The Christmas Catastrophe

By Cecilia Peartree

This is the 23rd novel in the Pitkirtly Mysteries series.
Christmas approaches again as it does at this time every year, somewhat to Christopher’s surprise. He has lost track of Mollie’s ambitious festive plans for the Cultural Centre, but meanwhile other Pitkirtly residents have more serious matters on their minds. Mrs Petrelli’s hospital stay brings past family problems back to the surface, and Amaryllis finds herself having to spend time searching for an uninvited guest instead of helping the police to investigate a suspicious death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cecilia Peartree
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005435998

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 Christmas Catastrophe

Cecilia Peartree

Copyright Cecilia Peartree 2021

All rights reserved

Chapter 1 Emergency

Chapter 2 A Missing Person

Chapter 3 A House Guest

Chapter 4 The Prisoner

Chapter 5 Cat Food and Malmo

Chapter 6 Hamish and Leonora

Chapter 7 Bid for Freedom

Chapter 8 Rearranging the Decorations on the Titanic

Chapter 9 The Open Window

Chapter 10 Sudden Death

Chapter 11 Slippery Customers

Chapter 12 A Little Light Sleuthing

Chapter 13 Repercussions

Chapter 14 Thin Ice

Chapter 15 Escalation

Chapter 16 Knitting Wool

Chapter 17 A Friendly Drink

Chapter 18 Disturbing News

Chapter 19 Two and Two Make Three

Chapter 20 Reviewing Christmas

Chapter 21 Conversations

Chapter 22 In the Dark

Chapter 23 The Interrogation

Chapter 24 Cancellation?

Chapter 25 Idle Speculation

Chapter 26 Unwelcome News

Chapter 27 Reprisals

Chapter 28 Being Sensible

Chapter 29 Family Reunion

Chapter 30 Fiasco or Fandango?

Chapter 31 Sending in the Cavalry

Chapter 32 Goodbye and Good Luck

Chapter 33 Christmas Launch

Author’s note

Chapter 1 Emergency

As far as Giancarlo was concerned, the whole thing began at the moment when he reached the top of the stairs and found his mother lying apparently motionless on the landing. As he approached he could see, much to his relief, that she was still breathing. But something must be wrong. Mrs Petrelli wouldn’t have chosen that particular spot for an afternoon nap, although he had known her to retreat to her bed for a well-earned siesta on occasion.

He crouched beside her and held her hand. ‘Mamma? Can you hear me?’

He tried again in his mother’s native language, but there was still no response. After a moment he knew something must have got through to her, for she stirred a little, and then she opened her eyes, stared at him and gave him a lopsided smile that was only a shadow of her usual welcoming beam.

‘Don’t try to speak, Mamma. I’ll get help.’

‘No – no doctors,’ she said, struggling even to say these few words.

He knew she prided herself on never being ill, but there was no doubt she needed medical attention. He stood up, moved a few paces away and made the emergency call. Of course there was the usual warning that the ambulance might take a while to get there – this time there were roadworks on the Queensferry Crossing, and all traffic was having to use the old Forth Road Bridge, causing congestion throughout West Fife. He brushed all that aside. Why did they even bother to mention it?

‘Have you tried NHS 24?’ said the woman at the other end of the line. ‘Maybe it’s something they can help with.’

‘It isn’t,’ he said. He lowered his voice so that his mother wouldn’t hear him. ‘She’s been lying on the floor in the cold for God knows how long. I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is. If I hadn’t happened to come back today…’

His voice was in danger of dwindling to a whisper.

‘We’ll do what we can, sir,’ said the woman.

He rang off.

‘Not the doctor,’ said his mother from the floor. At least her voice was a little stronger. She had a glazed look in her eyes, though.

He hoped she wouldn’t be too difficult when the ambulance finally arrived.

A couple of hours later he was waving her off to hospital. She had taken a liking to one of the paramedics, so persuading her to go with them hadn’t been hard after all. They had wondered if he might like to go with her in the ambulance. Actually that was the last thing he wanted to do after sitting on a plane all night as it made its way across the Atlantic. He could never sleep on planes, and he had been planning to try and stay awake all day to adjust to local time quickly, but now he felt as if all he wanted to do was to crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head. He knew he should probably make some effort to get to the hospital, even if that meant sitting in the corridor for hours in conditions of even less comfort than those of the airport departure lounge.

