Promenade with Death by Cecilia Peartree

Author:Cecilia Peartree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder, mystery, small town, shakespeare, scottish, theatre

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for word to get around. Soon after lunch, Jock McLean and Hamish arrived, and five minutes later Jan was on the door-step waiting to get in.

‘I had to wait until the lunchtime rush died down,’ she explained as she entered the apartment, ‘but we put a few things together for you in case you couldn’t manage to get out to the shops.’ She handed over two bags which proved to contain at least a whole week’s supply of whatever Maisie Sue and Jan considered to be essentials. Poking about in the bag, Amaryllis extracted a large packet of mixed biscuits.

‘Ah, that’s good,’ said Jock McLean, who had been pottering about in the kitchen on the pretext of making a pot of coffee. ‘I was looking for the biscuits. I couldn’t find any.’

‘I don’t always have biscuits,’ said Amaryllis, adding hastily to Jan, ‘but I do like them now and again. And visitors usually eat them up.’

Jock took the packet from her hand and disappeared again.

Hamish barked once. A second later, the entry buzzer went again, and Charlie Smith and his dog made their way up the stairs.

The dogs greeted each other effusively. Or at least, Hamish did.

‘Just as well I don’t need peace and quiet,’ said Amaryllis.

‘What have you been up to?’ enquired Charlie. ‘I saw Dave and Jemima over lunch-time and they said they’d just brought you back from the hospital.’

‘It was an accident,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Ah,’ said Charlie. ‘Something to do with where you were going on the bus yesterday, then.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Just an intelligent deduction. I wasn’t in the police all those years for nothing, you know.’

Although it was good of Charlie to visit her, Amaryllis couldn’t help wishing he hadn’t bothered. If he and Jan put their information together, they were bound to guess where she had been. Jan would be upset if Amaryllis told her what had happened, and no doubt she would find some way of blaming herself for it.

‘Where were you going on the bus?’ said Jan after a pause during which the cogs had evidently been turning in her mind.

Jock McLean chose that moment to bring over a tray of coffee, with the biscuits arranged neatly in order of size on a plate.

‘That looks nice,’ said Amaryllis.

It took a few minutes to distribute the cups. Amaryllis then started a diversion by getting Charlie and Jock to decide on whether their dogs should have a biscuit each, but when conversation on that front flagged, she saw Jan looking at her expectantly.

‘Did you go and see Aurora?’

‘Um,’ said Amaryllis.

Charlie’s and Jan’s eyes were trained on her in a way that reminded her uncomfortably of the searchlights from that inconvenient guard-post on the Mongolian border.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have given you the address,’ said Jan.

‘It’s not your fault if she can’t resist making trouble for herself,’ said Charlie.

‘Oh, all right!’ said Amaryllis. ‘I just wanted to check them out for myself, that’s all. It was a perfectly reasonable plan, under the circumstances.

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