Murder in My Backyard (32 page)

“What happened to him?” Ramsay asked.

“He’s great,” she said. “Really amazing. It’s the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s running a project for the homeless in Newcastle down by the river. But he hates James Laidlaw. He’ll talk to you and you should go to see the centre.”

It wasn’t only the wealthy businessmen and powerful councillors in the area who had been blackmailed by Laidlaw, Ramsay thought. It must have become almost a habit. He had made the same threat to Tom Kerr about his brawl in the street with Charlie Elliot. Ramsay remembered his conversation with the choirmaster in the dimly lit room earlier that evening.

“I could never have gone into the church again,” Tom Kerr had cried. “Not with a story like that splashed all over the paper. How could people have any respect for me?”

“So what did you do?” Ramsay had asked.

“What do you think I did? I paid him and I’ve been paying him ever since.”

Ramsay drew his thoughts back to the office and to the woman who sat with him.

“Now, Mary,” he said. “What has all this to do with Alice Parry?”

“Don’t you know?” she cried, immensely pleased because she thought she still had the power to surprise him.

“Do you mean you really haven’t guessed?”

He did not answer directly. He had never enjoyed lying.

“It’s your story,” he said again. I want you to tell it, I want to know what Alice Parry said to you on the afternoon of her death.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That’s almost irrelevant.”

“All the same,” he said. “ For completeness. Out of interest. I want to know.”

“We talked about Max,” she said. “We were having an affair.”

“Yes,” he said gently. He did not want to hurt her. He paused. “Did you realise Stella Laidlaw was blackmailing him about it?”

She looked up sharply. “ No,” she said. “I hadn’t realised even that she knew about us. She must have guessed. Blackmail must run in the family.”

“Do you know where Max is?” he asked. “We need to find him to tell him what’s happened. Besides, his wife is very worried about him.”

“No,” she said. “ I haven’t seen him since the night you took me in for questioning.” She grinned briefly. “He was there in the flat when the policeman came to fetch me.”

She paused. “He’ll be hiding,” she said. “Poor Max.”

“You must have thought the note arranging to meet you at Brinkbonnie was from Max,” he said. “And you went to meet him.”

“Yes,” she said. “It looked like Max’s writing. James must be an expert in forgery, too.”

She looked up at him. “ How could James know about Max and me. I suppose he guessed.”

“Apparently,” Ramsay said, “ when he realised you suspected him of blackmail, he searched your desk at work. There was an old letter from Max. It was rather explicit. It even mentioned where you met.”

She sat, deflated and very sad, so he felt sorry for her. To cheer her up, he said, pleading: “Tell me the rest of it then. Tell my why James Laidlaw murdered Alice Parry.”

She brightened immediately. “Henshaw had bought James off,” she said. “You must have worked that out.”

Ramsay remained impassive. He did not want to disappoint her and spoil her story. But he had worked it out. After the discussion with Tom Kerr, the explanation was inevitable. Henshaw hadn’t bribed community activists as Jack Robson had thought, he hadn’t needed to. Any village event is considered entirely unimportant until it is reported in the local newspaper. The story gives it credibility. With James Laidlaw in his pocket Henshaw could dictate the image the public received of his development. And of the developer, Ramsay thought, remembering the picture in the
Express
of Henshaw surrounded by adoring toddlers. Then he remembered the evening he had gone to the Laidlaws’ house and the interview being interrupted by an angry visitor. He realised now that the visitor was Colin Henshaw, furious because he thought James Laidlaw would break their deal.

Mary seemed encouraged by Ramsay’s silence and continued: “Henshaw wouldn’t talk to me, but I think he started paying James after the first editorial about the Brinkbonnie development. He had lots of other plans waiting to be approved by the planning department and he wouldn’t want bad publicity at that stage.”

“Tell me Mary,” he said, “ exactly what you think happened.” He said it to humour her because she needed to feel clever and in control after the assault on the sand dunes. James Laidlaw had already admitted the whole thing to Hunter. But he said it, too, because she was lively and funny and he did not want the conversation to end.

“Mrs. Parry felt guilty about selling her land to Henshaw,” Mary said, “and after I’d spoken to her that afternoon she decided to try to buy the field back. Of course Henshaw refused to sell. There must have been an argument and Henshaw told Mrs. Parry about James. You can imagine him, can’t you, blurting it out in the middle of the row: “You won’t get any support, you know, from that nephew of yours. I’m paying him off. You’ve no chance without the publicity of getting the support for your campaign.” Then Mrs. Parry not wanting to believe it but seeing in the end that it was probably true. Poor Mrs. Parry. How upset she must have been.”

“James Laidlaw was waiting for her in the garden when she got back from the pub,” Ramsay said, taking the initiative for the first time. The pretence that he was the passive recipient of her knowledge was over. After all, he had promised Mary some useful information. “Stella had taken a sleeping pill and it was easy enough for him to leave the room without anyone noticing. He went out through the kitchen door. Max was watching television and didn’t hear anything.”

He pictured James in the windy garden with its smell of ivy and salt in the black shadow of the Tower, waiting for Alice, wondering what Henshaw had told her. Then she had come back, angry and disappointed, threatening to expose him. He had killed her, stabbing her from behind with a knife he had taken from the kitchen as he had followed her into the house.

