7 A Tasteful Crime (23 page)

‘He’s in real trouble this time. Mr
Hargreaves thinks it’s all his fault. Everything from the accident with the apple to the two murders. It’s not fair, though, is it, Mr McLean?’

‘It’ll be fine,’ said Jock, although if his years in teaching had taught him one thing, it was that you couldn’t trust the Council as far as you could throw them. ‘And if it isn’t and he gets fired, you can a
lways march up and down the High Street with placards.’

‘Great idea!’ said Zak. ‘You can join in if you like.’

Jock had never joined in with anything like that in his life, and he wasn’t planning to start now, but he didn’t tell Zak that. Instead he requested help with the computers, claiming not to know anything in the hope Zak would do it all for him.

In the end he genuinely did need help. It would have been much easier if Charlotte had had a less common surname, something like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. But he hadn’t a clue how to find information about people, and after he had wrestled with the problem for half an hour, Zak achieved results almost immediately using social media.

‘You see, this is why people really shouldn’t put so much personal information online,’ he said censoriously as they looked at Charlotte’s profile on something called LinkedIn, where she had recorded her professional background and qualifications, and where she was linked to 15,670 people who mostly seemed to work in the media. Jock tried to imagine knowing as many people as that, but his mind boggled once he got past ten.

‘We can definitely work with this
,’ said Zak. ‘We can look for some of her connections and see if they mention her name in any useful contexts. Maybe find a Facebook or Twitter page. See if she’s got any friends in common with me.’

‘With you?
Why should she have friends in common with you?’ demanded Jock.  Zak gave him the kind of look he had noticed young people tended to give him lately.

‘They’re not really friends in the way you might understand them,’ he explained gently. ‘They’re more like acquaintances.
Or friends of friends. People in the same vague social groupings.’

‘Vague social groupings, eh?’ said Jock. ‘Something
like people who teach in the same school.’

‘Yes, but wider than that,’ said Zak, in an encouraging ‘I think he’s got it at last
, thank God’ kind of way. ‘More like people who teach anywhere in Scotland. Or in some cases, anywhere in the world.’

‘Ah,’ said Jock. ‘So it might be people who have once visited Pitkirtly. Or have some connection with the place.’

‘Exactly,’ said Zak.

‘Is this the same as the six degrees of separation?’ said Jock. ‘Or the fifteen minutes of fame?’

‘Mmm – maybe.’

Zak willingly set about the task of finding a link with Charlotte.
It took him approximately four minutes, and one of these was spent re-booting the computer because Jock had accidentally leaned on the CTL, Alt, Num Lock and F7 keys at the same time and caused it to crash.

It turned out that Zak’s father had gone to the same school as Charlotte. Jock felt a bit guilty at this point because he thought Zak might be upset by having to look at pictures of his father, but there was no outward sign of that. On the contrary, Zak seemed to be mildly amused by the
class photos on the site he had found.

Then there was another stroke of luck. Zak’s father turned out to have been in the same class as somebody called
Bob Campbell. With a bit more surfing – Jock wasn’t sure if this was the correct term any more, but he didn’t want to ask – Zak established that Bob was indeed Charlotte’s father, that he had once been a media tycoon and that he had gone to prison a few years before for hacking into police emails, though Zak said Bob probably hadn’t done it himself because he didn’t look as clever as all that.

‘Wow!’ exclaimed Zak, sitting back after an hour or so in all. ‘That was intense.’

‘A media tycoon,’ said Jock. ‘What does that mean exactly?’

‘Well, in his case it looks as if he owned a television station.
The Fife local one. And the production company that makes Open Kitchen. I don’t think he can still own either of them if he’s in jail, but maybe his family....’

‘You mean Charlotte? She owns
the television station and the production company?’

‘She doesn’t act as if she did,’ said Zak thoughtfully. ‘Maybe it’s her mum.
Or her brother.’

‘Does she have a brother?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ said Zak. ‘I think there’s more to be found out, though.’

‘Do you think I should report back to Amaryllis now?’

‘Leave it for now. We’ll have another go after I’ve checked there isn’t anybody waiting to go round the Folk Museum. It’s my turn to give visitors a guided tour. But you never get anybody on a Tuesday.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. People don’t seem to come out until the end of the week. Specially in the autumn and winter. It’s a form of hibernation, I suppose.’

Jock puzzled over this while Zak went out to the foyer.

When he came back they struck gold.

Chapter 30 Christopher’s return

After a while Christopher just sat there and let the Deputy Head of Culture’s words wash over him. He knew the other man was in the grip of some strong emotion, and in his experience this would burn itself out within a certain length of time – a day or two, a week or two, a year or two. There was absolutely no point in arguing.

He relaxed once he had come to this conclusion. There was something rather restful about sitting on the uncomfortable chair in front of Mr
Hargreaves’ desk, and he even found himself looking for a convenient place to put his feet up. It was too much to hope that he would actually drop off to sleep, but there was no harm in daydreaming.

So when the other man said, ‘That’s agreed, then. You’ll take this strategy forward,’ Christopher was slightly baffled.

‘You’d better email me with the details so that I can give it my in-depth attention when I get back to my desk,’ he suggested cunningly.

‘I’ll ask my secretary to send you a note,’ said Mr
Hargreaves. ‘Just a few bullet points.’

‘Fine,’ said Christopher, getting to his feet. ‘I’d better go now. The buses are only once an hour at this time of day.’

He could have sworn the man deliberately delayed him so that he just missed a Pitkirtly bus and had to buy some soggy sandwiches for lunch at the bus station. To make up for that, he bought a muffin too, and then found it tasted like sawdust and had to throw it in a litter bin, the search for which in turn almost made him miss the next bus.

