The Unexpected Suspect

By Cecilia Peartree

This is the 16th book in the Pitkirtly Mystery series. A stolen wheelbarrow gets Stewie into trouble through no fault of his own, and before long he is in danger of losing his job and his place at college. Meanwhile, someone takes most of the computers from the Cultural Centre in broad daylight, resulting in an unwelcome encounter for Christopher and the staff with the Office Supplies Investigation Section. Jemima runs another Family History event in the research room and Pitkrtly DNA test results are soon distributed all round Scotland via the magic of the internet. Is there any connection between these apparently random events? If there is, Amaryllis will find it sooner or later.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cecilia Peartree
• Release date: Sep 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463612187

Cecilia Peartree

Cecilia Peartree is the pen name of a writer from Edinburgh. She has dabbled in various genres so far, including science fiction and humour, but she keeps returning to a series of 'cosy' mysteries set in a small town in Fife.The first full length novel in the series, 'Crime in the Community', and the fifth 'Frozen in Crime are 'perma-free' on all outlets.The Quest series is set in the different Britain of the 1950s. The sixth novel in this series, 'Quest for a Father' was published in March 2017..As befits a cosy mystery writer, Cecilia Peartree lives in the leafy suburbs with her cats.

Book preview

The Unexpected Suspect

Pitkirtly Mysteries 16

Cecilia Peartree

Copyright Cecilia Peartree 2018

All rights reserved

Smashwords edition

Cover photo: Ian Ogilvy Morrison

The characters depicted in this story are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Contents

Chapter 1 In the Dark

Chapter 2 Later That Same Night

Chapter 3 Death and Secrets

Chapter 4 Aftermath

Chapter 5 Springing into Action

Chapter 6 Return to the Stone Age

Chapter 7 I’ve been here before

Chapter 8 Comings and Goings

Chapter 9 Burnout

Chapter 10 The Car

Chapter 11 Not Involved At All

Chapter 12 The Hunt for White Van Man

Chapter 13 Stranger Danger

Chapter 14 Neighbourly Interest

Chapter 15 More Computer Trouble

Chapter 16 Visiting Amaryllis

Chapter 17 Something to Hide?

Chapter 18 Computer Hell

Chapter 19 A Surprise

Chapter 20 Amaryllis breaks in

Chapter 21 Held to Ransom

Chapter 22 Cup-cakes

Chapter 23 The Pitkirtly Code

Chapter 24 The Morning After

Chapter 25 Trapped

Chapter 26 Stargazing

Chapter 27 Waking up Again

Chapter 28 Cold, Hard Facts

Chapter 29 Kicking the Kerb

Chapter 30 Always Connected

Chapter 31 Keep Right on to the End

The End

Chapter 1 In the Dark

He stared at the building across the road, necessity battling with memory. He was a different person now, no longer the schoolboy drifting along, willing to let other people decide for him which direction to head in. His Gran tugging him one way, and his friends the other. No idea which of the friends would lead him into trouble.

He shook his head and stepped forward.

One of those big cars zipped past just in front of him, and he flinched, thinking it could easily have knocked him down if he had been only a fraction quicker to try and cross the road. He tried again, glancing cautiously to left and right as he walked, on the alert now for trouble from all sides.

He was just about to ring the doorbell when he saw the thin line of light that meant the door was open. It seemed rude just to go in, even although he knew it was now his mother’s house and he thought she must be expecting him. Unless his sister…

He pushed at the door and it swung open. There was chaos in the small hallway, but then there quite often was. His mother had never been much good at housework, although that probably wasn’t her fault. Still, this was bad even by her standards. His gaze took in the table toppled over on its side, the coats from the coat-rack strewn on the floor, and – was that a bloodstain on the wall?

He was just moving over to have a closer look, not that he particularly wanted to view it up close, but he thought it might help him get an idea of what had been going on, when his sister flung herself through from the back of the house and came straight at him.

He took a step back but she was carried forward by her own momentum and ran into him. They both swayed for a moment and then Stewie remembered he was meant to be the big brother here and managed to keep them both upright by putting his hands on her shoulders and pushing her backwards a bit.

‘You’ve got here!’ she gasped.

‘Yes.’

‘Why did it take you so long? Mum’s frantic.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Did you not read my text?’

