Frozen in Crime

Chapter 3 Cleaning up the mess

Detective Chief Inspector Charles Smith, or 'Charlie' to his friends, family and Amaryllis, was in a state bordering on despair as he left the Queen of Scots and walked round to the car with Constable Burnett, his driver for the afternoon.

A serious crime investigation was all he and his officers needed, just when he had signed off half of them for the holidays and overtime was very unlikely to be agreed even if it had been popular with the officers who were left manning the station over Christmas. What was even more annoying was that he had put forward this very argument to the Superintendent only three weeks ago, when decisions about staffing over the holidays were being made at a higher level, and just before Inspector Forrester had booked a last-minute holiday in Cuba.

Normally the crime rate fell in a spell of cold weather, as most of the casual thieves and habitual burglars went into hibernation. He didn't blame them: they could easily freeze to death hanging around outside houses at night waiting for their chance to break in. There were always one or two, of course, who thought they needed the money to pay for 'Christmas'. He could almost see the quotes suspended in the air above them when they spoke.

Charlie Smith thought people's feelings of entitlement to 'Christmas' were way out of control these days. He blamed the media and the parents. They were the usual scapegoats for almost everything that went wrong in society. But to him the search for scapegoats wasn't nearly as important as actually catching the criminals and locking them up. If they knew there was a good chance they'd be locked up, they might think twice about doing anything bad in the first place. That was what kept him going.

He knew that he and his colleagues were only there to clean up the mess. Theirs wasn't a noble quest for truth, or at least not most of the time. It was a constant struggle to stop these people from interfering with the activities of the more or less silent majority, who were usually law-abiding because it was less trouble to abide by society's rules, not because of any moral conviction that they had to be 'good'.

Charlie Smith was a little on the cynical side. He told himself that he hadn't been born cynical, but circumstances had thrust cynicism upon him.

Quite often when something like this happened around Pitkirtly he found Amaryllis Peebles and Christopher Wilson mixed up in it somehow, and this case was no exception. But even with his previous experience of them, he found it hard to believe either of them, even Amaryllis, would take part in an armed robbery, and particularly one which left wounded people scattered around randomly in an icy car park. In this case he was worried rather than irritated by their involvement. Despite his reassuring words to Christopher, he thought that if the robber imagined the man could identify him, then Christopher could well be in danger. On the other hand, it seemed fairly likely that the robbery had been committed not by local mobsters - who had become very thin on the ground anyway in the aftermath of the Petrelli case - but by a gang from outside, perhaps even from Edinburgh or Glasgow. So they could be long gone by now and with no intention of ever coming back.

'But why choose Pitkirtly?' he mused aloud as they got in the car. 'The pickings here won't be that great compared to somewhere in Edinburgh. Or even Dunfermline.'

'Local connection, sir?' said the younger officer, skidding slightly as he pulled away on the seafront road.

'Hmm,' said Charlie Smith. 'I thought we'd seen off most of the local lot. Unless,' he added, having had an unwelcome idea, 'it's a new lot in town. Just starting up. Inexperienced, so more likely to shoot without thinking it through. Or maybe Liam Johnstone's gone feral.'

'Could be nasty,' said the young officer, increasing the windscreen-wiper speed try and clear the thickening snow.

'It already is nasty, Constable Burnett.'