Murder in My Backyard (31 page)

She began to scramble up the dunes on all fours, pulling with her hands and kicking with her feet. He seemed surprised by her sudden movement and could not use both hands because he was still holding the knife, blade outstretched. But he seemed to have power in his legs to compensate, and when she slipped, gulping for air, exhausted, he almost caught her. She kicked back with one foot, sending a shower of fine sand over his face and into his eyes. He swore and lunged forward with the knife towards her, but he could not see and missed her. She ran on. She could not hear him behind her. She slowed down for a moment and listened, but there was no sound of movement. He must have followed a different path, she thought. He would hope to trick her by getting ahead of her and cutting her off from the car. She stood quite still and listened again, but there was silence.

She was more frightened then than she had been when he was right behind her, tearing at her trouser leg with his knife. From the dune where she stood, catching her breath, she could see her car, ordinary and familiar on the grass. It seemed such a short distance away. She supposed she should creep towards it, keeping below the skyline, playing the same game as he was, so he would not know where she was either. But suddenly panic took over and she ran towards the orange car at fulltilt. She might even have started screaming again. She wanted only to be away from the place and the man who was following her. She thought when she reached the short, cropped grass of the carpark that the nightmare was over. There was nothing then between her and safety. It was only when she was nearly at the car, with several yards to go, already feeling in her pocket for her keys, that a man stepped out of the shadow of the Mini. He caught her in his arms and her screams echoed over the quiet and empty landscape.

On the way to Brinkbonnie Ramsay said nothing. After the shared elation of the Incident Room he seemed to close in on himself and shut Hunter off. He was deep in concentrated thought and Hunter sensed a lack of confidence.

He’s losing his nerve, Hunter thought. He’s not up to the job. That was the trouble with these small-town men. So little happened in the rural divisions that when there was some action they didn’t have a clue how to do the thing properly. Perhaps it was time to put in for a transfer to Newcastle Central before he turned into one of them.

Just outside Brinkbonnie they were given the information that a young policeman had seen Mary’s car at an accident on the Otterbridge Road, and they knew they were going in the right direction. Hunter cheered under his breath, but Ramsay would not allow himself to be optimistic. On the edge of the village he made Hunter slow down. He did not want the people there frightened by speeding cars and sirens. On the lane they went faster again and saw the Mini immediately, parked just beyond the carpark attendant’s hut.

“No sign of Laidlaw,” Hunter said. Ramsay’s silence was irritating him. What was the matter with the man? The thing was nearly over. Still Ramsay said nothing.

“Shall I drive on up the track and look for his car?” Hunter asked.

“Yes,” Ramsay said. “Drive on. But if we don’t find it soon, park. We must find the woman. That’s the important thing.”

The track was dry and rutted and Hunter was driving slowly. There was no sign of a car and he could sense his superior’s tension and impatience.

“This is impossible,” Ramsay said irritably. “The car could be anywhere behind those bushes. We’ll need to look on foot.”

Hunter drove on, unsure of what the inspector wanted him to do.

“Stop,” Ramsay said suddenly. “Stop here. Something’s wrong. We must find Mary Raven.” He felt that they had been deceived.

They got out of the car and stood in the frosty silence. Hunter shut the car doors and the noise was loud and shocking.

“Where do we start?” Hunter asked. He had none of Ramsay’s sense of foreboding. “They could be anywhere.” He imagined them lying together in some hollow in the dunes, a pornographic fantasy of sex in the open air. He stood in the moonlight and grinned at the idea.

“You cross the dunes to the beach,” Ramsay said. “I’ll walk back to her car.”

“What do you want me to do if I see her?”

“Nothing,” Ramsay said sharply. “ Not if she’s on her own. Wait until he finds her.”

“Shall I radio for help?”

“No,” Ramsay said. “I’ll do it. But by the time they all get here it’ll be too late.”

The first scream surprised them both. Hunter was only a few yards from the car. He began to run through the dunes towards the beach, swearing at the spikes of marram grass that scratched his hands and the sand that filled his shoes. Ramsay stood and listened, then walked quickly back towards the carpark entrance, his shadow long behind him.

