Christopher paced the terminal building at Edinburgh Airport, wondering why he was so nervous. It wasn’t as if he himself had been locked in a metal capsule with lots of people, who in his opinion were certain to harbour amongst them every virus known to man, while being treated with ill-disguised contempt by the cabin crew, consuming plastic food and heading for another country at speeds no human being was meant to endure. All he was doing was meeting Amaryllis.
After a bit more thought he realised that the only thing he had to worry about was the potential faux pas of having come to meet the wrong plane on the wrong day, in which case he could slink off home again without anyone else being any the wiser. Or, he decided after a few more minutes’ thought, the embarrassment of having to report Amaryllis missing if she didn’t arrive on the expected flight. He wasn’t sure if she would like being reported missing, anyway. If she was missing, it would almost certainly turn out to be part of some secret plan of hers to do with that other life he was only dimly aware of.
The doors opened with a decisive clunk. There she was walking towards him. Even after a long flight she was sleek as ever, moving like a panther, dressed like a vagrant. She had managed to get off the plane ahead of all the other passengers. She must have travelled clinging to the wing or something.
He wasn’t sure whether to hug her or not. It had been a while since they last saw each other. Three months, in fact, since she had announced that she wanted to go and trek round Outer Mongolia, and that she didn’t suppose he would be interested in coming with her. She was right: he hadn’t been interested.
He held out his hand to her. She took it, but leaned towards him and kissed him on the cheek.
He leaned back.
‘How was Outer Mongolia?’
‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Good journey?’
‘Yes, good.’
‘Have you got any luggage?’
‘Just this,’ she said, holding up a battered rucksack. Apparently she had travelled light, but then that was a sensible way to travel in such a remote area. Outer Mongolia didn’t sound like any place for these wheeled suitcases that all other travellers seemed to possess.
‘I don’t like those suitcases with wheels,’ he said, feeling foolish even as he spoke.
‘No,’ she said.
‘They remind me of the extending dog leads,’ he said. ‘Little white dogs running under your feet.’
She took his hand as they walked towards the exit.
‘How’s Pitkirtly?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Go on – something must have happened.’
He considered that for a while as they walked around the car park complex looking for Big Dave’s car, a frightening concept and an even more frightening reality.
‘Oh, yes – Young Dave’s in prison.’
‘Not a moment too soon,’ she said.
‘It was mostly the pension funds swindle. Embezzling money from the Council was a tiny part of it... Big Dave and Mrs Stevenson have more or less moved in together. Mrs Stevenson’s driving him nuts with all her projects. Jock – well, he’s about the same as usual.’
‘Ha!’ said Amaryllis.
They paused for a moment.
‘Aren’t we going round in circles?’ she added. ‘I’m sure we’ve seen that pay station before.’
‘They all look the same,’
Christopher was starting to wonder if anyone had ever been benighted in this godforsaken place by the time they heard a shout.
‘Hey, you idiots, I’m over here!’
‘Well, who would have thought of parking in the drop-off zone?’ said Amaryllis rhetorically as they retraced their steps and saw the most frightening car in the world, parked casually right in front of the terminal where only taxis were allowed to park. It was a black pick-up truck with colossal wheels and an American eagle painted on the side.
‘Hurry up or I’ll get a ticket,’ said Big Dave, although it seemed to Christopher that if you drove a car like that you had no need to be afraid of anything as mundane as a parking ticket.
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ said Amaryllis with a yawn.
But the luminous jacket of an airport parking enforcer appeared in the distance, and they bundled themselves into the car and set off at some speed. Christopher held on to the side of the seat, he hoped unobtrusively. Amaryllis laughed and bounced around in the front. She had lost her licence about six months before, a tortuous process that had included a court case in which she defended herself from speeding allegations by insisting she was being pursued by agents of a foreign power – Peruvian, as far as Christopher recalled. He remembered thinking of Paddington Bear as he sat in court.
Fortunately – or perhaps not, he thought as they hurtled round a corner and found themselves on the Forth Road Bridge – Big Dave had bought the monster truck soon after that. But Christopher knew he didn’t often get the chance to travel at speed, since his journeys mostly involved taking Mrs Stevenson to one of her many and varied activities in Pitkirtly and environs.
‘I never knew there was so much to do around here,’ he had once told Christopher gloomily. ‘There’s even a scrapbooking circle. Scrapbooks! Things that kids play with. Cutting and sticking. Odd bits of paper all over the house...’
Now Dave roared, trying to make himself heard above what was surely a souped-up engine, ’How did you find Outer Mongolia, then?’
‘I just carried on right through Russia, and there it was,’ said Amaryllis. The two of them laughed, and Big Dave accelerated.
‘So what was it you were doing there again?’
‘Trekking.’
‘Trekking?’
‘Trekking.’
She obviously wasn’t going to say any more.
Later, as she and Christopher shared a late fish supper and a bottle of Irn Bru at the flat in Merchantman Wynd, she did say a bit more.
‘I wasn’t really in Outer Mongolia.’
‘I didn’t think you were,’ said Christopher reluctantly. He had clung to the hope that she was really trekking in Outer Mongolia and not doing anything even more dangerous, but he supposed that if their relationship was going to develop he would have to get used to her other life.
‘I was in China,’ she continued. ‘I was asked to try and get some Tibetans over the border to Arunachal Pradesh. Things went a bit pear-shaped. I thought of you.’
‘Of me?’
‘I let go of the rope at the wrong time and landed in the river. When I got swept up on the shore there were giant pandas. Just as I was wondering if they were going to eat me, the SAS arrived.’
‘I don’t think I need to know any more,’ said Christopher.
There was a silence.
‘Something weird happened here yesterday,’ he said, changing the subject as clumsily as he had noticed Big Dave changing gear on the pick-up truck.
