7 A Tasteful Crime Page 5

  After a while he realised there was somebody walking in front of him. It was still fairly early on Sunday morning, so there weren’t many other people about. Something about the woman looked rather familiar.

  Maybe because she’d heard his footsteps, she swung round suddenly and glared at him. Then her face softened into a half-smile.

  ‘Mr McLean! I thought there might be a man following me – I’m glad it’s only you.’

  Unsure of whether to take offence, he nodded in muted greeting. It was Jan from the wool-shop. He had been slightly wary of her since the events of a few months ago. Up until then he had thought of her as part of the background of the town. It had been extremely disconcerting to find out that she had a personality and emotions, just as most other people did.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, blushing. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it came out. Are you going round to Tricia’s?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jock lied. ‘I’m heading for the harbour.’

  ‘Going the long way round?’

  He didn’t answer. Unfortunately she thought of something else to say.

  ‘Do you know what time everything starts?’

  ‘No idea. I’ll just go with the flow... That’s the best way.’

  ‘I suppose it is... Maybe see you later then.’

  Jock was forced to turn his steps vaguely in the direction of the harbour, but as soon as he could he diverted round towards Jemima and Dave’s. He felt as if he needed the security of being with his friends.

  When he came up one of the old cobbled back streets with the converted fishermen’s cottages and turned on to the High Street, he was almost knocked over by a running carrot. Dodging to avoid him, the carrot had a nasty-looking collision with a potato. Jock felt sorry for the boy in the potato suit. He had probably done nothing to deserve the fate of representing such an unattractive-looking root vegetable. On the other hand, at least his costume was a bit more manageable than those of the courgettes and bananas, who kept falling over the leg sections. The costumes had so much fabric in them that they must surely have been made for somewhat larger children.

  There was a sort of procession going on. It was rather chaotic, and he noticed a woman further up the street attempting to boom orders through a megaphone. He couldn’t see any sign of the big apple. Had they found another driver? Was Charlie Smith going to sue them for damages? Jock hoped he could summon up the will-power to keep well out of the way until these questions were no longer current.

  Just as he was standing there mulling it over – something he didn’t often do, preferring to keep on the move so that Fate wouldn’t find him a stationery target – the apple trundled round the corner at the foot of the street, from the direction of the car park near the Cultural Centre. It looked slightly lopsided and as it came closer he saw that it had a big dent in the side nearest him.

  The apple drew up and somebody waved from the driver’s cab. It was Amaryllis. Jock resisted the impulse to cover his eyes and moan. Had they really given her a driving licence again? It wouldn’t be safe to go out on the streets of Pitkirtly, what with her and Dave on the loose.

  She wound down the window. ‘Going my way?’

  ‘No! Just leave me alone!’

  He didn’t actually make the sign of the cross but he imagined it. She laughed, a bit wildly in Jock’s opinion, and drove off again, narrowly missing two cauliflowers and a much smaller apple.

  ‘Keep up at the back!’ called the woman with the megaphone.

  Jock walked on up the road and caught up with the woman. He recognised her at last as Deirdre, Christopher's ex-wife. He hadn't known Christopher at the time they were still married, so he hadn't been party to any of the circumstances of the break-up, but he assumed it had gone the same way as most other marriages, with the woman wanting more than the man was prepared to give. She sent him a scornful glance.

  ‘Bit of a shambles, isn’t it?’ he said cheerily.

  ‘This is just a rehearsal,’ she said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What is it they say? Life isn’t a rehearsal.’

  He walked off down the side street that led to Jemima’s house, laughing to himself at his own rapier-like wit.

  He had never seen so many people crowded into Jemima’s kitchen. There were a few friends who wanted either to wish her well or just to see what was going on. Maria, Ken, Charlotte and Eric, from the television crew he had met the day before, were presumably there to set things up and make sure the kitchen was ready. The others, a couple of complete strangers, turned out to be from that little-known publication ‘The Pitkirtly Press and Advertiser.’

  Jemima herself was an island of calm in the middle of the storm. She was peacefully unpacking a box of ingredients.

