The Christmas Puzzle (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 8) (3 page)

Chapter 3 FOOP

Amaryllis was almost offended by the incredulous chortles from both Maisie Sue and Zak that greeted her words. But at least Brian MacKenzie slunk away, defeated, almost bumping into a taller man of indeterminate age who was on his way in at the front door. Christopher, who had seemed to be on the brink of being cheered by the whole bizarre incident, looked as if he might descend into gloom again. Amaryllis didn’t like to see Christopher descend into gloom. It didn’t suit his innocent round face.

‘Morning, all!’ said the newcomer. He was wearing what could only be described as an anorak, but he started to remove it as he moved through the foyer. ‘Jason in yet?’

‘Morning, Bruce,’ mumbled Christopher. ‘He’s in my office… Come in here a minute,’ he said to Amaryllis, and led the way into the office, right on the heels of Bruce, the newcomer.

‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said as loudly as he could manage to Bruce and the other occupant of the office, a startlingly handsome middle-aged man – though middle-aged wasn’t the first word Amaryllis would have chosen to describe him – who was standing by Christopher’s desk leafing through a file. ‘I have to speak to Ms Peebles now on a confidential matter to do with the management of the Cultural Centre.’ He held the door open as a signal for them to leave. Fortunately the good-looking man took the hint, put his hand under Bruce’s elbow and ushered him out. Christopher closed the door and locked it behind them.

‘That was surprisingly quick-witted and – um – masterful of you,’ said Amaryllis admiringly, as he sat down with a thud behind his desk. ‘You don’t really want to speak to me about the management of the Cultural Centre, do you?... I thought not.’

She perched on the window-sill and arranged her legs in such a way that he couldn’t fail to notice the green leggings. However, he showed no sign of having spotted them.

‘Ah,’ he said suddenly. ‘Jackie Whitmore! He thought you were Jackie.’

‘She’s absconded,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Or disappeared. That’s why I’ve got to wear all this green stuff. I’m a stand-in elf. An understudy. A substitute.’ She heaved a theatrical sigh.

‘Zak and I met Mr Whitmore outside his shop on the way down the road,’ said Christopher. ‘Jackie’s definitely gone missing from home. I think he wants you to look for her. What were they thinking, casting her as an elf in the first place?’

‘It was community service,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I helped to set it up. But Jackie’s own probation officer went off sick and they must have sent that idiot to check up on her instead after Mr Whitmore reported her missing. I can’t believe Brian Whatsit didn’t even look at a picture of her to make sure he got the right person this morning. He just grabbed the nearest elf.’

She kicked the wall under the window, her indignation reviving. It was the incompetence of the whole thing that angered her most.

‘I suppose I’d better get back,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I need to see if Jock’s all right.’

‘Jock? What have you done to him?’

‘Nothing!’

‘What sort of nothing?’

‘Well, I may have inadvertently talked him into being Santa Claus.’

‘Is talked a euphemism?’ he said sharply. Amaryllis knew that Jock McLean, although he could be extremely irritating, was one of Christopher’s oldest friends. In a way it was probably being irritating that qualified him for that honour – if it was an honour.

‘There was no violence involved,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Threat of violence? Blackmail?’

She shook her head.

‘Battering to death with flowers?’

‘No. The flowers thing was just a one-off, anyway… Who was that just now?’

‘Who was what? Oh, Bruce! He’s in charge of FOOP. I’m afraid they seem to have sort of taken over the place for now. I’m hoping they’ll get bored and move on before they do any real damage.’

‘No, the other one. With the pretty blue eyes.’

‘Ah! Jason Penrose. He’s a famous historian. Or so they tell me.’

‘Nice legs,’ commented Amaryllis.

‘I hadn’t noticed,’ said Christopher coldly. ‘I think he’s better-known for his blog and more academic writings. According to the FOOP lot, anyway.’

‘What is this FOOP thing? I haven’t had time to check them out, what with the Christmas market and everything.’

Christopher frowned. ‘You mean you haven’t been snooping around in the dark or bugging their secret headquarters?’

‘I’ve given up all that,’ said Amaryllis, trying to sound loftily superior. She wasn’t sure if that tone worked or not. She planned to practise it a bit more in the hope it would help her once she was a local councillor. ‘I’m strictly legit now.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. She had the sense that he wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘Do you really want to know about FOOP?’