This helped to account for him not being in a very receptive mood when Amaryllis phoned.

‘Are you still at West Fife Council’s secret bunker?’ she said without any preamble.

‘Just left there.
How may I help you?’

She sighed.
‘Brain-washing. It’s so easily done, so hard to undo. You sound like one of these drones on the council tax helpline.’

‘I didn’t even know there was a council tax helpline.’

‘Where are you, anyway? There’s a lot of static on the line.’

‘I’m on the bus,’ he said, as quietly as possible. Annoyingly, she pretended not to hear this, and made him repeat it more and more loudly until three of his
fellow-passengers had glared at him and one had even told him to shut up.

‘Where are you, anyway?’ he asked once this silliness was out of the way.

‘Me? Oh, I’m doing surveillance.’

‘Who are you doing it on?’ he said, hoping against hope she had just selected some hapless Pitkirtly resident at random to keep her hand in
, and not somebody connected with this latest sequence of catastrophic events. He was in enough trouble already without being sucked into some sort of vigilante operation.

‘
It’s Charlotte,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I’m hiding in a cupboard in the Cultural Centre. I only phoned so you could come and get me out if I get stuck.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ he exclaimed, attracting more glares. ‘Just get out of there
right away and I’ll meet you at the bus stop by the Queen of Scots in half an hour.’

He pressed the button he hoped would cut her off. It had a red line on it, so he thought it was probably meant for cancelling or the equivalent.

He sat fuming for the next half hour as the bus trundled at its own speed, which wasn’t very fast, round all the villages between the Council offices and the Queen of Scots in Pitkirtly. He hoped against hope that Amaryllis would be there to meet him at the bus stop, but he had a very bad feeling about all this. Why was she tailing Charlotte in the first place? What did it have to do with anything? Presumably she must suspect the girl of something. With a lurch of his heart – or possibly his stomach, as the bus had just gone round a corner too fast, come bumper to bumper with another bus and was having to reverse back round the corner and uphill at the same time, a task which previous experience had shown was too demanding for many of the bus drivers on this route – Christopher remembered what had happened that time with Victoria.

Amaryllis wasn’t at the bus stop. But the good news was that he
didn’t find her in a cupboard in the Cultural Centre either. In fact the building was more or less free of the usual suspects. Of the staff, only the library volunteer, one of the librarians and the Folk Museum curator were around. Maisie Sue was in the Folk Museum lamenting the recent damage to the quilt. He had just missed Zak and Jock McLean, who evidently had gone out to lunch together. That was a first.

‘Have you seen Amaryllis?’ he asked the library volunteer. She frowned as if thinking hard. ‘Slim, reddish hair, hyperactive,’ he added. He couldn’t think of any other appropriate adjectives. She was so much just herself that he had never really had to describe her.

‘Oh, yes, that Amaryllis,’ said the volunteer, as if there were lots of them about. ‘She was sort of skulking around, about an hour ago, but I saw her out at the back by the bins after that. I think she went off with that woman from the television.’

‘Woman from the television?
Charlotte? Deirdre?’

He almost added ‘Maria’ and then remembered
that Amaryllis couldn’t have gone off with Maria. Why had Maria’s murder failed to stick in his mind as Eric’s had? Was he growing hardened to murder? Had he turned into one of these people without feelings who saw everything that happened through the cold unrelenting lens of rationality?

The volunteer shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It was definitely one of them.’

‘And what was Jock McLean doing in here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the volunteer. Her face drooped with the burden of being unhelpful. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she enquired, brightening up a little.

‘No, thanks.’

He was almost as sure as he could be that Amaryllis would be all right, no matter what she was up to. But he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging feeling that she must have needed him in some way, or she wouldn’t have phoned while he was on the bus.

‘Do you know where Zak and Jock went for lunch?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know who Jock is.’

Wait a minute. In the normal course of events Jock hardly ever set foot in the Cultural Centre. Not unless there was something going on that he didn’t want to miss because he thought it had the potential to turn out really disastrously.

‘What was Zak doing this morning?’ he asked the volunteer.

‘Well, he helped us tidy up a bit. He’s such a nice, helpful boy. Then he was at the computers with some old man. I don’t know what they were doing.’

Christopher translated ‘some old man’ into ‘Jock McLean’ in his head. That was even more peculiar. Jock usually avoided computers like the plague,
and had done ever since Jemima had tried to get him going on family tree research a couple of years before.

Had Amaryllis somehow got at him too?

He decided to go for a walk. He could take in the Queen of Scots in one sweep, and then go up the High Street to the café. Or should he do it the other way round? Charlie didn’t serve food, so unless they were thinking in terms of a liquid lunch.... It wasn’t impossible where Jock was concerned, but he had a feeling Zak was young and active enough to need solid food in the middle of the day.

He went up to the café first.

‘You’ll never guess what!’ said Jock McLean from a table by the window.

Christopher pushed his way between the tables, chairs and prams that crowded the place, and sat down opposite Jock.

‘Is Zak in here too?’

‘He’s ordering. You have to go up to the counter. You’ll need to be quick if you want something – he’s nearly at the front of the queue.’

‘I’ll wait till later,’ said Christopher, realising he was still queasy after the bus trip. ‘What won’t I guess? And have you seen Amaryllis today?’

‘No, but she rang me first thing. That’s why I’ve been on the computer with Zak.’

Jock’s small pebble-hard eyes gleamed. Christopher hoped he hadn’t become addicted to the internet. It could happen within a very short time, although Jock had seemed more resistant than most.