6 The Queen of Scots Mystery (19 page)

Chapter 32 New Directions

It was almost like old times.

Their favourite table was still there and they headed straight for it. The floor looked a bit different. Christopher wondered if it had been replaced or just cleaned.

‘I hope there’s plenty of Old Pictish Brew,’ said Jock
McLean, staring hard at the bar.

‘There you are,’ said Christopher, pointing to the tap with the luminous green broch logo on it. ‘And there are some bottles. I helped him go and get them from the cash and carry last weekend.’

‘Does he still get a delivery from Aberdour?’ said Jock anxiously. ‘They’re the only ones who do it.’

‘Calm down, Jock,’ said Jemima, settling herself into her favourite chair and taking a piece of knitting out of her bag. ‘Mine’s a Dubonnet and lemonade, when you’ve all finished admiring the view.’

‘I’ll get the first round in,’ said Dave. ‘Everybody want their usual?’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Christopher. They made their way to the bar.

It was the same, but different, Christopher mused. Water had flowed under the bridge; boats had been burnt. Neil Macrae was on remand awaiting trial for culpable homicide. Jackie Whitmore was out on bail for some associated charge. Charlie Smith had been offered his old job in the police force back, but he had decided to resign. He had bought the Queen of Scots from Neil, the transaction going through with amazing speed because of the circumstances; the transfer of the licence had been approved in record time, as the leaders of the local council had evidently been afraid the citizens of Pitkirtly would engage in all sorts of mayhem if not pacified by regular infusions of Old Pictish Brew. Perhaps they even knew of a secret ingredient in the beer that acted as a tranquiliser. Sometimes Christopher wondered.

He
smiled to himself as he accepted his pint from Dave. All’s well that ends well, he thought. We need Amaryllis to come in and explain everything to the assembled throng and everything will be right with the world again.

‘Where’s Amaryllis tonight, then?’ said
Charlie. He looked completely at home behind the bar, almost as if he had always been there and Neil Macrae’s tenure was only a temporary blip in the scheme of things.

‘I don’t know – she said she’d see us here.’

‘Hope she hasn’t got kidnapped again,’ said Dave, chortling in a particularly annoying way.

‘I don’t think she’ll fall for that more than once,’ said Christopher, crossing the fingers of the hand that wasn’t holding the pint glass.

‘Have you seen Penelope Johnstone lately?’ said Charlie.

‘Why? Should I have?’

‘I wondered how she was, that’s all.’

‘All right, I think,’ said Christopher. ‘Zak’s settled back into the fossil collection anyway.’

‘What’s he doing in there?’ enquired Dave, picking up Jemima’s glass from the bar.

‘Cataloguing. He’s got quite a flair for it. He’s going to make a fossil app too, while he’s at it. People can collect fossils when they’re out and about – but virtually. So they don’t disturb any of the sites.’

‘You’ve lost me there,’ said Dave, shaking his head.

‘It’s a young people’s thing,’ said Christopher. ‘It only makes sense if you’re under twenty-five.’

‘So not for old fossils, then,’ said Dave, chortling again. What had he got to be so cheerful about?

When they got back to the table, Jemima was fiddling with her mobile phone. It was a new one which looked far too complicated for her. Christopher half-expected her to ask him to fix something for her: change the time setting, find her text messages, or check for missed calls. Instead she glanced up and said, ‘I’m just tweeting about the Queen of Scots re-opening.’

Dave put her drink in front of her. ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering with that. Will anybody read it?’

She gave him a hard stare. ‘I’ve got ten thousand followers. I’m sure somebody will… Yes! Look.’

She held out the phone to show them the tweet that had flashed up.

‘Pitkirtly-Jem
- way cool news – have a drink for me,’ Dave read out loud. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well, my Twitter name’s Pitkirtly-Jem,’ she explained without even blushing. ‘And it’s a message from – let me see – Bill Clinton I think.’

‘Bill Clinton, the former president of the USA?’ said Christopher. He was almost prepared to believe it.