Amaryllis operated on the principle that no piece of knowledge need ever be wasted. She sometimes pictured herself as an information bag-lady, wandering around aimlessly, listening to people’s conversations, reading their correspondence and picking up the odds and ends they let drop. Perhaps she should have allowed the service she had worked for not long ago to transfer her and her skills to GCHQ. But after some thought she had recently decided her days of risking life and limb for an ungrateful nation were over. Perhaps it was a kind of spy burn-out. Better to give into it than to head for meltdown in the field, where on certain types of mission it could have happened quite literally.

She expected her skills to come in useful in politics, anyway. All that training wouldn’t be wasted.

‘Of course I want to know about FOOP,’ she said, opening her eyes wide to indicate extreme interest. ‘And about that man with the nice legs.’

‘You’d better move to a chair,’ said Christopher, coming round to the other side of his desk, where there were two chairs with padded seats that he offered to visitors he liked. The ones he didn’t like were just left to stand. It seemed to work. ‘It’s a long story... Do you want a coffee?’

‘No, thanks. Giancarlo takes care of all my coffee needs.’

He blinked. She wondered idly if she might be able to make him blush too if she tried just a little harder.

She gave in and moved to the chair opposite him.

‘They call themselves the Friends of Old Pitkirtly,’ said Christopher. ‘They’ve colonised the Cultural Centre on the pretext of consulting records, and they persuaded Jason Penrose to come up here to do whatever he does when he visits places. Make some fantastic historical discovery. Take people on walks to see it. Get himself filmed doing it all. That kind of thing. He runs a blog. Very popular, apparently.’

‘Popular?’ said Amaryllis. She certainly didn’t have time to sit around reading people’s ramblings about themselves. There was enough to do in real life without that. Reading blogs would be like sentencing yourself to stand in a virtual online corner, trapped by some crashing bore who only wanted to talk about trains, or his poetry, or something.

‘He writes about local history and posts pictures of himself posing on field trips,’ said Christopher.

On the other hand, thought Amaryllis, pictures of Jason Penrose in jeans and leather jacket... ‘What’s this blog called? So that I’ll know to steer clear of it.’

‘It’s called You Dig,’ said Christopher dismissively. ‘With a question mark.’

‘That’s a bit beatnik,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Is that all he does, then? How does he make a living out of it?’

‘I think he works at one of the universities,’ said Christopher. ‘In the south. He’s English, certainly. But he seems to be able to manage Scottish history all right.’

‘What about those other people? The Friends? What do they do? Is it like PLIF?’

‘Of course not!’ said Christopher indignantly. ‘They don’t have the broad concern for local affair and – um – community wellbeing that we used to have. They’re only interested in following up their own narrow interests. Some of them very narrow. Bruce, for instance – he’s chaired several local organisations before. The Community Council. The Round Table. He’s an expert on late medieval pottery. Then there’s Tamara. She’s keen on Celtic mythology. And Karen. Mature student from Stirling - ancient history, I think. I can’t remember any more of their names. My brain’s run out of space for trivia.’

‘There isn’t much ancient history in Pitkirtly, is there?’ said Amaryllis. She was starting to get the old familiar feeling of restlessness. Sitting in the chair made her feel trapped. She wanted to get up and wander about, tail somebody, interrogate them until their brain was tied in knots, plant a bug in Jason Penrose’s room and break in there in the middle of the night to retrieve it...

But of course, none of these were things a respectable local councillor would do. She sighed. Transforming herself into an upstanding citizen was going to be hard work.

Christopher didn’t seem to notice the sigh. Of course she had long ago given up expecting him to be sensitive to nuances.

‘Jason thinks the Romans might have popped in here at one time,’ he said.

‘Popped in? Did the Romans recognise the concept of popping in? Weren’t they more likely to come barging in and decimate the local population, then build a great big fort somewhere?’

‘Decimate doesn’t mean what you think it means,’ said Christopher.

‘How do you know what I think it means?’ she countered.

They glared at each other. There was a soft knock on the door.

‘May I come in?’ said a soft voice.

‘Just a minute!’ said Christopher, and got up and unlocked the door, still glaring. A woman drifted into the room in a cloud of faded Paisley pattern and the subtle scent of lavender.

‘Christopher, darling,’ she said weakly, her hands lifting as if to embrace him and then falling limply by her sides.

