Murder in My Backyard (13 page)

“What did the woman look like?”

Charlie shrugged. “It was hard to tell in that light,” he said. “Small, dark. I think she had long hair.”

“And what was she wearing?”

“How should I know? She was on the other side of the wall. I couldn’t see much more than her head.”

“You are sure,” Ramsay said slowly, “that there was a woman? This isn’t a game to annoy the police.”

“Oh,” said Charlie. “Think what you like.” He swore under his breath.

Ramsay ignored him. “ Did you notice a car near the green?” he asked. “ One not usually parked there?”

“No,” Charlie said. “ I didn’t notice anything.” But he spoke too quickly to have considered the matter and it seemed that the childish resentment had returned. “ Look!” he said. “How much longer are you going to keep me here? I’ll lose my job.”

“You’re free to go at any time,” Ramsay said. “We know where to find you.”

He rubbed a clear patch in the condensation on the window and looked out into the yard. Charlie Elliot went to a cupboard in the corner and pulled out a jacket. They watched while he laced shoes and fastened buttons and then Ramsay saw him go out into the yard. Fred Elliot was standing helplessly in the middle of the room with a teapot in his hand. “ I’ve made this now,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“No,” Ramsay said. “ I expect you want to open the post office.”

“Yes,” Elliot said. He seemed miserable and lost. “I suppose I should.” He seemed afraid to be left on his own. “ There’s no hurry.”

“Is it just a post office or is it a shop, too?”

“Yes,” Elliot said. “ It’s a newsagent. We sell magazines, stationery, confectionery. The post office counter is at the back. It’s a canny little business. Especially in the summer.”

“Where do you keep the stock you don’t sell?”

“What do you mean?”

“There must be out-of-date newspapers, magazines. You can’t keep them on the shelves. What do you do with them?”

“I save them,” Elliot said proudly. “Then sell them to a wastepaper merchant. For charity. I give the money to the hospital where my wife died. I can show you it if you like.” He had no suspicion, it seemed, of Ramsay’s motive for asking. Still in his slippers, he led the policeman across the yard to a large, well-built shed in one corner.

The collection of wastepaper had become a hobby, it seemed, almost an obsession. “I collect the neighbours’ papers as well,” he said. “And the church helps. It’s surprising how it mounts up. You can make pounds.” He unbolted the shed door and switched on a light. Inside, against one wall, in neatly stacked and wrapped bundles, were piles of newspapers. Ramsay could imagine Elliot in there, escaping from his rude and unpredictable son, soothing his nerves by counting the papers and calculating their worth. In comparison to the general tidiness, the floor was a mess of paper scraps, as if a child had been playing at cutting out. There was a pair of round-ended scissors and a tube of glue. Elliot stood, betrayed and horrified, realising for the first time what the questions had been leading up to.

“I take it,” Ramsay said, “that these have nothing to do with you.”

Elliot shook his head.

“You do realise that we’ll have to take these pieces of newspaper to compare with the print on the anonymous letter to Mrs. Parry?”

“Yes,” Elliot said. He looked at Ramsay desperately. “ He might have sent the letter,” he pleaded, “but that doesn’t mean that he killed her.”

“No,” Ramsay said gently. “ It doesn’t mean that he killed her.”

“What will you do with him now?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Ramsay said. “Probably take him to the police station and ask him some questions. You mustn’t worry too much. He can see a solicitor.”

“He wouldn’t have killed her,” Elliot said, as if he were trying to convince himself. “He wouldn’t have killed her.”

Ramsay left him in the shed, surrounded by his beloved wastepaper, standing by the open door and looking out at the whirlwind of sand funnelled by the wind into the yard.

Out in the street little had changed. An old woman stood on the pavement patiently waiting for the post office to open. Two detective constables moved slowly along the terrace on the other side of the green, knocking on doors, asking questions. In the garage workshop Tom Kerr stood before the open bonnet of a car. Ramsay stood by the open door and looked in.

Kerr straightened slowly. “ Inspector Ramsay,” he said. “How can I help you? Olive’s in the house.” He looked slightly ridiculous in his boiler suit still wearing the heavy-framed glasses. He would be more at home, Ramsay thought, in his choirmaster’s cassock.

