Chapter 29 Rescuing the rescuer
Christopher suspected Chief Inspector Smith had sent him on a wild-goose chase to keep him out of the way in case anything went wrong. At least he hadn’t suffered the ignominy of being packed off to the cattery with Dave, Jemima and the dog. He plodded through the snow, keeping the fence immediately to his left. After a while it curved round away from him, and he followed it doggedly.
He was depressed to see the sky darkening and the snow beginning again. What if Dave and Jemima got stuck at the cattery? Did Rosie have enough food for all of them, or would they have to ration it - or start to eat the animals? This idea amused him for about five seconds, and then he started to worry again. Why had Amaryllis been away so long? Perhaps Lord Murray had offered refreshments. He pictured the two of them sitting on hard but elegant chairs, one at each side of a small fire, a worn but expensive Persian rug between them, sipping Earl Grey tea from old-fashioned china cups. There might even be cucumber sandwiches. He knew this was a trick by his mind to divert him from more sinister thoughts. Amaryllis must have had her suspicions that everything wasn’t above board at Old Pitkirtlyhill House, or she would never have agreed to come up here in the first place.
He couldn’t quite work it out himself, unless she thought Mal hadn’t been entirely honest with them when they had met him here. Few things would have pleased Christopher more than finding out that Mal was a crook, and yet contrarily, knowing this was just based on gut instinct and jealousy made him more reluctant to accept it without evidence. He would have thought her friend Jimbo was more likely to be in the frame for the murder of the homeless man, since they had witnessed Jimbo speaking to the man as he went up the hill at the end of Amaryllis’s cul de sac. And yet Jimbo was a bona fide member of the armed forces with a cast-iron reason for being in the vicinity. Whereas they still weren’t sure how Mal had come to be in the old house….
The fence changed from being a tall structure with spikes on the top which somehow made him think of dinosaurs into a low wooden one, apparently much less threatening. But he saw when he approached it that it had a wire running along the top with a little sign saying it was electrified. For one wild moment he entertained the idea of taking a run up and vaulting over it.
At least this made him smile again.
He trudged on, still following the line of the fence even when it led him through a bramble patch as it had done once or twice so far. The snow was coming down more solidly now, and he couldn’t see more than a few metres ahead because it was blowing right across his path. Even if he had been able to see the house from this angle, which was doubtful in any case, it would have been rendered invisible by this whiteout. He hoped Dave and Jemima had got up the road to the cattery before it had developed fully.
It was at this point, isolated from the rest of humanity by the blizzard, unsure of where he was going and of whether he was due to walk into danger some time soon, that he reached into the pocket of his parka and took out his mobile phone, on this occasion fully charged up and, as he discovered when he switched it on, fully operational. He smiled again as he replaced it in his pocket. At least this time he hadn’t left it on the kitchen table. He had a live link to the outside world after all.
Almost as if the phone had been a lucky talisman, almost immediately after this he came to a stile. In normal circumstances he would have hesitated even then: but if Amaryllis was in trouble, which he had a horrible feeling she was, he had to do something to help. He batted aside his reservations about whether he would be any use against ruthless men, possibly armed with guns, and his feeling that he might get in the way or even just commit some hideous social faux pas. None of these thoughts were at all relevant.
He heaved himself up on to the first step of the stile. A deer stood at the other side, watching with what he could only think of as derision. He clapped his hands in their heavy gloves.
‘Shoo!’ he called, and the deer left. It tiptoed unhurriedly through the snow and eventually vanished from sight among the spindly birches and rowans, which had only now themselves become visible in a gap in the blizzard. He hoped it hadn’t gone to fetch reinforcements. He wasn’t sure how many deer constituted a herd and whether he could just push through them or if they would gang up on him.
This was so typical! He might have to face armed robbers any minute and he was worrying about a herd of deer. Christopher realised all over again that he really wasn’t suited to this kind of activity. He thought back fondly to the time he had helped Jemima unravel her family history in the library: that was where his strengths lay.
As he struggled over the top of the stile, slipping on the steps and clinging on to the sides to stop himself falling, he thought he heard a shout and a crash in the middle distance. Oh, great, someone had spotted him. But, glancing over in what he fervently hoped was the direction of the house, he found he could still only see about fifty metres ahead, so it seemed unlikely anyone had seen him, unless perhaps the security cameras happened to point over this way. But was this a fruitless quest anyway? He wondered if he might be better to go back, call Dave and Jemima and see if they had sent for reinforcements. After all, if the police did come along they would need somebody on hand to guide them quickly to the house, and if he stationed himself by the main gate…
But what would Amaryllis do?
He wouldn’t usually have bothered asking himself this question. It must be the extreme weather that was making everything seem urgent and somehow bigger, as if real life had suddenly turned into some sort of Nordic saga, or Russian epic along the lines of War and Peace. He would have to change his name to Kristoforovsky in the latter case, he joked to himself.
