Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher (6 page)

‘Hey!’ he called again. ‘Come here.’

‘Sod off!’ one of the boys shouted, not taking his eyes off the target. ‘We’re allowed. It’s not private.’

‘I was looking for someone. Mrs Howe. Do you know her?’

They didn’t answer immediately but they did stop throwing stones. They turned and gave him their attention.

‘Why?’

‘I’m a policeman,’ Ramsay said.

‘Na!’ The boy was probably too young for school. ‘ We know the copper round here. PC Whelan. He’s not on duty today though. Weekend off.’

Ramsay thought that crime prevention couldn’t be best served if a gang of bad boys knew the rota of the only local policeman. Then the target the lads had been aiming at drifted into his field of view. A dead animal, he thought at first. Not a dog. Something with long, grey hair floating on the surface like fine seaweed. The position of the animal shifted as it was buffeted by a wave and he saw that it was wearing clothes.

‘Do you know where PC Whelan lives?’ he asked.

‘Heppleburn Village.’ The answer was grudging but they were bored and curious.

‘I suppose that’s too far for you to go on your own.’

‘Don’t be dumb!’ They were scornful.

‘Would you be able to go and fetch him? Tell him that Inspector Ramsay is on the Headland and needs him urgently. If you can remember that.’

It was enough of a dare to send them running across the railway line and up the short cut through the dene. That was all Ramsay wanted. To be rid of them before they realized what was floating in the cut. He used his mobile phone to call Otterbridge Station. He talked to Sally Wedderburn.

‘You’ll set it all up then. I’ll wait here.’

‘Sure.’

‘And get here as soon as you can, Sal. I’m going to need you.’

She was ambitious and he heard her resistance.

‘For an accidental death?’ The child abductions were far more glamorous.

‘For a suspicious death.’ He didn’t want to be on his own when he told Marilyn Howe that her mother was dead.

‘She was dead before she reached the water.’

It was Monday morning. Hunter was so excited that he was almost drooling. He stood at the entrance to Ramsay’s office. In the room beyond a phone was ringing. Members of the public were still calling to report the sighting of a single man with a young boy.

‘How did she die?’ Ramsay hadn’t waited on the jetty to see the body lifted out of the water. He couldn’t bear the idea of the gang of kids or an excited neighbour telling Marilyn that a woman had been found in the cut. Especially if Marilyn were still alone. Later the doctor had refused to commit himself over the phone.

‘She was stabbed. A violent attack, the pathologist said.’

Ramsay wondered briefly how stabbing could be anything other than violent.

In fact when he and Sally had arrived at the house at Cotter’s Row, Bernard Howe was already there. He was sitting at the table in the back room, his hair still wet, his face red and blotchy through coming into the heat from the cold. In front of him was a foil container on a plate and he forked an unappetizing ready-cooked shepherd’s pie into his mouth. There was a recent gravy stain on his sweater. Marilyn opened the door to them and it seemed to Ramsay that she had already prepared herself for bad news. It was Bernard who was shocked. He was the one who couldn’t take it in. He sat with his fork halfway to his mouth while the food dripped on to the oilskin tablecloth.

‘We’ll need you to identify the body,’ Ramsay had said. ‘ Until then there’s no certainty.’ Although he had seen the long hair as the waves jolted the body towards the rocks and was quite certain.

But still Bernard Howe had seemed unable to move.

In his office Ramsay looked up at Hunter who blocked the doorway.

‘A full-scale murder inquiry, then,’ he said. ‘As if we haven’t got enough on our plates. You know the ropes.’

Hunter nodded but remained where he was.

‘You knew her, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘The victim?’ He could be as nebby as an old woman, started most of the canteen gossip.

‘Not really. I met her once and I’ve seen her around.’

‘They’re a funny bunch out on the Headland,’ Hunter said. ‘I went out with a lass from there once. Her dad took me to the club. You’d have thought I was a Martian. No kidding. The place suddenly went quiet and they all stared.’

‘They don’t like outsiders?’

‘Oh, they’re friendly enough when they get to know you but if there’s not a member of your family who can remember the Cotter’s Row street party at the end of the war, you’re a newcomer.’

