7 A Tasteful Crime (22 page)

‘Whoever it is, they won’t get past my mother,’ he said, and left.

‘My father’s work,’ she said to herself in the empty flat. ‘What could that possibly mean?’

Chapter 28
Yet another telephone call

Jock knew even as it unfolded that it was only a dream, but he was scared all the same. He was being chased down Pitkirtly High Street by a gigantic apple, which was going to roll right over him if he stopped. The only thing for it was to keep going, but he was getting out of breath, and there were school kids in the way all dressed up as sprouts, and he was afraid of knocking them over...

Then the school bell rang out stridently, and he panicked briefly about being late. The headmaster didn’t look kindly on teachers under his command
who weren’t in school before the bell rang so that they were mentally prepared to deal with all the day’s trials and tribulations.

He opened his eyes. The bell was still going. It was the telephone.

He flung on his dressing-gown and galloped down the stairs, stumbling on the final step and stubbing his toes against the cupboard in the hall. It had better be something important. After all it was too early in the morning for the parasites who worked for bloodsucking financial companies to have begun the daily task of tormenting anyone who had ever used a bank with their offers to help them reclaim money they didn’t know they had even handed over in the first place.

‘Yes!’ he barked into the receiver, in the mood for telling unwanted callers to go and do something anatomically impossible with their computer databases.

‘I didn’t wake you up, did I?’ said Amaryllis.

‘You – you – I hope this is urgent.’

‘It’s past nine o’clock,’ she said reprovingly. ‘It is quite important, though.’

‘All right.’
He slumped against the wall.

‘Giancarlo Petrelli. Somebody attacked him yesterday – about mid-evening.
In the road by his coffee kiosk. He said he had gone back there to collect the day’s takings because he’d forgotten earlier. Christopher found him lying in the road.’

‘Is he – OK? Alive?’ Giancarlo had once been a pupil of Jock’s, and he still felt a certain fatherly protectiveness towards the boy, even though he hadn’t been the easiest child to teach
, and had apparently distracted all the girls in the class just by his presence.

‘Yes, he’s alive. Cracked ribs and bruising. He says someone drove the apple at him.’

‘And you suspect Dave?’

‘No, of course not!
If Dave had driven the apple at him he’d have missed by a mile. No, it’s someone with a motive. They want to silence him.’

‘Why? Is it his – um – family again?’

‘Family as in family?’ She gave the word significant emphasis. ‘No, not this time. I think it was Charlotte. One of the television crowd.’

‘Yes, I know. Why should it be Charlotte?’ Jock thought this over for a moment and added, ‘
No, don’t tell me – I know. You already had your suspicions of her, didn’t you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘You were talking to her on the way up to the hotel. It sounded as if you were trying to get something out of her.’

‘It’s different now. I need to find out something more specific
about her. And I thought you could help.’

‘Me? What made you think of me?’ On the one hand, Jock was slightly flattered. In normal circumstances he was the last person Amaryllis would ask for help.
On the other hand, he had an uneasy feeling that when Amaryllis said ‘you could help’ what she really meant was ‘you could put your life in danger’.

‘Well, I need to do some surveillance today. And Christopher
will probably be at work. You were the only person I could think of who might have time.’

‘Oh great,
I was the last person you thought of, then.’

‘Not really – I did wonder about Jemima, but I know Dave would kill me if anything happened to her.’

‘Ah,’ said Jock, understanding it all now. ‘So I was the only disposable person you could think of.’

‘No! I know you can take care of yourself.
Even if it’s only by taking cover until everything’s OK. There might be a certain element of danger in this.’ She paused, and then added, ‘But if it goes according to plan, I should be watching your back all the time.’

‘All right, all right, you’ve persuaded me.’

‘I need to find out about Charlotte’s father.’

‘Her father?
Why?’

‘Never mind that for now. I want you to do some research. Start by asking Deirdre or Ken – even Oscar, if you can catch him. He’s left the hotel in a police car. Deirdre’s still in her room. Ken’s having breakfast.’

‘Where are you? At the hotel?’

‘I’m behind a newspaper in the foyer,’ she said.

‘That’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it?’

‘Cliché or not, it works.’

‘So you want me to ask Deirdre and Ken about Charlotte’s father? Do we even know her last name?’

‘No. But one of them will know. Start with that,
and then see if you can find anything online. Do you know how to use the internet yet, or will I have to get Jemima to help after all?’

‘I’ve taken a class,’ Jock muttered. ‘But I haven’t got the internet
at home. Just the phone.’

‘
After you’ve found out her last name, go down to the Cultural Centre and borrow a computer there. Maybe Zak can give you a hand with it – but don’t tell him why. And for goodness’ sake don’t tell Christopher, or he’ll try and stop us. This is all on a need to know basis.’

When
Amaryllis reverted to worn-out phrases from spy novels, he knew she must be serious.

‘So will you be watching Charlotte?’

‘Yes. But don’t tell anyone.’

‘Anything else, now you’ve got me out of bed?’ he enquired.

‘You might see if you can find out anything about Glasswearie, while you’re at it. I meant to ask my contact at GCHQ, only he seems to have gone underground. Or maybe he’s avoiding me.’

‘What’s Glasswearie?’

‘It’s the made-up place they were supposed to go to when Blair Atholl fell through. For Open Kitchen.’

‘Glasswearie,’ Jock repeated. He wasn’t confident about remembering the name, but he wanted to show willing.
‘Anything else?’

‘
Yes. Can you just run through what happened at Tricia’s again?’

‘Eric arrived
. Tricia gave him the apple. Eric collapsed on the floor.’

