5 Frozen in Crime (19 page)

The men on the ground had made better progress than
anyone expected: the helicopter made several sweeps over the whole area: the
grounds of Old Pitkirtlyhill House, the towns of Torryburn, Pitkirtly and
Culross, Pitkirtly and Preston Islands and the mud-flats in between them, and
nobody saw them. Amaryllis couldn’t believe Mal and Jimbo had just vanished
into thin air. For a few moments she wished she was on the ground chasing them.
If they had skied along the line of trees it would have been easier to follow
on foot than from the air. But surely they would have to emerge at some point.

 Listening in on a headset she heard an exchange
of radio messages between people on the ground and the pilot. A place was named
where the helicopter could touch down, but it hovered for a while. Just after
that, the helicopter suddenly lurched, the pilot corrected it and they headed
out to the middle of the river.

‘Sudden cross wind,’ Amaryllis shouted in Charlie’s
ear.

‘Are you enjoying this?’ he shouted back.

She nodded and smiled. ‘How did you know?’

‘Your hair!’ he said, and pointed at her head. ‘It’s
standing on end.’

Her hands instinctively went up to try and smooth
it down, but it was a lost cause, what with the adrenalin that always seemed to
go straight to her hair, and the draught that whistled through the interior of
the helicopter.

Charlie’s expression told its own story. He would
have done anything to avoid this sort of scenario, she knew. Almost like
Christopher, except that none of it seemed to have an impact on the loose
partnership between him and Amaryllis, which she knew some people considered
completely incongruous. It seemed to work though. The helicopter hovered over Pitkirtly
Island for a few minutes, then circled above the mud-flats in the bay. It was
frustrating not being able to see the action at closer range, but she had a lot
of sympathy for the idea of not being caught in cross winds. She listened to
the headset again and frowned.

‘Still no sign of them,’ she called to Charlie.
Even in this raised voice he detected a note of grudging admiration. ‘They’ve disappeared,
maybe gone to ground… There’s going to be hell to pay in the army over this -
they always claim they can spot people who are likely to do this kind of thing,
and to alert the civil authorities to people leaving the forces. But presumably
you didn’t get any word of it?’

‘Nobody would have told me anyway,’ said Charlie
gloomily. He had spoken almost too quietly for her to hear, but she sensed that
he hadn’t really been speaking to her at all.

‘Not your fault!’ she yelled.

‘Too bothered about the weather, and Christmas… We
had Christmas dinner at the station… Microwaved sprouts. Might as well have
been cold pizza… Minds on the job instead of…’

She wasn’t sure if she had heard him properly.
What was all that about microwaved sprouts?

‘Charlie, what are you talking about?’ she shouted
in his ear. ‘Microwaved sprouts? Cold pizza?’

‘We had Christmas dinner,’ he shouted back. ‘At
the station. Instead of concentrating on the job. Might as well have been cold
pizza.’

‘Everybody deserves a Christmas dinner,’ she
yelled, although she was far from convinced of the truth of this.

As the helicopter’s circuit widened to include
Preston Island and Culross, Amaryllis glanced down. The top of the old mine shaft
leading to the workings that had once extended out under the Forth caught her
eye. There were patches of snow scattered across the seaweed, but it was
freshly fallen and would melt quickly with all the salt water and mud around
it. She pictured men working in tunnels far below, in constant fear of the
water breaking through and drowning them, or the tunnels collapsing and burying
them forever in layers of rock and mud. She shivered. They had worked there all
the year round, even in this weather. Who knew how many tunnels criss-crossed
each other below the mud flats, as well as inland around the power station?

‘Tunnels!’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘There are tunnels
under Pitkirtly. That’s what they’ve done!’

Charlie stared at her blankly.

‘Tunnels!’ she said again. ‘There are tunnels all
around here. Old mine workings. Mal and Jimbo haven’t gone to ground – they’ve
gone underground - that’s why we can’t see them.’

Charlie was still staring as if she had grown two
extra heads. She remembered something important.

‘The maps! From the kitchen table!’

She slid her hand into her pocket and brought out
her mobile phone, hoping the pictures she had taken of the maps were still
there. Of course they must be: she hadn’t archived anything off recently: she
hadn’t had time. The only thing that might have gone wrong would be if
Christopher had used the opportunity of staying at her flat overnight to play
with the settings.

As she navigated to the image store and retrieved
the maps, she knew she had been worrying unnecessarily. Christopher treated his
own mobile with the caution that most people would have applied to an
unexploded bomb. He wouldn’t have dreamed of touching an unfamiliar phone that
didn’t belong to him. She peered at the maps on the small screen. She wished
now that she had given in and bought reading glasses. But it didn’t matter too
much. All she had to do was to remember what Christopher had found in the
library that day when they had looked it all up.

