6 The Queen of Scots Mystery by Cecilia Peartree

the idea quite quickly. Not only was it pink, a colour she rarely wore, but she liked to save it for occasions when there was actually some danger of getting shot. She didn’t think that was the case this time. She had already formed the view that the person or persons responsible for Liam Johnstone’s death had intended to kill him and nobody else. In her opinion he had been asking it for some time. She still hadn’t forgiven him for firing his gun at her and his son Zak as they stood defenceless in the yard behind the Happiness Club.
    Of course, his death could have been a horrible accident, but she tended to discount this possibility. Someone like Liam almost always got away with doing stupid things that would have killed anyone else, so that even if he had driven his car at high speed over a precipice it would turn out he had been flung clear at the last minute and landed in a patch of heather or on someone’s discarded mattress.
    She was ambivalent about catching the person responsible for his death. She almost thought they deserved to get away with it. On the other hand, she still hungered to know the truth even if in the end she might decide not to share it with the police.
    It was almost eleven when she got away from Christopher’s – Dave and Jemima had popped round and Jock had appeared later with some bottled Old Pictish Brew he had found in his kitchen cupboard and brought round to celebrate Amaryllis’s return.
    By midnight she had been in her flat for long enough to abandon her travel bag in the middle of the kitchen floor and to change from her black daytime outfit to the equally black clothes she wore for her night-time excursions. The weather was still cold enough for her to need the black leather jacket. She had been through several of these in the past few years, but she always liked to replace the lost and damaged ones with new jackets in exactly the same style.
    She sidled down the cobbled back street that was one of the routes down to the Queen of Scots. Although the lights would usually have been out there anyway by this time on a Monday night, the place had a deserted look and feel to it. Someone had been round the whole building with police tape, almost as if they were tying it up ready to send through the post.
    She crossed the road quickly and ducked under the tape at the side of the pub, getting into the shadows as fast as she could. Not a moment too soon, either. Voices approached from the direction of the harbour.
    ‘Evening, Keith. You drawn the short straw then?’
    ‘Yes, I’m on until four o’clock in the morning.’
    ‘ You won't be standing around here all that time though?’
    ‘No way, not when it’s this cold. I’m just going to cycle down from the station every so often and have a look round.’
    ‘See you later, then, mate.’ One set of footsteps receded.
    ‘Cheers, pal,’ said Keith Burnet, getting closer to Amaryllis’s lurking place. Suddenly he was very much closer: close enough to reach out and grab her by the arm. ‘Come on out here where I can see you,’ he said, urging her towards the road. ‘It’s you!’ he said, as they came round the corner.
    ‘It certainly is me,’ said Amaryllis, jerking her arm away from his grip and smoothing out the sleeve of her jacket. Of course leather always got wrinkles in it – that was something that appealed to her about it – but she didn’t like them to be left by a policeman’s hands. You never knew where they’d been.
    ‘I thought I recognised you,’ he said. ‘What were you doing, inside the crime scene cordon?’
    ‘Is that what it’s called nowadays?’
    ‘It’s no use prevaricating,’ said Keith. ‘I know you’re up to no good.’
    ‘Oh, somebody’s been learning big new words,’ said Amaryllis. ‘I happened to be passing and I thought I saw somebody in the shadows over there. Because I’m a public-spirited person, I knew it was my civic duty to go and see what they were up to. You see, some