7 A Tasteful Crime (10 page)

‘Maria’s already on her way,’ said Ken, coming back in. ‘
And the ambulance and police. We’re all to stay where we are.’

‘I hope you can explain what you were doing under the table,’ said Charlotte
accusingly to Jock. She looked over at Darren, who had finally got up from the floor and was standing near the sink, where Maisie Sue was trying to clean her head wound with kitchen roll. ‘You shouldn’t have been in here at all.’

‘I
just wanted to see my mum,’ said Darren. ‘It’s my day off from the cattery. Rosie was coming into town so she dropped me off.’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘You two could be in big trouble. Skulking at a murder scene...’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Jock. ‘We don’t know that it’s a murder scene. Maybe he did choke on the apple...’

‘No, don’t say that,’ said Tricia in a small voice.

‘Or maybe it was natural causes,’ said Jock brightly. ‘That’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Charlotte. ‘
This could ruin us altogether. If there’s even the slightest chance of poisoning, nobody will ever want to appear on Open Kitchen again. This is the kiss of death.’

Her voice lowered almost to a growl.

‘Just when my career seemed to be taking off, too.’

Chapter 12 Panic stations

Christopher was hanging about in the foyer of the Cultural Centre. He felt as if he had spent his whole life to date just hanging about. He was used to being on the fringes and not in the centre of the action, but never before had he been conscious of being quite such a waste of space.

He hadn’t even had the chance to see any of the studio part of the t
elevision coverage, because they had locked him out of his own office. He knew Oscar and Deirdre were in there, and he thought Maria was operating the cameras and sound equipment, along with two men who had appeared that day for the first time, and who were so taciturn that he hadn’t even heard their names. Certainly it wasn’t the sort of situation where formal introductions were in order, but he was slightly offended that nobody had even seen fit to...

Standing in the corner by the coat-hooks, Christopher was so deep in offended thought that he didn’t notice at first that the door to the office had opened abruptly and somebody had come out.

‘Can you get us to Tricia Laidlaw’s house? Do you know where it is?’ yelled Oscar across to him. He had a big voice for a small man, when he needed it, Christopher reflected.

But there was no time for reflection. Deirdre, wild-eyed and twitchy, followed Oscar. Maria followed Deirdre, almost jostling her in the rush to get out. What was wrong? Had the office gone on fire because of all the extra electrical equipment in there? Was there a mouse?
A plague of giant spiders? A nuclear strike?

Christop
her’s mind ran quickly through various possibilities ranging from natural disaster in the office to some catastrophe outside that they had all witnessed on the feed from the 5-a-Day procession, and couldn’t decide which of them made sense.

In the end he resorted to asking them. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Tell you on the way,’ said Maria. ‘We’ll take one of the cars.’

‘We’ll need a camera,’ said Oscar.

‘Ken and Charlotte are there, remember?’ said Maria. ‘With all their equipment.’

‘Just get on with
it!’ cried Deirdre.

The four of them ran out to the car park, Christopher in two minds about whether he should lock up behind them. But were the two taciturn men safe to be left in the building without supervision? He didn’t want to get into trouble if they went on some sort of wild media-workers’ binge and wrecked Maisie Sue’s quilt samples or made a bonfire of library books.

He dithered at the door for a moment.

‘Don’t bother about that!’ called Oscar. ‘This is life and death!’

‘Life and death?’ enquired Christopher.

‘Eric,’ said Deirdre, on a sob.

He followed the three of them out of the building in silence.

Christopher
wasn’t very good at navigating in cars, being more accustomed to navigating Pitkirtly on foot, but he only took them down one dead-end, and they were at Tricia’s gate and climbing out of the car within ten minutes of leaving the Cultural Centre. They still hadn’t told him anything.

‘There should be an ambulance,’ said Oscar as they rushed up the path.

‘It’ll be stuck in the road-works on the motorway,’ said Christopher. They ignored him.

The front door wasn’t locked. Ken met them in the hallway.

‘You did call an ambulance, didn’t you?’ said Maria accusingly.

‘I’m not stupid, Maria. Of course I did. I even called NHS 24 and somebody told us
there was nothing we could do so we’d better call an ambulance.’

‘Where is he?’ said Deirdre. ‘Where’s Eric?’

‘In the kitchen,’ said Ken. He didn’t move or indicate where the kitchen might be. The three other television people stared round blankly at all the closed doors.

Christopher pushed past them and opened the kitchen door. At least that was one thing he could do to help.

There were too many people in the kitchen.

‘What are you doing here?’ he had time to say sternly to Jock McLean before Deirdre came hurtling into the room. Christopher stepped aside, leaving a clear path for her and the others.

‘Where’s Eric? Let me see him!’

Tricia shuffled along behind the table to make more room
, bringing her almost into contact with Jock McLean, who stood there looking obscurely guilty – or was it just his natural expression? Charlotte rose from the floor at the far side of the room and took a step back; Maisie Sue and Darren, who for some reason were busy at the sink, turned round to watch. Christopher noticed blood trickling down the side of Maisie Sue’s face. His mind boggled briefly before re-focussing.

Deirdre flung herself forward and
then came to an abrupt halt, causing Oscar and Maria to cannon into her.’

‘Watch what you’re doing,’ she said
to them irritably. She crouched down at the far side of the table before falling to her knees. Oscar and Maria crept forward a little. Christopher noticed Maria stooping for a moment as if to pick something up from the floor, but he couldn’t see what it was. He craned his neck to get a better look at what was happening there, but then he heard his name being whispered.

‘
Christopher,’ breathed Maisie Sue. ‘It’s Eric. He’s passed.’

‘Passed what?’ said Christopher, startled.

