Murder in My Backyard

by Cleeves, Ann

  “That had nothing to do with me.”

  “How well do you know Dr. Laidlaw, Miss Raven?”

  She feigned anger. “Look,” she said. “You’ve asked me that before. It’s late. I want to go home.”

  “Could you answer the questions,” he said. “Humour me.”

  “Dr. Laidlaw isn’t my doctor, but I go to his practise and see him sometimes. I know his wife.”

  “Has he written any prescriptions for you lately?”

  This time the question genuinely surprised her.

  “No,” she said. “Can’t you tell? I’m the picture of health.”

  “A prescription with your name on it was taken to a pharmacist in the middle of Otterbridge today.”

  “It must be a coincidence,” she said. “ Really, I haven’t been to the doctor for years.”

  “It was a fictional prescription,” he said. “Made out for someone else entirely. But Dr. Laidlaw chose your name. Why was that, do you think? Why, of all the patients in the practise, was yours the first to come into his mind?”

  “I don’t bloody know!” she said, but she was secretly delighted.

  “When did you last see Dr. Laidlaw?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  There was a pause. Mary lit another cigarette. It was very late and she had not slept well on Sophie’s sofa. She yawned.

  “We’ve had some difficulty in finding you during the last few days,” Ramsay said. “Can you give me some idea of where you’ve been?”

  “Be more specific,” Mary said, playing for time.

  “What about Tuesday morning?” Ramsay said. “ That’s when Charlie Elliot was murdered.”

  But if he hoped to frighten her he did not succeed. She seemed to take a keen interest in the questions. She was wary. But she did not feel under any personal threat.

  “I talked to you,” she said. “You came into the café in town and I saw you there.”

  “What about earlier that morning?” he asked. “ Between five and six-thirty. Where were you then?”

  “I was at home,” she said. “ I was restless and couldn’t sleep. I started to do some work.”

  What’s wrong with all these women? Ramsay thought, remembering that Stella Laidlaw, too, had complained of being restless. Do they all suffer from insomnia?

  “Can anyone confirm that you were at home?” he asked.

  “I was typing,” she said. “Someone else in the house might have heard it.”

  “Why have you spent so little time in the office?” he asked. It was a final question. He expected to get nothing else out of her. He was profoundly disappointed.

  So she told Ramsay a little about her story. It was a relief to have something to tell him without pretence, and as she spoke with immense enthusiasm he became more interested.

  “If it comes to anything,” he said, “you should let me know. It might be a police matter.”

  “Yes,” she said. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad policeman after all. She was tempted just for a moment to trust him. Then she remembered Max, sobbing and overwrought, and knew that this was just another trick to put her off her guard.

  Ramsay told Hunter to take Mary home, and as he had just started eating a bacon sandwich in the canteen, she had a long wait for him. It was half-past one and the town was quite quiet. Hunter said nothing as he drove through the empty streets. Mary Raven wasn’t his type.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” he asked when he parked outside.

  “No,” she said. “ I can manage fine.” And he put her independence down to the sort of woman she was. He almost expected a lecture on feminism.

  She waited until the car had pulled away before she went into her flat. She moved quietly because she did not want to draw attention to herself and she did not want to disturb Max. She pushed open the door into the bedroom, expecting to hear his drunken heavy breathing. But Max had gone and the only sign that he had been there was the crumpled bed.

  Her first impulse was to rush out into the street to look for him, but she realised that he had probably been gone for hours. She climbed into the bed and fell asleep, exhausted.

  When she woke, she switched on the radio immediately, half expecting to hear that Max Laidlaw had been arrested for murder. There was nothing. She phoned his home, but Judy answered the phone in a tight and tearful voice, and she replaced the receiver without speaking. It was too early for him to be at the surgery. Again, to escape her growing anxiety, she returned to her story. She looked back in her shorthand notebook for the name and address of the man she had seen in the magistrates court who had been convicted for a second time of drunk driving, then went out intending to find him.

