Chapter 11 Long-lost friend
Amaryllis wasn’t sure why she had let the fictitious explanation of Mal’s presence in the house come so easily to her tongue as she spoke to the policemen. She supposed she had a kind of fellow-feeling with Mal and felt vaguely protective towards him. Not many people allowed themselves to harbour the kind of grand ideas he seemed to have, and she didn’t want that afternoon’s inspiration to turn into humdrum suspicion, even if Christopher seemed to be thinking of it exactly in that way.
Fortunately Christopher didn’t contradict her, although he did have an anxious expression on his face when she glanced sideways at him.
‘Gamekeeper, eh?’ said Charlie Smith, and the junior officer with him wrested a notebook out of his coat pocket and wrote in it, although it must have been a struggle even to keep the pencil in his hand when he was wearing such thick, inflexible gloves.
‘What do you want to see Lord Murray for, anyway?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Has he been fiddling his expenses in the House of Lords or something?’
She thought it was almost certainly drink-driving. These old-style aristocrats thought they could get away with anything.
Charlie shook his head again, dislodging all the remaining snow off his woolly hat. ‘Ongoing enquiry,’ he said. ‘And we did wonder if Mr Douglas had somehow got inside the house but if you’ve had a look, it seems he hasn’t.’
They set off back through the trees towards the road. Amaryllis asked herself where Dave could have got to. Was it possible he had made it as far as the main road, flagged down a driver and gone to a garage in the hope they could move his truck that evening? But surely in that case he would have found some way of contacting Jemima by now. What if he had concussed himself when the truck came to a standstill? Maybe he had managed to get out and then stumbled off somewhere in a random direction and ended up in a remote snowdrift where nobody would think of looking for him. The bad feeling she had had about this from the start got worse, in the same way that if you carried something for a while it seemed to get heavier and heavier.
She glanced round at Christopher, walking alongside her. He gave her a half-smile, but he still looked anxious. But then, as she had observed on many occasions, his default expression was one of worried bewilderment. It was difficult to read anything about the degree of anxiety he felt at this exact moment.
They were approaching the place where all three vehicles now sat, covered in varying amounts of snow, when they heard the noise of a powerful engine coming towards them. Amaryllis glanced up to see a tractor rumbling round the corner, its bright lights illuminating the scene, its massive wheels making everything else look tiny.
It came to a standstill in the middle of the road. A figure jumped down from the cab, and went round to the passenger side where it seemed to be helping someone down. Then the two figures walked up to the other vehicles and stood there for a moment, staring.
Amaryllis started to run, her feet in their reindeer herding boots - she had acquired them on a mission in the north of Russia - sinking into the snow in unexpected places. She hoped she wouldn’t fall head-first into a drift and have to be heaved out by her feet; but the potential embarrassment of that didn’t matter now anyway.
‘Dave!’ she called. ‘Dave!’
She skidded to a halt on an icy patch behind the ruined Range Rover, and waited just for a few seconds to get her breath back, since something odd seemed to have happened to her voice. Then she walked forward and confronted the two men.
‘Dave! Where have you been?’ She couldn’t remember the last time she had hugged anyone, but she just walked up to him and flung her arms round his solid mass, or at least, round as far as they would reach. He laughed down at her.
‘What’s got into you, lass? What are you out here for, anyway? You’ll catch your death of cold.’
‘I’ll catch my death? What about you?’ She stepped away from him. ‘Do you know how worried we’ve all been? Christopher and I came all the way out here to dig you out of a snow-drift! And Charlie Smith and -’
She had to stop speaking then, because something had got into her throat and choked it up. Probably the cold, she thought.
Christopher caught up with her and shook Dave by the hand in a masculine demonstration of pleasure and relief.
‘What happened here?’ said Dave. ‘Whose is that Range Rover?’
‘We borrowed it from the landlord of the Queen of Scots,’ said Amaryllis, glad to have something neutral and unemotional to say.
‘I hope when you say borrowed that means he knows you took it,’ said Charlie Smith, coming up behind her. He nodded to Dave. ‘Glad to see you’re all right, Mr Douglas. You’ve had a lot of people worrying about you.’
‘I don’t know why,’ said Dave. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Where did you get the tractor?’ said the young constable, staring at it with what looked very much like envy.
‘He came up to the farm and I brought it out,’ said the other man who had been stoically observing the touching reunion scene that played out in front of him. ‘We thought we might be able to tow the truck out, but I’m not sure, with those other things in the way.’
‘We can move the police land rover,’ said Charlie. ‘But I don’t know about this one.’ He patted the driver’s door of the Range Rover. A wing-mirror fell off at his feet.
