Murder in My Backyard (3 page)

“Where are you going?” Maggie asked.

“To the Tower,” Olive said. “It’s St. David’s Day and the family are coming. I promised Mrs. Parry I’d do her a couple of extra hours before dinner.”

“Shall I give you a lift up in the car?” Maggie asked. “ It’s going to rain any minute.”

“No,” Olive said. “The walk’ll do me good.”

“Take care then,” Maggie said, but her mother had already gone and there was no reply.

Peter Laidlaw divided his year by the times spent at Brinkbonnie. When friends at school boasted about package tours to the Greek islands or Disneyland, he considered them with scorn. No place in the world had the magic of his visits to the Tower.

His father, Max, was a general practitioner in Otterbridge, and the family lived in a big Victorian terrace with tricycles in the hall and gerbils in the kitchen. Nine-year-old Peter was happy enough at home, but his parents were always busy and the house was often crowded with people he did not know. His parents promised him their attention, then found excuses for not fulfilling the promise. His latest campaign was for a tree house in the ash at the bottom of the garden. The excuse for not building it was a rusting tandem that had stood outside since the twins were born.

“There’s enough rubbish in the garden already,” his mother would say, “without making any more. When your father takes that thing to the tip, we’ll think about it.”

Max had bought the tandem when he and Judy were students and he was reluctant to get rid of it. It represented a time of great happiness: evenings in folk clubs, friendships, shared bottles of cheap wine. He had loved to ride with her around the Northumberland countryside. She had looked so striking—a frail Pre-Raphaelite beauty with red hair—and people in the streets had stared at them as if they were celebrities. He had been proud to be seen with her. When Peter was born, Max had fitted a small seat on the back and they had still ridden out together on family outings. Then the twins had arrived and the tandem had been useless, pushed outside to make room for the rocking horse Alice had given them and all the other toys. Now Judy swore at it whenever she went into the garden to hang out the washing and nagged at Max to do something about it. The days of romantic bike rides seemed long past.

It seemed to Max that Judy could not be happy now unless she was part of a group of women. Whenever he came home from work, the house seemed full of them or of other people’s children. But he never complained to Judy. That would be an uncharitable, unliberated thing to do. He had encouraged her to take part in the community activity and presumed she enjoyed it. She had been a nurse and she taught relaxation for the National Childbirth Trust. Sometimes he came home from running an antenatal clinic in the Health Centre to find rows of pregnant women lying on the living-room floor. She volunteered to run a crèche for the women writers’ workshop and every Wednesday afternoon she was exhausted with the effort of entertaining a dozen precocious children, who ground Play-Doh into the carpet and tipped sand down the lavatory. She was a committee member of Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the groups met in their home. It occurred to him occasionally that he would not recognise her if she were not surrounded by a group of women, a coffee mug in one hand, leaning forward earnestly to listen or to make some point. He could hardly remember what she looked like when she was on her own. Even in bed she usually had one or the other of the twins beside her. She was always tired.

“Dad,” Peter said, from the back of the car as they drove out of Otterbridge towards Brinkbonnie, “ what do you get if you cross a sheep with a boiler?”

“I don’t know,” Max said automatically.

“Central Bleating.”

Max groaned.

“That’s very funny, Peter,” Judy said. She looked at Max crossly.

Humour was an essential phase in a child’s development.

“Will I be able to stay up for dinner tonight?”

“Perhaps. If Aunt Alice agrees.”

“Will Sam and Tim? I expect they’re still too small.”

Sensing Max’s irritation, Judy passed a copy of the
Beano
into the back seat, and for the rest of the trip to Brinkbonnie Peter was quiet.

