Jane Blyth-Sheridan’s house, or for rustling an alpaca, or even for admitting to having friends like Charlie and Jock. Then he saw that they were standing around a bit further up the road chatting to Keith Burnet.

Keith gave him a wave. It seemed that arrest probably wasn’t imminent. The uniformed officer walked off, leaning weight to this surmise.

‘There’s a body in the garden centre,’ said Amaryllis.

‘A what?’

Christopher recalled Jock’s dazed expression and his insistence on calling the police. So something really had happened up here on the fringes of town. It hadn’t been an over-reaction or an outbreak of uncharacteristic vividness of the imagination on Jock’s part.

‘A dead body.’

‘Why didn’t he say so?’

‘From what I heard, he didn’t have time to chat before you were dragged off by a woman with an alpaca,’ she said. ‘What was all that about?’

She sounded vaguely amused. He frowned. Had he expected a more extreme reaction?

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We were looking for you when I found the alpaca. Algernon. Then the woman came along. I had to give her a hand – she wasn’t going to get him back into his stable on her own... Funny, though.’

‘What was funny?’

‘She went off somewhere. While we were having our coffee... Never mind all that, though. Is there really a body in the garden centre?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘He seems to have been shot.’ She put just the smallest amount of stress on the word ‘seems’.

‘Can’t they tell?’ said Christopher.

‘Hmm,’ said Amaryllis.

Keith Burnet had come up behind Christopher, as he realised when another voice joined the discussion.

‘I can’t comment on that,’ he said, before either of them even asked him to comment. ‘Now tell me, did any of you lot have an alibi for the time of the shooting?’

‘Alibi?’ said Christopher. In all his dealings with the police he couldn’t remember ever having been asked for an alibi before. It was quite exciting. ‘Shooting?’

‘A shot was definitely fired,’ said Keith. ‘Didn’t you hear it?’

‘No, I don’t think so... When would that have been?’

‘Probably about the time the strange woman was accosting you in the wood,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Don’t give him any clues,’ said Keith reproachfully.

‘The strange woman... the alpaca... Wait a minute. There was a bit of a bang just before the alpaca came out of the bush.’ Christopher was proud of this feat of memory. ‘It was a door banging in the wind.’ He stared at them. Keith was shaking his head, a pitying expression creeping across his face. Amaryllis was smiling in that unnerving way she had.

‘There wasn’t any wind,’ she said to him. ‘And,’ she added as if it settled the matter, ‘there wasn’t any door.’