Coffee. He had forgotten to have a coffee in all the chaos. Coffee was the answer. And then more coffee.

He had gone through to the restaurant kitchen to use the coffee machine when for some reason he thought of Victoria. Damn! He should probably try and warn her, just in case things were worse than they seemed. The paramedics had thought his mother might have fractured her hip, but they had also suggested it might have been a minor stroke that had caused her to fall in the first place.

He didn’t like the idea that things were worse than they seemed, and still less did he like the prospect of contacting Victoria.

For one thing, he had never tried to contact her in prison before. Mrs Petrelli usually handled any communication that was necessary. Not that either of them would actually have chosen to communicate with his sister unless they absolutely had to. She had exiled herself from the family with the crimes she had committed. He wasn’t even sure where she was at this moment. Wasn’t there a women’s prison somewhere that she was likely to be in?

He drank a couple of cups of coffee in the deserted restaurant. He supposed he would have to cancel any bookings for the evening and close it. Unless he and the staff could manage it amongst them. That might be a good idea. He knew that despite running food deliveries during lockdown, times had been hard for Mrs Petrelli, which was one reason why he had paid only a fleeting visit to New York to tidy things up there, with a view to returning to Pitkirtly more or less permanently in order to help her get the business back on its feet. He had decided he could paint just as well here as anywhere. Working in the restaurant might get in the way of that, though. He wondered if his mother had ever thought of selling it and retiring to Italy. He would enjoy capturing the light and colours there.

He had closed his eyes and imagined himself sitting somewhere high above the Bay of Naples, capturing the blue of the sea in a series of small paintings he could surely sell to the tourists, if nobody else, when he heard a knock on the window nearby.

Jemima and Dave were outside waving at him frantically.

He got up and went to the door. Of course they would have seen the ambulance - or heard about it from their network of spies. Amaryllis must get a bit miffed at finding herself pre-empted every time by a couple of aged amateurs. He was smiling to himself as he opened the door.

Jemima frowned. ‘We heard Mrs Petrelli was taken away in an ambulance,’ she said accusingly.

He wiped the smile off his face. ‘That’s right. My mother had a fall in the house. They think she might have fractured her hip.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Jemima.

‘Do you need a lift to the hospital?’ said Dave.

Giancarlo took an involuntary step backwards. The last thing he needed was a ride to the hospital with Dave in the driving seat. He might as well have called ahead and booked them all into accident and emergency.

His mind was too clouded with worry and exhaustion for him to find a tactful but firm reason for not accepting the offer. Luckily Jemima intervened.

‘Sorry, Giancarlo. Dave isn’t driving outside Pitkirtly now – are you, Dave?’

‘It’s an emergency though, dear,’ muttered Dave.

‘There’s a bus stop at the hospital now,’ Jemima told Giancarlo. ‘You can get straight there from Pitkirtly. Or there’s always Pitkirtly Cars.’

‘I wouldn’t bother with them,’ said Dave. ‘The last I heard, one of their drivers got too many points on his licence and was banned, and the other one accidentally drove on to the beach one night last week and wrecked his car.’

‘Anyway,’ said Jemima, ‘if there’s anything we can do, Giancarlo, just let us know.’

‘Anything except driving,’ said Dave.

She gave him a final exasperated look and they walked away in the direction of the Queen of Scots.

Giancarlo could have done with a drink, but in his current state he thought it better not to start just yet. He would be better to try and find out whether his mother had made a note of where to contact Victoria. Didn’t she have an address book somewhere? He thought she was still using the one somebody had sent her from Italy, with a picture of Vesuvius on the front cover.

He had forgotten about Vesuvius when he had pictured himself overlooking the Bay of Naples. It wouldn’t be a good place to be during a major eruption – although the artistic possibilities could be interesting.

He made his way back up to the flat, mulling over the pros and cons of relocating to the country of his ancestors, and he was just about to go into his mother’s bedroom to look for an address book when the phone in the hallway rang.