‘Tamara,’ he said, still glaring.

‘I’m sorry, am I interrupting?’ she asked faintly.

Amaryllis opened her mouth to say ‘yes’ before realising she shouldn’t, partly because it wouldn’t be polite but mainly because she wanted to eavesdrop on what this woman had to say to Christopher. She closed her mouth and left it to Christopher to deal with it.

‘Not exactly,’ he said, which was just what Amaryllis would have expected him to say if she had ever envisaged those circumstances.

Tamara wandered over to a chair and let her body droop and undulate until she was sitting on it. Amaryllis saw that she wore some weird pendants round her neck – Celtic style jewellery, or amulets or something – and, in defiance of the season, she had odd stringy sandals on her feet. But perhaps she had wellies for outdoors and changed into the sandals once she crossed the threshold of the Cultural Centre.

There was something not quite right about the woman. She looked to Amaryllis’s cynical eye as if she might be playing a part that she should never have been cast for. Apart from anything else it seemed unlikely that anyone could survive in this day and age with the die-away airs of a Victorian invalid.

‘Amaryllis, this is Tamara from FOOP,’ said Christopher.

Amaryllis nodded at the woman. She wasn’t going to say ‘pleased to meet you’. Not even for the sake of her recent political ambitions would she bring herself to lie outright to people like this.

‘I’ve heard all about you from Christopher,’ said Tamara. Her dark eyes glistened like pebbles.

‘Good,’ said Amaryllis, nodding again.

‘So how can I be of assistance?’ said Christopher.

‘Don’t you have something else to be getting on with?’ said Tamara to Amaryllis. ‘Some crime to solve, something to do for the police? Do you work with the police all the time, or are you a freelancer?’

‘No,’ said Amaryllis, intentionally ambiguous. ‘I don’t have anything planned this morning.’

Tamara looked her up and down. ‘I like the green,’ she said. ‘It suits you.’

Amaryllis kept a tight rein on her desire to leap across the space between the two chairs, grab Tamara by her spindly arms and throw her out of the window. The only thing that stopped her, apart from her own iron will-power, of course, was that she thought Christopher might disapprove.

‘Weren’t you going to get back to see if Jock McLean was all right?’ he said, perhaps divining her annoyance and stepping in as he so often did to prevent bloodshed.

‘And there’s a missing person to track down, too,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We mustn’t forget about her.’

As she stalked from the office with as much dignity as she could muster while wearing green leggings and false ears, Amaryllis heard Tamara saying half-heartedly, ‘Green isn’t really her colour, is it?’

Chapter 4 Melting the Ice

The next thing that happened was that some men came along and said they were going to turn the road into an ice-rink.

Jock McLean thought he must have misheard at first, but then Giancarlo came up and started to complain about having to relocate his coffee kiosk.

‘Where to?’ said Jock. ‘I didn’t know there was anywhere to put it apart from the old shelter. They’re not making you move into the phone box, are they?’

‘Definitely not,’ said Giancarlo. ‘They’re bringing a fast food van later. I’ve got to share it with the French crepe seller.’

‘What an upheaval, isn’t it?’ said the woman from the Council, who had turned out nicer than her job title suggested. Jock had unbent a little towards her when she had let him take off the Santa Claus outfit temporarily while it was altered to fit him better. He would still need a cushion, but at least the legs wouldn’t be hanging off him once they had been taken up.

She had even suggested he could go round behind the tram where it was a bit sheltered, for a quick smoke, providing he took off his beard.

‘Of course you won’t be able to do that when you’re in character as Santa, but just for now...’

Jock knew he would never be in character as Santa even if he lived to be a hundred and did this every year – which he fervently hoped wouldn’t happen. He was planning to hang up his beard after this year’s fiasco, and he would be keeping his fingers crossed that this particular form of community engagement never happened again.

‘So who’s going to skate on this ice-rink thing?’ he asked Giancarlo.

‘Visitors. Tourists drawn to Pitkirtly by the magnificence of our Christmas events,’ said Giancarlo darkly.

‘You’ve been hanging about with us too much,’ said Jock. ‘You need to get back some of your youthful enthusiasm.’

Giancarlo shrugged his elegant shoulders in his elegant, probably Italian-made, black leather jacket. ‘I’d need something to be enthusiastic about, though.’

