Murder in My Backyard (18 page)

“Yes,” she said. “He’s a doctor at the Health Centre. I know his wife. We’re both involved with the women writers workshop.”

“Did you talk to Mrs. Parry about Max or Judy Laidlaw?”

“Only indirectly,” she said. “ She thought her family should have given her more support over the development issue.”

“She wanted them behind the banners trying to stop the builder?” Hunter was sneering, trying to provoke a reaction.

“Something like that.”

“Not very likely, is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably not. James wants to keep his objectivity. Max might be more sympathetic.”

“What time did you leave Mrs. Parry?”

“I don’t know. About half-past four. She was expecting her family.”

“Did anyone come to the house while you were there?”

“No,” she said. “But as I was on my way into the village someone was coming across the green towards the Tower. When he saw me, he waited until I came out before he went into the churchyard. I was a bit worried. I wondered if I should go back and check that Mrs. Parry was all right, but I thought she was probably able to look after herself.”

“Are you sure he went up to the house?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw him walk through the churchyard to the little gate into the garden.”

“Who was it?”

“The fat man who was so rude to Mrs. Parry at the meeting.”

Charlie Elliot, Ramsay thought, delivering the letter.

“Did you see him come out again?” Hunter asked.

“Yes,” she said. “ Just as I was getting into my car.”

“Where had you parked your car?”

“By the green outside the church.”

Hunter paused, drank tea. “ Did you walk through the churchyard to get to your car?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t like to wander through Mrs. Parry’s garden. I went down the drive.”

“Did you go into the churchyard later that evening?”

“No,” she said. “ It looked very interesting, but I didn’t go in.”

You’re lying, Ramsay thought. But why? Hunter was continuing with his questions.

“When did you leave Brinkbonnie?”

“As soon as I got to my car,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

She hesitated just for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “What reason could I have for staying?”

Ramsay’s head was full of questions, none of which was possible to ask her. If she was the woman in the churchyard, where had she left her car? No-one had seen any strange car on the green that night. And what on earth had she been doing there? Was there an angle on the planning story she was reluctant to talk about before her article was finished? Or was the reason more personal? He spoke for the first time since the interview had started and his soft voice surprised her.

“Tell me,” he said. “What relationship do you have with your employer?”

“What do you mean?” she demanded angrily. “Relationship? Do you want to know if he is screwing me?”

He smiled, as if amused by her childishness, her lack of taste and sophistication.

“Let me tell you,” she said. “James Laidlaw and I have no relationship at all outside the office. He’s besotted with his wife.”

“You don’t meet him at all socially.”

“Occasionally,” she said vaguely. “ We have some mutual friends.”

Ramsay nodded and indicated to Hunter that he should continue the questions.

“Where were you on Saturday evening?” Hunter asked.

“In Newcastle,” she said. “At a party.” She looked at him defiantly. “I can give you the address if you like. I got drunk and stayed the night. I slept on the floor. On my own.”

“That would be very helpful,” he said.

“What time did you arrive at the party?” Ramsay asked.

“I don’t know!” She was almost shouting. “How should I know? I went home to change first. I didn’t want to get there until it had warmed up. What are all these questions about?”

“A woman answering your description was seen in the Brinkbonnie churchyard on Saturday night,” Ramsay said formally. “We need to eliminate her from our enquiries.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Who saw this woman, anyway?”

“A reliable witness,” Ramsay lied.

“Why are you bothering with this?” Mary cried. “ You know who killed her. Why aren’t you out there looking for him? You’re just wasting time, my time.”

Ramsay said nothing. He knew Hunter agreed with Mary Raven. He thought they were wasting time, too. Charlie Elliot had murdered Alice Parry and run away. If he was innocent, Hunter had said, he would have come forward by now. We’ll find him. He might even have left the country, but we’ll get him in the end. Ramsay sighed. He felt his options were closing. He could not afford another failure. It was easier, perhaps, to accept the general opinion that Charlie Elliot had killed Alice Parry in a drunken rage. It was not so unlikely, after all. He stood up and then, on impulse, wrote the number of the Incident Room on a scrap of paper.