‘Yes?’
She picked up a large chip and bit into it aggressively.
‘Ms Farquharson told me off for being late, and Jemima hinted that she knew something I didn't know.'
'You're right, that's weird.' Amaryllis nodded lazily, leaning back in the uncomfortable leather and chrome designer chair she liked so much, and watching him through half-closed eyes as she sipped Irn Bru.
‘I've no idea what it can be... Jemima's in the Cultural Centre every day at the moment. I bump into her round every corner. I hope she isn't over-hearing things she isn't meant to hear.'
‘Try asking Dave what she’s up to. You just have to get him started and he’ll talk about her for hours on end.’
Amaryllis yawned.
‘Sorry – you’ve been travelling all day and all night,’ said Christopher, starting to gather up the fish supper packet. ‘Sorry – I’ll go now.’
‘No need to be sorry, it isn’t your fault.’
*
After Christopher had gone, and once she was sure he must have reached the top of the road, Amaryllis yawned again, stretched and put on the special leather jacket she kept hanging up on a hook in the hallway. Never mind jet lag or any of that nonsense, it was time to get back into her nightly routine. She was glad Christopher was too shy to suggest staying over. One of these days it might happen, but for the moment she would rather it didn’t. She enjoyed the novelty of having a good friend of the opposite gender, and didn’t want to spoil it. She thought he felt much the same. The idea of settling down in a conventional romantic relationship filled her with horror.
She took extra care as she slid over the railings and dropped lightly to the ground under the balcony. In her absence, who knew what sort of low-life had taken over her own patch here in Pitkirtly? She raced into the shadows of the beech tree at the corner of the street and peered out from there, heart pounding. She sidled along by the wall, making her way cautiously down towards the waterfront and the harbour.
Something was wrong: she could sense it with that sixth or seventh sense that had been born in her and developed to its utmost in the course of her chosen career. A misplaced wheelie-bin here; a gap in a hedge there as if someone or something had pushed through; a ragged blanket, perhaps carelessly abandoned by a rough sleeper, in the doorway of the boarded up pub down by the river where smugglers once used to bring contraband ashore. She paused to examine the blanket: it had an exotic pattern that wasn’t native to Pitkirtly.
Amaryllis was frowning as she slipped out of the doorway and along the waterfront like a shadow. Her plans hadn’t included anyone sleeping rough.
There was someone at the end of the harbour wall, sitting on the bench that Amaryllis knew had a memorial plaque dedicating it to a former town councillor who had got rich by building a school extension of sub-standard concrete in the 1960s. The seated person seemed to be contemplating the different kinds of darkness: the clear sky in midnight blue with its ostentatious display of the sparkling jewels that were stars, the darker shapes of the hills at the far side of the river, the flame that illuminated the funnels and chimneys of Grangemouth oil refinery, the swirling dark currents of the River Forth itself. You could stare at the changing flavours of darkness for hours without getting bored, after all. Amaryllis had done it herself before. So it wasn't surprising that the person on the bench didn't stir for a while.
Even when someone else suddenly appeared, rising up magically from below the wall like some sort of sea creature and then assuming the shape of a man as he walked towards the bench, its occupant showed no visible reaction. Amaryllis, though she considered herself immune to surprise, had to admit his sudden appearance made her jump. It took her brain a moment to process what had just happened and translate it into something that made sense. Of course, the newcomer had come up the steps from the river, perhaps from a boat. She had seen the steps there, thick with slippery seaweed and not at all inviting.
It was late to be arriving from a boat, and her first thought was that he was up to no good, but she told herself firmly not to superimpose the lessons learned from her professional life on to the much less turbulent world of Pitkirtly, even if that world had proved itself in recent times to have hidden depths, much like the currents in the River Forth. It was purely survival instinct that made her draw back against the wall of the nearest building before either of these people looked in her direction. Even at the level of social interaction, if they came this way Amaryllis didn't want to get trapped in conversation with them on her first night back.
The shape of the man who had come up the steps merged into the darkness near the bench. He seemed to be stooping over the one who was sitting on the bench. He -
'Why, Amaryllis! And here we thought you were in Mongolia - or was it Azerbaijan?'
Amaryllis nearly jumped out of her skin. How had someone as loud as Maisie Sue McPherson managed to creep up on her so silently? She really must be too old for this game.
'Amaryllis.' Maisie Sue's husband Pearson caught up with his wife and gave Amaryllis a curt nod. He had been a CIA agent, but she had no idea if he still was. She felt no comradeship with him either way - quite the contrary.
'Maisie Sue!' said Amaryllis, trying to mask her dismay. She glanced at Maisie Sue's feet. Native American moccasins. Of course.
'I couldn't sleep?' said Maisie Sue. 'I guess it's the same with you?'
'Yes,' said Amaryllis. She manufactured a yawn. 'I'm quite tired now, though. On my way home.'
'I guess we should be getting home too, shouldn't we, Pearson?' said Maisie Sue.
'I guess so,' said Pearson, glaring at Amaryllis. She ignored him.
'We'll come along with you,' said Maisie Sue. 'Pearson doesn't think it's safe for a woman to be out on her own at this time of night, do you, Pearson?'
'I surely don't,' said Pearson.
'So - how did you find Mongolia?' said Maisie Sue.
Amaryllis opened her mouth to make the same joke she had shared with Dave earlier, but decided the McPhersons wouldn't appreciate it. She tolerated their company as far as the end of Merchantman Wynd, and then said goodnight to them. It was probably just as well they had come along. Complications and excitement could wait. She wanted to find the rhythm of her life in Pitkirtly again, to adjust her pace accordingly and to join in with whatever new and random pleasures her friends had become involved in since she had left for China.
The exotic blanket worried her quite a lot. She didn't like her plans going awry.