Murder in My Backyard (29 page)

In the police house Ramsay sat alone and waited for something to happen. He was not sure what he was expecting but sensed that they were close to some resolution. He put out a general call that he should be notified of Mary Raven’s whereabouts, but he did not want to apprehend her. If they found Max Laidlaw, he should be brought in for questioning immediately.

He telephoned Judy, who answered the phone very quickly.

“Yes,” she said. “ Who’s there?” He could sense her holding her breath, praying that it was her husband.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s Inspector Ramsay. I was calling to find out if you’ve heard from your husband.”

“No,” she said. “ I’ve heard nothing. No-one seems to know where he is.”

The children must have been returned to her because in the background he heard one of the children calling for a drink.

“Try not to worry,” he said. “ If Max does get in touch, perhaps you could let me know.”

“Yes,” she said. She sounded exhausted. “Of course.” She seemed not even to have the energy to replace the receiver because as he pressed the cradle to cut off the call he heard the toddler talking again.

The afternoon wore on and he waited for a knock at the door, for the message that someone in the village wanted to talk to him. He switched on the light to make the place more welcoming and phoned the Otterbridge Incident Room again. Mary Raven had been seen in Otterbridge, they said. They were keeping an eye on her.

“Don’t lose her!” Ramsay said. “And don’t pick her up unless she takes you to Max Laidlaw.”

He settled down to wait again.

He welcomed Hunter’s return at least as a break from the tension, but he was disappointed that it was the policeman and not one of the locals who stood outside waiting to be let in.

“Well?” he demanded as soon as Hunter was inside. “How did you get on?”

Hunter shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “ Robson’s theory won’t work. Jane Massie was really committed to the campaign to stop the houses being built. I believed her. She showed me evidence, too. She wrote lots of letters all the way through. There’s no way that the campaign collapsed because she dropped out, and she says that the same committee ran the thing all the way through. No-one made any excuses to leave or not pull their weight.”

Ramsay was listening intently. “Did Henshaw make any approaches to her while the planning process was going through?” he asked.

Hunter shook his head again. “ Not until it was all over,” he said, “and then he gave a donation to the village playgroup. Jane Massie runs that, too.”

Then Ramsay lost patience. He had been waiting long enough. He wanted to talk to Henshaw again, to confront him with his wife’s statement that he had left the house on Saturday night after Alice Parry’s visit. He felt that the builder was mocking him.

“Stay here,” he said to Hunter. “I’m expecting someone from the village to make an approach. Be gentle with them. I don’t want them frightened off.”

He slammed the door behind him and walked quickly across the green to the Otterbridge Road. Perhaps it was because he was so angry and preoccupied that he made the same mistake as he had on the night after Alice Parry’s murder and walked into the Greys’ farmyard instead of the Henshaws’ drive. The place was quiet. He felt rather ridiculous, standing in the muddy farmyard looking round him absentmindedly, and the embarrassment of his previous mistake returned. He imagined Celia Grey looking down on him from one of the upstairs windows, sneering at his indecision. It would be impossible now to turn round and go away. Charlie Elliot’s body had been found on Grey’s land, so he had a perfectly good excuse for being there. So, still imagining that he was being watched, trying to present an air of purpose, he walked towards the back door. If it had not been for his pride, he would never have seen Henshaw’s Rover tucked into one of the machinery sheds. Only the bumper was showing.

The back door was slightly open and the kitchen was empty. He knocked and called, but no-one answered. He waited, still thinking that his approach had been seen, then pushed open the door and went inside. The farmyard had been full of late-afternoon sunshine and long, warm shadows. When he entered the shadow of the kitchen, he shivered. He put his hand on the top of the range, but it was cold. The kitchen was much tidier than it had been on his previous visit, the sink and draining board empty, the work surfaces clear except for a bowl of rather mucky, recently collected eggs. The tile floor had been washed and in one corner it was still damp. He moved on through the door that led into the rest of the house, into the entrance hall where he had stood with Celia Grey on his last visit, trying to persuade her to allow him to talk to her son. The sun came in from an upstairs window and lit the specks of dust in the stairwell. There were two other doors leading from the hall. Both were huge and heavy and must have blocked out all sound. Both were shut tight. He called out and his voice echoed over the stone flags:

“Mrs. Grey! Are you there?” Immediately after speaking he opened the nearest of the doors.