From Otterbridge they drove east along narrow lanes through farmland. To the south, on the horizon, was the winding wheel of a long-extinct pit and the chimneys of a newly built aluminium plant, but they seemed a long way off. It was late afternoon and the clouds were building for a storm. They drove straight into the wind, and in exposed places the car rocked and buffeted. In the valleys, where rows of trees lined the road, it was almost dark, and when they drove through the villages there were lights in cottage windows. When they drove into Brinkbonnie, it started to rain with slow, heavy drops and the clouds over the sea were so thick that they could not see beyond the first range of dunes. As Max turned into the Tower drive through the high walls covered with ivy, he had to switch on his leadlights to see, and it began to pour. As the car stopped behind the Tower, sheltered a little from the east wind, Alice came out of the kitchen door to meet them, under a huge golfing umbrella, followed by one of her cats. She wore a blue-and-white-striped apron over her clothes and there was flour in her hair.

“My dears,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

Peter was trying to open the car door to get out and kicked Sam in his eagerness to climb out. Sam began to cry. Max shouted at Peter for his clumsiness and it seemed there would be a horrible family scene until Alice scooped the baby from the back of the car and made him laugh, sent Peter into the house to wait for his cousin, and greeted the adults with a calm, slightly bemused smile.

“Come in,” she said. “There should be some tea.”

When he met his wife, James Laidlaw was thirty, already editor of the
Otterbridge Express
with ambitions of better things. He had interviewed Stella Rutherford in a small workshop in a converted barn on the outskirts of Otterbridge. He was preparing an article on local businesses and she was fresh from art school with plans to set up in knitwear design. He knew of her because her father was one of the biggest landowners in the district and he had expected someone loud and horsy. In fact, Stella was pale, fine-featured, and nervous. She chain-smoked and laughed at herself for being so anxious. It was her background, she said. Everyone expected so much of her. Her father had told her she would be a failure and she thought he was probably right.

James had left the interview feeling like a sixteen-year-old in love for the first time, and even now, thirteen years later, he was obsessed with her fragile beauty. She was right, the knitwear design idea had been a failure, and as soon as she had married she had given it up. She seemed not to have the strength to see anything through. Even motherhood, it seemed, was too much for her, and after the birth of Carolyn she had been so severely depressed that she had spent six months in hospital. Her father, an insensitive and self-centred man, had found her illness embarrassing and cowardly. He had never visited her in hospital and since then the family had had little to do with him. Stella claimed to hate him. James had seen her through the bad times, almost glad, it seemed, of an excuse to spoil and cherish her. Even now he considered her before anything. He had been offered a job in Fleet Street but turned it down without discussing it with Stella. He knew she would never survive the move.

He had been working and was home later than Stella had expected. He saw her waiting at the window and felt guilty for making her anxious.

“Do we have to go?” she asked as soon as he came into the house. “I’m not sure I can face it.”

“Nonsense,” he said gently. “You know you’ll enjoy it once you’re there.”

“I won’t,” she said. “ I don’t know why we go. You don’t even get on with Max particularly.”

“Oh, well,” he said easily. “ It’s always relaxing to be with Aunt Alice.”

“She doesn’t sound very relaxed at the moment.” Stella was defensive. “ She phoned not long ago and asked to speak to you. She’s worried about the development on the land at the edge of the village. She wants your advice.”

“That’s not worry,” James said. “It’s guilt because she sold the land in the first place. There’s nothing I can do about it now. We reported the Department of the Environment’s decision in the paper.”

The
Express
was a local paper with a limited circulation, but James Laidlaw took his journalism seriously. It was not all advertisements and wedding photographs. He had done a piece once about the poor standard of care in an old people’s home, which had been taken up by the big Newcastle papers, and a feature about a county councillor’s corruption had forced the subject of the article to resign.

Carolyn, who was twelve and their only child, appeared quite suddenly beside them. She was wearing a coat and carrying a holdall. She was slight and pale as a ghost, so quiet that they often hardly noticed she was there. Her mother dressed her in old-fashioned clothes, with skirts too long for her, so she looked younger than she was.

“Are we going?” she asked. The question surprised them, so seldom did she take any initiative. “Peter will want me to play with him. He’ll miss me if I’m not there.”

“Do you enjoy these trips to Brinkbonnie?” James asked. Sometimes he wished he had a son, someone noisy and robust to bring life to the house. Even now, when most of her friends had Walkman cassette players and bedroom walls covered with pop-star posters, the only sound to come from Carolyn’s room was the practice scales of her violin.