“If you remember anything,” he said, “or come across any information that might help, give me a ring. Inspector Ramsay.”

She looked up briefly and nodded, but he saw her roll the paper into a ball and push it into her pocket before returning her attention to her notebook.

In the street the policemen paused in the sunshine. Hunter wanted to get back to the Incident Room, taking phone calls, tracking down Elliot, but Ramsay seemed gripped by an obsession, haunted, Hunter thought, by the woman in the churchyard.

“I didn’t believe Miss Raven,” the inspector said. “She was lying.”

Hunter stood sullen and unresponsive. He thought Mary Raven was an irrelevance. He was afraid of their colleagues stealing the glory of Elliot’s discovery.

“Go to Newcastle!” Ramsay said. “ Check her story. Find out what time she arrived there and as much as you can about her.”

Hunter nodded unenthusiastically.

“I’ll go back to Brinkbonnie,” Ramsay said, “and check the addresses of the lads in the bus shelter. They might have seen the woman in the churchyard.”

He felt a renewed energy and hope. Mary Raven’s denial became a challenge. He looked again through the café window. She was drinking more coffee and stared anxiously and absent-mindedly towards the wall.

Hunter found the house where Mary Raven claimed to have spent Saturday night in a quiet, scruffy street close to the hospital. There was a Chinese take-away on the corner and rubbish in the small front gardens. Many of the houses were owned by the same landlord and let to students. From one house came the sound of rock music. Outside another group of young people sat on the front steps talking in loud southern voices. Hunter felt he had wandered into an alien land. The group on the steps stopped and stared at him, though by the time he reached the house where Mary’s friends lived they had resumed their conversation. The house was near the end of the terrace, with a CND sticker in a bedroom window and a bicycle propped against the fence. He knocked at the door, hoping that he would find no-one there. Weren’t students supposed to go to college after all? Didn’t they have lectures and tutorials to attend?

The door was opened by a pretty blond girl wearing a kimono. She had a towel wrapped around her hair, bare feet, and pink toenails. She did not seem surprised by Hunter. Nothing surprised her.

“I didn’t expect to find anyone in,” Hunter said. “ I thought you were all at the university.” He would have liked to mention grants, taxpayers’ money, but felt his disapproval would be lost on her.

“No,” she said vaguely. “ Not today. No lectures. I’ll be going in to the library later.”

She looked briefly at his identification card and stood aside to let him into a poorly lit hall. The plaster was peeling onto the floor, and as she walked ahead of him into the living room he saw the small white pieces stuck to the soles of her feet.

The living room was large and well proportioned but almost empty. A huge Japanese paper lampshade hung from the ceiling. There was a settee with a pine frame and brown cushions and an expensive stereo with a shelf of cassettes and a box of records. The carpet was threadbare and not very clean. Hunter sat gingerly on the settee. He could feel the wooden struts of the frame through the thin padding of the cushion.

“Sorry,” she said. “It isn’t very comfortable.” She sat on the floor, her long, smooth legs straight before her, her ankles crossed. She began to dry her hair.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“You had a party on Saturday night,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, unbothered, unafraid. “It was my birthday on Sunday. Did the neighbours complain about the noise? I don’t know why. We invited them all to come.”

“No,” he said. He was finding the interview very difficult. “It’s not that. Was Mary Raven at the party?”

“Yes,” she said. Her hair was long and fine. She pulled out the tangles with her fingers. “ She was here. She stayed the night. She was too drunk to drive home.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I can’t remember exactly.” She considered, frowning. “ She was at university, I think, with some of my friends. I share the house with a couple of postgraduates. I probably met her through them. She always seems to be around. Of course, she’s a lot older than me.” She took the damp towel from her shoulders and folded it on the floor. “What’s this all about?”

“Miss Raven was in Brinkbonnie on Saturday afternoon. We need to eliminate her from the Alice Parry murder. It’s only a formality.”

“Oh.” For the first time she was shocked, even impressed. She looked at Hunter through long, fair eyelashes. “How exciting.”