When Mary Raven hurtled down the sand bank and into his arms, he felt only relief. He held her, trying to calm her as she sobbed, awkward at first, then remembering what it was like to hold a woman in his arms. At first she was hysterical in her terror. She tried to pull away from him, tearing at his face with her fingernails and kicking his legs with her heavy boots. Then she recognised him.

“He tried to kill me,” she sobbed. “He had a knife and he tried to kill me. It couldn’t have been Max. Max would never have done a thing like that.”

“No,” Ramsay said, his arms still around her shoulder, trying to stop her trembling. “ It wasn’t Max.”

From the main road they heard the sirens of police cars coming to assist them, and as they came to the end of the track, Hunter emerged from the nearest dune, his hand bleeding, his face triumphant, with his prisoner.

“Too late as usual,” he said, nodding towards the flashing blue lights. It would do no harm, this, he thought. It might mean a promotion if Ramsay didn’t take all the credit.

“Where’s the knife?” Ramsay asked.

“He dropped it in the dunes.” He looked towards the reinforcements. “ They’ll find it.”

“Well, then,” Ramsay said. “You’d better get him back to Otterbridge.”

James Laidlaw looked strangely young without his spectacles. In the half light of the dunes Mary had mistaken him for Max and Ramsay could see how that was possible. James had lost all desire to fight. When they opened the back door of the police car for him, he got in without a word. He sat upright, a respectable figure. He was still wearing a suit. A policewoman who had taken Mary to her car was wrapping her in a rug, pouring tea from a flask.

Hunter was about to drive away when Ramsay tapped on the window. Hunter opened it with hostility, expecting another command or rebuke.

“Well done,” Ramsay said. “That was a good arrest.”

Ramsay would have liked to take Mary Raven to his cottage in Heppleburn to talk to her. He would have been more comfortable there, without interruptions and telephone calls. He could have made her coffee and waited until she was ready to talk. But he knew it would not do and the interview would have to take place in the police station in Otterbridge, with its institutional furniture and the knowledge that somewhere in the same building James Laidlaw was being questioned, too.

At first she refused to go with him.

“It’s
my
story,” she said. “I need a phone and a typewriter. No other bugger’s going to get the glory after all this work.”

“It will be your story,” he said, coaxing her with his attention and his gratitude. “ There’ll be no press release tonight. All the papers will know is that James Laidlaw has been arrested. They’ll be desperate to talk to you tomorrow. And, you know, I might be able to give you some useful information.”

So she allowed herself to be helped into the back of his car, complaining only when he drove past the Castle Hotel without stopping to buy her a drink. At the police station he left her for a while in the company of a policewoman, but she seemed not to mind and from the corridor he saw her scribbling intensely in her notebook. He went to talk to Hunter. Laidlaw, it seemed, had started talking as soon as the car left Brinkbonnie and nothing could stop him.

“He asked to write a statement,” Hunter said. “He’s doing that now. He refused to see a solicitor. We’ll have no problem with a conviction.”

So when Ramsay returned to begin his interview with Mary, he knew most of the details of the case. But he gave nothing away. He was diffident, unsure, so she thought he needed her. He let her believe that it was her story after all.

“How did you find out about James Laidlaw’s racket?” Ramsay asked. They drank tea with a little whisky in it. They were at the top of the building and there were no blinds on the windows. Outside spotlights lit up the old walls that surrounded the town and the ruins of the abbey.

“It was just really a wild guess at first,” she said. She was more herself, excitable, proud. She was showing off. “ His decisions about which stories to run were so arbitrary. The Brinkbonnie development was just an example. When the plans first went before the council, he wrote an editorial about the destruction of rural communities. It didn’t bother him that Alice Parry was his aunt. Then, when the village started its own campaign, he began to talk about objectivity and ordered me off. I thought it was just some weird autocracy—that he wanted to show me who was boss—until I did court duty on the morning after Mrs. Parry died.”

She paused to catch her breath. He waited patiently and smiled to encourage her.

