Unrelated Incidents

By Cecilia Peartree

This is the 18th novel in the Pitkirtly Mystery series, set in a small town on the coast of Fife, Scotland.
A series of unexpected and apparently random incidents takes place in and around Pitkirtly. Rosie investigates a night-time disturbance at her cattery and later disappears. A public meeting is held about a movie studio project which is planned for the Pitkirtlyhill estate and which somehow involves land belonging to the golf club. Amaryllis is keen to get ahead of the police in the investigation but she can't seem to pinpoint anything that will lead her to Mr Big. Christopher is led astray by Douglas Prestonfield, much to his son Kyle's disapproval.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cecilia Peartree
• Release date: May 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463937358

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

UNRELATED INCIDENTS

(Pitkirtly Mysteries 18)

Cecilia Peartree

Smashwords edition

Copyright Cecilia Peartree 2019

All rights reserved

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Darkness and Light

Chapter 2 Maps and Plans

Chapter 3 A Request He Couldn’t Refuse

Chapter 4 Other People’s Secrets

Chapter 5 Feedback from Kyle

Chapter 6 Burke and Hare Revisited

Chapter 7 Night Manoeuvres

Chapter 8 Puzzled of Pitkirtly

Chapter 9 Cat People

Chapter 10 There’s Been a Murder

Chapter 11 Led Astray

Chapter 12 Noises in the Night

Chapter 13 Not Quite as Simple

Chapter 14 Advice from Isla

Chapter 15 Whisked Away

Chapter 16 Best Laid Plans

Chapter 17 Sins of the Fathers

Chapter 18 A Visitor

Chapter 19 Helping the Police

Chapter 20 Not Helping the Police

Chapter 21 Visitors at the Dog Home

Chapter 22 Christopher’s Weekend

Chapter 23 Gathering the Threads

Chapter 24 Recalled

Chapter 25 Douglas Reads the Riot Act

Chapter 26 Looking for Mr Big

Chapter 27 The Five Cat Couple Again

Chapter 28 A Different Kind of Research

Chapter 29 Teasing Out the Strands

Chapter 30 Open Day

About the Pitkirtly Mysteries

Chapter 1 Darkness and Light

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ muttered Rosie, heaving herself out of bed as she reached for her dressing-gown. ‘Not again.’

Something had woken her up suddenly. She had been dreaming that she had kidnapped the last person to annoy her, who happened to be the lawyer for the Old Pitkirtlyhill estate, and marched him to the boundary fence of the cattery, where she took careful aim and fired at him.

Had she invented this dream in order to accommodate the sound of a real shot being fired? It had happened before with the door-bell.

She stumbled down the stairs. Whether it was real or imaginary, she had to go and check the cats. It was hard enough to retain customers at the moment, with the proliferation of cat-minders who purported to look after cats by visiting them once or twice a day in the comfort of their own homes. She was very sceptical about this practice. What if the home in question burned down or was flooded or burgled while the owners were away? These cat-minders couldn’t guarantee the safety of the cats twenty-four hours a day…

By this time she had picked up a torch, pushed reluctant feet into a pair of sandals, flung open the back door and gone outside. There were no neighbouring houses, which was one thing she very much liked about the location of the cattery, and the beam of the torch did not illuminate very much of the way, but she worked round all the cat enclosures and accounted for all the cats, although one or two of them got the idea that it was morning, and started asking for their breakfasts.

‘Just trying it on,’ she told them in a low voice. ‘You do know cats in the wild only eat once every three days, don’t you?’

She knew what she had to do next, although she was in no hurry to do it.

She made another round of the cat enclosures. All secure.

She took a couple of deep breaths, and marched to the perimeter fence. Of course she hadn’t really shot anybody just there. Nobody had been shot. There was no sign of anything having been disturbed. It was all in her mind. Her unconscious mind, for that matter. It wouldn’t even have occurred to her in daylight.

She unlocked and opened the gate, a fearsome metal thing with bolts and a padlock on the inside. It swung open with barely a squeak. She peered out and then, telling herself not to be silly, stepped outside, holding on to the torch with one hand and the gatepost with the other. She swung the torch round in an arc in front of her. Of course, it didn’t cover the whole area of the paddock, but she thought she had seen enough.

Nobody there. Nothing unusual. Go back to bed, Rosie.