‘Sssh!’ said Maria without even looking round at him. She slid her hand into a pocket. Christopher wondered briefly whether she was removing evidence from the crime scene, and if so, should he tell somebody about it. But when he looked at Darren’s white, anxious face he forgot all about it.

‘He’s dead,’ said Darren in a low voice.
‘He just collapsed there and then he was dead.’

Christopher looked at Maisie Sue. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked, also in a low voice this time.

‘Don’t ask,’ said Darren with a sigh.

‘Stop all that muttering!’ hissed Maria. ‘Deirdre’s in shock here.’

She moved forward and put her arm round Deirdre’s shoulders.

There were voices in the hall – Ken and at least one other person – and a policeman burst into the room.

Poor old Keith Burnet, in at the deep end again, was Christopher’s first thought.

‘C
ould everybody please stay exactly where they are?’ said Keith in a firm but quiet voice.

Maria glanced round at him. ‘Hmph – they might at least have sent someone more senior.’

Christopher decided then and there that Maria was possibly the most unpleasant person he had ever met. And that included the man who had come into the library the week before and harangued the librarians about why he couldn’t borrow ebooks because he didn’t have the right kind of device to read them on.

‘Stand aside, please, miss,’
said Keith, striding onwards. He stood respectfully behind Deirdre’s crouching figure for a moment and then lifted her gently by the shoulders. He pushed her towards Oscar, who put his arms round her with apparent reluctance, possibly because Maria was scowling at him.

Keith leaned down to look at Eric – or at least Christopher assumed Eric was lying on the floor beside the table. He hadn’t particularly wanted to view the body, but it would be nice to know what was going on.
But he supposed he would find out in due course. He leaned against the wall and tried to look invisible.

Keith straightened up. ‘Is there a doctor on the way?’

‘Ambulance,’ growled Ken, just outside the kitchen door. ‘In a traffic jam on the motorway.’

‘Ah,’ said Keith. He took out his notebook and pencil. ‘Could we all please move into another room? I’ll need to take all your names and addresses for a start.’

Christopher heard him on his radio as they all began to move.

‘Backup! I need urgent backup
!... I don’t care if it’s lunchtime, sarge. I need backup at Mrs Laidlaw’s house right now... Can’t you leave it and put it back in the microwave later?’

Christopher followed Darren and Maisie Sue through to the front room. Jock McLean and Tricia joined them, but there wasn’t time for any sensible conversation before the others came in. Tricia only had time to ask Maisie Sue if she was all right, and Maisie Sue didn’t have time to reply.

Once they were all gathered, even Ken, who seemed reluctant to be in the same room as the rest of them – was it a form of claustrophobia, Christopher wondered, or just that he didn’t like any of them very much? – Keith wrote down all their names and addresses.

‘I expect the sergeant will have some questions for you individually,’ he said. ‘Before he gets here, I’d like to get some idea of where everybody was at the time of the –um – accident.’

It seemed that there had been quite a lot of people in the kitchen at the time. Jock McLean and Darren admittedly, shame-facedly, to having been hiding under the table, for reasons that didn’t entirely make sense to anybody.

‘So can somebody tell me exactly what happened in there?’ Keith went on, once he had drawn a little diagram in his notebook. ‘Mrs Laidlaw?’

‘Yes, you may well ask her!’ said Maria nastily.

Tricia’s face paled. ‘
They started filming. Charlotte and Ken. Mr – I mean, Eric – came in at the back door and said something. It was something to do with going to a ball. I can’t remember exactly. Then he came and asked for some condensed milk.  Well, I knew there was only just enough in the tin for my cake, so I offered him a piece of apple instead and he took it and put it in his mouth, and then fell down on the floor and choked. I’m so sorry,’ she added, addressing Deirdre. Then, as if it had only just dawned on her what she had done, she put her head in her hands. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t believe it!’

‘Never apologise,’ said Jock McLean, putting his hand on her shoulder and squeezing. Christopher could hardly believe his eyes. Jock making any kind of physical contact with someone of the opposite gender was practically the equivalent of a proposal of marriage.

‘I guess I must’ve been looking at things from a different angle,’ said Maisie Sue, frowning. ‘It didn’t seem to me that he choked – it was more like he had some sort of a seizure.’

‘We’ll have to wait and see what the doctors say,’ said Keith, writing in his notebook.

The door-bell rang, and two men barged in without waiting for the door to be opened. Glancing out of the window, Christopher saw a flashing blue light in the street. It must be the long-awaited ambulance.

‘We couldn’t get through town
any quicker,’ said one of the paramedics. ‘There’s some sort of procession going on.’

After that most of them seemed to be
more or less redundant. Deirdre was eventually allowed to leave with the ambulance, although as Darren muttered to his mother, there was no need for that once Eric had been officially pronounced dead. The others waited in the front room for what seemed like forever, because Keith Burnet wouldn’t let them leave until he had clearance from above.

What Christopher wished most of all was that he had decided to go round to the Queen of Scots for an all-day drinking session and
hadn’t heeded the voice of his conscience telling him his place was at the Cultural Centre.

After an hour or so, the promised police back-up arrived. It consisted of the local sergeant and another constable.

‘Sorry about the delay,’ said the sergeant. ‘There’s been a bit of a riot in town.’

‘A riot?’ said Christopher.

‘Two processions clashed, and all hell broke loose,’ said the newly arrived constable with relish.

‘There was only one procession, surely?’ said Christopher.

‘Only one of them had a permit,’ said the sergeant, sighing. ‘The other one was a protest march organised on the spur of the moment.’

Christopher couldn’t bring himself to ask any more silly questions. Fortunately Keith Burnet filled the gap.