‘It looks as if they must have gone into a tunnel before
they even hit the main road,’ she said, zooming in and using the touch screen
to trace the probable route taken by Jimbo and Mal.

‘I thought all the tunnels around here were
flooded years ago,’ said Charlie, looking puzzled.

Amaryllis consulted the map images again. It was
all coming back to her. She could almost hear Christopher speaking, in the
quiet but confident voice he used when he was talking about history and
archives. Not that she encouraged him to do that under normal circumstances.
She didn’t want to be bored to death, after all: there were other, worthier
ways to die.

After a while she spoke to the pilot. ‘Can you put
us down on Pitkirtly Island?’ she asked.

‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said the pilot’s
voice in the headphones. ‘You’ll be a sitting duck if I winch you down. And
there’s no way I can land around there. They’ve set up an exclusion zone for
ten miles round Longannet – that was HQ telling me more about it just now.’

She sighed, consulting the maps again. ‘OK, near
that little wood then. Behind Sunk Causeway.’

‘We’re waiting for reinforcements,’ he said
censoriously. ‘They’re arriving by boat in twenty minutes.’

‘But we won’t be in the way,’ Amaryllis protested.
‘I just want to check something out near the island.’

She had visions of making her way through the
tunnels with Charlie and taking out the conspirators. Then she looked at
Charlie’s face. Was he up for it? He had always seemed far too sensible. Too
law-abiding. Playing it by the book.

Like Christopher.

She sighed again. Why was Christopher in an
ambulance when she needed him? He would have tried his best to stay completely
law-abiding, but she knew from previous experience that in this kind of
situation he would just follow her lead and do what she asked him to do –
unless it involved keeping mobile phones charged up and switched on, of course.
She wasn’t sure Charlie would be so ready to relinquish responsibility to her.
In fact she was almost sure he –

‘When you asked if he could put us down, what did
you mean?’ he asked.

‘I meant I want to be on the ground where the
action is, not skulking up here as if I were watching the whole thing on
television,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Yes, but ‘us’?’ he said.

‘You can come with me if you want,’ she said. ‘But
there are rules. You’ve got to forget you’re a boring policeman.’

‘Hmm.’

‘You’ve got to do what it takes.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘And remember, Christopher will kill you if
anything happens to me.’

‘That’ll be right,’ he muttered as the co-pilot
helped Amaryllis into a harness. ‘I’d better do it, I suppose. It won’t be any
stupider than any of the other things I’ve done lately.’

She smiled at him just as she slid over the edge. ‘Up
to you,’ she said. Then the cold air hit her and she shivered all the way down
to the ground. She landed well, went into a crouch, dodged behind the nearest
tree and called Christopher on her mobile phone. When he didn’t reply, as she
had thought he wouldn’t, she called Jemima instead.

She wasn’t surprised when Charlie arrived on the
ground a few moments after her, in the middle of the conversation. He joined
her behind the tree and waited patiently while she spoke, only stamping his
feet once and rubbing his gloved hands quite unobtrusively.

There was a lot of background noise and she found
it hard to make out what Jemima was saying, but the gist of it seemed to be
that something strange had happened when she and Dave were making their way
back to Pitkirtly.

‘… got them in the car… pease brose,’ was what it
sounded like.

‘Who do you have in the car? And what’s pease
brose when it’s at home?’

‘No, we’re going home,’ said Jemima.

‘But who’s in the car with you?’

‘It’s Christopher, of course,’ said Jemima. ‘And
some old man with him – I don’t know who he is. He’s wearing a tweed jacket.
And wheezing a lot.’ Her voice lowered slightly. ‘He looks as if he’s been
living rough for a while.’

‘That’s Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill. Can I speak
to him?’

Amaryllis made a thumbs-up sign to Charlie. He
smiled politely.

‘Hello?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Lord Murray?’

‘No, it’s me,’ said Christopher. She could hear
him wheezing even with the line being so bad. Why wasn’t he in the ambulance?
Had Jemima and Dave kidnapped him?

‘Get off!’ he added. She deduced that he wasn’t
speaking to her.

‘Is Lord Murray there? I need to speak to him
about Mal.’

‘What about Mal?’ Christopher sounded suspicious.
He wasn’t going to give up the phone without a struggle. She gave in for the
sake of speed.

‘Can you just ask Lord Murray if there’s any
previous connection between Mal and Pitkirtly Island? Any reason for him to
want to –um – destroy it? And,’ she added hastily, ‘does he have any background
in explosives? In the army, I mean.’

