Ramsay 04 - Killjoy

by Ann Cleeves

  John drank lager and thought about Connor and Sam Smollett and of how much the two had in common.

  How Connor would sneer, he thought, if he could see him now.

  ‘Gabby Paston was here yesterday,’ he said suddenly. From Sam Smollett he had gone on to think of Abigail Keene and he spoke the words without thinking. He regretted them immediately.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Evan Powell looked up from his meal.

  ‘She was here yesterday. She had an appointment for lunch. She told someone in class.’

  ‘Do the police know about this?’

  ‘Yes,’ John said evenly. ‘ Someone was in college today asking questions. A detective sergeant called Hunter.’

  Evan grunted to show what he thought of Gordon Hunter.

  ‘What else did she say?’ Jackie asked. ‘ That poor girl. I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind all day. Do they know yet what happened to her? What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ John said. ‘ He didn’t tell me anything.’

  Ramsay called into the Holly Tree on his way home from the police station. Hunter, thinking of the overtime, would have been glad to go, but Ramsay knew he could be more discreet, that he would find it easier to persuade people to talk. The owner, a dynamic woman with a county voice called Felicity Beal, was an old acquaintance. She had been at school with Diana, his ex-wife, and during his brief marriage he had been a regular at the restaurant. Diana always claimed that Felicity fed them for nothing, simply as a token of friendship, but he suspected that Diana had paid the bills secretly. He could never have afforded to take her there.

  He was greeted at reception by the restaurant manager, a young man with Mediterranean good looks who shared Felicity’s bed, and according to Diana, took all the profits. His English was perfect, his accent cultivated.

  ‘Mr Ramsay,’ he said. ‘Sir. We are just about to finish serving but if you come to a table now I’m sure we can accommodate you.’

  ‘Not tonight, thank you,’ Ramsay said. He had forgotten the man’s name and felt awkward about it. ‘ Is Miss Beal working today?’

  ‘Of course,’ the man said smoothly. ‘She works every night. Sometimes I think she doesn’t trust me. I’ll tell her that you’re here.’

  ‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘Please don’t bother. I’m sure I can find my own way.’

  He walked past the restaurant door to get to the kitchen and saw the Powells, their meal over, standing up to leave. Jackie was in profile, her face tense, staring out of the window and Evan touched her shoulder to gain her attention. Ramsay felt awkward about being there. He didn’t want to explain his presence in front of the other diners and he hurried on before they saw him.

  Felicity was sitting by a stainless-steel table with a large glass of red wine. In a corner a young girl was stacking plates into a machine.

  ‘Stephen Ramsay!’ Felicity shouted in a voice which had been honed during her hunting days. ‘Come in and pour yourself a drink. I can’t get up. I’m bloody knackered. I did most of the cooking myself tonight. The chef claims to have flu. How’s that bitch Diana?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ramsay said mildly. ‘You’ve probably seen her more recently than me.’

  ‘What are you doing here then? If you’re fed up with the police canteen you’ve had it, old son. I’m not cooking another thing tonight.’

  ‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘ It’s work. I need your help.’

  ‘And how can I help Ramsay the great detective?’ She took another swig from her glass.

  ‘You may have heard that a girl was found murdered yesterday evening in the Grace Darling Centre in Hallowgate Square. We’ve traced her movements for the morning but no one seems to have seen her after midday. She claimed to have had a lunch appointment here. I was wondering if she came.’ He took a photograph from his pocket and set it on the table. ‘Her name’s Gabriella Paston,’ he said. ‘She was wearing black leggings, a navy jumper, and heavy boots.’

  ‘She’d stick out like a sore thumb then, wouldn’t she?’ Felicity said. ‘I spent all lunch time in the bloody kitchen so I didn’t see her, but if she was here someone will recognize her. They should all be finishing soon. Sit down and have a drink until we’ve got rid of the punters. I don’t want you wandering round the restaurant in your big boots. I might get a reputation.’

  He sat beside her on a tall stool and accepted a glass of wine.

