Bitter End Part 22

Before starting a fingertip search she made a quick tour of the upstairs rooms: two bedrooms and a bathroom, all of which were unnaturally tidy, even to the point of fresh towels in the bathroom. It was uncanny. Even in the tidiest house you'd expect to see a pair of shoes peeking out from under the bed, a few newspapers lying around, maybe a coat or something draped over the banisters. But no. This place was so tidy it was scary.

The wind had picked up, confusing her with ambiguous noises that might be either branches tapping against each other or the village bobby hopping in at the kitchen window. She squandered a couple of minutes on checking from every outlook point, just making sure that n.o.body was creeping around out there, and then headed back downstairs to the ink black living room.

In her imagination, the room felt different. Warmer?

Smaller? She couldn't pin down the basis for such a weird impression but her torch showed no visible changes from her previous image of the room so she dismissed it from her mind and got down to work.

Leaving the books till last, since they would take for ever to examine, she let down the lid of the bureau and ran her torch beam along the line of pigeon holes. Every one of them was empty. So, it quickly transpired, were the drawers underneath. Fizz didn't take time to ponder the strangeness of this; she turned immediately to the storage unit, whipping open drawers and cupboards with the speed of a career burglar. It took only a few seconds to establish that it didn't hold so much as a paper clip.

She stood in the middle of the room and thought about it. The place had been sanitised. Not emptied but sanitised.

It looked like Poppy, or someone else, had come 138. back and removed everything that might give a clue to her whereabouts. Not taking the trouble to sort out the telltale from the innocuous, but grabbing everything personal as though time was of the essence. She was already sure that, when she explored properly upstairs, she'd find the wardrobes, the airing cupboard, even the bathroom cabinets, as clean as a surgeon's glove.

Now that she thought about it, neither of the two beds upstairs had been slept in. Both were made up with crisp duvet covers, the pillows propped up to display their lacy trims, and yet the explosion had happened in the early hours of the morning when Poppy would, supposedly, have been asleep in bed. Shocked and cut by flying gla.s.s, Fizz could hardly see her nipping back home to plump up the cus.h.i.+ons before being carted away to hospital.

She went over every room in the house, scrutinising every empty drawer, running her fingers over the bottom of the cupboards, hoping that, against all the odds and in spite of all the sanitising, some small clue to Poppy's whereabouts might have been overlooked. But whoever had done the job had done it properly. She didn't even find a trace of dust.

There was no food in the kitchen, not even ice cubes in the fridge. The gla.s.sware in the cupboards was so s.h.i.+ny it looked like even the fingerprints had been removed. There was nothing that could be construed as pertaining to a cat, neither dish nor bed nor toy, and the only sign of previous occupancy was a half empty container of was.h.i.+ng-up liquid beside the sink.

That left the books. She was already running short of time and there were upwards of fifty paperbacks on the shelves, but she had found books to be enlightening in the past, and not just because of their literary content. Either Poppy or her husband had been a fan of science fiction: more than half the books were of that genre and the others were an a.s.sortment of romances, historical fiction and family sagas. 139. Each row was neatly lined up at the front of its shelf, leaving a four inch gap at the back, but there was nothing hidden in the gap. Every shelf was the same but the arrangement, Fizz guessed, was probably so that Poppy could push them back, dust the front of the shelf and then bring them forward again. She lifted each book in turn to check that there was nothing underneath and then dashed into the kitchen to check her time. She was already ten minutes over her time limit. She knew Gurbachan was out there, probably swearing like a sailor's parrot with Tourette's syndrome, but she couldn't leave without searching the books.

Working at the speed of light, she whipped the books off the shelves and checked them for inscriptions, giving them a good shake to dislodge anything stuck between the pages before replacing them as found. Shelf one revealed nothing. Shelf two revealed nothing. She was three quarters of the way through shelf three when she heard a noise behind her.

Sweat burst out all over her like a dose of chicken pox.

She switched off her torch and listened, her mouth ajar and her eyes popping. A second later it came again -a

kind of hiss that identified itself to her as escaping gas.

The thought exploded in her head like Brora Lodge. Gas!

For a moment the terror filled her so completely that she couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't access any of her senses. Then, in the instant her adrenalin kicked in, she heard it a third time.

'Sssssssssssss.'

Her legs thrashed, carrying her across the pa.s.sageway into the kitchen at a speed that would have left a bat out of h.e.l.l standing. At one microsecond during her progress she saw the silhouette of a man at the window but she was nose to nose with him before the sight had travelled the length of her optic nerve to her brain.