‘Of course I read it!’ He felt guilty. He had really only taken in the part about trouble, and that they needed him right away. He had seen there was a lot more than that, but he had stopped at the first smiley. Were they still called smileys when the mouth was turned down and the hair standing on end? He would have to ask Sam later. If he ever told her about this.

‘Never mind – come on through!’

She took his hand and more or less dragged him through to the kitchen. Stewie’s mother was sitting at the table, her head in her hands. She glanced up at them.

‘Stewie!’

‘Hello, Mum. What’s all this, then?’

‘Oh, my God, don’t ask!’ She buried her face in her hands again, and started sobbing.

Stewie stared at her. She always had been a bit dramatic, which was probably why his Dad and she hadn’t got on. But how did she expect him to find out anything if he wasn’t allowed to ask? He turned to his sister. Half-sister.

‘Caitlin? What’s going on?’

Caitlin sniffed. ‘It’s all her fault.’ She pointed a finger at their mother. ‘She should be the one to tell you.’

‘I don’t care whose fault it is!’ Stewie snapped. ‘Just tell me, one of you! What do you want?’

‘Open the back door,’ said Caitlin.

‘What?’

‘The back door. Have a look in the garden.’

He crossed the room, squeezing past his mother at the table, and opened the back door. And closed it again quickly. ‘Is that a…?’

Caitlin nodded.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Sean,’ said Caitlin, in a tone that suggested Stewie should have known that already.

‘Sean…?’

‘Mum’s latest,’ said Caitlin. She made a face. ‘Not the best she’s ever had either.’

‘What’s happened to him?’

His sister’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It was an accident.’

‘What kind of accident?’

‘The kind where Mum hit him over the head with one of those big heavy pans somebody gave her as a wedding present.’

Stewie had imagined his mother couldn’t do anything that would surprise him these days, but his mouth dropped open and he stood there staring at his sister for at least a couple of minutes.

‘Have you called the police yet?’ he said at last.

His mother, who had seemed to be miles away in some private hell, brought her head out of her hands so quickly that he was afraid her neck would snap. ‘Are you serious, son? The police? Do you think my head buttons up the back?... I knew you’d come to a bad end, associating with those people.’

‘People?’ he repeated.

‘Never mind that now, mother!’ said Caitlin. ‘We need to get him out of the way. He can’t die in our garden.’

‘It’s a bit late to worry about that, isn’t it?’ said Stewie. ‘Anyway, how do you know he’s dead?’

‘I’ve done first aid at school,’ said Caitlin. ‘It’s obvious.’

‘What do you want me to do, anyway?’

‘You can get him away from here,’ said his mother. ‘Then it won’t be anything to do with us.’

Stewie shook his head. ‘There’ll be fingerprints. And DNA. And he lived here, didn’t he? The police will be here in no time, once he’s found.’

‘Ah, well, once he’s found,’ said Stewie’s mother, nodding. ‘That could take a while.’

‘How do you think I’m going to move him?’ said Stewie. ‘I don’t have a car, and even if I did, I wouldn’t want to have – traces – in it. Specially when it’s nothing to do with me.’

‘Nothing to do with you?’ His mother’s voice rose almost to a hamster squeak. ‘I’m your mother, son! And wee Caitlin’s your own sister. You’re the man of the house. It’s up to you to look after us both.’

‘The best way I can do that is to call the police,’ muttered Stewie. He was starting to remember why Gran had taken him to live with her in the first place. Living with her hadn’t exactly been a picnic, but at least he hadn’t been at the mercy of his mother and the next in a long line of fancy-men.

‘No police.’ His mother had dug her heels in, and he knew from experience that the more you pushed her, the deeper she would dig them.

‘We’ve got next-door’s wheelbarrow out there,’ said Caitlin helpfully. ‘Only we couldn’t get him into it on our own. He’s too heavy.’

‘Next-door’s wheelbarrow?’ said Stewie. ‘This is unbelievable!’

‘I don’t know what we would’ve done if we hadn’t thought of that,’ said Caitlin. ‘It was my idea. I sneaked round and got it out of his shed. It’s down at the bottom of the garden.’

‘We’ll put it back though,’ said their mother.