‘Yes, I know all that,’ she said impatiently. ‘I need the details. Eric came in at the back door, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, and he said something stupid to do with Buttons.’

‘Think about it. Did he just suddenly arrive at the door and come in straight away, or was there something else?’

‘He just came in – no, he didn’t! He came in once, and they weren’t ready for him, and he went out again.’

‘You told me that before. What did he say before he came back in again?’

‘What, you mean something like “I’ll just take a swig of doctored whisky from my hip flask” or “Give me a minute to get a bite of this prawn that’s weeks past its sell-by date”?’

‘Anything at all,’ said Amaryllis.

‘He did say something like “give me a minute”,’ said Jock slowly, remembering. ‘There was something he wanted to do before he made his entrance. Something to do with the air in Pitkirtly. As if it wasn’t good enough for him.’

‘Yes? Use his inhaler? Take his medication?’

‘Lip balm!’ said Jock triumphantly. ‘He wanted to use his lip balm.’

‘Lip
balm? That could be it! Jock, if I were there beside you instead of skulking around here, I might even kiss you!’

Jock told himself to be thankful for small mercies.

‘Don’t tell anyone else what you’ve just told me,’ she added.

‘
Don’t worry, I’ll wipe everything we’ve said in the last five minutes from my mind,’ he said. He was only exaggerating slightly. Nowadays he was finding more and more that recent conversations disappeared from his memory with alarming frequency.

‘Good. I wonder what happened to
the lip balm,’ Amaryllis said thoughtfully. There was a pause before she continued. ‘Good. We’ll rendezvous at the Queen of Scots at fourteen hundred hours. If you’re there first, mine’s a half of Old Pictish Brew.’

‘Is there a code word?’

‘Get lost,’ she said.

‘Wait a minute – is get lost the code, or did you just tell me to go away?’ said Jock. But he was speaking to thin air. Amaryllis must have switched off her phone.
She probably had meant him to get lost after all.

Chapter 29  Jock and Zak go surfing

Just as Jock was eating his breakfast Amaryllis rang back briefly to say Deirdre and Ken had left the hotel and were heading for the High Street to buy a paper. He wanted to ask how she knew whether they were buying one paper between them or not, but she rang off abruptly before he could go into that much detail.

He
didn’t have time to eat his last piece of toast. Oh, well, even spies probably had to make that kind of sacrifice.

He wondered if
Deirdre and Ken would patronise the local paper shop for their news-related requirements, or whether they might press on down to the supermarket, where they could get ready-made plastic-textured cheese sandwiches or pre-packed rubbery pasties as well. On balance he imagined they might just try the paper shop. They should come to it first anyway if they took the obvious route down from the hotel, which was in what the brochure called an elevated position above Pitkirtly with a panoramic view of the coastline, and what local people called ‘up the hill a bit’.

He
hung around outside the paper shop anyway, despite knowing that Jackie Whitmore’s father might come out and chase him away at any moment.

Ten minutes after he got there, Deirdre and Ken came strolling down the hill. They had taken the obvious route.

‘Morning,’ said Jock, stepping out in front of them.

‘Hallo, Mr McLean,’ said Ken politely. He tried to walk round Jock, but Jock cunningly outwitted him by moving to stand in front of him no matter where he went.

‘Morning,’ said Deirdre, going into the paper shop. She emerged a few moments later while Jock and Ken were still trying to out-manoeuvre each other.

‘What on earth are you two doing?’

‘I just want to get past,’ complained Ken. ‘I need to get some stuff out of the Cultural Centre.’

‘Have the police given us the OK?’ said Deirdre, reading the front page of the local paper. There was a massive headline which said ‘Second
TV star slain’. ‘It’s a bit of a stretch calling Maria a TV star, don’t you think?’ she added.

‘Simpler than calling her a worthless hanger-on,’ said Ken.
‘And less likely to attract Oscar’s lawyers.’

‘Where’s Charlotte this morning, then?’ asked Jock brightly.

‘Oh, she’s still on the phone up at the hotel,’ said Ken, sidestepping round Jock and running off down the hill. He reached the jeweller’s shop at the foot of the High Street quite quickly and disappeared round the corner by the supermarket.

‘What do you want to know about Charlotte for?’ said Deirdre.

‘Oh, no reason,’ said Jock. ‘Well, I was just wondering if she had any family here. There’s something familiar about her looks.’

Deirdre pursed her lips, gazing at the newspaper. ‘They haven’t bothered to get their facts straight at all.
Very sloppy reporting... No, I think she’s from West Lothian.’

‘Are you sure? She looks a lot like the
McLaren family who used to live in Haggs Gardens, only I think they moved away about ten years ago. She isn’t a McLaren, is she?’

Jock was proud of himself for concocting this complete fiction on the spur of the moment.

‘No, her name’s Campbell.’

‘Campbells, eh?
That’s funny. I did know a Bill Campbell once, but I think he was from over in the west somewhere – Lochgilphead, maybe it was. He was keen on fishing.’

Now that he had started, the lies were tumbling out one after the other. Fortunately Deirdre had had enough of listening to this nonsense, even if he hadn’t
quite finished with his ramblings.

‘Is there a cafe around here?’ she said absently. ‘I need to
read the inside pages to find out what they’re saying about us, in case we need to consult lawyers about anything.’

Jock steered her tow
ards the cafe a little further down the street and left her there while he progressed on to the Cultural Centre to carry out the next part of the operation.

He had to fight his way through the assembled Pitkirtly media, consisting of two reporters, one of whom was taking pictures
of the front door on his mobile phone, to get in. Once inside he discovered that Christopher had been summoned to West Fife Council headquarters to account for what had happened since Saturday. Zak seemed to think he would be there for most of the day.