Somehow smiling propelled him onwards through the tundra, instead of back over the stile in ignominious retreat. He didn’t think he had the depth for a character from Tolstoy. Making himself smile would have been frowned on, for a start.
He started as a face suddenly popped round a tree trunk a few metres ahead - and relaxed as he saw it was another deer looking at him. Would the police, when they came, find him wandering around in a state of paranoia, convinced animals were watching him round every corner? There was something about the snow and the deer and indeed the whole situation that made him feel as if he were in a different world.
The falling snow had one big advantage, but he didn’t realise that until it slowed to a few flakes and then stopped altogether. It had hidden him from observers, but it had also concealed from him how close he was getting to his target. He could now see the back of the house through the remaining vegetation - and he knew anyone looking out from there would be able to see him too.
He would have lurked for much longer at the edge of the scrubland, except that two things happened in fairly quick succession as he hesitated.
The first thing was that two men appeared round the end of the house, carrying something between them. It seemed at first like a sack of something heavy, because they were laboring over the task and it sagged in the middle between them. As they came closer, he saw that it was a person in a big jacket - a lot like Chief Inspector Smith’s big jacket, in fact. Christopher weighed up the chances of someone else wearing Mr Smith’s jacket and decided it was rather unlikely. So his hunch that something was badly wrong had been correct, but that wouldn’t be of much use to him now.
One of the men walked unsteadily, with a bit of a limp. His mind flew to Mal, who had been around the last time they were here. The other looked vaguely familiar too. What was going on here? Crouching now behind a Christmas tree that grew near the edge of the wild area, he rapidly discounted the possibility that Charlie Smith had fallen accidentally somewhere in the grounds and they were bringing him round to the back of the house for medical attention. That didn’t leave very many other possibilities. If they were desperate enough to attack a police officer, then he certainly didn’t want to confront them.
He thought one of them had said something - or maybe it was just Charlie Smith groaning.
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Then he heard a couple of words - they sounded like ‘Pitkirtly fireworks’, but that was so weird that he didn’t really believe his ears.
Then loud laughter and ‘set the charges, then,’ from one of the man. Again, he didn’t know whether to believe the evidence of his senses. He hoped they were deceiving him, since his mind leapt to explosions, perhaps because he knew Mal at least had once been a soldier. That was it. Now he knew it was all in his mind. He breathed a small sigh of relief, but lurked behind the tree just in case. He wondered if the aristocracy planted out their Christmas trees after using them just as some normal people did, in the hope they would take root properly. He remembered his father once planting out a Christmas tree and then having to chop it down a few years later because it had grown so big and towered over his sweet peas.
Why was he even thinking about sweet peas at a time like this? He peered out from behind the tree again. They had disappeared into the cellars, if these were the rooms accessible through the open door he could see. It must be confusing having doors at different levels like this. It might be useful to have cellars, though.
He knew his thoughts were rambling to avoid focussing on the crux of the matter.
The other man had looked vaguely familiar. He pictured Jimbo as he had last seen him, climbing the hill outside Amaryllis’s flat sideways on his skis in that clever way that skiers had. And talking to the homeless man. This time an alarm bell definitely rang in Christopher’s mind. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in coincidence - he came across evidence of random occurrences being related to each other every day - but suddenly all the unusual things that had happened in Pitkirtly over the past few days had linked themselves together in a pattern. He couldn’t quite work out what pattern they were making, but it was almost certainly a dark, sinister Gothic one and not just a harmless Paisley.
He heard voices again, and kept well behind the tree for a few minutes until he judged that they were now coming from further away. He peered out again. The two men were walking away round the corner of the house, leaving a new set of tracks in the snow. No sign of Charlie Smith now. He wondered if the men were planning on returning to the back of the house any time soon.
It took him a while to get himself out from behind the tree. He knew Amaryllis would have done it much more quickly. He pushed the thought of Amaryllis further down in his mind. It wouldn’t help if he got emotional about this; he had to think rationally.
Then he heard a muffled bang from the back of the house, and reason went out the window.
He sprung out from behind the tree and headed out into the open, trying to run across the snow but failing miserably as his feet in their winter boots sank into it, collecting ice on their soles and weighing him down. He flung himself at the wall of the house when he got to it, clinging on and trying to merge into the stone. There was smoke now billowing from what he imagined was either the back door or a separate entrance to the cellars. Pushing all his instincts aside, he headed straight for it.
As he went in, he bumped into someone heading out. Someone who was dragging a dead weight behind her.
‘Help me with Charlie,’ she said irritably. ‘I’ve got to go back for Lord Murray.’
He pushed her aside and went on into the smoke.
‘Just get out,’ he said over his shoulder, coughing. ‘I’ll be back.’