Well, Ramsay thought, there were still plenty of communities in Northumberland like that. He wondered how long the Howes had been living on the Headland. He could not imagine that they belonged.

‘Sal Wedderburn stayed the night with the family,’ he said. ‘She was there when I told the girl about her mother.’

‘Aye.’ Hunter was disapproving. ‘I’d heard you’d called her in to play social worker.’

Ramsay wondered if it was time for a warning about the petty rivalry which flared between the two officers occasionally but decided against it. Gordon Hunter was given to sulks and flounces and he could do without that now.

‘They seemed to take to her.’ But as soon as the words were spoken he wondered if that were true. There had been no hostility but the family had hardly seemed to acknowledge Sally’s presence. When he’d said that he’d like her to stay – for support, to fend off the press if that proved necessary – Bernard, had emerged briefly from his stupor to say, ‘But where will she sleep? Claire uses the spare room.’

Ramsay had explained that the sofa would be fine and there had been no more comment. He had hoped that Marilyn would form a relationship with Sally, would confide in her, but realized now that this was unlikely to happen.

‘You think one of the family’s involved, then?’ Hunter asked.

‘I don’t know anything at this stage.’ The words were sharper than he’d intended and he added, ‘No. That’s not why I asked Sally to stay. The girl was very close to her mother. They went everywhere together. She’ll know better than anyone if Kath Howe was anxious, frightened. I’d hoped she’d see Sal as a friend.’

‘Ah.’ Hunter was relieved. ‘Like I said. Playing the social worker.’

‘I’d like you to come over to Heppleburn with me,’ Ramsay said. ‘I want every single person on the Headland talked to. I don’t mean a plod asking a couple of questions on the doorstep. I mean a pot of tea on the table and someone listening for as long as the chat goes on. Gossip. Not just about the Howes but about anyone living in the place.’

‘You think we’re looking for a local, then?’

Ramsay shrugged, tried not to show his frustration at Hunter’s demand for easy answers. ‘It’s not the sort of place a stranger would wander across to by chance. Especially in the weather we’ve had this weekend. I don’t suppose we’ve got a time of death yet?’

‘Nothing specific. Some time Saturday.’

‘Ah.’

‘Problem?’

‘The Coastguard House has been converted to private use. On Saturday afternoon there was a kiddies’ party. I presume that means carloads of strangers visiting the place. Not exactly a problem. More of complication. We’ll need a list of visitors, car registration numbers. It certainly doesn’t make life easier. Anyone unfamiliar on the Headland that day would have been put down as a guest of the Coastguard House.’

‘Do you want me to talk to the owners?’

‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘Leave me to deal with the peasants? Is that it?’ Hunter grinned to show there were no hard feelings, exposing teeth which seemed very white in an even brown face. He’d been on a package holiday to Turkey in the autumn and he’d topped up his tan regularly since then on the sun beds.

‘Charm the old ladies more like,’ Ramsay said. Hunter liked that and grinned again.

The jetty was still roped off with blue and white plastic tape. Despite the drizzle a small group of onlookers stood in the car park of the Headland Social Club. Mostly old men with pitmen’s coughs. One of them was blind and had his arm linked with that of his companions who provided a running commentary on the proceedings. Not that there was much now to comment on.

A blue transit van with a noisy exhaust rattled to a stop beside the group. On the side
ERIC WILSON MOBILE SHOP
was painted in uneven white letters. This was the excuse for the gathering, though Ramsay thought that on normal Mondays it would be the women who’d be waiting. Perhaps the men had persuaded them it wouldn’t be safe to be out.

Eric Wilson jumped out and opened the back doors of the van. Apparently from nowhere a group of children came running down the road. They pushed to the front of the queue and began pointing at the trays of improbably coloured sweets and chews which the shopkeeper stored sensibly out of their reach. The men muttered disapproval but did not try to stop them. It was as if they were scared to. These were the children who had been throwing stones at Kath Howe’s body.

Ramsay waited until they had been served then made his way towards them. They munched silently, surrounded by a scattering of dropped sweet wrappers. In other circumstances he would have ordered them to collect the litter, but he resisted the temptation and said mildly, ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

They grinned as if they had caught him out.

‘Na. Half term, isn’t it?’