'For f.u.c.k's sake,' he hissed, sounding suspiciously like the supposed gas leak. 'I've been a sodding hour out there.

I'm going.' 140. Fizz could have felled him for scaring her like that. She looked longingly at the hammer in her hand, took three deep breaths, and confined her response to teaching him a few new phrases that virtually blew his hair back.

'Christ!' he muttered and fell back to lick his wounds, while Fizz considered her options. There were still books to look at, she reflected, but it was unlikely that they'd hold any more information than the others had and, besides, her nerve was completely blown. She didn't even want to go back into the living room but she couldn't risk leaving any signs of her presence.

Two minutes,' she said. 'I have to tidy up and go to the loo.'

'A second longer and I'll be gone,' gritted Gurbachan, who had recovered his aplomb and, with it, the fear of his father's wrath.

Fizz gave him the finger and ran upstairs to take care of the most urgent of her tasks.

The expedition had not been the success she had hoped for, she thought as she sat there, but neither had it been a total waste of time. It proved there was a suspicious amount of organisation surrounding Poppy's disappearance.

Either she had been ready for the explosion -a

contingency which carried several intriguing possibilities or she had covered her trail pretty d.a.m.n quick.

The problem this presented was: how to pa.s.s this intelligence on to Buchanan without admitting to a degree of meddling beyond the call of duty? 141.

Chapter Twelve.

It had rained all day Sunday and, although Buchanan

had persisted in playing eighteen holes in the afternoon,

he felt somewhat defeated to see the brilliant suns.h.i.+ne

that greeted him on Monday morning. It streamed in the

living room window, etching bright oblongs on the carpet

and on Selina who chose to sunbathe there, just where

Buchanan would trip over her every time he came out of

the kitchen. On the way to work he noticed, for the first time, that crocuses were in full bloom everywhere and the green spikes of daffodils were already four inches high in the tubs and window boxes. Spring was bustin' out all over and here he was, or would be in a minute or two, stuck in a gloomy office till the sun went down.

In fact, the office wasn't at all gloomy. The high Georgian windows looked straight up George Street and got all the light that was going, but that didn't affect the principle.

People like Fizz seemed to be able to get out and about at odd times throughout the day: commuting between home and office, library and college, and still managing to fit in the occasional sortie to see people who might help them with inquiries, all without doing any harm to her grades.

She never took public transport if she could avoid it: too miserly, probably. Her Doc Martens were her preferred mode of transport and she'd be marching into the office at any minute, rosy-cheeked and smelling of ozone and filling Buchanan with a pernicious envy. 143. He couldn't face getting behind his desk but stood at the window reading his mail between intervals of staring out at luckier people. He saw Fizz come striding down George Street at five-to-nine with her arms swinging and her hair jiggling, the Oxfam coat she'd been wearing for the past two winters flapping behind her like Superman's cape. A cross between a Munchkin and a Sherman tank. You had to smile.

He could hear the faint stir of her arrival in the front office, a burst of chattering, a shriek of laughter and, for some reason, the sound lightened his mood and let him get on with his work. Three minutes later she was bursting into his office, her entry concomitant with her knock.

'Buenos dias, amigo,' she said, a.s.saulting the spare chair with her behind. 'How's it going?'

Buchanan threw his pen on top of his papers and yawned. 'Can't get started this morning.'

'Late nights, huh?'

'I should be so lucky. What about you? What sort of a Sunday did you have?'

If she'd been seeing Giles, Buchanan didn't really want to know about it but he couldn't resist asking. He needn't have worried, she was as evasive as ever.

'Oh, just the usual quiet Sunday: church in the morning, bible cla.s.s in the afternoon, evensong in the evening, a little ram-raiding, a few lagers with the boys, a bit of a punch-up outside the pub and a night in a police cell.

Same old routine. Heard anything from Giles?'

'Not yet. I expect he'll touch base this morning if he has anything to report.'

She shoogled her chair round and swung her Doc's up on to the corner of his desk. 'Well, whether he has or not, 1 certainly have. I think I'm being followed.'

Buchanan felt squeamish with shock. Fizz's safety had always been of the utmost importance to him but, since the attack that had left a permanent scar across her eyebrow, remarks like this tended to push him one step 144. closer to neurosis. He put his elbows on the table and held his head for a minute.

'I could be wrong,' she said cheerfully. 'It could be pure coincidence, but I saw that guy again -the one I spoke to in the Chirnside Hall Hotel the other night, remember?'