It wasn’t until she was halfway up the stairs, obeying her own instructions, that she realised there had been something a bit odd out there after all. A sort of dark bundle right at the edge of the patch of torchlight. Lying against the outer side of the fence. Old clothes or a horse blanket that had blown off a horse, or something. It could even be a squashed trampoline, except that there weren’t any houses near enough for it to have escaped from somebody’s garden during one of the spring gales. But trampolines always ended up on a railway line, didn’t they?

She had made herself laugh, which was good. It went on a bit too long, which wasn’t so great.

Well, she certainly wasn’t planning to go and have another look tonight. If it was still there in the morning, she would deal with it then.

She slept late in the morning after her disturbed night. Those two cats who had thought it was breakfast time hours ago would be very hungry by now. Or they had gone back to sleep. You never knew with cats.

After seeing to all her paying guests, dishing out breakfasts and tidying the cat litter, she steeled herself to open the gate again and have a closer look at the squashed trampoline.

In daylight, it had vanished altogether. Maybe a gale had got up during what was left of the night and blown it on to the nearest railway line, which was some way away. She walked up to the spot where she thought it had been – although the distances were different in daylight – and saw flattened grass, odd darker splotches and tyre tracks leading away down the hill.

The police sirens that she had vaguely heard in the distance started to come much closer after that, and she moved back towards the gate to her own grounds and stood waiting there.

‘I wonder what’s happened to Rosie,’ said Amaryllis, outside the Pitkirtly College canteen a little later that day. ‘I would have thought she’d be waiting on the doorstep for this.

‘Maybe her car’s broken down again,’ suggested Jock. ‘It was on its last legs when I saw her the other week. She had to get it towed up the High Street. Dave nearly died laughing.’

‘We’d better go in,’ said Amaryllis. ‘They’ll be starting any minute now.’

Jock picked up Hamish and they went inside. They were settling into the seats Amaryllis considered best placed as far as heckling was concerned, and the hapless man from the Council who was chairing the meeting had already risen to speak, when Dave and Jemima hurried in, flustered and incoherent.

‘Rosie,’ gasped Dave, and had to pause for breath.

‘The police,’ said Jemima. She paused, a hand to her chest, gasping.

‘She’s been arrested,’ said Dave.

‘Arrested?’ exclaimed Jock.

The chairman of the meeting coughed censoriously and glared at them. Amaryllis glared back.

She leaned over towards Dave. ‘What’s she done?’ she asked in a stage whisper.

‘Are we ready to start the meeting?’ said the chairman, raising his voice.

‘We’ll tell you later,’ hissed Jemima.

‘It’s a stitch-up,’ growled Dave.

The chairman of the meeting coughed again.

‘I wonder if he’d like a throat sweet,’ said Jemima. ‘I think I’ve got one here.’ She opened her capacious handbag and rummaged in it, producing multiple rustling sounds but no sweet. ‘Oh, no, I forgot. Dave had the last one when we went to that talk about paintings.’

‘I’d have been better walking out,’ said Dave with feeling. ‘Still, I had a good wee sleep.’

‘Please,’ said the chairman. ‘If we can’t hold the meeting without interruption we are going to have to ask some audience members to leave.’

Jemima glanced round behind her.

‘Aye, we’re a rowdy lot,’ remarked Jock.

‘Sssh!’ said a woman from the row behind them.

Once the meeting got going, it became rather more rowdy.

The main instigator was an old man in a flat cap and a suit that had seen better days.

‘He goes to all the meetings,’ muttered Jock. ‘Let’s just leave now. This’ll take all day.’

‘To sum up my argument,’ said the man in the cap, as if he was a lawyer arguing in court and not just some heckler who had wandered in off the street to pass the time. ‘Does the Councillor not admit that this is just some fly-by-night scheme to scam money off the public and increase our taxes? And to waste valuable agricultural land that we might be growing potatoes on to feed our womenfolk and children?’

‘You just shut up for once, Colin MacLaughlan!’ yelled a man with a red face from right at the back of the hall. ‘You’ve had your say. Give somebody else a chance. There are people here who are directly affected by this movie studio nonsense, and we want answers!’

‘I yield the floor,’ said the man in the cap, sitting down with what would, have been a flounce if he had walked off instead.

‘Would you like to ask a question?’ the chairman hopefully asked the man with the red face.

There was a deathly hush. Most people with any sense stared at their feet.

Amaryllis put up her hand.

‘The lady in black,’ said the chair, nodding in her direction. Jock tried to make himself as small and insignificant as possible, in case anybody noticed him when they looked at Amaryllis.

