An Unfortunate Return

By Cecilia Peartree

'An Unfortunate Return' is the 27th novel in the Pitkirtly Mysteries series.
The small town of Pitkirtly is infested with roadworks thanks to the local council's plan to introduce a Low Traffic Neighbourhood. Many local people predict traffic mayhem, but none of them expect a murder, a mysterious attack in broad daylight outside the church hall, or the more minor havoc wreaked by an environmental campaigner. Several of these incidents seem to be connected to a disappearance in the Alps a few years before. Local knowledge, sticky notes and a good deal of thought are required to solve all the puzzles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cecilia Peartree
• Release date: May 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224654550

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

An Unfortunate Return

Cecilia Peartree

Smashwords edition

Copyright Cecilia Peartree 2024

All rights reserved

Cover image credit: Photo 12390383 | Mud Flats © Elvis22 | Dreamstime.com

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Amaryllis is Activated

Chapter 2 Christopher Misses Out Again

Chapter 3 The Wheelchair

Chapter 4 At the Scene

Chapter 5 The Man from the Council

Chapter 6 Local Knowledge

Chapter 7 On the Trail

Chapter 8 Taking It All In

Chapter 9 Marie Knows Somebody

Chapter 10 On the Ground

Chapter 11 In the Church Hall

Chapter 12 Getting Things Organised

Chapter 13 Late for Tea

Chapter 14 Locked Room in Reverse

Chapter 15 Water Under the Bridge

Chapter 16 The Tea Party

Chapter 17 Visitors

Chapter 18 Following in the Footsteps

Chapter 19 Visiting Hours

Chapter 20 Christopher and Kyle and Mollie

Chapter 21 Inviting Mark to Tea

Chapter 22 Attack in the Dark

Chapter 23 The Newcomer

Chapter 24 More about Kirstie

Chapter 25 Sticky Notes

Chapter 26 The Missing Knife

Chapter 27 Vanished

Chapter 28 Sticky Moments

Chapter 29 Yet More Visitors

Chapter 30 A Bit of Thinking

Chapter 31 Crisis Point

Chapter 32 A Nice Quiet Evening

Chapter 33 Endgame

THE END

MORE BY CECILIA PEARTREE

Chapter 1 Amaryllis is Activated

It was too quiet, even by Pitkirtly standards. Amaryllis had taken herself for one of her night-time expeditions round the town, partly because the cat, Leonora, had been unusually restless, and partly because of a feeling she had. Amaryllis didn’t entirely put her trust in feelings, but this one had been quite insistent, waking her up in the early hours of the morning and refusing to let her go back to sleep. Or had that been the cat? A bit of both, probably.

There was nothing happening in the streets in the immediate vicinity of her apartment to account for the sleeplessness. For once Pitkirtly hadn’t been attacked by one of the many named storms of the season or by flooding or snowdrifts, and the residents seemed to have breathed a collective sigh of relief as they often did at this time of year, and looked forward to late spring and summer, when at least the rain was usually warm. The water in the harbour appeared to be as calm as could be expected, glinting appealingly in the light of the full moon, and when she glanced along towards the Queen of Scots all was quiet and calm there too.

It wasn’t until after she had turned to walk past the supermarket and then part-way up the High Street that she noticed anything wrong.

Someone had left a heap of cones and shovels and temporary barriers in the middle of the entrance to Dave’s and Jemima’s street. Amaryllis crossed the road to have a closer look. There was a machine under a tarpaulin, and they had dug a hole too, she discovered suddenly as her feet rocked on the edge of the abyss, which lurked in the shadows to one side of the pile of stuff. An idiot trap, she thought, taking a step back. Made by idiots for idiots.

Because Amaryllis was at heart rather a public-spirited person, although that aspect of her character was sometimes expressed obliquely, she extracted a couple of cones from the pile next to her and placed them in the most useful positions. She would have liked to put a full set of barriers round the hole too, but after some thought she decided to leave that to the workmen – if there were any workmen. It was just possible the equipment had been left here by some even bigger idiots who had thought it would be fun to steal the lot from elsewhere and leave it somewhere random. Although in that case they might not have gone to the bother of digging a hole in the road.

She mulled it all over as she returned home. Council employees or jokers? They were idiots either way, she decided, climbing the stairs to her apartment. Leonora greeted her with a demand for food, as often happened.

