Death in a Cold Spring (Pitkirtly Mysteries Book 9) by Cecilia Peartree

other twin, and to placate his girl-friend, who had been hoping for a meal out to make up for having their last evening out interrupted.
    He didn’t have the time or the energy to think about any of it properly until well into the following morning. And even then the thoughts came to him courtesy of a phone call from Amaryllis.
    ‘I was going to break into your house and leave you a note,’ she said, ‘and then I remembered I had your mobile number.’
    ‘You sound quite disappointed,’ he said.
    ‘Obviously I need to know what happened yesterday. We saw the truck bringing the van up to the police station. Will forensics be round later to look at the inside?’
    ‘You know I can’t tell you anything about that.’
    ‘Jemima says there was only one twin in the van after all.’
    ‘How the hell did Jemima find out...?’
    There was a pause while Keith wondered if he could stab himself to death with his standard police issue pencil. He jabbed it into his side to see what happened.
    ‘Aha!’ said Amaryllis. ‘Only one. So that means the other one is either still at large or lying about in a ditch or somewhere... Was it the boy or the girl?’
    ‘Don’t push your luck!’ he snapped. He couldn’t ever recall snapping at a member of the public before. Although Amaryllis didn’t really count. He remembered Charlie Smith nearly tearing his hair out during one of the cases she had got involved in. Was it the one with the tramp and the dog, or one of the others? They had all started to blur into one now in his head.
    ‘I know where there was somebody lurking the other night,’ said Amaryllis.
    She had that smug ‘I’ve got a secret’ tone in her voice.
    ‘Lurking? I don’t think that’s at all relevant.’
    ‘How do you know? Maybe it was the missing twin.’
    ‘I don’t care,’ Keith lied. ‘I just want you off my back. So stay out of this case or I’m going to have to get a restraining order.’
    ‘You can’t restrain a law-abiding member of the public.’
    ‘No, I don’t suppose I can. But you’re a different matter.’
    She laughed. ‘I like to think so... Anything else I can do for you?’
    ‘Go away.’
    He rang off decisively. She was impossible. He didn’t know what a usually sensible and mature man like Christopher Wilson saw in her. Unless it was the red hair. Some men liked it.
    For just a moment he stood there considering how exciting it might be to go out with somebody so unpredictable and so liable to take you right to the edge of the law – maybe even beyond the edge on occasion – instead of with a girl who probably already had both their lives planned down to the last detail. For just a moment he experienced a kind of resentment about all that planning, and then he sighed, shrugged his shoulders and came back to reality. Because you had to live in the real world, at the end of the day. Visiting la-la-land was all very well for a wee while at a time, but he liked his feet to stay on solid ground.
    Amaryllis had the ability to conjure up quick-sands wherever she went.
     

Chapter 8 The other half of the puzzle
     
    Amaryllis wasn’t sure what had made her conjure up a scenario in which one of the twins was missing. She didn’t believe in psychic power, so it wasn’t that. Some sort of intuition based on reality and not on the supernatural must have triggered this thought. After speaking to Keith, she ran through the events of the past few days in her mind like a movie. It wasn’t exactly in the horror genre, although it had looked as if it might go that way at first, what with all the blood, and it couldn’t really be a comedy now that at least one death had occurred. Instead it seemed to be shaping up to be some weird art-house effort that she would never have gone to see in a million years.
    That was appropriate, in a way, what with the arty people who had joined the cast.
    She frowned. It wasn’t very much, but it was something odd. She had reached the point in her