“I’d like to speak to Charlie Elliot,” Ramsay said.

“Aye,” Kerr said with a trace of anger. “You and me both.”

He wiped his hands on a cloth and moved to the front of the garage to meet Ramsay. “ He’s not here,” he said. “He came in from his dinner about half an hour ago. We had a car with a timing problem and he said he’d take it up the road to see what was wrong. He’s not back yet. It doesn’t take a ten-mile drive to check a timing problem.”

“Where do you think he’s gone?”

“I don’t know,” Kerr said. “He doesn’t talk to me. He’s very moody. This had made my mind up for me. I’ve been thinking of telling him to leave for a while.”

“He was talking of looking for work in the south,” Ramsay said.

“Was he?” Kerr seemed relieved. “He’s not said anything to me.”

“If Charlie comes back, will you tell him to get in touch? I’ll be up at the police house.”

But Ramsay knew that Charlie was unlikely to return and realised with a depressing certainty that he had allowed a major murder suspect to run away. In the street outside the garage a Radio Newcastle reporter stopped him and asked for an interview, but Ramsay said he had no comment to make and hurried up the hill to the police house. He sent cars up each of the roads out of Brinkbonnie, but by then it was too late. Charlie Elliot had disappeared.

Hunter seized on the disappearance of Charlie Elliot as an excuse for activity. While the communications centre at Otterbridge put out a general description of Charlie Elliot and of the car he was driving, Hunter drove at great speed around the country lanes, hoping to make an immediate arrest. He returned to the police house in the middle of the afternoon, disappointed, but still convinced that Charlie Elliot was a murderer. Ramsay knew the danger of jumping to conclusions too quickly and cautioned patience, an open mind.

“Charlie Elliot had an alibi for the time of the murder,” he said reasonably. “His father confirmed that he was in the house by eleven. And then there was the girl he saw in the churchyard. We should be looking for her.”

“What girl?” Hunter demanded. “ Man, that was just Elliot making up stories to throw us off the scent. No-one in the Tower saw a girl. And the old man was lying to protect his son.”

“What about motive?” Ramsay said quietly. “ I thought you said no-one would commit murder for the sake of a few houses.”

“No-one sane,” Hunter said. “We know Elliot was unbalanced, unpredictable. Look at his obsession with that girl in the pub. He’s our man. He can’t have got far. We’ll have him tonight.”

But as the afternoon wore on there was no information about Elliot. No-one had seen the car. The men waiting in the police house became irritable and impatient, and to make things worse Fred Elliot was on the phone every half-hour wanting to know if his son had been found and claiming that Charlie, too, had been murdered.

At half-past six Ramsay had waited long enough.

“I’m going to Otterbridge,” he said to Hunter, “to talk to the Laidlaws. Go and sit with old man Elliot. There’s a chance Charlie will come home when he’s cold and hungry. And you’ll need to break that alibi if you’re to prove Charlie guilty. Elliot might talk while he’s so upset.”

They walked together down the street to the green, where Ramsay’s car was parked. Despite the cold, two teenage boys in black leather stood by the bus stop, smoking a cigarette, passing it between them.

Poor sods, thought Hunter. What else is there for them to do in a place like this?

“Nip over and get their names and addresses,” Ramsay said. “Stella Laidlaw saw some lads at the bus stop on Saturday night. Find out if it was them.”

Hunter went, sauntering towards them, indirectly over the grass. Ramsay thought Hunter had more in common with the boys than he did with him. The sky was clear and there would be another frost. Ramsay shivered as he watched the three figures by the bus shelter. He saw Hunter take a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and hand it around, then the three of them huddled together around the lighter, sheltering the flame from the breeze. He imagined the three in conspiracy against him. “That’s my boss,” he imagined Hunter saying. “But don’t take any notice of him. If you’ve got any information, come straight to me.”

That’s ridiculous, he thought. Diana always said I was paranoid. But his suspicions about Diana had been justified and she had run away eventually with someone who produced television programmes for the BBC in Fenham.

Hunter returned, stubbing out the cigarette with the heel of his designer trainers before he reached the inspector.