‘Breakfast will be served at the usual time,’ she told the cat, and went back to bed.

The next thing that happened, surely no more than three seconds after she’d gone back to sleep, was that her phone rang.

‘I need a bit of help with Dave,’ said Jemima once they had exchanged greetings.

She didn’t sound completely distraught, as she might have been if it had been some serious health problem, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a crisis. Jemima wouldn’t have called at – Amaryllis squinted at the time showing on the phone – half-past eight in the morning – otherwise.

‘All right,’ she said, freeing herself from a tangled sheet and grabbing for some clothes. ‘What is it?’

‘He’s got into a fight,’ said Jemima.

‘A fight?’

Amaryllis didn’t usually ask silly, redundant questions – that was Christopher’s job – but it was early and she was startled. In all the time she’d known Dave, he’d never shown any sign of feeling aggrieved enough to get into a fight. Occasionally when driving, he’d looked as if he might come close to it, but then he seemed to consider the effort that would be involved in stopping the car safely and getting out to confront whoever had incurred his wrath, and just shrugged and carried on.

Now she heard frantic barking at the other end of the conversation. She rolled her eyes as she pulled on one of her many black tops. Jock McLean and Hamish That was just the extra fuel the situation needed to make it escalate into mortal danger for at least one of the participants.

‘Better keep the dog inside the house,’ she said briskly.

‘Oh, we’re all out at the front,’ said Jemima. ‘But Jock’s got a tight grip on him…’

Any minute now, Jock and Hamish would wade into whatever fray was in progress, and everyone would probably end up in hospital.

‘I’m on my way,’ said Amaryllis.

She resolutely ended the call, picked up her jacket and put it on as she went to the door and off down the stairs at a run. She’d have to take a couple of shortcuts to get to Dave and Jemima’s in time to do any good. Her spirits lifted a little, despite the lack of coffee in her system. It was a while since she’d dodged through people’s back gardens and evaded all kinds of hazards on her way to help someone.

It wasn’t as much fun as dodging Serbian or Taliban bullets, of course, but she was realistic enough to know that no-one in their senses would employ someone of her age to carry out missions of national significance. She was lucky to have had the chance to enjoy herself at the time.

Two high fences, one annoying dog, a prickly hedge and a friendly cat later, she arrived in about the middle of Dave’s and Jemima’s street, not far from their house. She heard the noise immediately, in fact she had imagined hearing rumblings from several gardens away. An engine roared, and someone was shouting. It wasn’t Dave. She broke into a run again.

Dave, in the middle of the road, loomed over the smaller man who shouted up at him. The smaller man wore a hard hat and jeans. Dave wore a cardigan, the loose trousers he favoured nowadays, and slippers.

‘But how am I going to get my car out?’ he said mildly once the other man stopped shouting. ‘You’ve got both ends of the street blocked off.’

The shouting started up again.

‘…knew all about this. There were plenty posters up… I can’t help it. We’ve got to get on. Time’s money!’

Perhaps the man in the hard hat was so used to communicating at the top of his voice to be heard above the machines he worked with, that he didn’t even realise he was doing it. Amaryllis reached Dave and positioned herself alongside him, ready to spring at the other man if anything kicked off.

‘There’s Amaryllis!’ called Jemima from her front step.

‘Now we’ll get something done,’ added Jock McLean.

Hamish almost pulled Jock off his feet in his urgent desire to greet Amaryllis. The two of them came trotting over to join the group.

‘You’d have been better to stay where you were,’ she muttered.

‘Thought you and Dave might need a hand. I suppose you think you could’ve taken out the lot of them with one hand tied behind your back.’

‘The lot of them? Are there more?’

‘Aye,’ said Dave, appearing to notice their presence at last. ‘There’s a gang at the far end of the street and another one at the junction with the High Street. It’s completely blocked. Madness!’

He roared the last word, causing the man in the hard hat to step back in alarm.

If there was to be any actual fighting, Amaryllis didn’t think it would last long. Perhaps she should have paused for a coffee after all.

‘What are they doing?’ she said. ‘I saw they’d dug a hole at the junction. Is it urgent gas repairs or something?’

‘Low Traffic Neighbourhood,’ said the man in the hard hat from a safe distance. He turned as if to head off along the street.