  ‘Of course I’d like a description of the person she was with,’ Ramsay said. ‘ That’s most important. And some idea of the time they left.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Leave it to old Felicity. It wasn’t desperately busy here yesterday lunch time, and the same staff are on, so I’m sure we’ll be able to sort it out for you.’ She looked at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Diana always said that the stress would kill you,’ she said. ‘Relax and leave it to me.’

  But when the waiters and waitresses came into the kitchen, complaining that their feet were killing them, grumbling at each other with the familiarity of family members, no one was able to identify Gabriella Paston. They tried. They passed the photo round between them, tried to remember similar customers served in the past.

  ‘When was she supposed to be here? Yesterday? No. No one like this was here yesterday.’

  ‘If she had smartened herself up?’ Ramsay said. ‘Put on make-up? Tied up her hair?’

  No, they said. The day before had been fairly quiet. There had been a big party of executives from a Newcastle insurance company. All men. The only woman in the place was at least sixty.

  He gave up and let them go away to their homes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Felicity said. ‘She can’t have been here. They’re a good crowd. If she had been they would have noticed.’

  ‘You take reservations for the tables in the restaurant, don’t you?’ Ramsay said.

  ‘Of course. Most regulars know they won’t get in without booking.’

  ‘Would you have a record of the reservations made for yesterday? And a note if any of them failed to turn up?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘ I get Carlo to make a note. It’s a bloody nuisance if you’ve turned away custom because someone’s booked and then the table’s empty.’

  ‘Perhaps we could look,’ Ramsay suggested gently.

  ‘Of course.’ She did not move but screamed through the kitchen door. ‘Bring the reservations diary, Carlo, there’s a dear.’

  The young man came immediately. ‘What is it?’ he said with theatrical resignation. ‘What have I done now?’

  ‘Nothing, my sweet. You’re perfect. You know that. The inspector wants to see if someone made a reservation for yesterday lunch time and didn’t keep it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Carlo said. ‘There was one. I remember. I wrote it down on the black list.’ He turned to the back of the diary. ‘Here we are: Miss Abigail Keene.’

  ‘Oh Carlo,’ Felicity said. ‘You donkey. Didn’t you realize? Someone was having you on. That’s no good to the inspector.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ramsay said. ‘It might be important. The murdered girl was playing Abigail Keene in a Youth Theatre production.’ He turned to Carlo. ‘ Did you take the phone call?’

  ‘Yes, sure. I take all the phone calls. Felicity thinks she can manage without me but I do all the work in this place.’

  ‘Who made the reservation? A woman?’

  ‘Yes. A woman.’

  ‘A young woman?’

  ‘Hey! I don’t know about that,’ Carlo said, smiling so widely that Ramsay could see the gold crowns on his molars. ‘All English people sound the same to me!’

  Across St Martin’s Hill Dennis Wood arrived home to a quiet and cold house. He had worked late, then met a friend for a drink in one of the smart new hotels on Newcastle’s quayside. The friend was a developer who had had a part in the building of the hotel and was inordinately proud of it. Dennis Wood hoped to interest him in a similar development at Hallowgate, and plied him with drink, hoping that he would mellow
to the idea at least to the extent of agreeing to visit Chandler’s Court; Dennis had drunk too much himself to keep the friend company, and he could remember nothing of the drive home. He was glad that Amelia was out. She would only have scolded him about driving when he had been drinking, nagged about the scandal there would be if he were caught and made to appear in court. There had been similar conversations on other occasions.

  He put himself to bed, folding his clothes meticulously but forgetting to remove his socks. He fell immediately and deeply to sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  Amelia Wood’s body was found by a jogger at eight in the morning while Dennis Wood was still sleeping off the excess of the night before. The jogger, a PE teacher at St Martin’s High School, took the same route every day: through the village, across the hill, and down the footpath through the dene. When he crossed the hill it was still dark and the ground was hard. There was no pleasure in the running and he wondered what crazy obsession prompted him to maintain the daily ritual. In the solid houses which backed on to the hill the lights in the bedroom windows reminded him that he could be still at home, drinking tea, reading the paper. The sky was clear and by the time he reached the path into the dene it was light enough to see where he was going. A high wall marked the boundary of the gardens and gave some shelter from the frost.