They were sitting together in a small living room. Ramsay guessed that Celia Grey would consider it her own room. It would not be used by the rest of the family. It had no television and he could not imagine a teenage boy in here. The windows were small and it was still in shadow. There was a brick fireplace with a bowl of dried flowers on the grate. On a small sofa Henshaw and Celia sat close to each other. Henshaw was turned towards her, holding one of her hands in both of his. When he saw Ramsay, standing just inside the room, he jumped to his feet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” he demanded. “I thought you needed a search warrant before you did this sort of thing.”

“I did knock,” Ramsay said mildly. “I was hoping to talk to Mrs. Grey, but it’s convenient that you’re here, too.”

“You can’t talk to her now,” Henshaw blustered. “Can’t you see that she’s upset? You know what they found on their land earlier this week. It’s been a terrible shock.”

“Did Mrs. Grey have a shock on the evening of Alice Parry’s death?” Ramsay asked:

“What do you mean?”

“You came here, didn’t you, on Saturday night?” Ramsay asked. Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Celia Grey. “I think your husband was away,” he said, “and you sent your son out into the village. But Mr. Henshaw was late. He had an unexpected visitor. Someone it was hard to get rid of. Was Mr. Henshaw still here when Ian came home? Perhaps we should ask your son.”

“What are you saying?” It was Henshaw again, red-faced with anger and concern. “Bob and Celia are neighbours, friends. I’m here because I heard that Charlie Elliot had been found in the barn. I wanted to offer my help. He’s a good chap, Bob, but not very imaginative. I thought she might need some support.”

“Do you always park your car in the shed so it can’t be seen from the road?” Ramsay asked reasonably, and Henshaw’s outburst seemed unbalanced and irrational.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Henshaw said. “ You should watch what you’re saying.”

Celia Grey stood up and both men fell silent. “It’s no good, Colin,” she said. “He knows. I told you it would all come out in the end.”

“It’s none of their business,” Henshaw muttered. He gazed at her sentimentally. “How could anyone else understand?”

“I’m afraid it is my business,” Ramsay said. “Do you realise that you’re a suspect in a murder enquiry, Mr. Henshaw? We believe that Charlie Elliot was murdered by the same person as Alice Parry. We’re still looking for her killer. If you have any information that would eliminate you from our enquiries, it would be in your interest to give it.”

“Colin was here when Alice Parry was killed,” Celia Grey said. “You were right. My husband was visiting his mother in hospital in the Lake District. I’d rather you didn’t ask my son, but you were right about that, too. Colin was still here when he arrived home.”

“What about Monday evening?” Ramsay asked. “Was Mr. Henshaw here then, too? Is that why you didn’t notice any noise in the farmyard?”

She nodded.

“Thank you,” Ramsay said. They were a strangely matched couple, he thought. She seemed so upright and cold. He could picture her dressed in Puritan black and white as one of the New England settlers, motivated by principle and guilt.

Henshaw, in contrast, was driven by greed and ambition and seemed to have no sense of morality at all. Yet he looked at her now with tenderness and admiration and he had done everything in his power to protect her. “ It would have been easier,” Ramsay said, “if you’d told me straightaway.”

“I couldn’t have Celia bothered,” Henshaw muttered. “ I had to consider her reputation. She has her position in the village to think about. Don’t you know she’s chairwoman of the WI?”

There was no irony in his voice. It seemed to Ramsay then that Henshaw was the innocent and Celia Grey was the corrupter of souls. He wondered when and how the relationship had started. He thought it could have no future.

“Now I know all about your affair,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me what
really
happened in your conversation with Alice Parry.”

“Nothing,” Henshaw said rudely. “I’ve told you everything that happened. There’s nothing more to say.”

Ramsay did not believe him, but time was slipping past and he was no nearer to reaching a solution. He left them, closeted in the half darkness, sharing their secret, frightened affection.

