5 Frozen in Crime by Cecilia Peartree Read Free Book Online Page B

House might be somewhere nearby, but we’re not sure what that is.’
    ‘Hmm, interesting,’ said Charlie Smith,
unexpectedly calming down a bit. ‘Maybe I’ll come out there myself after you.
Don’t go any further - pull over to the side of the road or something. Wait.
Play cards. Have a sandwich.’
    He rang off.
    Christopher relayed his instructions to Amaryllis,
who shook her head. ‘No way. If we pull over we’ll definitely get stuck.’
    She revved the engine again, hard. The Range Rover
stalled.
    She managed to get it going again but they had
lost momentum, and rolled back some way.
    ‘Try, try, try again,’ she muttered, and the car
suddenly jumped forward, shot up another section of the hill and crashed
straight into something at the side of the road. There was a horrible grinding,
screeching noise, and then they lurched over to one side. Christopher was
pushed against the passenger door, and then showered with broken glass as the
windscreen caved in on top of them.
     

Chapter 7 Connections
    Charlie Smith had been so incensed with Christopher
and Amaryllis - mainly with Amaryllis, because he knew she must have been the
ring-leader - that he could see his junior officers watching him anxiously for
signs of a stroke or heart attack. At least one of them was likely to be
listing the signs and symptoms of each of these in his or her head in case they
had to call an ambulance.
    But as he finished the phone call he was smiling. ‘Where’s
that list of stuff from the safe in the jeweller’s? I need to check something
out.’
    ‘It’s back in the office,’ said Karen Whitefield,
still apparently anxious about his welfare. ‘Are you feeling all right, sir?’
    ‘I’m fine, and I’ll be even more fine if one of
you goes and gets me the list instead of standing about staring as if I had two
heads,’ said Charlie. ‘And by the way, who was it that told an elderly woman
she’d have to wait until the morning before we’d go and look for her equally
elderly husband in a snowdrift at the side of the A985?’
    The assembled officers shuffled their feet and
muttered. But he wasn’t going to press the point now. Better to follow up this
lead while there was still a chance of getting out there this evening. After
all, if Christopher Wilson could do it, then surely he could. Even without the
company of a best friend who was a retired spy.
    Karen brought him the list and he glanced down it.
    No, he hadn’t been imagining things. There it was,
in black and white, listed unobtrusively among Rolex watches (query fake) and
diamond pendants: one gold peacock richly decorated with diamonds, emeralds and
turquoises, purchased by private sale during the summer from the collection of
Lord Murray of Pitkirtlyhill. The jeweller had added a note explaining that the
egg was waiting to go to an important client in the Middle East and that he
thought it was an antique one made by Fabergé for some Russian aristocrat.
    Charlie had intended to visit Old Pitkirtlyhill
House to question Lord Murray about this piece of jewellery. It seemed to him,
although he wasn’t an expert in the field, that a Fabergé animal must be equal
in worth to quite a number of Rolex watches, and he had a suspicion that it
might have been stolen and was being fenced, unintentionally or otherwise, by
the jeweller, although that did seem slightly far-fetched in a place like
Pitkirtly and in that case the jeweller could just have left it off the list.
Perhaps it didn’t really exist at all but was part of some sort of an insurance
scam. But he was reasonably sure the thieves had probably just worked out for
themselves that the most valuable stuff would be in the safe, so had
concentrated their efforts on that.
    He hadn’t really envisaged trekking to see Lord
Murray through several feet of snow, but if he was going to have to go out to
rescue Amaryllis, Christopher and possibly Dave Douglas too, he might as well
justify the trip in terms of more useful