Jemima laughed. ‘Of course
not. Bill Clinton’s one of my distant cousins in Colorado.’

‘Tell Jemima about what Zak’s doing, then,’ said Dave to Christopher. ‘She’ll know what you’re talking about.’

Christopher was about to launch into as much explanation as he could manage when there was a disturbance at the door, and three women burst in. They were giggling and pushing each other about like teenagers, and at first he didn’t recognise them and thought they would get into trouble and perhaps even be thrown out by Charlie Smith. Then he realised there was something horribly familiar about the dark red hair and sparkling blue eyes of the rowdiest of the group. She had done something to flatten out the spikes of hair a bit, so instead of standing up on end it was curling wildly around her face, which gave her a surprisingly different, though no less scary, appearance. He couldn’t work out who the other two were until they came over to the table and stood there, still giggling.

‘Evening all,’ said Amaryllis. What was the matter with her? Christopher had never heard her giggling before, not even when Dave had
run over one of Jemima’s favourite woolly hats, the one with the multiplicity of bobbles sewn round it. He had claimed it was accidental, but they all suspected otherwise.

‘Why don’t you introduce us to your friends?’ said Dave.

The three of them giggled again, more or less in unison. Jemima seemed to be checking Twitter again.

‘
He says there are ten foot snowdrifts where he lives, and he’s had a bear on his deck looking in the windows,’ she told them.

‘I read in the paper that some people want to introduce bears to the Highlands,’ said Dave, diverted from his ogling of
Amaryllis and the other women.

‘We don’t need them in Pitkirtly – there are enough wild animals around here,’ said one of the women. Christopher stared at her. She had sounded like Tricia Laidlaw, and yet…

‘Haven’t you worked it out yet?’ said Amaryllis. ‘We’ve all had makeovers.’

‘Makeovers? What
on earth for?’ asked Christopher, genuinely baffled.

‘
That’s the nearest thing to a compliment that any of us will get,’ said Amaryllis to the others. ‘Make the most of it.’

They all giggled again. Christopher began to notice other things about them. They were all completely overdressed for Pitkirtly, with big necklaces that could have been made of plastic, and big matching bracelets that rattled up and down their arms. He didn’t think he had ever seen Amaryllis wearing any jewellery before, apart from a special watch that she had always claimed had a secret compartment for poison in it, and that told the time in various other time zones including, she swore, zones outside the earth’s atmosphere.
They had debated at length about whether places outside earth had time in any real sense of the word, he recalled.

They were all wearing very similar outfits but each in a different colour scheme. Amaryllis wore
all black, apart from a necklace and matching bracelet made apparently out of silver coloured door hinges, and shiny silver shoes. The one who sounded like Tricia Laidlaw but who had on a thick layer of glittery eye shadow and a hairstyle that trailed down one side of her face, wore a colour he thought might be called electric blue and the third one, who hadn’t spoken yet and was lurking slightly behind the other two and not giggling with quite the same genuine amusement, wore a purple top with a sparkly pattern down the front, and black leggings. He stared at her more closely. Her blonde hair was cut quite short so that it lay almost flat against her head. She was of a slightly matronly build which wasn’t in his opinion all that suited to wearing leggings, but he thought she carried it off reasonably well.

‘So what can I get you ladies to drink?’ said Jock McLean, standing up courteously and advancing on them. They giggled again.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever been in a group of ladies before,’ said Amaryllis. ‘We should probably have some sort of ladylike drink.’

‘Dubonnet and lemonade all round then?’ said Jock.

‘Don’t you dare!’ said Amaryllis.

‘You’d better sit down,’ said Christopher, looking around for more chairs. He wasn’t sure that he wanted them to join the group, but better that they sat down and made themselves less conspicuous than that they attracted the wrong sort of attention. Already some of the old Queen of Scots regulars had come in and now some of them were clustered round the bar making comments and gestures.

‘Thank you, Christopher,’ said the blonde one in the leggings as Christopher fetched a chair and practically shoved her into it.