There was a pause, then Christopher said
tentatively, ‘He told me about it. In the ambulance. Mal got into trouble over
some incident on the island. When he was younger. Something to do with
explosives. And girls drowning. Then they sent him away to join the army… Get
off me, you stupid dog!’

‘Girls drowning?’

She heard a lot of coughing at the other end of
the line, mixed with what sounded like whining, and then Jemima’s voice. ‘He
can’t talk any more just now. We’ve got to get him home.’

‘Hmm,’ said Amaryllis, cutting the connection. ‘That
makes sense. But it means he’ll be more desperate to succeed. More dangerous.’

‘What’s that?’

She explained it to Charlie as best she could. In
the end he shook his head and said, ‘I’ll never understand you, Amaryllis. You’re
still enjoying all this, aren’t you?’

That was why, she reflected, she had some sort of
a relationship – albeit a strange, flawed one - with Christopher, but could
never have one with Charlie. Christopher accepted her without question: even
when he strongly disapproved of some of the things she did, he knew it was her
right to do them. Charlie had that urge that, in her experience, policemen and school
teachers often had, to persuade or coerce people to behave in a way that met
their own standards.

‘I’ll enjoy it when we catch up with them,’ she
muttered.

 ‘What now?’ said Charlie, glancing around. They
were right on the coast here but there was still a good layer of snow lying
almost up to the edge of the mud flats. The tree they lurked behind was part of
a small copse near a footpath right at the edge of the town. In front was the
railway line, beginning to curve away from Pitkirtly at this point, and beyond
that the River Forth and Pitkirtly Island, which of course wasn’t really an
island but a peninsula. It was smaller than its very similar neighbour, Preston
Island, and less industrial. But evidently that was all on the surface, for
according to Amaryllis there was a rabbit warren of old mining tunnels under
it.

Amaryllis was consulting the maps on her phone again.
He didn’t know how she could read the text without glasses, the screen was so
small. It was one of the many things about modern life he just didn’t
understand.

‘Was the dog there?’ he asked suddenly.

‘The dog?’

‘I left it with them. Did they still have it?’

She frowned.

‘Maybe. I think I heard something whining once or
twice when I was on the phone to them… And Christopher told it to get down. Or
at least I think it was the dog he meant. Might have been Lord Murray.’

‘So where do we go now?’ said Charlie. ‘Whatever
we’re going to do, we’ll have to do it now. Otherwise they’ll be here and we’ll
have no chance.’

‘They could be here already,’ said Amaryllis. Then
she looked up and grinned. ‘But I don’t think so. Even if they did that first
stretch quickly on skis, they’ll have slowed up when they got into the tunnel.’

‘But we don’t know where they went underground.’

‘Oh, yes, we do. Look.’

She showed him the screen and he screwed up his
eyes and pretended to be able to make sense of the map.

‘Look, here,’ she said eagerly. ‘There’s an
entrance in the grounds of Old Pitkirtlyhill House. That’s where they’ll have
gone in. The tunnel leads straight from there into Pitkirtly, and right under
the town, and then under the island. But it’ll take them a while. Even if there
aren’t any rock falls. But they may have checked that out beforehand. May even
have shored up the tunnels with steel beams. That’s what I would have done.’

‘So they’ve been planning this for a good while?
And it’s all going to kick off here, not at Longannet?’

She nodded. ‘I think so.’

Charlie got out his phone. ‘I’d better call it in.’

‘Who to?’

‘I don’t know – the station first. They can pass
it on to anyone else who needs to know. The fire service. The army. Your lot.’

‘They aren’t my lot any more,’ said Amaryllis. He
gave her a look. Once a spook, always a spook, as far as he was concerned. Not
that he had actually seen her carrying out spook-like activities. Not for a
while anyway.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m a PI now. And I’m
on a case.’

‘You’re not going to find the proceeds of the
jewel robbery down there in the tunnels,’ he said, trying to sound scathing. Of
course, now that he had said that, they would probably go straight down the
ladder and into an Aladdin’s cave full of treasure. The mental image made him
smile, and he moved away from Amaryllis to make his call. It wouldn’t do for
her to think he found this very serious situation amusing.

He ended the call and glanced up to find she had
already crossed the railway line and was waiting for him at the other side. She
seemed to be staring hard at an old stone bridge that stood incongruously on
its own in the middle of a patch of nettles and sticky willow. Maybe she
thought there was a tunnel entrance there.

‘They were all heading for Longannet,’ he said,
‘but they’re going to send a contingent round this way, just in case.’