“People who appear in court are often much more worried about being in the paper than they are about the fine they receive from the magistrates,” she said. “ James usually did the monthly magistrates court and that was strange in itself. Most editors think themselves too superior to mix with petty criminals—they’re more likely to be taking the magistrates out to lunch. James said it was his way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the town, but of course it wasn’t that at all.”

Ramsay interrupted gently, reluctantly, showing her that he was entertained by her conversation, but that he needed all the details.

“What did happen when you were in the court that Monday?” he asked.

“There was this drunk driver,” she said, making the most of the drama, playing up to him, watching his reaction. “He’d been in court before and he was disqualified for twelve months. But he had his own business and was much more worried about the bad publicity than about losing his licence. He came up to me in the waiting room and asked if there was any way of keeping his name out of the paper. Of course I said it was impossible. He got quite cross and said he had heard it was possible to come to an arrangement about it. He was a wealthy man, he said. Money was no object. At first I thought he was just an isolated loony who was trying it on, but when I considered it later he seemed indignant, almost self-righteous, as if I was treating him unfairly.”

“So James was taking bribes from people who had appeared in court and wanted the fact kept secret?”

“Yes,” she said, and her eyes sparkled because he was listening to her so carefully and following her line of thought so well. “But that wasn’t all he was doing.”

She paused dramatically while he poured her more whisky, then, although he already knew what was coming, he waited, attentive for her next revelation.

“The odd twenty quid to keep a bank manager’s name out of the paper was only chicken feed,” she said. “That wouldn’t keep our Stella in designer frocks and fancy kitchens. So James got more ambitious and the racket with local businesses started.”

“When was that, Mary?” Ramsay asked, quiet and apologetic. “When did the local business racket first start?”

“Years ago,” she said. “Perhaps even before I started on the paper.”

“Tell me,” he said. “ How did it work?”

“Well,” she said, tantalising him, the perfect performer. “Of course I don’t know all the details …”

“But it’s your story, Mary. You know how it worked.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “ I know how it worked. James Laidlaw, the great investigative journalist, threatened to put people out of business if they didn’t pay him lots of money. That’s how it worked.”

“How could he do that, Mary? I need to know.”

“He snooped,” she said. “He was a bloody good reporter. He followed leads, listened to rumours. He found out all the things that people wanted to hide. And if they were clean as the driven snow, he started the rumours himself.”

“What about evidence?” Ramsay asked. “ You’ll need evidence for your story.”

“There are some people willing to talk,” Mary said. “ There’s May Smith in the cottage hospital. She’ll talk to you.”

“May Smith?” Ramsay said, although Hunter had been visiting her only hours before. “Who’s she, Mary?”

“She’s an old lady. She was a resident in the White Gates old people’s home. She liked it there. She was happy. But the place had to close because James ran a campaign about it in the
Express.
Relatives of the old folks who lived there took them away because they thought everything you read in the papers is true.”

“Why did he run the campaign, Mary?”

“Because the matron refused to pay him protection money.”

“Why didn’t she go to the police?”

“Would you have believed her?” Mary demanded. “After all the publicity there’s been about the ill treatment of old people in nursing homes? Or would you have thought she was making the whole thing up to protect her business?”

“Perhaps,” Ramsay said. “But we would have looked into the complaint.”

“And you would have found nothing!” she said. “ No witnesses, nothing. None of the other old people’s homes in the area would admit to paying up in case the same thing happened to them. James Laidlaw was a powerful man, and married to a Rutherford. They were frightened of him. They thought he was worth a fortune.”

She paused again, went to the window, and looked down on the street.

“Someone did tell the police what James was doing,” she said. “Joe West, the county councillor. Do you remember him? But you were too busy investigating the allegations of fraud James was making in the
Express
to take any notice.”

Ramsay thought. He remembered Joe West, though he had not dealt with the investigation personally, and he could recall no connection in the case with the
Express.
It was something about fraudulent expense claims for his council work. And he had had his house painted, Ramsay remembered, by council workmen using materials paid for by Northumberland County. In the end they had decided not to prosecute. How many other councillors, after all, could claim total honesty if there was a major investigation? Joe West had resigned and they had considered the matter at an end.