The two of them gazed at him with what they probably thought were pleading looks but which seemed to Stewie like the death stares of some kind of monster. Something from mythology, he thought grimly, one beast with two heads. He hadn’t known anything about mythology until Sam got it into her head to paint pictures of it. They had gone into the library and looked at books together for hours, until Zak’s girl-friend Harriet told them they had to leave so that she could lock up. He had drawn the line at posing for Sam’s pictures of Greek gods, though. He had never seen himself as a mythological being. Except maybe a troll that hid under bridges.

‘What are you smiling about?’ said his mother.

‘Nothing… All right, I’ll have a look and see what I can do. I’m not promising, mind. I still think you’d be better to call the police right away.’

He opened the door, touching the handle gingerly as if it might be red-hot.

He stepped cautiously round the body that was sprawled across the small area of paving, went up the short flight of steps and walked along the garden path almost to the end, at which point he bumped into the handles of the wheelbarrow.

He should have brought Sam with him. She would have talked him out of getting involved. But that was probably why he hadn’t brought her. Despite everything, Stewie felt some sort of bond with his mother and sister, and he hadn’t wanted them to face whatever had happened without his support. He still didn’t want to abandon them, although he couldn’t help wishing they hadn’t even asked him to help.

He grasped the handles and began to turn the wheelbarrow round so that he could wheel it towards the house. There was a faint rustle in the bushes just behind him. Probably a cat. Or a fox. Stewie always felt sympathy for foxes. They were kind of scruffy, like him, and sometimes moth-eaten, and the paler parts of their fur tended to be the same colour as his hair, although much thicker. Then there was the fact that many people didn’t like them.

He heard a sort of grunting, snuffling noise over by the house too. Maybe it was a badger or a hedgehog. What other kinds of animal lived in this garden? He hadn’t realised his mother and sister had their own private zoo. Did badgers have heavy footsteps like that?

But he didn’t have time to worry about that now. He finished manoeuvring the wheelbarrow into position and began to push it back along the path towards the house. He wasn’t exactly an expert with wheelbarrows, and it ran on to the grass a couple of times, but after a while he got into his stride and found it easier.

He was starting to feel as if he might be really helping by the time he had bumped the barrow down the steps. He wheeled it on to the paving stones, stopped and looked for the body. Now that he was on a roll, it should be easy enough to lift it into the barrow. He didn’t even consider where he would go next, or what he would do when he got there. Bury the body? Tip it into the water?

As it turned out, he didn’t have to worry about that anyway.

There was no sign of a body after all.

He opened his mouth to shout for help, closed it again when he remembered the neighbours, and instead walked over to the back door, opening it even more gingerly than before.

His mother and sister were sitting at the table with hot drinks now. Everything looked perfectly normal. Had he dreamed the rest?

Caitlin sprung to her feet. ‘You were quick. What did you do with him?’

‘Um – nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’ said their mother.

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ said his mother and sister together. He would have laughed at their identical expressions if he hadn’t been so freaked out by this whole situation.

‘What do you mean, gone?’ said their mother.

‘Not there any more,’ said Stewie. ‘He was there before I went for the wheelbarrow, and when I brought it back, he’d gone.’

‘But he’s dead!’ said Caitlin. She went so white that he thought she might be about to faint.

‘Not as dead as all that,’ said Stewie.

His sister moaned and swayed, clutching the back of a chair.

‘Stop winding her up!’ snapped their mother. ‘Caitlin, sit down, for God’s sake. You must have been looking in the wrong place, Stewie. Go and try again.’

‘He wasn’t there,’ said Stewie. ‘He must have moved while I was getting the wheelbarrow.’

‘Or somebody else moved him,’ said his mother.

‘But nobody else knew – did they?’ said Stewie.

‘No, of course they didn’t,’ said his mother. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I’ll have a look round outside,’ said Stewie, although he would prefer to have had root canal surgery on all his teeth than go out there again. Not only did he not want to encounter the undead Sean, but he didn’t particularly want to run into the kind of person that would start manhandling a corpse around in the dark for whatever reason. A body-snatcher? He shuddered.

Outside, an irate man was hanging about outside the house next-door.

‘What’s going on around here tonight?’ he demanded, ‘There’s been a terrible racket, people shouting, and somebody’s been at the shed.’