‘Do you ever see your sister?’ said Jock. The girl was a convicted murderer who, if the forces of law and order knew what they were doing, wouldn’t see the outside of prison for a long time, but she was Giancarlo’s twin sister, after all. Maybe the lad was missing her.

‘I don’t have a sister any more!’ said Giancarlo, his face twisting in an ugly grimace that was quite uncharacteristic of him. ‘Not after the things she did. She doesn’t exist.’

‘Are you still planning to go to America?’ said Jock, vaguely recalling something he had heard a few months before.

‘I suppose. Not sure if I should leave my Mum on her own though.’

Giancarlo mumbled the last sentence, almost as if he were ashamed to have any ties to his family. As far as Jock could recall, Mrs Petrelli was the only member of the family who hadn’t been in trouble with the law at some point, so it was probably a good sign that Giancarlo wasn’t keen to cast her off too.

The men working on the ice rink were shouting at each other. This whole ice thing seemed as if it could only end badly. Jock wouldn’t be sorry if it all fell through – he smiled to himself at his unintentional humour. He had gone to an ice rink with a friend once, and the hired boots had been far too wide, and a wee girl about half his size had offered to give him a hand after he had fallen over for the sixth time. There was no way he would ever venture on to the ice again, not even to save somebody from drowning. Not that you could drown anyway in the amount of water involved in this fiasco.

‘Do they really think anybody’s going to skate on that?’

Giancarlo shrugged again. ‘People do in Edinburgh.’

‘Pitkirtly isn’t Edinburgh,’ said Jock. ‘This is an awful lot of trouble to go to for a handful of visitors. We’re never really going to be the tourist capital of the world.’

‘It’s just about getting our share of the market,’ said Giancarlo. ‘Edinburgh’s overcrowded. If we can get some of their tourists to come over here...’

His voice tailed off into gloom again. He leaned against the tram.

‘It’s not going to happen,’ said Jock, shoving his pipe in his pocket. ‘We’ll be sitting here in this thing all dressed up, and Charlie Smith’s dog will be outside laughing his head off at us.’

‘Charlie Smith’s dog?’

‘Charlie’s dog’s just a symbol,’ explained Jock. ‘He stands for everything that’s real and ordinary about Pitkirtly.’

‘Does he know you’re putting all that responsibility on him?’ said Giancarlo, smiling at last.

‘Of course not,’ said Jock. ‘He’s just a dog.’

Amaryllis materialised nearby. Her hair bristled so much that it had almost pushed the silly elf’s cap right off her head. Her eyes glinted dangerously.

‘Who are those FOOP people?’ she said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Jock.

Giancarlo made himself scarce with admirable speed and silence. Jock wished he was younger and faster-moving so that he could do the same.

‘Tamara,’ said Amaryllis, drawing the word out until it was as long as a snake and just as sinuous. ‘Where has she come from all of a sudden?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jock. ‘I’ve never seen her around Pitkirtly until a few weeks ago. Maybe she’s from Torryburn. Or Limekilns.’

‘Hmm,’ said Amaryllis. ‘In that case, what’s she doing nosing around Pitkirtly? Is she a Jason Penrose groupie or something?’

‘Could be,’ said Jock. ‘They tell me he’s very popular with people of the female persuasion.’

‘Who’s that?’ said Elizabeth French from the Council, coming round the corner of the tram. ‘Jock, dear, I wonder if you could possibly get into position. We’re going to be doing a photo-shoot in five minutes.’

Amaryllis raised an eyebrow at him. Jock tried not to blush. He didn’t understand how he had gone from being ‘Mr McLean’ to ‘Jock, dear’ in such a short space of time. Or at all, in fact. He had better be on his guard for further such intimacies.

‘You too, Amaryllis, my dear,’ said the Community Engagement Advisor, popping her head back round the corner. She smiled encouragingly at both of them. If Jock hadn’t been on his guard he might have risked breathing a sigh of relief. This must be how she treated everybody once she had known them for an hour or two. It was nothing personal.

‘I don’t know if I can stand much more of this,’ said Amaryllis, as they made their way to the front of the tram and clambered aboard again. ‘But surely she can’t keep up the niceness for much longer. Something’s got to give. I want to see her shouting and screaming at someone. Drumming her heels on the floor like a two-year-old.’