‘The landlord’s not going to be too pleased,’ said Dave. ‘Maybe you’ll get barred from the Queen of Scots. For life.’
He was laughing again.
‘Why haven’t you called anybody?’ said Amaryllis. It was impossible to be cross with him, and yet impossible not to be, when you thought about what he had put them all through, especially Jemima.
‘I didn’t want to worry them,’ he muttered. ‘And I left my mobile phone at home.’
‘Our phone lines are down anyway,’ said the tractor owner. ‘I don’t have a mobile.’
Amaryllis took out her mobile, found Jemima’s name in her contacts list and handed it over to Dave. ‘Call her now,’ she said.
Dave walked away a little to make the call, but even from a distance they heard him grovelling. Amaryllis hoped he had bought Jemima something nice for Christmas. Although she suspected it would be enough for Jemima if they just got him home safely.
‘Where’s your farm?’ she asked the tractor driver.
‘Up that way, over to the right,’ he said, gesturing. ‘Your friend only had to come up the road a wee bit and then he saw our lights. Just as well really. He was kind of lost.’
‘Just leave him to us now,’ said Charlie Smith. ‘We’ll take everybody home and then we can maybe organise tow-trucks in the morning. Constable Burnett, can you sort out the warning triangles while I get everybody in?’
Dave came back to the group and silently handed Amaryllis her phone.
‘How was she?’ said Christopher.
‘All right,’ said Dave. ‘She said to hurry home.’
Amaryllis guessed that Jemima wouldn’t really believe Dave was OK until he walked in the front door. And then once she had reassured herself, she would give him a lot of grief for leaving his phone on the kitchen table. What was it with men, mobile phones and kitchen tables? She remembered Christopher doing the same not long ago, although of course on that occasion she had been the one who was in trouble.
Charlie reorganised the back seat of the police Land Rover to make room for them. There were a lot of space blankets, some rope and a big first-aid kit.
‘We’ve got soup and sandwiches,’ said Christopher. ‘Anyone want some?’
Charlie Smith banned them from eating and drinking in the Land Rover - ‘We don’t want anybody thinking we took it out for a picnic’ - but Dave accepted a cup of soup just before they got in.
‘Ah, the taste of home,’ he said, an almost ecstatic expression spreading over his face as he slurped it down much too quickly.
‘Did you get Jock settled in all right at Rosie’s?’ said Amaryllis.
/> ‘Aye, he got his feet under the table in no time,’ said Dave. ‘Cocoa and toast…and that’s just the start of it.’
He made cocoa and toast sound like the first step towards an orgy, while in Amaryllis’s experience, although comforting, they were almost guaranteed to kill off any sensuous feelings. She thought Dave was being a bit over-protective. Particularly since his niece Rosie was at least fifty if she was a day.
Charlie Smith, having refused Dave’s demand to put the blue light on, let the young constable drive back to Pitkirtly while he stared morosely into the middle distance. Amaryllis wondered if he would get into trouble for coming up here in a blizzard to rescue someone who didn’t need to be rescued and to interview someone who wasn’t there. But perhaps he was just mulling over the case. She thought about possible reasons for them to want to speak to Lord Murray. There must be a connection with the robbery that had happened earlier that day. Perhaps some of the jewellery had belonged to him and was in the shop for repair or cleaning, or even for sale. She remembered thinking about what a lot of money the house and grounds must suck in just for routine maintenance. The owners probably had to sell off minor assets on a regular basis.
At last they skidded to a halt outside Jemima’s house, where she and Dave now lived.
The front door opened almost before the Land Rover had come to a complete standstill. There were two figures on the doorstep. One of them stepped back a couple of paces, presumably so that she didn’t get in the way as Dave lumbered up the short path and took the three steps in one pace, then scooped up Jemima in a bear hug.
‘Are you two getting out here, or do you want to be taken right to your own front doors?’ enquired Charlie Smith.
Amaryllis, averting her gaze from Dave and Jemima’s reunion, clambered down and helped Christopher down. They stood uncertainly on the pavement.
‘Come away in!’ called Jemima, temporarily freeing herself from Dave. ‘Maisie Sue’s just made another batch of pancakes, and I’ve got a whole tin of tablet.’
‘I can feel my fillings falling out already,’ Christopher muttered.
‘Are you coming in for pancakes?’ said Amaryllis through Charlie’s open window.
‘Got to get back,’ he said.
‘Thanks for the lift.’
‘Any time.’
‘I don’t think you mean that, Chief Inspector. But I’ll try not to take you up on it anyway.’
‘Just don’t get into any trouble over Christmas!’ he shouted after her as she and Christopher made their way up to Jemima’s door.