Murder in My Backyard (16 page)

In the
Express
office James Laidlaw heard Mary’s car from his desk and walked to the window to watch her arrive. The car’s exhaust had been going for days and she claimed not to have the time or the money to get it mended. He wondered sometimes why he had ever employed her. Her lack of organisation was legendary. He watched her climb clumsily out of the small car and heard her come up the stairs. Then she burst into the office, dropping scarf, keys, files onto the floor.

“Don’t look at me like that, Marg!” she said to the receptionist. “You’ve got to be kind to me. I’ve got a hangover.”

“Where have you been?” James asked, standing in the doorway.

“Magistrates court,” she said. “ It’s the first Monday of the month. I knew you wouldn’t want to do it today. The flasher from Whittingham was up. Otherwise it was all motoring.”

“Oh.” James was momentarily distracted. “ What did he get?”

“Remanded for social enquiry reports,” she said. “ There were a couple of drunk drivings and a strange thing happened—” She broke off, realising that legal gossip was inappropriate. “ I’m so sorry about your aunt Alice, James,” she said. “ Isn’t it awful? She was such a nice lady.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She was.”

“I met her, you know, on the afternoon before she died.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She told me.”

“She was so sympathetic. So easy to talk to.”

“Have the police been to see you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “ They might have been to the flat. I haven’t been in much. I went to a party in Newcastle on Saturday night and stayed with friends in town. I didn’t get home until late last night. When exactly did she die?”

“Saturday night,” he said. “At about midnight.”

“So she died soon after I’d seen her,” she said. “Do the police know who killed her?”

He shrugged. “ They won’t tell me,” he said, “but there was a lot of ill feeling in the village about the new housing development.”

“I know,” she said. “I was at the residents’ meeting on Saturday afternoon. They were really angry.”

He looked at her sharply. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “ Why were you there? We’d decided not to cover the Brinkbonnie development because I couldn’t be objective.”

“I thought
I
could cover it objectively,” she said. “And if you didn’t want to run the story, someone else might.”

“We don’t work that way here,” he said. “I intend to run a paper with standards.”

“I’ve got standards!” she cried. Her face was flushed and he thought she looked like a moody teenager. He did not know how old she was. She had worked for him for five years and had seemed no younger then than she did now. He knew very little about what she did when she was on her own. She had kept her student friends and her social life seemed to consist of wild, alcoholic parties and evenings in smoky pubs.

“I thought it was a good story,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “ I didn’t mean to snap. I’m upset.” He looked at her. “She didn’t say anything that might help the police find out who killed her? They’ll want to talk to you, anyway.”

She shook her head. “We ended up talking about personal things,” she said. “She was so easy to confide in.”

“I’ll miss her,” he said, and returned to his desk to work.

They left the office together at five o’clock. He wondered if he should phone Stella to tell her that he was on his way home but decided against it. He had been half expecting her to ring him, to demand his presence back at the house, but there had been no call and that was a good sign. He pulled the glass door tightly shut behind them, then went down the stairs into the street. There was a smell of stale beer from the pub next door.

“Where are you off to tonight?” he asked, as he walked her to her car.

“Home,” she said bitterly. “ To an empty flat.”

He waited until she got into the Mini and revved it into life, then with grating and erratic lurches drove it away up the street. By now it was very cold. With the darkness the temperature had dropped. He thought for a moment of the plight of the swan on the river, trapped as the ice spread, then started quickly home, resisting the temptation to go into the Blue Anchor for a drink to warm him up first.

As Mary Raven drove from the
Express
office to her flat, the depression that she had kept at bay with alcohol and frantic activity since Saturday night returned. Persistent and awkward questions repeated themselves in her mind, and she was very tired. She saw the lights of a large supermarket that stayed open late in the evening and realised she was hungry and that there was no food in the house. She turned sharply into the carpark. The motorist behind her hit his horn and she mouthed obscenities to him in her mirror.