  Amelia Wood lay only yards from the open hill. The teacher thought at first she was a pile of summer rubbish blown into the undergrowth and left to rot. He even began to develop in his mind a lecture on the subject of litter to be delivered at the morning’s assembly. But as he approached he saw that it was a woman’s shape. She was lying on her side, dressed in a dark velour track suit, her buttocks curved towards him. She was quite close to the path and little attempt had been made to hide her.

  He ran back on to the hill looking for someone to help, someone with whom to share the responsibility of the discovery. There was no one in sight. He could have returned to the village, used the phone in Front Street, but that would have taken time and the situation seemed urgent. He chose instead to go through a gate in the high wall which bounded the common, into one of the gardens, and up to the house beyond. He had time to think, even in his panic, that he was in the wrong job and he wished he could afford a place like this. At first he could find no way into the house. There was no light and when he banged on the back door there was no response. He ran round the house over a lawn scattered with leaves, past bare fruit trees. On a semicircle of gravel a BMW was parked. Presumably then, someone was at home. As he ran to the front door he was joined by a Labrador which appeared from nowhere. He leaned on the door bell with all his weight until he heard movement upstairs, then stood, suddenly breathless and shaky waiting for someone to answer it.

  Dennis Wood was wakened by the shrieking of the door bell below him and by the barking of the dog. He groaned and turned over, hoping that Amelia would be up and would answer it. But it continued, making his head pound, and eventually he padded downstairs, still wearing the socks of the night before, pulling on a dressing-gown and tying it around his paunch. When he opened the door he saw a madman in a track suit and running shoes who yelled incoherently about an emergency, about needing to use the phone. As a good citizen he let the man in, but showed no interest. He thought the incident had nothing to do with him.

  Ramsay was sitting at his desk at Hallowgate police station when he received the news of Amelia Wood’s death. He had been there since seven, reading through the statements taken the day before from people who had been at the Grace Darling Centre on Monday evening, realizing with increasing frustration that no one had seen anything unusual. His first reaction to the discovery of the body was anger, directed not at the murderer but at Hunter. He had told the sergeant that someone should interview Mrs Wood. What had happened? It was the sort of incompetence that irritated because it was unnecessary. Hunter disliked the routine of statement taking and avoided it. He claimed it was boring, usually a waste of time, but Ramsay thought it was the listening which he found so irksome. He could not bear to give someone else his full attention. He had assumed apparently that like all the other witnesses Amelia Wood had no useful information to give. Her murder contradicted the assumption.

  Ramsay drove to Martin’s Dene alone, leaving instructions that Hunter was to follow him when he got in. He drove down the wide avenue of Martin’s Close looking at the smart houses without envy. The Woods’ home was at the end of a cul-de-sac, 1930s mock-Tudor, large, separated from the street by a row of trees. A police car was blocking the drive so Ramsay parked in the street and walked in. The front door was open. He shouted and stepped into a wide hall, then went through to the kitchen where he could hear voices.

  The kitchen was sleek and expensive and gave no sign that food was ever prepared there. Dennis Wood was perched ridiculously on a stool by a breakfast bar—there was nowhere else to sit. He was dressed in a grey suit and striped shirt, but the shirt was unbuttoned at the collar and he wore no tie. After letting the jogger into the house he had gone on to prepare for work. The policeman called first to the scene had recognized the woman as Amelia Wood—he had seen her in court—and broke the news to him.

  ‘Didn’t you notice,’ the policeman had asked, polite but incredulous, ‘that she’d been missing all night?’