‘Most of the land you’re planning to use for these studios is occupied either by farmers or small businesses,’ she said. ‘Are they going to have any real say in what’s going to happen?’

Jock glanced at Amaryllis in mild surprise. He hadn’t expected her question to be quite as sensible and normal as that. Surely she wasn’t at last settling down into middle age? He felt a bit depressed at the thought.

‘There will be compensation from the Council,’ said the chairman. But one of the panel members behind him tugged at the back of his jacket to attract attention, and whispered something to him, and he added hastily, ‘Some form of compensation. Or a relocation package.’

‘Isn’t there an alternative to this upheaval?’ said Amaryllis. ‘An alternative site, I mean.’

‘We’ve identified this as the optimum site all round,’ said a woman on the platform who had hair drooping over one side of her face. She put a hand up to push it back, displaying a frightening set of talons painted in a sort of greyish-blue colour, with sparkly bits. They fascinated Jock, while reminding him of a massive eagle he had once got a bit too close to at a birds of prey demonstration. Apart from the sparkles, of course.

‘What’s so optimum about it?’ Amaryllis enquired.

‘It’s close to major transport routes, as well as to historic towns that are already established as good locations,’ said the woman rapidly, as if reciting from a list. ‘There’s enough space for three sound stages, an effects studio, a green screen and office accommodation. We could even utilitise the existing buildings on the site if they turn out to be worth it.’

‘Do the existing buildings include Feline Amazing?’ asked Amaryllis.

‘Feline – what?’ said the woman.

‘It’s a brand name,’ muttered the chairman with evident reluctance. ‘Mrs Viewforth’s cat boarding kennels.’

‘Ah, Mrs Viewforth. I see.’ The woman glanced down at the tablet in her hands and swiped it a couple of times. ‘One of the smaller property owners.’

‘She hasn’t met Rosie, then,’ said Dave, laughing.

The chairman began to glare in his direction, but then he must have remembered he was trying to show an intelligent interest in Amaryllis’s questions, so he smoothed his face back into neutral. Perhaps her reputation as a trained assassin had spread throughout the west of Fife.

‘Small, but vitally important to the local economy,’ said Amaryllis.

‘Of course,’ said the chairman.

‘And to all the cats who have spent their holidays there over the years,’ said an indignant voice from the back of the hall.

‘Be quiet, you silly old woman,’ said another, deeper voice. ‘Nobody’s interested in anything you have to say.’

‘What I want to know,’ said Douglas Prestonfield, suddenly getting to his feet, ‘is how this is going to affect the golf course.’

‘The golf course?’ said the chairman.

‘Yes, the golf course. Your plans clearly show that we’re due to lose a chunk of land, sliced off the top corner. Near the thirteenth green. What are you planning to do about that? There’s no space at the far end for us to make it up.’

‘Um,’ said the chairman. ‘I don’t think we had noticed…’

‘Well, if you think we’re going to take this lying down,’ said Douglas, getting into the spirit of things, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’

At that point it became obvious that things were going to get out of hand.

The man with the red face at the back shouted a series of rude words aimed at golf courses, people who played golf, and people who came to meetings straight from the golf course wearing their stupid plus-fours, into all of which categories Douglas fell.

The same man also wondered loudly why Lord Murray himself wasn’t around to answer questions, since he was the one who had started all this.

‘He ‘s got no loyalty to the people who’ve stuck by him over the years – over the centuries,’ he concluded. ‘No sense of history, or honour. What use are aristocrats if they turn against the people who’ve been their bread and butter?’

Nobody answered that - if it was in fact a question - but three other men from random positions around the room counter-attacked with a series of different rude words.

‘Any minute now some woman’s going to hit out with her handbag,’ Dave predicted.

‘Well, it won’t be me,’ said Jemima. ‘Come on, we’ve got to get out of here before it gets violent… It’s worse than Parliament,’ she continued as the four of them, with Jock carrying Hamish, scuttled out by a side door near their row of seats, and made their way round to the front of the building before anybody else had thought of escaping. They could hear the din from outside. As they walked off the College campus and on to the main road, a police car drove up. Hamish barked and struggled to get down out of Jock’s hold.

‘We’re well out of it,’ said Dave.

‘What was that about Rosie?’ asked Amaryllis.

‘Well,’ said Dave, ‘we had a text from her first thing to say…’

‘Wait!’ shouted Douglas Prestonfield, not far behind them.

He had lost his golf cap in some skirmish or other, and was more flustered than Jock could remember ever seeing him. They paused for a couple of minutes until he caught up.