“What time did she arrive at the party?” he asked.

The girl shrugged. “ She was late,” she said. “We didn’t get home ourselves until the pub shut and she turned up soon after, perhaps eleven-thirty, a quarter to twelve. She was definitely here by midnight. They all sang ‘ Happy Birthday’ to me when the clock struck twelve and I remember Mary joining in. She’s got a terrible voice.”

“And she didn’t leave the party after that?”

“No,” the girl said. “I’ve already told you. She was too drunk. I think she’d been drinking before she got here.”

“Was Miss Raven on her own at the party?”

“What do you mean?” She seemed already to have lost interest and was looking vacantly out of the window.

“Did she have a boyfriend with her?”

The girl smiled, her attention caught again. “ Oh, no,” she said. “We’re never allowed to meet Mary’s boyfriend. He’s a deadly secret. She only talks about him when she’s been drinking and then she starts to cry.”

“Who is he?” Hunter asked.

“I’ve told you I don’t know. None of us have ever seen him.”

“But she must have told you something about him.”

She smiled again. “Nothing useful,” she said. “Only that he’s handsome, stimulating, sensitive. And married.”

“How long has she known him?”

“I think it all started last summer. She disappeared from the scene for a while then, and she’s never gone out with anyone else since.”

“And you have no idea who this man might be?”

“No,” she said. “ Sometimes I think Mary made him up. She can be quite strange at times, you know, a bit intense, and rude. I had thought he might be a figment of her imagination.”

Hunter was reluctant to go. He sat on the low, uncomfortable sofa watching the pretty young woman brush her hair like a veil across her face, hoping that she might offer him coffee, allow him to prolong his stay. But she looked up at him and smiled.

“Is that it?” she asked. “Any more questions?”

He shook his head and she stood up to show him out into the street.

Outside Hunter felt elated. It was twelve o’clock and the smell of ginger and soy sauce lingered in the street, but he was no longer offended by it. If Mary Raven had arrived at the party in Newcastle by midnight, she could not have murdered Alice Parry. Now, perhaps, Ramsay would leave the case alone and admit that Charlie Elliot should be caught and brought to court. He would have to admit that Hunter was right.

All morning Ramsay was aware of time passing, of seconds and minutes slipping by. In Otterbridge on his way from the
Express
office to the café to interview Mary Raven, he had walked so quickly that Hunter had difficulty keeping up with him. On the way to Brinkbonnie he knew he was driving too fast. It was a mild spring day and the only remaining trace of snow was a white swathe under the hedges and trees and, as he drove past at speed, what might have been a carpet of snowdrops.

As he approached the village he reluctantly slowed the car. He passed Henshaw’s palatial bungalow and turned briefly to see if Henshaw’s Rover was parked in the drive. There was no sign of it. Then he came to the high, ivy-covered wall to the entrance of the Tower drive. From there he could see the sweep of Brinkbonnie Bay and the sunlight on the breaking waves. In the centre of the village he parked behind the Castle Hotel so that his car could not be seen from the street. He did not want to give the residents warning that he was there.

The first address on Hunter’s list of lads who regularly hung around the bus shelter was a red-brick council house in a small crescent behind the smart houses that overlooked the green. The road was dark, in the shadow of the hill, and it was quiet. Ramsay knocked at the door, but there was no reply. A neighbour who must have been watching the inspector’s approach from behind thick lace curtains hurtled out into the front garden, obviously afraid that he might leave before she could find out who he was and what he wanted.

“She’s not there, pet,” the elderly lady said, then, hopefully: “Can I take a message?”

Ramsay ignored the offer. “Where is she then?” he asked.

“At work, pet,” the woman said. “ She’s a dinner nanny at the little school. She’ll be home soon. You can wait in with me if you like.”

“No,” Ramsay said. “Thank you.” She was so lonely that he knew it would take him hours to escape once he was in the house. “It was the lad I wanted to talk to.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, he’s not there. He’s at school.” She looked at him curiously. “At least he went off on the school bus this morning,” she said. “Are you from the welfare?”

She had placed Ramsay as an education officer checking on truancy.