She sounded like… Christopher peered at her more closely. ‘Penelope?’ he said, not really believing the evidence of his eyes and ears. He glanced across at the one in the electric blue. ‘Tricia?’

‘Damn,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I thought we could at least keep Christopher wondering for a bit longer than this.’

‘Christopher notices more than you think
he does,’ said Penelope. Her middle-aged middle-class tones were quite at odds with the purple top and particularly with the leggings, but now that he looked at her again, he noticed the same blue eyes and the same general shape as he had been aware of before.

Tricia fluttered her eyelashes at Jock McLean, who hastily took drinks orders and fled to the safety of the bar.

‘Why didn’t you take Jan from the wool-shop with you?’ said Dave in an innocent tone. ‘She looks as if she could do with a make-over.’

Jemima glared at
her husband. ‘I can’t believe you’re being so insensitive, David,’ she said. ‘Jan’s not been herself since the arrests.’

‘She doesn’t need a make-over any more than these three do, anyway,’ said Christopher.

Amaryllis flung herself into a chair and sulked for a few moments, but then Jemima showed her a message on Twitter that made them both laugh, and then Jock came back with the drinks.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ he said to Amaryllis.

‘That’s nice,’ said Amaryllis. ‘Why? Did you miss my dazzling wit and repartee? Or did you need a fourth for dominoes?’

‘No, none of these,’ said Jock, moving his chair further away from Tricia’s. ‘We were waiting for you to tell us the whole story.’

‘The whole story?’

‘About Neil Macrae and his evil deeds.’

‘I’m not sure I know absolutely the whole story,’ said Amaryllis. ‘But if I’m going to tell you what I know, we’d better get Charlie over. And fetch the dog down from the flat too. They both deserve to hear it. Although I suspect Charlie of being told it already by his ex-colleagues. They’re not known for their ability to keep secrets. Especially Keith Burnet.’

‘I thought you were the only one who could worm secrets out of Keith Burnet,’ said Dave. ‘Using your special little ways.’

Amaryllis ignored this. ‘I’ll go and see if Charlie can leave the bar now.’

‘He’s got help,’ said Penelope.

Christopher glanced over towards the bar, which was as busy as he had expected considering that this was the first night for weeks that the pub had been open. He was surprised to see two young men he recognised. ‘Zak. What’s he doing here? And isn’t that your friend, Amaryllis?’

‘My friend? Oh, yes, Stewie.’

Amaryllis got up again and went over to the boys. He noticed them recoil as she rattled her door-hinges at them, and then laugh. She made her way over to Charlie Smith.

‘Zak’s come along to help out in case it’s busy,’ said Penelope with a certain amount of maternal pride. ‘
Of course his real vocation is museum work, isn’t it, Christopher?’

‘Um – maybe,’ said Christopher, who wasn’t sure that he believed in vocations, and particularly in those related to his own line of work.
Still, it was nice that Penelope believed in her son. With a bit of luck he wouldn’t turn out like his father.

Once Charlie had fetched the dog and settled him under the table, they all leaned in to hear what Amaryllis had to say and to find out if Charlie had indeed been party to confidential information from his former colleagues.

‘It started with Neil Macrae being greedy,’ said Amaryllis. There was a murmur of agreement round the table.

‘He liked to over-charge for crisps,’ said Jock McLean.

‘All pub landlords over-charge for crisps,’ said Dave. ‘It’s better to bring your own.’

He brought a crumpled crisp packet out of his pocket to illustrate his point. Charlie glared at him. ‘You’re not supposed to eat your own food in here. I’m planning to do meals soon.’

‘Squashed crisps don't really count as food, though, do they?’ said Amaryllis. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, Neil Macrae got that bit too greedy. He had always grudged paying the full amount of tax on what he made out of the pub. But he knew everything had to go through the books and be audited. So he started to fiddle the books, with the help of Jackie Whitmore, who had done computing and book-keeping at college.’