The mental image created by her words sustained Jock through the threatened photo-shoot and made him chuckle all over again as he walked up the hill with Amaryllis after they were both released – only on bail, though – by Elizabeth French. She had made it clear that if he and Amaryllis failed to appear at the launch of the Christmas celebrations later that day she would hunt them down, with the help of the huskies if necessary, and force them into their costumes.

‘That’s some feisty woman,’ said Jock when he had finished chuckling. ‘She doesn’t need to drum her heels to get her own way.’

‘I’m surprised Santa Claus dared to get a cheap flight out of here, with her on his back,’ agreed Amaryllis. ‘That reminds me...’

They were passing Mr Whitmore’s paper shop. She darted inside. Jock, having nothing better to do, followed her. By the time he got inside she was already haranguing the man.

‘... go and speak to the police again! How do you expect them to do anything if you don’t tell anyone she’s still missing?’

Mr Whitmore shuffled his feet. ‘They’re looking for her anyway. She’s meant to be on that community service thing. Brian Whatshisname’s already been round here after her... An elf, for God’s sakes! Can you think of anybody less like an elf than my Jackie?’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I’ve had to take over from her.’

He regarded Amaryllis’s wiry form and startlingly hyperactive hair with a critical eye.

‘Aye, well,’ he said. ‘Maybe. If you found her first, though, they might do a deal or something.’

‘Ha!’ said Amaryllis. ‘The kind of deal that gets us both locked up. No – if I find her, I’ll be leaving her on the doorstep at the police station with a note disclaiming all knowledge.’

While Mr Whitmore tried to work out what this meant, Jock nudged Amaryllis and said, ‘How are you going to find the time to look for her? I thought being an elf was going to be a full-time job?’

‘Didn’t Mrs French explain? It’s only from two till eight every day.’

‘It started earlier than that this morning,’ Jock grumbled.

‘That was to make sure we would both fit into our outfits.’

‘Never mind all that. What about my Jackie?’ said Mr Whitmore, getting back to the point.

‘The probation officer already knows about her,’ said Amaryllis. ‘He’ll report back to the police and so on. I’ll do some work on it in the mornings if I can, but I’m not making any promises. She might not want to be found.’

‘I don’t know why she’s done it,’ said Mr Whitmore. ‘She seemed happy enough at home here. She wasn’t too taken with the uniform but it was better than being inside.’

‘I can see her point about the uniform,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Why do you think I want to get her back? Green isn’t my colour.’

‘Being an elf isn’t in your nature,’ commented Mr Whitmore. ‘It wasn’t in Jackie’s either. Two of a kind.’

Jock smiled to himself at the affront he saw on Amaryllis’s face.

As they left the shop and walked on up the road, she said, ‘There was no need for him to be so rude. Elves come in all shapes and sizes.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ said Jock soothingly.

He arranged with Amaryllis that they would meet at the Cultural Centre after lunch so that they could arrive at the tram together. There was no point in one of them being there without the other. Jock had already made up his mind that if Amaryllis went off on one of her unexplained absences he would refuse to play his part. Mrs Community Engagement French would just have to put on the red costume and white tickly beard herself in that case. She would fill it out a lot better than he did, that was for sure.

As sometimes happened when things were particularly fraught, Jemima and Dave were waiting on his doorstep. On seeing him, Dave broke into one of those Christmas songs that had been annoying Jock in the shops since August or thereabouts.

‘Ho ho ho to you,’ growled Jock as he walked up his garden path. ‘How did you two find out?’

‘Amaryllis let us know,’ said Jemima. ‘She thought she might need our help with talking you into it.’

‘Amaryllis? Help? She knew she only had to ask me and I’d do what she wanted.’ Jock opened his front door. ‘I suppose you’ll be needing tea and biscuits. I’ve only got those pink wafers, mind. Special offer this week.’

They followed him inside.

‘What did she threaten you with?’ said Dave.

‘Nothing,’ said Jock, putting the kettle on. Dave and Jemima sat down at the kitchen table.

Dave would have made a better Santa Claus than him, he realised. But Jemima probably wouldn’t have let him do it. She was far too protective with the man. He was going soft these days.

‘What do you think can have happened to wee Jackie Whitmore?’ said Jemima.

‘She’ll have run off somewhere,’ said Jock. ‘They’ll catch up with her soon enough. Anyway, that one can look after herself. I wouldn’t worry if I were you.’