“They’re all right,” he said. “Bored out of their brains, but who can blame them in a place like this? They weren’t here Saturday night, but they’ve given me the names and addresses of a couple of other lads who might have been.”

Ramsay nodded and walked on alone to his car. Hunter might be good at communicating with local teenagers, but he had other skills. He had been married to Diana. He knew how to talk to the civilised middle classes.

Max Laidlaw was on call that Monday morning but paid the deputising service to take the duty for him. Judy wanted him to take Peter to school, then spend some time with her and the twins. In the afternoon he had a surgery and by then he would be pleased to leave the house. He told himself he needed time to think. In a sense Alice Parry’s death had changed nothing and there were still decisions to be made. In the chaotic house in Otterbridge he found decisions impossible.

Judy made things worse. All morning she seemed unable to leave the subject of his aunt’s death alone. She followed him around the house demanding his attention, desperate, it seemed, for his opinion. Even while he was shaving she was shouting at him through the closed bathroom door.

“What did you think of Ramsay, the detective?” she asked. “I didn’t know what to make of him. He seemed rather hostile, I thought.” Then: “How did Alice seem to you that night? Was she even more upset than she said?”

“I don’t know,” he shouted, slamming out of the room, almost tripping over her on the landing. “And I don’t bloody care.”

“But you talked to her,” Judy said, catching him up as he ran down the stairs to the kitchen. “You helped her clear up the dishes after supper and she wouldn’t let anyone else into the kitchen. ‘I want a private word with Max,’ she said, and she sent us all away. So what was the great secret?”

“There wasn’t any secret,” he said. “ You know what she was like.”

“At one time you would have trusted me. Now you don’t share anything.” She gave him one of her hurt and vulnerable looks.

“There was no secret,” he said. “Really.”

I’m too soft, he thought. When she looks at me like that, I’d promise her anything. He wanted to make some gesture of affection, but before he could show her how much he cared for her, one of the twins cried for her attention and she turned away.

Throughout the morning the children irritated him. On the way to school Peter was listless and tired, reacting to the smallest provocation with tears or temper, and in the house the twins whined with a mechanical, metallic sound that grated on his nerves.

“Of course they’re demanding,” Alice had said on the evening of her death when they were alone in the kitchen at the Tower. “But you wouldn’t be without them, would you?”

And he had responded wholeheartedly: No, of course he wouldn’t be without them. He loved them.

Now it did not seem so simple, and he longed for the old times, when he was a tandem-riding student, before guilt and responsibility.

When the time came to go to the surgery, Judy seemed to sense his unhappiness. She was concerned about him, she said. She put on boots and a sweater to help him clear the ice from the windscreen of the car and told him to take care when he was driving.

“Drive slowly,” she said. “It’s still very slippery. Perhaps you should walk.”

“I’m only going into town,” he said, though he was pleased that she was worrying about him. “The roads will be clear by now.”

Before he drove off she stood close to him and kissed him. Her nose was cold and the unexpected gesture shocked and touched him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “ It’s been my fault. You will take care?”

He nodded and squeezed her arm, then got into the car.

The roads were a slushy mess, the thin layer of snow already melted by salt and regular traffic, but in a school playground a queue of running boys in grey uniforms slid down an icy run. Max braked too sharply at a traffic light and the car slid forward before stopping, harmlessly, against the kerb. The jolt made him think of Judy and her concern for him. She was wrong, he thought. It was not her fault, but he could think of nothing that would make things right. The lights changed and he drove on slowly.

The Health Centre was packed. Four buggies had been parked in the porch outside, and he had to push his way past them to get into the waiting room. Inside the room was hot and noisy with the damp acoustics of swimming baths. The place was full, it seemed, with feverish children and bronchitic grandmothers. The receptionist was flushed and fraught. She hardly acknowledged Max as he walked past because she was trying to answer the telephone and find a missing file at the same time. The ill-tempered chaos suited his mood and he called irritably for the first patient.

Stella Laidlaw phoned late in the afternoon when he was examining his last patient, a toddler with an ear infection. The receptionist spoke to him first.

“I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “I explained that you were busy, but the lady insisted. She wouldn’t give her name. She said it was personal.”