She took a trolley and began to wander aimlessly down the aisles. The place was almost empty and the few shoppers she met intimidated her with their efficiency. They were well-dressed women on their way home from work with lists in their hands and a detailed map of the shop in their heads. They would have, she could tell, strong views on artificial additives, and she imagined that they looked at the contents of her trolley with disapproval. Defiantly she lifted pies, ready-cooked meals, and several tins of rice pudding from the shelves. What was the point in eating healthfully when you felt like dying? At the off-licence beyond the checkout she bought two bottles of wine and four cans of lager. Outside it was dark and the trolley had a wheel jammed. When she got into the car, she felt like crying.

She saw Max’s car, empty, parked outside her flat when she arrived there and read the licence plate by the street light with disbelief. She had been dreaming about Max for two days and had thought she would never see him again. The sight of the car, solid and familiar, made her think she had been a fool to be frightened. After all, she knew Max. He was a doctor, caring and gentle. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Her fears had been caused by lack of sleep and an overactive imagination.

One of the other tenants of the house had let him into the hall and he stood there by the ugly Victorian sideboard, clasping an armful of flowers. He looked worried and very serious and she thought he would put on a face like that when he was telling one of his patients that they had some dreadful illness.

“What are you doing here?” she asked roughly. She would not allow herself to seem pleased to see him. She could not forget the days of anxiety.

“I had to see you,” he said. “ Can’t you let me in?”

She had a carrier bag in each hand and set them on the floor while she felt in her jacket pocket for her keys. A can of lager rolled out and he stopped it with his foot and picked it up. She opened the door and led him into her living room. It smelled damp and stale. He took both bags from her in one hand and carried them through to the kitchen while she lit the gas fire and drew the curtains. He still held the flowers carefully in the other hand.

“What happened to your aunt?” she asked. She was standing with her back to the fire, but she felt very cold. “ I have to know.”

He set the flowers carefully on the scratched wooden table.

“You can’t think I had anything to do with that,” he said.

She shrugged. “ I don’t know what to think. On Saturday night I thought it was all over. I’d come to terms with that, and now you’re here. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

“That I can’t do without you. I need you.”

“Don’t give me all that crap,” she said, but as the fire warmed her feet and fingers, she felt her resistance melting, too. She longed for the old elation and felt that after all it was still possible. Would it make any difference to her, she thought, if she found out he was a murderer? In her confusion and her pleasure in his company, she came to no conclusion.

“What about your wife?” she asked. “ Can you do without her?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not only that. I have responsibilities. There are the children, my work. And now there’s the problem of Alice.”

“So you’ve still not made a choice,” she said. “ You’re here, but you’ve still not decided.”

“How can I decide,” he cried. “I care for you both.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Really. It’s impossible.”

He moved away from the kitchen door and walked towards her. She knew she should be strong and tell him to go back to his bloody wife and his bloody kids, but she said nothing. He stood very close to her.

“I need more time,” he said quietly. “ You don’t understand. Things have changed. Someone saw you in the churchyard on Saturday night. It could be dangerous. If the police find out …”

“I know someone saw me,” she said. “I recognised him. It was that man from the meeting, Charlie Elliot. But don’t worry. He was drunk. He won’t remember anything, and if he does the police won’t believe him.”

“He saw you?” Max demanded. He was shocked. “ How could you let that happen?”

“I didn’t know then,” she said, “that it would be so important.”

“How can you say that?” he said, then seeing the surprise on her face, wanting to reassure her, he continued more reasonably: “No, of course not. How could you?”

“You can’t think I had anything to do with your aunt’s murder?” she said. His reaction to learning she had been seen in the churchyard frightened her. “ I liked her. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.”

“No,” he said flatly. “ I know you had nothing to do with that.” He reached out and stroked her face and neck, just under her ear where he knew she liked it. She could not respond to the caress and turned away.

“Look,” she said. “This business has made me feel really uptight. Why don’t we open some wine?”

