Chapter 14 Extreme knitting
Christopher was worried enough to call round at Amaryllis’s apartment at eight on Boxing Day. It would have been still pitch dark at that time, except that the snow made seem it a bit lighter. He wasn’t sure of the scientific explanation for this but the extra light helped if you were getting up and going out while the rest of the world slept.
He trudged through the snow. At least the gales had died down again. It had been annoying having to go to bed early because there was nothing to do once the electricity went off, and he was pleased to find the power supply suddenly working again today. It must have been some temporary blip, not the lines coming down as he had imagined. He remembered reading about people having to wait days or even weeks to have their power restored. What did they do without the ability to boil a kettle and make a cup of tea?
The blinds were up at Amaryllis’s sitting-room windows, which led to the balcony, and when he rang the bell downstairs she answered almost at once, sounding bright and breezy. Whatever had been bothering her on Christmas Day, she must have got over it very fast. He even felt a tiny trace of resentment about having got up so early to rush round and see her.
‘Good that we’ve got the power back,’ he said as she took his coat. Then he glanced round the room, normally a white minimalist haven with little furniture and no clutter, and his eyes widened.
There were big sheets of paper all over the floor, the glass-topped table, the big white sofa. They were covered in diagrams and lists drawn with marker pens in various colours. On the sofa some multi-coloured knitting formed a second layer of chaos, flung down as if randomly.
He didn’t intend to pry into whatever she had been writing, but he caught sight of his own name halfway down one of the sheets. He glanced up to the top and saw the word ‘Weaknesses’ written there in big letters. He wasn’t sure what to make of this.
‘It’s a SWOT analysis,’ she said.
‘So I’m a weakness, am I’?’
‘Not exactly. I’ve put you down as a strength too.’ She held up another piece of paper. ‘It’s because sometimes when I bounce ideas off you, you come up with a really helpful point, like Dr Watson - and sometimes you use delaying tactics to try and stop me following up a clue.’
‘No, I don’t!’
‘You do, if you think it might be dangerous.’
‘Well, maybe. But that could be a strength as well,’ he argued. In spite of the bickering and the fact that he hadn’t needed to get up early after all, he was relieved to see her like this. She still seemed restless, but she had turned the energy from this restlessness into something that could be useful.
‘Is the knitting part of it?’ he said mildly.
She laughed. ‘Believe it or not, I like to do a bit of knitting when I’m thinking about things. It helps me to focus.’
He stared at the tangle of wools. ‘But you don’t actually focus on the knitting.’
‘Don’t make fun of it - you might end up with a woolly hat next Christmas. Or a pair of socks. I haven’t worked out which it is yet.’
‘But isn’t there a pattern?’
She laughed, as if patterns were for wimps. ‘The shape develops organically from the wool. Like a sculpture emerging from a piece of stone.’
‘So what’s all this about anyway?’
She let the ‘Strengths’ list flop back to the ground, and picked up another piece of paper from the table. The diagrams on it crawled around all over the place, and the text straggled round them like ivy round an old window-frame.
‘It’s a mind-map.’
Christopher examined the drawing. He wasn’t sure what it said about the state of Amaryllis’s mind. It would have provided fuel for all sorts of psychological research projects.
‘I was thinking about your epic quest,’ he said, at a loss for a positive comment about the mind-map.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve scaled back my ambitions a bit, you’ll be pleased to hear.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less important,’ said Christopher. ‘I was thinking of this thing about the butterfly –’
‘The butterfly that flaps its wings and brings the world to an end?’
‘Yes, sort of. The fact that even if you think of what you’re doing to help people here as small and insignificant, it could affect the whole course of human history.’
‘Yes, whatever. So what do you think? Will it be a viable business?’
‘I don’t know.’ Christopher was slightly baffled, not unusually. ‘What sort of business is it?’
‘My PI business, of course. So much crime has happened around here, I think the police need some competition to spur them into solving it.’
‘I thought you usually provided that already. Does this have something to do with the bullet-proof vest Tricia Laidlaw gave you?’
‘Yes – I found it at the back of the wardrobe. When the electricity went off,’ she said, as if it explained everything. ‘I’m going to start with the robbery.’
‘But don’t you need a client to be able to call it a business?’ he said. ‘Otherwise it’s just you nosing around as you always do.’