Stewie shrugged. ‘Don’t know, pal. My Mum didn’t hear anything.’

‘Your Mum, is she?’ said the neighbour, looking him up and down. ‘You should maybe try coming round here a bit more often, then.’

If this evening’s events were anything to go by, Stewie didn’t think he would want to come round here again. Ever.

There was a movement in the shadows at the other side of the road. Somebody else was about. Was that Sean himself, stumbling about in the dark?

He shrugged again and went back into the house. If there was an undead man walking the streets, he was sure the neighbour would sort it out. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to put up with that sort of thing.

Chapter 2 Later That Same Night

There was an angry buzzing somewhere somewhere, and Amaryllis’s semi-conscious mind translated it into a swarm of bees settling on her chrome and glass dining table. They suddenly flew up, still in a cluster, narrowly avoided a collision with the over-the-top chandelier Sarah Ramsay had given her as an ironic present on the occasion of a major birthday which she had kept secret from everyone else, and began to circle the room, now emitting a peaceful melodic murmur.

She woke up already knowing that someone was at her front door.

It was funny, she mused, throwing on a dressing-gown and making her way towards the door, that your mind was capable of reaching two quite different conclusions at the same time from the same stimulus. But then that probably explained a lot about the EU referendum and other similar occasions when the popular vote had resulted in an impossible conundrum for those in power.

‘Have you seen Stewie?’ said the breathless voice on the entryphone.

‘You’d better come up,’ said Amaryllis and pressed the button that would admit the girl to what she knew people sometimes thought of as her lair.

Sam was even more breathless when she got to the top of the stairs.

‘There was some man down there shouting at me,’ she said.

‘Where – outside in the street?’

‘He had the boot open and he was doing something with his car seats. Just along the road a bit. He turned round and shouted. I think he must live somewhere about here.’

Amaryllis frowned. The downstairs flat had been empty for almost a year, and when she thought about it at all she hoped the owners would never find another tenant. Fortunately they seemed to be quite fussy about choosing someone suitable, so perhaps it would be all right. Shouting at a passer-by wasn’t a very good start, however.

‘What’s this about Stewie?’ she said.

‘I don’t know where he’s gone,’ said Sam. She was clutching her phone to her, and now she glanced down at the screen, frowning in concentration as if she could will him to make contact.

‘How long has he been missing?’

‘Oh, he isn’t missing. Not really. I’m sorry to have bothered you – I just thought he might have come round here.’

‘I wonder why he should do that,’ said Amaryllis.

Sam burst into tears.

‘We’d better have a cup of tea,’ said Amaryllis hastily, taking a leaf out of the books of almost everyone else she knew. ‘Sit down. Would you like a biscuit with it? I won’t be a minute.’

She fervently hoped Samantha would have calmed down on her own before she returned from the kitchen. She wasn’t over-modest about her skills, but coping with young women in the throes of emotion definitely wouldn’t have appeared in the list, if there had even been a list. While she waited for the kettle to boil she amused herself by starting on one. Armed and unarmed combat, camouflage, surveillance, subterfuge, torture, knitting…

Well, the knitting was a bit of an exaggeration.

She poured a cup of tea for Sam, and said firmly, ‘Drink this first, before you say any more.’

‘Thanks,’ gulped Sam. She had few sips and then reached out a thin hand for a biscuit, so Amaryllis guessed she was feeling very slightly better.

‘He went out about nine o’clock. When it was getting dark. He hasn’t come back yet,’ she said after demolishing the biscuit. Amaryllis silently passed her the plate and she took another one. ‘Sorry – I always get hungry when I’m in a state… I don’t know where he was going. We’d had words. I thought he might do something silly.’

Amaryllis sighed. The day Stewie didn’t do anything silly would be the day she let Jemima and Dave talk her into going on a coach trip to Blackpool with them.

‘So he’s been out ever since then?’ she said, trying to make things absolutely clear.

‘Yes,’ said Sam. Tears were gathering in her pale eyes again, but she blinked them back. ‘We were going to watch a programme about Ancient Egyptian mythology together too. I’m working on a frieze for a tomb.’

‘Whose tomb?’ said Amaryllis.

‘Oh, not a real