  ‘Everybody gets the same,’ she explained to Jock when she noticed him watching. ‘Then we have to make it into something different.’

  ‘A cake?’ he said, eyeing the small bag of potatoes she had just placed on the kitchen table.

  ‘Mmhm. Potato cake, more like. You don’t have to use all the ingredients, but I think you get extra marks the more you use.’

  ‘Extra marks?’ said Jock, uneasily reminded of his former career.

  Jemima frowned. ‘It’s a bit like school, isn’t it? I don’t really know why I went in for this. It was silly of me. I only did it because they couldn’t find anybody else at such short notice.’

  ‘You’re famous for your cooking, though, dear,’ said Dave, overhearing. ‘They couldn’t run the show without including you.’

  ‘No show without Punch, eh?’ said Jemima absently, fishing out a can of condensed milk from the box.

  ‘Potatoes, condensed milk, what next?’ said Jock.

  ‘Treacle,’ she said, holding up the tin. ‘I think I can do something with this…’

  ‘We’d rather you didn’t confer over the recipe,’ said Charlotte quietly. ‘It’s meant to be all your own work, Jemima.’

  ‘Mrs Douglas to you,’ said Dave, coming round the table to loom over the girl. To her credit, she didn’t retreat or even shrink back. She seemed impervious to his height and general pugnaciousness. Jock wondered for a moment if she was just generally impervious to everything, which might mean she didn’t really care about herself or others. He had encountered people like that during his teaching career. There was usually something awful hidden in their backgrounds, and it often seeped out into the foreground too.

  ‘Now, now, Mr Douglas. We’ve got to have the same rules for everyone,’ she said, still speaking in a hushed voice as if in church or other hallowed place of her choice – a television studio? A museum? Jock couldn’t quite work it out.

  Dave, unusually, took a step back. ‘No offence,’ he said.

  ‘Did you know Amaryllis was driving the apple?’ Jock asked him, trying to cheer him up. Everybody seemed different today, for some reason. Maybe it was the tension of waiting for the contest to start. Or the strain of having your kitchen full of these media types.

  Dave scowled and glanced sideways at Jemima, who had just unpacked a bag of oranges and was staring at them as if she’d never seen fruit before.

  ‘We can’t talk about it here,’ he muttered out of one side of his mouth.

  ‘I didn’t say you couldn’t talk about it,’ said Jemima. ‘I just said I didn’t want to hear any more about it until after you apologised to Charlie Smith for wrecking his car.’

  ‘But he didn’t mind!’ said Dave indignantly. ‘The insurance will pay.’

  Jemima turned her back on him and opened a cupboard to put some of the food away. She turned back to the box of goodies, took out a jar of beetroot and regarded it with suspicion.

  ‘Hmm,’ she muttered. ‘Beetroot icing?’

  ‘Don’t give away any of your secrets, Mrs Douglas,’ said Maria, shaking her head disapprovingly.

  There were lines of strain on Jemima’s forehead that hadn’t been there before. Jock guessed she would like to tell Maria to g
o away but was too polite to do so. Luckily he wasn’t.

  ‘Aren’t there any rules about putting the contestants off by telling them the rules all the time?’ he said to her. Her eyelashes fluttered as she pondered this. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you got out of the way and left them to it?’ he added, wondering how much more obvious he would have to be.

  ‘Oh, we can’t do that just yet,’ said Maria. ‘We’re still establishing the light levels in here. It’s a bit dim.’

  Jemima’s kitchen wasn’t the only thing that was a bit dim, thought Jock, and then told himself off for even thinking it in the privacy of his own mind.. When he had been a teacher it was practically a sacking offence to call a kid dim. Especially if they were.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Charlotte, looking up from what she was doing with one of the cameras. ‘It’ll look very atmospheric. Sort of Victorian. Or Fifties.’

  ‘There’s atmospheric and there’s faffing around in the dark unable to see what’s happening,’ said Maria. ‘We want the viewers to know there’s no funny business going on.’

  ‘There won’t be any funny business in my kitchen,’ said Jemima.