She gave him a look.
‘That’s why you’re on the Weaknesses list, Christopher.’ She turned over the Opportunities sheet which, he noticed, didn’t have his name on it anywhere, and started to write on the back. ‘Now that you’re here, I might as well ask you about what the robbery looked like from where you were standing.’
‘At my office window,’ he said. ‘Are you just going to ask people all the things the police have already asked them?’
‘Probably, but I’ll listen to the answers a bit more thoroughly. So, tell me, Mr Wilson, what exactly did you see?’
He sighed, sat down at the glass-topped table since there wasn’t a more comfortable space available anywhere, and said, ‘Will I get a cup of coffee if I tell you?’
She agreed to his terms, and he ran through his recollection of what he had seen from his office window on Christmas Eve. Faithful to her methodology, she listened closely. At the end she sat back and said, ‘What about Jock McLean? I wonder if he saw the same as you.’
‘He didn’t see as much,’ said Christopher. ‘He was hiding on the floor.’
‘Hmm. I’d better give him a call at the cattery if I can get through. By the time he gets back he’ll have forgotten all about it.’
‘Can I have a coffee now?’
‘Just one more thing – you were looking out the window before you heard anything, weren’t you? Can you remember what you saw then?’
‘Some idiots falling over on the ice. An ambulance coming to pick somebody up. That’s about all. Why?’
‘I was just thinking if the two robbers ran towards the Cultural Centre as part of their getaway, they might have arrived from that direction in the first place. Do you know if there’s cctv anywhere around there?’
He shook his head. ‘We looked into it but there were some human rights and privacy issues so we decided against it.’
‘What about strange cars parked in that road behind the Cultural Centre? Did you notice anything?’
He shrugged, feeling guilty now: he realised he didn’t really pay much attention to cars in general, but obviously that wasn’t a very helpful attitude. In fact he didn’t consider himself all that observant at all. Amaryllis could do with having an assistant who was good at all the detail. Not that he thought of himself as her assistant, of course. In the light of his appearance on the ‘Weaknesses’ list he was perhaps more of an anti-assistant, only nobody had bothered to invent a word for that.
‘A bit like anti-matter,’ he muttered.
‘I think it’s time for coffee,’ she said. He watched her as she put the kettle on and searched through the cupboards for food. Her dark red hair was standing on end today, which was a good sign. Now that he thought about it, her hair had been decidedly limp for the past little while, although he had imagined it was because she had
been wearing a woolly hat in the extremely cold conditions. Or maybe all her joie de vivre had been swept away by the freezing north-easterly wind that some said came straight from the Arctic Circle.
‘Do you think the town’s cut off now?’ she said, bringing the coffee. ‘Will we run out of fresh food and have to beg tins off people who’ve stored them since the end of the war?’
‘Jemima probably has some of those,’ said Christopher. ‘We’d better keep on the right side of her.’
She glanced down at the piece of paper again. ‘Does anyone know yet whether these robbers actually fired at your office window? Did Charlie Smith say anything?’
He shivered. Being shot at wasn’t a comfortable thought, even although he had been standing behind triple-glazing at the time.
‘If they did fire, I wonder why,’ said Amaryllis thoughtfully. ‘Are you sure they saw you?’
‘One of them was staring straight at me,’ said Christopher. ‘Maybe he fired because he thought I’d recognised him, and wanted to make sure I didn’t tell anybody.’
‘Better watch your back if that’s what it was,’ said Amaryllis. He sort of wished she hadn’t said that. He shivered again.
‘But surely they’ll have gone somewhere else by now?’ he said.
‘Yes, I expect so.’
The expression on her face didn’t give him much confidence. What if they came after him? They could find out easily enough who he was, and he couldn’t keep away from the Cultural Centre indefinitely. It would be child’s play to track him down there. But would they want to return to the scene of their crime?
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Amaryllis. ‘There’s no reason for them to come back - if they got all they wanted the first time.’
‘But how do we know if they did?’
‘We don’t. But we can try and find out what they did get. Charlie Smith will have a list. We’ll get it all out of him. Custard cream?’
‘You’ve been seeing too much of Jemima,’ said Christopher, accepting a biscuit. ‘It’ll be tablet next,’ he added darkly, ‘and then where will we be?’