‘Hurry up, Jimbo and Mal will get ahead of us if
we’re not careful,’ she said. She pushed through the undergrowth and led the
way under the stone structure. He couldn’t decide if it was the remaining arch
of a railway bridge, or part of an old sea wall.

‘What’s in here?’

‘One of the tunnel entrances. At least that’s what
the map seems to be showing… Pity we don’t have a few aerial shots.’

‘Or a bigger map,’ he said as they walked under
the arch. Suddenly there was a heavy-looking door in front of them with a
new-looking padlock on a heavy steel chain.

Amaryllis took something that resembled a Swiss
army knife out of her pocket. ‘Look away for a minute,’ she told Charlie.

There was a clunk and a bang, and when he looked
back the padlock was lying on the ground. She unbolted the door and pulled it
towards her.

‘There’s a tunnel. It looks as if it goes into a
kind of bank first,’ she said. ‘There’ll be either a ladder or a slope before
too long.’

Or a deep dark shaft plummeting suddenly down to
the centre of the earth, he thought suddenly in an uncharacteristic effort of
the imagination.

‘We should wait for back-up,’ he said, but he knew
it was only a token protest. Amaryllis was going into tunnel and he was going
with her.

It was a dark tunnel going into the bank, then
sloping downwards. Amaryllis produced a torch that was much more powerful than
it looked. Charlie experienced an odd feeling of envy mixed with guilt. Why
wasn’t he, as a police officer, at least as well-equipped as her? It was no use
blaming government spending cuts: he knew they had all the stuff they needed,
but it was all back at the station or in the Land Rover, and he hadn’t thought
to bring it with him. Of course, he had never been in the Cubs or Scouts. His
parents’ irrational fears of uniformed organizations had a lot to answer for.
How horrified had they been when he joined the police force?

‘You’d think they’d have blocked this off
altogether,’ he said censoriously. ‘Anybody could come in here.’

‘I suspect the authorities think it is completely
blocked off,’ said Amaryllis.

The tunnel led them in a slow spiral downwards.
The ground under their feet made a fairly smooth surface for walking on. Every
so often the roof was strengthened by wood beams. Amaryllis turned the torch
beam on to one place where this had happened.

‘They’ve been busy here. These are newly fixed –
look at the bolts.’

‘Hmm, at least it’s a bit less likely we’ll be
buried in a rock fall,’ said Charlie gloomily.

‘Don’t worry, there’s still the risk of firedamp,’
said Amaryllis. ‘So you don’t have to stop worrying altogether.’

‘There won’t be any firedamp down here, will
there?’

‘Who knows?’ she said lightly.

They came to a place where the tunnel divided.

‘One way leads out under the Forth and the other
way goes back to Old Pitkirtlyhill House,’ said Amaryllis. ‘What do you think?’

Charlie didn’t know what to think, since he had
lost all sense of direction. He didn’t like being underground: it seemed to be
preventing his brain from functioning properly. Maybe he was partly
solar-powered. He smiled to himself at this fanciful idea, and suppressed the
smile quickly when he noticed Amaryllis giving him a funny look. He didn’t want
her thinking he’d gone nuts already from claustrophobia.

‘We could try one way for a bit and then go back
and try the other,’ he suggested.

‘OK, I think this way goes towards the river so
let’s have a look,’ said Amaryllis, choosing one option apparently at random
and leading the way with the torch again. They had only gone about twenty
metres when she stopped.

‘Water underfoot. That isn’t a good sign.’

‘There isn’t much yet. Do you think it’s from the
river?’

‘Probably. Let’s try the other way.’

He couldn’t see her face but there was a sort of
frown in her voice. He wondered about that. She seemed disconcerted.

They passed the junction and walked on for about
twenty metres the other way. Then two things happened very quickly: the first
was that Amaryllis fell over something and swore like a trooper, only under her
breath. The other thing was that when she stopped swearing, Charlie heard other
people’s voices in the distance. It was hard to tell how far away they were because
of the tunnels and the echo.

‘It’s them,’ he breathed, helping her up.

‘The torch!’ she whispered, leaning down to find
it. They could see the beam from it spilling over the floor of the tunnel. She
shone it down on the thing she had fallen over. It was a box shape covered with
a tarpaulin. There were more boxes behind it, a line of them stretching along
the tunnel as far as they could see.

He tugged at her arm to get her to move.

‘Come on, we’ve got to get away. Back up to the
surface.’

‘No!’ She lifted a corner of the tarpaulin to
reveal a plain wooden crate. ‘It’s the explosives. We’ve got to stop them.’

‘But the reinforcements – they won’t be long. We
should go up to the surface and wait. Show them where to come.’

