Frozen in Crime

Chapter 11 Long-lost friend

Amaryllis wasn't sure why she had let the fictitious explanation of Mal's presence in the house come so easily to her tongue as she spoke to the policemen. She supposed she had a kind of fellow-feeling with Mal and felt vaguely protective towards him. Not many people allowed themselves to harbour the kind of grand ideas he seemed to have, and she didn't want that afternoon's inspiration to turn into humdrum suspicion, even if Christopher seemed to be thinking of it exactly in that way.

Fortunately Christopher didn't contradict her, although he did have an anxious expression on his face when she glanced sideways at him.

'Gamekeeper, eh?' said Charlie Smith, and the junior officer with him wrested a notebook out of his coat pocket and wrote in it, although it must have been a struggle even to keep the pencil in his hand when he was wearing such thick, inflexible gloves.

'What do you want to see Lord Murray for, anyway?' said Amaryllis. 'Has he been fiddling his expenses in the House of Lords or something?'

She thought it was almost certainly drink-driving. These old-style aristocrats thought they could get away with anything.

Charlie shook his head again, dislodging all the remaining snow off his woolly hat. 'Ongoing enquiry,' he said. 'And we did wonder if Mr Douglas had somehow got inside the house but if you've had a look, it seems he hasn't.'

They set off back through the trees towards the road. Amaryllis asked herself where Dave could have got to. Was it possible he had made it as far as the main road, flagged down a driver and gone to a garage in the hope they could move his truck that evening? But surely in that case he would have found some way of contacting Jemima by now. What if he had concussed himself when the truck came to a standstill? Maybe he had managed to get out and then stumbled off somewhere in a random direction and ended up in a remote snowdrift where nobody would think of looking for him. The bad feeling she had had about this from the start got worse, in the same way that if you carried something for a while it seemed to get heavier and heavier.

She glanced round at Christopher, walking alongside her. He gave her a half-smile, but he still looked anxious. But then, as she had observed on many occasions, his default expression was one of worried bewilderment. It was difficult to read anything about the degree of anxiety he felt at this exact moment.

They were approaching the place where all three vehicles now sat, covered in varying amounts of snow, when they heard the noise of a powerful engine coming towards them. Amaryllis glanced up to see a tractor rumbling round the corner, its bright lights illuminating the scene, its massive wheels making everything else look tiny.

It came to a standstill in the middle of the road. A figure jumped down from the cab, and went round to the passenger side where it seemed to be helping someone down. Then the two figures walked up to the other vehicles and stood there for a moment, staring.

Amaryllis started to run, her feet in their reindeer herding boots - she had acquired them on a mission in the north of Russia - sinking into the snow in unexpected places. She hoped she wouldn't fall head-first into a drift and have to be heaved out by her feet; but the potential embarrassment of that didn't matter now anyway.

'Dave!' she called. 'Dave!'

She skidded to a halt on an icy patch behind the ruined Range Rover, and waited just for a few seconds to get her breath back, since something odd seemed to have happened to her voice. Then she walked forward and confronted the two men.

'Dave! Where have you been?' She couldn't remember the last time she had hugged anyone, but she just walked up to him and flung her arms round his solid mass, or at least, round as far as they would reach. He laughed down at her.