  ‘And if there is it’ll just be me doing my panto routines,’ said Eric gloomily.

  ‘Oh, I doubt if that would count as funny,’ said Maria.

  Jock expected to catch a heart-rending glimpse of the tortured soul behind the pantomime Buttons front as Eric stared at Maria, but instead Eric began to laugh and clap.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a funny bone in your body, Maria!’ he said. ‘Apart from the obvious one, that is. But you said that in quite a nice deadpan delivery. We’ll get you on stage at the Royal Albert Theatre in Rosyth yet.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not!’ Maria snapped. She swung round to confront the two men from the local press. ‘Have you seen enough of our bickering yet? Do you want to move on to another kitchen?’

  ‘This is all good stuff,’ said one of them. He nudged his colleague. ‘Here, you can get a good shot of old Mrs Mop over there snuggling up to her old man.’

  ‘Excuse me!’ said Jemima, who had indeed moved closer to Dave and was murmuring something to him. Jock knew it was just as likely to be an instruction not to embarrass her any more as it was to be something affectionate. ‘Do you mind giving me a bit of privacy in my own kitchen?’

  ‘Ah, but it isn’t your own kitchen today, Jemima,’ said Eric cheekily. ‘It belongs to the whole nation.’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration, isn’t it?’ said Jock. ‘How far afield are you expecting people to be watching this? Rosyth? Rotherham? Romania?’

  ‘The live show will be local to West Fife, but we’ve sold the rights to the edited version nationally,’ said Ken, getting a fanatical gleam in his eye.

  ‘If you don’t all get on with it we won’t even go local, never mind national,’ said Maria. ‘Let’s wrap this up. If we haven’t got the right light now it can’t be helped. But then, some people might look better in dim light anyway.’ She was looking at Eric as she spoke. Despite Eric’s earlier laughter, it seemed there was no love lost between those two.

  Within moments, the kitchen was cleared of almost everybody and everything apart from two cameras on stands that Ken and Charlotte had set up and sternly warned them not to touch, and Dave and Jock sat down at the table and looked at each other. Jemima was still stowing away the things from the box.

  ‘What happens now?’ said Jock.

  ‘They come back twice more,’ said Jemima. ‘At eleven to film me mixing everything up and then again at three once I’ve done the baking and icing. They take away my cake, and we all go down to the Cultural Centre for the results.’

  ‘Are they showing it all live?’ said Jock incredulously. ‘Will some people be watching all day, like the London Marathon?’

  Dave chortled. ‘I’d like to see Jemima and Tricia and Penelope doing a marathon!’

  ‘Where’s Christopher?’ said Jock, looking round as if he expected Christopher to emerge from under the table. Possibly with Charlie Smith’s dog in tow.

  ‘He’ll either be keeping an eye on Penelope in his own kitchen, or down at the Cultural Centre keeping an eye on what they’re up to there.... He’s got an awful lot of responsibility on his shoulders,’ said Dave. ‘Don’t know how he puts up with it all.’

  ‘Well, you’re irresponsible enough to make up for that,’ said Jemima.

  ‘If a man can’t be irresponsible in his old age, when can he be?’ said Dave.

  Nobody seemed to have an answer to that.

  Chapter 8 Age of Responsibility

  Christopher had handed over his kitchen to Penelope Johnstone that morning with only the slightest of concerns about the state it would be in when she handed it back. He knew if anything she would almost certainly leave it a lot cleaner than she found it. He wasn’t sure how it had passed the food hygiene inspection.

  Zak had been delegated to help and support his mother. Each contestant was allowed one assistant who was only there to fetch and carry, and intervene in case of major disasters, but they weren’t to be allowed to handle the food mixer or any other dangerous electrical equipment. Penelope confided in Christopher before he left that she didn’t use an electric mixer.

  ‘I prefer to just beat and beat and beat with a wooden spoon,’ she said. ‘It’s so good for getting rid of those aggressive impulses that one has.’