‘The whole town could be blown sky-high by then!’
she said, raising her voice slightly. ‘We haven’t got time to wait for
reinforcements – we have to do this ourselves.’

‘Sssh – stop arguing,’ he hissed. ‘They’re not
going to blow anything up straight away – they’ll wait and see if they get the
ransom money first.’

Still she hesitated. The voices were coming
closer.

He tugged at her sleeve again. ‘Come on, we can’t
let them catch us here. We can’t move the crates. It’s a no-brainer.’

She stood still for another moment.

‘I know what we can do,’ she said suddenly. ‘Come
on, let’s go along the other branch – to Pitkirtly Island and the Forth.’

‘No! We’ve got to get up to the surface.’

‘I didn’t know you were such a stubborn man,
Charlie,’ she said as they started moving at last. ‘You can go on up to the
surface if you like – I’ll go the other way.’

‘No! We’d be better to stick together – and what
are you planning to do anyway?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

Her voice was grim. Their steps speeded up.

‘You know you said Christopher would kill me if anything
happened to you?’ he said after a moment’s silence.

‘I was only joking,’ she said.

‘But all the same – I’d better keep an eye on you,’
he said. ‘We’ll both go towards the river. I’ll look the other way if you need
to do anything bad.’

They reached the fork in the tunnel where one way
led up to the open air and the other out under the Forth. Amaryllis suddenly
switched off her torch. Charlie heard the voices behind them much more clearly
than before.

‘Is this how you left the tarp?’

‘Maybe… Do you think it’s been disturbed?’

One of the men swore, and the other said, ‘There
was a very faint light. Ahead of us. I thought I’d imagined it.’

A pause, then the voices came loud and clear
again.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You know what? It’s that interfering friend of
yours. I knew she was bad news.’

‘Don’t be stupid. We left her in the house. How
could she have got down here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Give me a hand and we’ll get the stuff out. No
point in hanging about now. Let’s get on with it.’

‘I’ll go this way,’ Amaryllis whispered in Charlie’s
ear. ‘Sorry, I’ll need the torch. You go on up to the surface – just follow the
left hand wall and you’ll be fine. Hurry!’

She gave him a little push and placed his hand on
a wall of rock. He sensed her slipping away from his side. It did make sense
for them to split up so that only one of them would get caught, but it was a
hard thing to decide, and he wasn’t sure that he would have been ruthless
enough to do it.

As he climbed back up the tunnel as fast as he
could, he heard one of the men say, faintly now, ‘Fireworks in the old town
tonight,’ and laugh.

His heart thudded so hard he was sure they would
hear it. The rock wall began to feel slimy, cold and damp under his hand but he
knew it was just the dampness of his own sweat. He had begun to doubt that he
would ever find his way back to the surface when he glimpsed a hazy greyness
ahead, encouraging him to speed up and reach the big door again.

He burst out of the tunnel, half-closing the door
behind him, and drew a deep trembling breath as if he hadn’t taken in any
proper air since he had been underground. He emerged from under the archway and
scanned his surroundings to try and locate the helicopter, or the back-up he
hoped for. Everything was quiet, and white.

Charlie felt a stab of guilt. He should have gone
with Amaryllis. It was pointless having come out in the open when there were no
rescuers to alert. He turned back towards the archway – and heard the door
being flung open with such force that it seemed to rattle the old stonework
around it. He just had time to think, that can’t be her, before diving for
cover in a clump of brambles. He heard a shot, and cowered down even lower,
trying to make himself impossibly small.

When he dared to glance up through the brambles,
he saw Mal’s head appear round the archway, and then quickly draw back, like a
tortoise retreating into its shell. Charlie kept very still, even although an
extremely prickly branch was digging into his leg, and another one seemed to
have trapped a strand of his hair. His knees were starting to ache well before
he decided it was safe to come out.

He crawled backwards through the brambles, cursing
under his breath as they snatched at his face, hands, legs and hair, and then
at last stood up.

A shot whizzed over his head. Mal must have
miscalculated his height. He didn’t have time to look round for cover: he just
flung himself to the ground, this time in a patch of icy mud. It was a stupid
thing to do, of course. Mal would just walk forward and shoot him where he lay.
He would have been far better to run... It was no use running now.

The buzz of the helicopter came at the same time
as the sound of running feet in heavy boots, and the shouting of terse
commands. After a moment he raised his head to look. The helicopter was right
overhead, and a small group of uniformed policemen had crossed the railway line
and were heading right for him. He pushed himself up and turned round. A small
flotilla of grey boats had arrived in the bay, and men in combat gear were
disembarking from them and swarming on to the island. Back-up had arrived.