‘They’ve gone too far this time,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to have a word with Jim.’

‘Jim?’ said Jock, puzzled.

‘My brother,’ said Douglas.

‘Oh – El Presidente!’ said Jock.

‘El what? Oh, never mind. He’s got to do something about this. They can’t decimate the golf course. We’re hosting the heats of the All-Scotland juniors later this year.’

Amaryllis was strangely silent. Jock glanced at her, wondering what she was thinking, although he well knew it would be impossible to tell.

‘I didn’t know your golf course went all the way up the hill,’ said Dave, sounding sceptical. ‘Isn’t it all at the lower side of the main road?’

‘We have some land further up,’ said Douglas. ‘We were keeping it in reserve in case of flooding further down. If sea levels rise. Climate change, and all that.’

They walked on, turning down the High Street.

‘Does anybody fancy a scone?’ enquired Jemima.

There were no dissenting voices, so they headed down to the café.

‘I don’t think I will after all,’ said Douglas. ‘I’m meant to be watching what I eat. Marie’s been monitoring my weight. It’s worse than having one of those Nitwit things.’

‘Nitwit?’ said Jemima doubtfully as they watched him stride off towards the car park, where, Jock reflected, no doubt he had left one of his energy-guzzling fast cars which he probably didn’t associate with climate change or with his increasing weight.

Maisie Sue and her fiancé Ben, the man formerly known as a Canadian maple syrup smuggler, were gazing into each other’s eyes behind the counter in the café. Fortunately that meant they didn’t notice Hamish being smuggled in.

‘Break it up now,’ said Dave.

‘You can tell us about Rosie while we wait for our order,’ Amaryllis told him.

They sat down at the table in the window.

‘We got this text,’ said Dave. He fumbled around in his pocket. ‘Where’s my mobile, Jemima?’

‘It was on mine,’ she said, and produced a phone from her bag. ‘She never sends you any texts. She knows you keep losing your phone.’

Jemima handed the phone to Amaryllis, who glanced at the text, frowning. ‘I’m surprised they let her send this.’

‘What does it say?’ asked Jock.

‘There’s been a murder – am in custody – send help,’ Amaryllis told him. ‘I wonder where they’re holding her.’

‘Won’t it be up at the police station?’ said Dave.

‘Perhaps not. They might guess we would try and break her out.’

‘Would we?’ said Jock.

She ignored this. ‘They’ll have taken her to Auchterderran. That’s what I would have done.’

‘Not everybody thinks like you, though,’ said Jock, privately thinking it was just as well they didn’t.

‘I suppose we could try Pitkirtly first. See if they’ll tell us anything. Someone will have to make arrangements for the cats to be looked after. Perhaps we can help out with that.’

Jock had a feeling she was looking at him. As far as he knew, he was the only one round the table with any cat experience, although admittedly it did include hiding in a cat cage while he was on the run, and on a different occasion being ignominiously fired by Rosie when she thought he had lost one of the cats. But now that he had Hamish, he must surely be exempt from cat care duties.

‘It’s a bit of a coincidence, though,’ observed Dave. Ben had brought over their order and they were all making inroads into the scone mountain. ‘I like this new blueberry jam. It makes a change.’

They waited with varying degrees of patience to hear why Dave thought it was a coincidence. He finished his scone and then looked up, apparently surprised by the silence.

‘A coincidence?’ Amaryllis prompted.

‘Yes, it’s a coincidence this happening just when they’re trying to get this new movie studio idea off the ground,’ said Dave. ‘You’d think they had done it on purpose to make sure she didn’t make trouble.’

‘Hmm,’ said Amaryllis. ‘They should have known better, in that case.’

She didn’t say any more at that point, but Jock sensed that her tone meant impending doom for somebody. Or maybe the blueberry jam hadn’t agreed with her. Either way, it was definitely a forerunner of trouble.

Chapter 2 Maps and Plans

Christopher had fondly imagined he would have a quiet afternoon going through some maps Kyle had unearthed among the Murray Hutchison papers a few months before. Kyle’s unearthing days were temporarily over, since he was, also temporarily, looking after the Folk Museum during Zak’s absence. There had already been some welcome changes to the displays, and in particular there were fewer dead sea creatures and more about local crafts, which had already resulted, somewhat irrelevantly, in the advent of a Fair Isle knitting class, and the promise by Maisie Sue that she would re-start her quilting group as soon as she had a minute. The likelihood of her having a minute had diminished since she got