‘What does that mean?’ said Amaryllis.

‘They’re blocking off both ends of the street,’ said Dave. ‘It’s madness.’

‘We’re not completely blocking it,’ said the man in the hard hat over his shoulder. ‘If you’d read the plans, you’d know about it.’

‘I’ll give you plans!’ roared Dave, and took a step forward. ‘Come back here and look me in the eye!’

Amaryllis grabbed one of his arms and Jock the other. They held him back as the man in the hard hat broke into a run.

‘They’re not going to get away with this,’ Dave growled.

Hamish tugged harder on his lead and began to growl in sympathy.

Amaryllis was sorry in a way that she hadn’t had any excuse to intervene in a proper physical fight. On the other hand, she knew Jemima would be relieved not to have to patch up Dave or even rush him to hospital.

‘What’s all this about plans?’ she said.

Jemima had left the sanctuary of the front step and come up to them.

‘Goodness knows,’ she said. ‘Are you coming in for a bite to eat, Amaryllis? I was going to do bacon rolls for Dave and Jock. There’s enough for you too.’

‘Coffee would be nice,’ said Amaryllis.

She ended up having to eat a bacon roll too. There was no-one more insistent than Jemima when it came to persuading people to eat.

‘Better enjoy it while it lasts,’ said Dave, sitting back after he’d eaten his roll. ‘We won’t be able to get to the shops for food soon, the way things are going.’

‘Amaryllis won’t see us starve,’ said Jemima, laughing.

Amaryllis guessed Jemima didn’t want the argument about streets being closed to start up again now that they’d all settled down. But obviously something would have to be done about the men in hard hats and the dangerous chasms opening up in the streets for people to fall into. She wondered about the posters the man outside had mentioned, too. They must only have been displayed in places where people were unlikely to see them. Perhaps at the far end of the harbour wall. Or in the window of the newsagent’s that had opened up right at the top of the High Street, where the dodgy baker’s had once been.

‘Have you seen any posters?’ she asked Jock, once they were safely out of Dave and Jemima’s and walking along towards the High Street together.

‘I don’t take any notice of that kind of thing,’ he said. ‘They should’ve made sure everybody knew though.’

‘Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to know,’ said Amaryllis thoughtfully. ‘At least until it was too late.’

She would need several cups of espresso before she could work out what to do. No-one could be allowed to upset Dave and Jemima on her watch.

Chapter 2 Christopher Misses Out Again

Mollie caught up with Christopher just as he was about to go into the Cultural Centre.

‘I see they’ve made a start on the roadworks,’ she remarked.

‘What roadworks?’

He saw her looking at him in that quizzical way people often looked at him when they thought he might have recently beamed down from a different planet.

‘It’s this new LTN. We had a display about it in the library last November… But maybe that was when you were away on holiday.’

He didn’t want to confess to not knowing what she was talking about, although somebody must have explained it to him at some point, so he just said,

‘I suppose that was it. Is there anything happening today? In the library, I mean.’

‘Isla’s away on that course,’ said Mollie.

Christopher nodded, although he had forgotten about the course. Was his memory failing or had he just got better at filtering out things he wasn’t at all interested in?

He went into his office, switched on the computer and walked over to the window to stare out while it booted up. The machine was taking longer and longer to do so, but he would rather return to writing on parchment with a quill pen than contact the IT people to try and persuade them to fix or replace it.

Somebody had put up barriers across one whole side of the car park. He supposed they were about to start work on the gas main or the water pipes. That would be annoying for anybody who usually parked in the disabled spaces, now located behind the barriers, especially at the weekend when it was busy. Still, he supposed the utilities people needed to get on with their work during the brief spells of dry weather that sometimes occurred between the freezing rain of winter and the slightly warmer rain of the spring, summer and autumn.

Once the computer had dragged itself from slumber, he wondered whether to look up ‘LTN’ on the internet, partly so that he could pretend to Mollie he’d known about it all along, and partly to distract himself from the contents of his email inbox. However, the phone rang as he was about to start his search, and by the time he’d dealt with yet another request for figures, he was ready for a coffee break. He could do with a doughnut too. Where were Dave and Jemima when you needed them?

‘Did you see the roadworks have started up?’ said Kyle, in the staff tea-room.