Of course, it was probably a spam call, he thought, but he picked it up anyway. Maybe the paramedics had somehow got hold of the landline number, although he thought he recalled asking them to call his mobile with any news.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Giancarlo?’ said a woman’s voice.

An older woman – one of his mother’s friends. She must have got word of the incident through Jemima’s network. Even although he well knew how efficient that network could be, he was still amazed at how quickly the news had spread.

‘It’s Penelope Johnstone speaking. Sorry to bother you, Giancarlo, but I heard the news about Giulia. Tell me, how is she? Or is it too soon to say? Is there anything I can do?’

‘They think she might have a fractured hip. But she probably isn’t even at the hospital yet. There were delays on the roads…’

‘Oh, yes, of course there were. I suppose it’s the roadworks on the Queensferry Crossing. Really, you’d think they would do a better job of building all these bridges in the first place. If it isn’t one, it’s another… Do you think she might be allowed visitors? I can fit her in tomorrow if that would be all right.’

‘I don’t know, Mrs Johnstone. They might have to operate or something. I haven’t heard any more yet.’

‘Oh, of course. I’m being impatient again.’

Wasn’t she always impatient? And nosy. And… Giancarlo was about to end the call when he remembered something interesting about Penelope Johnstone.

‘No worries, Mrs Johnstone…. Can I ask you something while you’re on the phone?’

‘Anything, dear, anything at all.’

‘It’s about my sister. Victoria.’

‘Yes?’

Her tone wasn’t encouraging, but he pressed on anyway.

‘I need to get in touch with her. Do you have any idea how I can do that? I know you used to go and see her sometimes a while ago with my mother, but I’ve no idea where she even is.’

‘Ah,’ said Penelope. There was a noticeable pause.

‘Sorry, I guess it’s confidential,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I expect I can find out some other way. I don’t want to go and see her or anything, just to get a message to her.’

‘I haven’t seen Victoria for some time,’ said Penelope at last. ‘I think she’s been moved since I last saw her. If she wanted the family to know where she was, she would have been allowed to tell them, so of course Giulia might have a note of it.’

‘I see,’ said Giancarlo.

He had never bothered to enquire about his sister’s whereabouts. He had tried to put her out of his mind altogether, but it was impossible to do that while he still remembered the happy childhood they had shared before things went so badly wrong. He didn’t think she would want to think of him either. She probably saw him as a traitor to her and to the rest of the family.

‘I’m sure my mother knows,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’ll be able to ask her next time I see her. Thanks anyway, Mrs Johnstone.’

He put the receiver down. He didn’t know what he was thanking her for. She had refused to answer his question, although by the sound of it she might well know the answer.

He stood in the same place, next to the shelf where the telephone sat, for a few more minutes, and when he got his brain back into focus he saw his mother’s handbag on the chair. He had told her off a few times for leaving it there, where it was the first thing any intruder would see as they came into the flat, but she insisted anybody bent on robbing them might as well take it from there instead of having to rummage about her bedroom.

He didn’t like doing it, but he picked up the bag and took it into their sitting-room to search through it for clues, having decided this was a better use of his time than worrying about how much worse things could have been if he hadn’t arrived home when he had.

Chapter 2 A Missing Person

Christopher sat at his desk on a bright mid-November morning, which was in itself a contradiction in terms, and dreaded the approach of Christmas.

The brightness of the morning might have been unusual, but the dread was only too familiar. Caroline had announced her intention of coming to stay over Christmas, and his plans for having a nice quiet day alone in the house, eating what he liked and watching documentaries about Anglo-Saxon treasure and the history of maps and the spread of the Great Plague of 1665, were in ruins. The fact that he had spent approximately twelve months out of the last twenty or so in almost exactly that same way was immaterial. He would never tire of it, although he had to admit to himself that his tolerance for steam railway television was almost at an end.

He wished something would happen to take his mind off it. Amaryllis bouncing in to announce some madcap scheme – now he came to think of it, she hadn’t come up with one for a while – or even just Dave and Jemima grumbling about cupcakes again.

Kyle appeared in the office doorway.

‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ he said. ‘My mother held me up, wanting a chat. She and Dad hardly ever seem to speak to each other these days so she’s started to get desperate for human contact.’

This was more information than Christopher needed about the domestic situation in the Prestonfield household.

‘Sorry,’ said Kyle again. ‘If I hadn’t slept in, she wouldn’t have caught me. It’s the dark mornings.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Christopher. ‘This is always a time of low vitality, or so Isla was telling me the other day.’

Kyle flung himself into the chair by the map table. ‘The whole year’s been like that, though, hasn’t it? The whole two years. Still, never mind, it’s nearly Christmas.’

Christopher felt like crossing himself and waving garlic around Kyle’s head to ward off the evil word. ‘I’d rather not think about Christmas,’ he confessed.

‘We’re all going to have to think about it,’ said Kyle grimly. ‘I suppose you know about Mollie’s plans.’

‘Plans?’

Images of the library transformed into Santa’s grotto or, worse still, a scene from some children’s cartoon, flashed through Christopher’s mind.

Kyle rolled his eyes. ‘You’ve been at the staff meetings, haven’t you? What did you think she was talking about when she asked you if it was all right?’

‘I must have missed that bit,’ said Christopher. ‘What are those plans of hers? I suppose I can’t avoid finding out in the end.’

‘Better to find out before you fall over on the artificial ice on the way into work on the first of December,’ Kyle agreed.

‘Artificial – what?’

Christopher wondered if anybody would notice if he took the whole of December off work and went somewhere else for the duration. Was there anywhere in the world that didn’t celebrate Christmas? Apart from the obvious. Was there anywhere with a rational approach to Christmas? He knew the weather would be different in the southern hemisphere, for instance, but he had an uneasy feeling that they might still push the boat out when it came to decorations and general chaos.

Kyle started to laugh. ‘I was joking… The ice rink’s going to be round the back.’

‘By the bins?’ said Christopher. ‘The bin-men will go on strike.’

Kyle was still laughing, in a more and more annoying way. He only just managed to get the words out. ‘It’s to be in the supermarket car park!’

‘Are you just making this up?’

‘No – Mollie’s managed to get the Council to agree.’ Kyle recovered slightly. ‘It fits in with their anti-car strategy. They can fence off half the car park and people will be able to cycle to the shops instead of driving.’

‘You’re still making it all up, aren’t you?’

‘It’s going to happen,’ said Kyle. ‘Mollie’s building her activities round it. In the library. She’s asked me to do something in the Folk Museum too.’

‘So it’s more of a winter festival, then,’ said Christopher hopefully.

‘Sort of. But they’ve still got to have a Santa’s grotto. Mollie suggested your office for that.’

Christopher kept a dignified silence at this. Kyle relented and added,

‘Don’t worry, the steering group rejected it. They’re going to use a corner of the library. Where the biographies are. Nobody ever goes there.’

There was a long pause while Christopher tried to take it all in. He didn’t remember even hearing about the steering group. He couldn’t believe Kyle hadn’t drawn his attention to the threat before now. There was probably nothing he could do to stop it all in its tracks.

Why hadn’t Amaryllis told him? She must know what was going on. What was the use of having a retired spy in town if you couldn’t rely on her to ferret out vital information and pass it on?

‘Amaryllis,’ he said absently, glancing round the office as if he thought she might have concealed herself somewhere among the assorted desks, tables and chairs.

When had he last seen her?

‘Have you seen Amaryllis lately?’ he enquired.

‘She’s away,’ said Kyle, turning his attention to rearranging some maps in the top drawer. ‘Who’s been in here? Everything was in chronological order the last time I looked.’

‘Away where?’

‘She didn’t say anything. Anyway, I haven’t really seen her for a while. I heard from Jemima she’d gone to Aberdeen for something or other.’

‘Aberdeen?’ A wave of panic swept over Christopher. That was why she hadn’t been at the Cultural Centre for a few days. She hadn’t wanted anybody to know she was about to launch herself on another mission for her former employers. She was going to fly from some secret military base in the middle of nowhere into Afghanistan or somewhere even worse – was there anywhere worse? North Korea? – and this time she would never come back. He had tried to tell her she was too old to do that kind of thing,