“Oh, yes!” she said, her eyes gleaming. “It’s the best place in the world.”

When they arrived at the Tower, the front door was still open, but there was no sign of Alice. Max and Judy were in the sitting room drinking tea, not speaking. In the wide, wood-panelled hall there was a pile of baby equipment.

“Look at this!” James murmured to Stella as he stepped over buggies, camping cots, packets of disposable nappies. “ It’s like a travelling circus.”

Peter appeared at the top of the stairs on the first landing and called Carolyn to join him. She dropped her holdall with the rest of the luggage and ran to meet him, but by the time she reached the top he had disappeared into the small room where they kept their toys and were allowed to play. At the top of the stairs Carolyn paused. The house was very quiet. Her parents must have joined Max and Judy. The silence was broken by a muffled whimper. Carolyn moved quietly along the landing and listened again. The noise was coming from Aunt Alice’s bedroom. Aunt Alice was crying. Carolyn stood quite still and felt her own eyes fill with tears. She felt betrayed. That was the sort of behavior she expected from her mother, not from her aunt. Now it seemed all adults were similarly unreliable. She turned her back on her aunt’s room and looked for Peter.

Mary Raven sat in her car and dreamed of her secret lover. She had met him, one beautiful summer’s evening, at a barbecue on the wild, uninhabited part of the Brinkbonnie dunes owned by the Northumberland Wildlife Trust. The party had been organised by the Trust, and she was there partly because she was sympathetic to the cause and partly to cover the event for the
Otterbridge Express
. At first it was a predictable evening. The fires took too long to light, the sausages were burnt on the outside and pink in the middle, and bossy women with jolly Girl Guide voices shouted to them as if they were children:

“Come
on
, everyone. There are hundreds more sausages.”

Mary drank too much red wine from a plastic cup, then climbed over the dunes to look over the sea. It was late but still light, the sky’s violet and gold reflected in the wet sand and ebbing sea. Behind her she heard the children complaining as they were rounded up for bed, the first chords of guitar music, the strains of a protest song. The empty beach stretched south for seven miles towards Brinkbonnie village.

When he climbed up the dune and sat beside her, she was not surprised. Perhaps she had wandered away from the crowd in the hope that she would be followed. It was that sort of night: hot, romantic. She was ready for excitement and some sort of sexual adventure. When she saw who it was, she was not surprised, though at the time almost anyone would have done. She had been aware of him all evening and had sensed as he prodded cindered sausages with a long fork that he was ready for rebellion, too.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said. She smiled at him.

“You look a bit lonely.”

“No,” she said. “ Just enjoying the evening.”

She stood up suddenly and ran down the steep bank of sand, sliding and tumbling, sending up a rainbow of fine sand that gleamed in the last of the light. She was wearing loose, clown’s trousers and a T-shirt in black and white stripes. When she reached the water, she looked back at him. Later she thought that if she had carried on up the beach without turning to see if he was still there, staring at her, none of it would have happened. He would have gone back to the fire, shaken the sand out of his trainers, and under the orders of the bossy women done his duty with black bin bags and rubber gloves. He would have gone straight home to his wife. But she did turn round, and he saw it as a challenge to follow her. He launched himself from the top of the dune and ran at full-tilt without stumbling. She was impressed by the run. She had expected a more cowardly descent, a sedate walk perhaps, with his hands behind him in case he fell. As he ran towards her she turned and walked away up the beach, just on the edge of the tide. He fell in beside her as if he were there by chance, as if in the whole vast expanse of the beach it was pure coincidence that he happened to be there.

Nothing extraordinary occurred that night. There was no wild passion in the marram grass. They walked almost the length of the beach until it got dark, acknowledging each other’s presence in the end with brief bursts of conversation. Afterwards she could not remember exactly what had been said. She had talked, she thought, about her mother. Perhaps she had been more drunk than she realised. Halfway back they stopped. He put his arm around her and pointed out the shape of one of the constellations—she could not remember which. When they returned to the point on the beach where the walk had started—she could see in the moonlight the skid marks of her slide down the dune—he kissed her.