“I didn’t see James,” Mary said, breaking into his thoughts. She was embarrassed. It was a sort of confession. “ I was in the churchyard waiting for Max. He didn’t turn up. I supposed, of course, that it meant that he’d decided to stay with Judy. I was upset. I thought he didn’t care about me. I left soon after eleven and I saw no one in the Tower garden then. But perhaps James was hiding.”

“No,” Ramsay said. “He couldn’t have been hiding. He was seen by someone in the village.”

“Who?” she demanded. “Who saw him?”

It was his turn to tease her. “Can’t you guess?” he asked.

“Charlie Elliot!” she said, delighted because she had worked it out after all. “ It must have been Charlie Elliot, but you said he was home before Mrs. Parry died.”

“He was,” Ramsay said. “ But he came out again. He was drunk, a little amorous. He’d always been obsessed with Maggie Kerr and he stood in the street and stared up at her window. On his way home he must have seen James Laidlaw standing in the moonlight in the middle of the Tower lawn waiting for Mrs. Parry. It wouldn’t have meant anything to him until the next day when he heard about Mrs. Parry’s death.”

“But why didn’t Charlie tell you about James?” She had taken a notebook from her pocket and was scribbling details in shorthand. The door opened and Hunter slipped quietly into the room, but she took no notice of him.

“Because it would have meant admitting that he was out of the house at about the time Mrs. Parry died,” Ramsay said. “ Besides, he hoped to use the information against Laidlaw.”

“And that’s why he died,” she said.

He nodded.

“Charlie phoned Laidlaw the day he disappeared,” Hunter said. “Laidlaw promised to come to his hideout the next day with enough money for Charlie to go abroad, start again. Instead he came up early in the morning and killed him.”

He spoke with great satisfaction and she looked at him with distaste. She seemed small and very tired. The euphoria of her story and the pleasure in the completeness of all the details had gone. She was realising, Ramsay thought, how close she had been to becoming the third victim.

“I didn’t realise about Charlie Elliot,” she said. “I thought he was the murderer. It never occurred to me that James might have killed his aunt. I thought it was just about money.” She paused. “Why did he do it?” she asked. “Why was he so desperate for money? The paper can’t have been doing badly.”

Ramsay looked at Hunter to check his facts. “It was Stella,” he said. “As you said, she has expensive tastes. Everyone thought her father paid for that big house by the river, but he’d had nothing to do with her since she went into hospital. James was afraid of losing her. He thought if he gave her everything she wanted he might keep her happy.”

“What will she do now?” Mary asked.

Ramsay shook his head. “I don’t know.” But it wasn’t Stella who concerned him. It was the child with the white hair and the transparent skin who had lost the only adults she could trust. He never knew that Carolyn had realised almost from the beginning that her father had killed Alice Parry. Peter, sleepless with excitement, had seen his uncle on the lawn, waiting. He had told Carolyn because he told her everything and he had kept the secret because she had wanted him to. Yet though Ramsay never knew of that terrible responsibility, he considered her the real victim of the case.

Ramsay heard from Mary again two months later. She phoned him at Otterbridge and offered to buy him lunch.

“To celebrate,” she said. “I’ve just got a job on the
Journal.
”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. It had been impossible in the weeks after the Brinkbonnie murders to escape Mary’s picture in the press and the articles of the “local intrepid reporter who finds solution to murder mystery.” She had even been on national television. “They’re lucky to have you.”

“Let’s go to the Castle in Brinkbonnie,” she said. “You can pick me up at the flat, then I can get drunk.”

So he gave her a lift to Brinkbonnie. The sun was shining and there was a mild westerly wind. In the street where she lived the blossoms dropped from the trees like snow. In Brinkbonnie everything seemed much the same. As they drove down the Otterbridge Road he looked into the Greys’ farmyard, but there was no blue Rover in view. Perhaps it was discreetly parked in the tractor shed. The post office was still shut for lunch and the same cars were for sale outside Kerr’s garage. They stopped, for a moment, outside the field where the houses were planned, but there were no bulldozers. The council had decided to appeal against the inspector’s decision to the high court, so building was delayed.

In the Castle they sat on the stage in the lounge bar and ordered steak. She drank beer and most of a bottle of overpriced red wine. She wore wide red dungarees and enormous earrings shaped like frogs.

Halfway through the meal when she was already loud and flushed she put down her knife and fork.

“Did you know that Max and Judy are moving into the Tower?” she asked. And he realised that he was only there because there was no-one else she could talk to about her secret lover.

“No,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“He resigned from the Health Centre after the business with Stella and the prescription,” she said. “ They’re planning to open the Tower to the public, run courses in local crafts, folk music. You know the sort of thing.”

He nodded.

“Have you seen Max?” he asked gently.

“No,” she said. “I thought he might have been in touch, but it’s probably just as well this way.”

“Yes,” he said. He could think of nothing more to say.

“I’m moving to Newcastle at the weekend,” she said. “I’m not really a small-town girl.”

He would have liked to ask her what had happened to Stella and the little girl, but decided in the end that he preferred not to know.

When he dropped her outside her flat, he thought she might ask him to come in for a drink, but she only waved like a child and beamed when he wished her good luck. He went home to the cottage in Heppleburn. In the woods in the dene there were bluebells and wood anemones and the trees were green with new leaves. He made a pot of coffee, so the smell of it filled the house, sat on the windowsill, and thought that he should appreciate the view while it was still there. Then the telephone rang and Hunter, at the other end, told him he was needed at work.

First published in 1991 by Century

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