It was only later that he realized he’d seen the school-crossing lady in Heppleburn Village. A sudden death on the Headland had been too much for them to resist.

‘Were you playing round here on Saturday?’

‘We might have been here.’ As if playing wasn’t a concept they recognized.

‘I need your help.’ He began walking away from the men buying bags of potatoes and tins of beans. The children followed. When they could not be overheard he said, ‘It’s a murder inquiry.’

That had them hooked. They wanted to know if Mrs Howe had been shot, stabbed or had her head cut off. They acted out scenes from particularly nasty videos and pretended to be carrying automatic machine guns. Every other word was an obscenity. Ramsay felt out of his depth. He’d been imagining the Gorbals Diehards not these manic addicts of celluloid pornography.

‘Was it a serial killer?’ one of them asked. ‘Was it?’

‘No!’ he said, more sharply than he’d intended. ‘And if you’re going to be stupid I’ll ask someone else to help.’

Then they calmed down because above everything else they were bored.

‘What time were you here on Saturday?’ he asked.

They looked confused. They didn’t own a watch between them.

‘Before tea or after tea?’

Again that had little meaning. They seemed to eat continually when they weren’t at school, scrounging crisps and biscuits from whichever mother they could con into providing them.

‘What was on the television before you went out?’

‘
Live and Kicking
. When that was finished there was only the sport.’

‘And what was on when you went back in?’

‘
Baywatch
’. It was the oldest boy. He gave a lecherous smirk. ‘My dad always watches that.’

‘So you were out all afternoon?’

They nodded.

‘Where did you go? Were you down by the jetty?’

‘Earlier on.’

‘Did you see anything?’

‘The murder, you mean? Na.’ He shook his head, disappointed, then gave a blood-curdling scream, an imitation presumably of a woman being stabbed. ‘Later we hung around the Coastguard House. There was something going on. Loads of big cars.’

‘It was a birthday party,’ one of the younger boys said almost wistfully, then added, ‘Not that we’d have wanted to go.’

‘Na!’ they all joined in.

‘Did you see Mrs Howe that afternoon? You would all recognize Mrs Howe if you saw her?’

‘Course we would. She was an ugly bitch. And a stuck-up cow.’ A pause. ‘ That’s what my mam says.’

‘Did you see her on Saturday afternoon? At the jetty?’

They shook their heads, quite certain.

‘What about later? You’d have had a good view down the Headland from the Coastguard House.’

They looked at each other. Ramsay thought they were taking the question seriously, trying to reach a consensus.

‘We didn’t see her. But we mightn’t have. It was drizzly and misty. Like today only worse. And it was sodding cold. You couldn’t see much. Especially when it started to get dark.’

Ramsay imagined them, banned from their homes by the men who wanted to watch
Grandstand
in peace, hovering round the gate of the Coastguard House, attracted by the noise and the flash cars. Being a nuisance. Getting in the way. If they were noticed at all.

‘So you didn’t see anything unusual?’

But by then they’d lost interest and they were already swaggering away, back to the jetty, to swing on the blue and white tape and shout insults at the constable on duty.

Ramsay walked up the hill to the Coastguard House.

Claire didn’t turn up for work at the Coastguard House on Monday morning. Emma hadn’t really been expecting her to. She’d heard about Kathleen Howe’s death from Brian who’d gone down to the club for a pint after his Sunday lunch and found the jetty cordoned off, the place crawling with coastguards and police.

‘What a terrible accident!’ Emma had said, meaning it at first and only thinking of the implication later. Then there was a feeling which was not so much relief as gratitude.

‘Not an accident.’ Brian’s words were slightly slurred. The club might have been shut but he’d had a few cans at home and most of a bottle of Rioja with his roast beef. ‘That’s what the talk is. The lass spoke to the blokes who fished her out.’

She hadn’t replied. Couldn’t. She would have expected Brian to go on about the tragedy all afternoon, making sick jokes, even phoning his friends to tell them. Luckily he never mentioned it again.

When the doorbell rang late on Monday morning Emma hoped that it would be Claire, deciding that she would be happier at work after all. Claire would know what was going on.

But Claire would have gone round to the back and let herself in. Instead there was a man who waited patiently while Emma unlocked the door and tugged at it. It always warped in the damp.