Christopher nodded. He hadn’t actually seen them, of course, but Mollie had, and that was good enough for him.

‘Dad’s been getting himself in a state about it,’ Kyle continued. ‘Keeps going on about being a prisoner in his own house. Which is nonsense, of course. Mum takes him out nearly every day in the car or his wheelchair.’

‘Are the roadworks near you, then?’

Kyle shrugged. ‘They’re all over the place. Haven’t you seen the car park?’

‘I thought that was for the gas people. Or maybe the water board.’

‘No, they’re making a pocket park at the far side,’ said Kyle. ‘It’s part of the LTN. Didn’t you see the display in the library that time?’

‘I was away,’ said Christopher, because he didn’t want to have to ask what a pocket park was. ‘At Caroline’s,’ he added, because he didn’t want Kyle thinking he’d gone off to some exotic location while the rest of them were stuck at work.

‘There’s a leaflet too,’ said Kyle. ‘I expect there are still some in the library if you want one.’

‘Thanks,’ said Christopher. He took a big gulp of his coffee, hoping to finish it before Kyle introduced any more new concepts.

Fortunately, Amaryllis came in at lunchtime and explained some of it, though her main purpose was to deliver doughnuts because Dave and Jemima hadn’t been able to do so that day.

‘Jemima was worried you might starve to death before they get down here again,’ she said. She stared out of the office window. ‘What’s going on out there?’

‘Kyle says it’s a pocket park,’ said Christopher gloomily. He bit into the doughnut. It was his favourite kind, with pink icing on top and jam in the middle. The jam oozed out and all down his front. He’d had that kind of day before, and survived. ‘Why can’t Dave and Jemima get here? Are they all right?’

‘They’re fine.’ She turned away from the window and flung herself into one of the visitor chairs. ‘There is roadworks at both ends of their street. Dave says he needs to stay in and keep an eye on things, in case the workmen get too close to where his car’s parked.’

‘That’s a bit daft, isn’t it, working on both ends of the street at the same time? What if there’s a fire? Or somebody’s taken ill?’

‘I expect it’s just a mistake,’ said Amaryllis.

After lunch Kyle brought him a leaflet with a big headline on the front.

‘Getting Pitkirtly Moving Again!’ he read aloud, with a sinking feeling. It looked like the sort of headline that meant the opposite of what it said, particularly since the leaflet had been produced by a council department. ‘I didn’t realise it had stopped moving.’

‘Ha!’ said Kyle. ‘Some people would say it stopped some time in the 1950s.’

Christopher laughed, but his laughter had a hollow ring to it. After Kyle had gone, he debated with himself whether to unfold the leaflet, read and digest its contents or to throw it straight in the bin. He still hadn’t decided by the end of the afternoon, so he took it to the Queen of Scots, hoping Charlie Smith and Jock McLean would enlighten him about what it all meant.

‘It’s just another of their money-making schemes,’ Charlie suggested. ‘They’ll be looking to fine people for using the roads. Never mind that everybody pays road tax anyway. And petrol tax… They’re just being greedy as usual.’

‘They’re in the grip of the cycling cult,’ said Jock. At his feet, Hamish gave a warning growl. No cyclist would venture into the pub while he was on guard. ‘We might as well all buy horses and carts now. That’s the way it’s going, for people who can’t manage a bike.’

There was a brief discussion about where they would keep all the horses and carts, with Charlie refusing to contemplate the possibility of turning the Queen of Scots into a coaching inn, and Jock unsure of how Hamish would take to having a horse loose in his back garden.

‘He’s bad enough when he sees a cat there,’ said Jock. ‘Or a squirrel. He can’t catch any of them for toffee, but he goes mad. There’s no knowing what he’d do about a horse… But then, he isn’t too keen on cyclists either, mind.’

Christopher relaxed a little. Things would go on as they’d always done, after all. As long as he and Jock and Charlie could argue amicably over a pint of Old Pictish Brew, all was right with the world.

This feeling of mild contentment, fuelled by a few more pints, lasted until he reached the end of his street on the way home, and saw the pile of rubble topped with a few traffic cones, and had to step round a hole in the ground to access his house.

‘They’ve started here too,’ he said indignantly to Amaryllis on the phone a few minutes later, once he was safely behind his own front door.

‘It’s all in the leaflet Kyle gave