By early evening of the same day, Mary Raven had her story. It was complex. She would have preferred to talk to Henshaw, of course. She was convinced that he played a part in it somewhere. But she had evidence enough without him, and she had not tried too hard to find him. She had rattled into Brinkbonnie in the morning, staying long enough to annoy Rosemary Henshaw, then driven on to talk to other people in different places. At the back of her mind all the time there was her concern for Max, and as she drove along, she stared out as if she might see him by chance walking down the pavement towards her. Perhaps the anxiety clouded her judgement because she had no sense of danger.

She had gone to the west of Newcastle to a converted warehouse where an ex-councillor had set up a charitable trust for alcoholics. She talked to the man and all of the residents, as well as an old lady who had lived rough for years, walking from the Scottish borders to the Tees every summer, and who had been persuaded to make her home in this building off the Scotswood Road with its view of the Tyne. Then Mary drove back to Otterbridge to the geriatric hospital and talked to another old lady, her body as fine and frail as a pipe-cleaner doll, her mind as bright and clear as a child’s, her memory perfect. By this time Mary was pushed on not only by ambition but by anger.

When she got to her flat, Mary saw her landlady, who lived in the house next door, staring at her curiously through the living-room window. When Mary moved she disappeared guiltily, so Mary thought: She’s planning to put the rent up again. But the landlady had promised to phone the police as soon as Mary got home. She thought Mary was a nice girl and had never liked the police, so it was a difficult and awkward thing to do.

Inside the flat Mary boiled the kettle, made a mug of coffee, and started in her mind to write her story. Absentmindedly she went to collect her mail from the front door. There was a leaflet about the poll tax, and hand-delivered, still stuck in the flap of the letter box, a note.

“Meet me,” it said. “ Brinkbonnie dunes. Eight o’clock.”

He had signed it with the incomprehensible scribble that could only be deciphered by colleagues and pharmacists.

She stood for a moment in the grimy, ill-lit hall holding the note and staring at it. The coffee mug in the other hand tilted and tipped hot liquid over the carpet and her foot. There was none of the elation she might have expected. She was glad he was safe and had apparently so far avoided arrest, but she was not even sure if she wanted to see him.

I’m tired, she thought. I can’t handle this. Not now. I need a drink.

The day before, she would have been overjoyed to receive such a summons from Max. Now it was just something else to worry about.

She walked into the living room and propped the note in the typewriter her parents had given her as an eighteenth-birthday present. She stared at it anxiously as if it were a bomb. She looked at her watch. It was seven-thirty already. She went to the window to draw the curtains to put off making a decision. The street was empty. Whatever shadow she had imagined had been following her had disappeared. It was all hallucination, she thought. I’m losing my mind. She finished her coffee and took the empty mug into the kitchen. The phone began to ring, disturbing and insistent. Suddenly, just to avoid answering it, she picked up her jacket and car keys and went outside, leaving the light on in the living room and the note in the typewriter.

Carolyn Laidlaw arrived home from school on Friday evening to find the house empty. She had her own key and let herself in, apprehensive about what she might find there. She switched on the radio to Metro, almost expecting to hear on the local news that someone had been arrested for the Brinkbonnie murders, but there was only a bland announcement that the police were following a number of leads.

In her parents’ bedroom she found signs that her mother had left the house in a hurry. There were the clothes that she had been wearing that morning flung on the floor and in the bathroom a tap had been left running. Carolyn was tempted to search through the dressing-table drawers while she had the house to herself, but while she would have welcomed certainty she was frightened about what she might find there.

Her father had said he would be working late and she wondered if she should contact him at the office to find out where her mother was, but she knew that would worry him, so she kept her fear to herself, listening all the time to the radio, until she heard the key in the door. Then she could not stop crying.

The discovery that Colin Henshaw could not have killed Alice Parry left Ramsay with a sense of panic. At first he could not think clearly. Perhaps Henshaw had hired someone to commit the murder, he thought, because his commitment to Robson’s theory was so great that he was reluctant to let it go. But that would not work. If Henshaw had not killed Mrs. Parry, Charlie Elliot could have had nothing to blackmail the builder about, and the motive for the second murder disappeared, too. Ramsay had been certain that this evening would mark the end of the investigation, and now it seemed they would have to start at the beginning again and reconsider all the old evidence. Hunter had been right all along, Ramsay thought. This case was about more than a few houses.