“I don’t know,” he said, tempted. “I don’t think I should stay. Judy will be expecting me home. She’s worried about the kids. Peter found the body …”

“Oh, fine,” she said, suddenly angry. “You were feeling guilty because you put me in such a bloody awkward position on Saturday night, so you bring me flowers and think everything’s hunky-dory. Now you can go back to your wife and children and forget about me again.”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “Really.”

“It seemed like that on Saturday,” she said, “while I was waiting for you.”

“I’ll phone you tonight,” he said, “ when Judy’s in bed. Will you be in?”

“Yes,” she said. “ Of course I’ll be in. Where the hell am I likely to go?”

But she allowed him to put his arms around her and kiss her, and it was only after he had gone and she was arranging the flowers haphazardly in water that she felt she had been deceived.

When James arrived home he found Stella calmer, returned almost to her normal self, though he could tell by her restlessness that she was still under considerable stress. She seemed to find it impossible to sit still. She had lit a fire in the living room and made him stand in front of it to thaw out, while she brought him whisky and slippers.

“You’re losing all the heat into the garden,” he said, nodding towards the window. “Why don’t you draw the curtains?”

But she refused. The ice in the moonlight was so beautiful, she said, and lasted such a short time. They should make the most of it.

“Where’s Carolyn?” he asked.

“In her bedroom, watching television.”

“You should be more careful what you say in front of her,” he said. “You hurt her at lunchtime.”

“Nonsense,” Stella said. “ She didn’t say anything. She’s a tough little lady.”

“No,” he said. “ She’s not as tough as she makes out. She keeps all her feelings bottled up and that’s dangerous. We expect too much of her.”

He was genuinely worried about Carolyn. Since the weekend she had not mentioned Alice and he found her silence unhealthy, even if it was easier for him than tears or difficult questions. He wondered if he had gone too far in talking about the girl. Stella usually reacted to any implied criticism of her ability as a mother with tears. But now she seemed strong enough to cope with anything.

“I expect you’re right,” she said. “ She’s so grown up now. I forget sometimes how young she is.”

Ramsay went to speak to the Laidlaws that night without any clear idea of what he hoped to achieve. He had nothing to ask them that would not wait until the following day. He was grasping for some shred of evidence that would move the investigation forward. From his car he contacted the communications centre. There was still no news of Charlie Elliot. He admitted to himself later that he also went because he had been so affected by the warmth of Max and Judy’s home. He needed evidence that marriage was not always as happy as theirs seemed to be, that he was not really missing out on anything of value. Perhaps he hoped to find that evidence in the elegant house in Otterbridge. There was also an element of needing to propitiate James Laidlaw, of what Hunter would call “sucking up to the press.”

When he first entered the tall Georgian house behind the abbey, it seemed to Ramsay that he would be disappointed. He was met with an image of domestic contentment. Stella was curled up in a large armchair in front of the fire reading a book and the little girl was playing with a jigsaw on the floor. James opened the door to him and showed Ramsay into the room, taking obvious pleasure in his family. Yet throughout the conversation Ramsay felt uneasy. Stella talked too much and too quickly, and this was odd in comparison with her silence of the previous day. James watched her protectively. He answered Ramsay’s questions quickly, before Stella could come in, as if he were afraid of her making a fool of herself. More disturbing to Ramsay was the child, who watched him with an intense and unblinking stare, motivated, he thought, either by hatred or fear.

“Will you have a drink, Inspector?” Stella asked. “ It’s so cold. You must have a drink.”

Ramsay said he would have a small one to keep out the cold. Stella returned to her chair with a drink for herself, and as she talked she twisted the stem of her glass between her fingers.

“This is all so upsetting,” she said. “ You can’t imagine how upset we are.”

Ramsay made no reply.

“How can we help you, Inspector?” James said.

“Just a few questions,” Ramsay said. “And I wanted to keep you in touch with what’s been going on. I’ve just come from your brother’s house.”