  Christopher rarely had them himself, and he couldn’t imagine Penelope having them either, although there was no doubt she was entitled to feel cross occasionally after putting up with Liam Johnstone for all these years.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure you’ve got everything you need, I’ll leave you in peace,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, Mr Wilson,’ said Penelope. ‘I know you’re a very busy man. I don’t want to keep you back.’

  By the time she had expressed that idea several times, Christopher started to wonder what she would do if she did indeed want to delay him. But he couldn’t be annoyed with her, and he liked Zak and wanted to encourage the boy to make a good career in the sane, sensible world of archives, so he was smiling as he walked down the garden path and out to the street.

  His smile lasted until he reached the High Street, where all hell had broken loose.

  There were fruits and vegetables of various shapes and sizes chasing each other around, apparently out of control. A group of men and women stood outside the wool-shop in a cluster. As he approached, they all walked away - except one.

  'Oh, Christopher!' said Deirdre with a sob in her voice. 'It's all gone completely wrong.'

  She was wearing a hi-vis vest and carrying a megaphone which, he saw at a glance, had somehow got twisted out of shape, with the handle now almost at right angles to the rest. How on earth had that happened?

  He took a step back from her. He was afraid she would fling herself into his arms. Even when they were married he hadn't encouraged that sort of familiarity, and it was much too late for it now. Though come to think of it, he couldn't remember seeing her this upset before. Angry, furious, incandescent - but not upset and vulnerable.

  He pushed the word out of his mind. It didn't fit. She was trying something on.

  'What happened to that?' he asked, pointing at the megaphone.

  A tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her face. 'Somebody didn't like it.'

  'Who on earth..?'

  'I couldn’t possibly say.'

  'Why not?'

  As he spoke, he had a horrible premonition.

  'I'm afraid it was a friend of yours.'

  'Amaryllis?' He couldn't think of any other friend of his whom he could even imagine taking out their anger on an innocent piece of crowd control equipment.

  Deirdre nodded sadly. He was still suspicious of her, but despite himself he was starting to feel cross with Amaryllis too. He couldn't quite say why. It was probably something to do with getting mixed up in messy emotional cross-currents that would quite likely result in him being out
of his depth at some time soon in some way he couldn't even predict.

  'She ran it over,' said Deirdre.

  'Ran it over? But how...?'

  Right on cue, there was a beeping sound and a giant apple came up the High Street, scattering courgettes and cauliflowers in front of it. It drew up at the kerb near them. When it got close, Christopher could see there was a driver's cab attached to the front, and inside was Amaryllis, looking as filled with adrenalin as if she were riding a roller-coaster.

  'Do you want to have a go of it?' she asked Christopher as she got out.

  'No, I don't!' he snapped. 'And how did this happen?'

  He held up the mangled megaphone.

  Amaryllis looked from him to Deirdre and back. She smiled dangerously. 'Would you believe me if I said I didn't know?'

  'No.'

  'OK, then, here's the story...'

  'Are you sure you want to tell me?' said Christopher. 'Would you prefer to consult your lawyer first?'

  'The case would be laughed out of court,' said Amaryllis. 'If you just have a look in the cab of this giant apple, you'll probably notice that the accelerator and brake pedals are somewhat closer together than they are in most vehicles.'

  ''The whole thing's completely different from most vehicles,' said Deirdre scornfully. 'Any idiot can see that. What made you think you could drive it without even having an HGV licence?'

  'How do you know?' said Amaryllis.

  'How do I know you thought you could drive it?'

  'No, how do you know I don't have an HGV licence?'

  'But you don't have a licence at all,' said Christopher, reluctant to intervene between the two women but a stickler for the truth nonetheless. 'You lost it for speeding a couple of years ago. The time with the Peruvian agents.'

  'Yes, I did mention Peruvians, didn't I?' said Amaryllis. 'But that doesn't mean I haven't got it back by now, does it?'

  'But it isn't an HGV licence, is it?' said Deirdre.

  'No,' said Amaryllis. 'But you don't need an HGV licence to drive a giant apple,' she added triumphantly. 'It counts as either a tractor or a minibus. I don't know which. I checked and they said it was all right.'