  ‘No,’ Wood had said, still fuddled by the hangover, by the shock. ‘She was a busy woman. I’d assumed that she was still out when I got in last night. There was no sign of her car, you see. She must have put it away in the garage as soon as she got home. Then this morning I thought that she’d left early.’ Seeing the young policeman’s disbelief he added: ‘She wasn’t the sort of woman, you know, that you worried about.’

  The PE teacher was obviously still in shock. He was standing by the window, staring out into the garden. Ramsay introduced himself but the man hardly seemed to register his presence.

  ‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ he said, almost to himself. A policeman handed him a mug of tea and he took it absently, turned to him, and repeated the phrase like a chant.

  ‘I want someone on the front door,’ Ramsay said. ‘No unauthorized access. We’ll need back up. Immediately. I want to get to the scene of crime as quickly as possible. If my sergeant arrives send him on down to me. Tell him no interviews at this stage. I’ll talk to Mr Wood myself later.’

  The last thing he needed after the cock-up of failing to see Mrs Wood the night before was Hunter bullying the witnesses.

  ‘Which is the quickest way?’ he asked.

  ‘Through the garden. There’s a gate in the wall with access straight on to the hill. You won’t miss it from there.’

  Ramsay thought that the Woods must have paid for help with the garden. Apart from a few beech leaves on the lawn it was immaculate. The vegetable plot had been dug over for the winter, the paths were clear, the trees and shrubs regularly pruned. He could not imagine Dennis Wood getting his hands dirty and even with her ferocious energy Amelia would hardly have had the time. Besides, from what he had learned of her, horticulture would have been too tame an interest. The door through the wall was arched. It could be bolted from the inside but had been left ajar. Ramsay went through it and stood for a moment to take his bearings.

  The hill was a piece of windswept common surrounded on three sides by houses and bordered on the fourth side by the dene. There was a view over roofs to Tynemouth and the sea. Ramsay stood now at the corner where the dene and the houses met. There was access to the hill from a number of points but a well-trodden footpath led from Martin’s Dene village opposite him to the corner, where a cinder track had been created through the trees down the steep side of the valley. At the village end of the footpath was the Holly Tree restaurant.

  There was already a considerable police presence by the body and he was impressed by the efficiency of at least some members of the Hallowgate force. A Land-Rover had been driven over the hill and a policeman in a navy anorak was marking the area with blue and white
tape. As he walked towards it Ramsay caught the jolly Scottish voice of the pathologist unnaturally loud in the still, clear air. It was still cold and the grass and each branch and twig were covered with hoar. At the bottom of the dene a pool of mist lay over the burn. He stepped over the tape and joined the group of people looking down at the body. Among them he recognized Hallowgate’s chief superintendent, a quiet, studious man, nearing retirement. He was considered soft by some of his subordinates, too liberal by far, but Ramsay liked and respected him.

  ‘Ah, Ramsay,’ the superintendent said. ‘ Thank you for getting here so quickly. Any connection, do you think, with the Paston murder?’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ Ramsay said. ‘Mrs Wood was at the Grace Darling Centre on Monday evening, when Gabriella Paston’s body was discovered.’

  ‘You think she witnessed something?’ Ramsay was aware of a sharp intelligence.

  ‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately she’d left the Centre before the girl was found and we couldn’t get hold of her yesterday to take a statement.’

  ‘Yes,’ the superintendent said quietly. ‘I see. That was unfortunate.’ He said nothing else. He was not the sort of man to be critical in front of outsiders.

  ‘Have you discovered any other connection between Mrs Wood and the Paston girl?’

  ‘None at all at this stage.’

  ‘But it seems sensible to you to consider both murders as part of the same investigation?’

  ‘Definitely. Unless we come across any evidence to the contrary.’

  ‘Well then,’ the man said, briskly indicating, as he intended, his confidence in Ramsay. ‘I’ll leave you in charge. Report back to me later today. We’ll need details at some stage for a press conference.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ramsay said, wishing that his boss in Otterbridge was half as sensitive. He watched as the superintendent, slightly stooped, more like a scholar than a policeman, walked back towards the Woods’ house.