  In the street outside her flat she thought at first that the Mini would refuse to start. It spluttered and choked and she explained to it, more loudly and obscenely with every twist of the key in the ignition, that she needed this story, she really needed it. At last the engine turned over. As she looked in the mirror before driving off, she thought she saw the back of someone in the front garden of the house where she had her bedsit. She thought for an instant that it was Max, but when she looked again behind her, the figure had gone. Then she told herself that she was losing her mind. She was tired and she had made the image up. It was the postman or that strange man who lived on the ground floor who always went into the garden to clean his shoes. But all day as she drove around the region following her story, asking her questions, becoming more alarmed and triumphant about the answers she received, she had the sense of a shadow behind her. She never saw anyone. She did not even think that she was being followed. It was that someone knew where she was going and arrived there first, that he was following the workings, the logic of her mind. You’re imagining things, she thought. You’re so desperate to have this story to yourself that you’re imagining the competition.

  The drunk driver had his own business in a new glass-and-plastic factory on the industrial estate to the west of Otterbridge. He made valves, he told her. She gathered it was something to do with the oil trade, deep-sea diving. He sat in his cluttered office and explained it all in detail, hoping, she supposed, for a feature that would give him free advertisement, but she did not take it in. He offered to take her round the workshop and she went because she thought it would please him. He had a daughter, he said, not much younger than her, a student. She seemed to remind him of his daughter, and when he offered to take her out for lunch, she accepted, thinking she might get more out of him when he had drunk a couple of pints.

  “Only the pub over the road,” he said, grinning. “ I can’t take you into town. Not now. I have to get a taxi home and back.” Then, suddenly and lonely: “My wife’s left me, you know. She said the publicity was the last straw. I hope my daughter will keep in touch all the same.”

  And there, in the pub over Scotch and scampi, he told her everything she wanted and more, and she came away with a list of contacts. As she went to the ladies’ halfway through lunch, she looked carefully around the lounge bar, sensing again the shadow behind her, but she saw no-one she recognised. When she drove away from the factory, the Mini starting this time as sweetly as anything, it was probably only coincidence that a large grey saloon parked along the road pulled out, too, and kept far enough away from her that it was impossible for her to see the driver.

  She arrived home just as the children were coming out of the school on the corner of her street and the pavement was full of mothers. In her flat the curtains were still drawn from the day before and there was a bottle of sour milk on the table. Mary Raven opened the curtains and opened the window to let out the smell, but the noise of the children distracted her and she shut it again. She tried to phone Colin Henshaw, as she had tried several times over the previous days, but again his wife answered. Mary pretended to be an estate agent phoning on behalf of a client who wanted to buy one of the new houses in Brinkbonnie, but Mrs. Henshaw still said he would be out all day.

  “Who are you?” Rosemary Hensh
aw repeated suspiciously when Mary gave her fictitious name, as if she recognised the voice on the telephone and did not believe the fiction.

  “Perhaps you could tell me where I can get hold of him,” Mary persisted.

  “No,” Rosemary Henshaw said shortly. “ I’m sorry. I’ve no idea.”

  So Mary went back to the list of contacts, and encouraging the Mini with soft words and endearments, she set off round the region again, feeling the shape of the story growing more solid with every interview she did, already seeing her name on the front page of the London dailies.

  When she got back to the flat late that night, triumphant, needing coffee, whisky, the biggest Chinese take-away in the world, there was a note from James Laidlaw asking her to make sure she reported to the office the next day.

  Sod you, she thought. One more day and I’ll have this cracked. Then I won’t need you anymore. You’ll be finished.

  Of Max there was no word.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ramsay was in his kitchen, drinking coffee, spreading some of his mother’s homemade marmalade on a piece of toast when Jack Robson appeared at the cottage. The interview with Mary Raven the night before had depressed and frustrated him. He had expected more from her. He had thought she would provide all the answers he needed. If she had not killed Alice Parry, why was she being so obstructive? Ramsay was sure Max Laidlaw was her secret lover and his failure to persuade her to tell him that had left him feeling incompetent. She was hardly the sort to be coy about sex. He could not help feeling that Hunter would have made a better job of it.

  When the knock came on the front door, it was still early, before eight o’clock, and Ramsay supposed it was probably the postman with a circular too big to fit through the letter box. Instead it was Jack Robson, his face glowing after the walk from the other end of the village. He stood, his hands in his pockets, waiting to be let in.

  “Hey, man,” Robson said. “ You’re a hard person to get hold of. I was here several times yesterday evening and I couldn’t catch you in.”

  “No,” Ramsay said. “I was working late.” He did not know what to make of Robson’s appearance. In a serious investigation there was always the pressure of time, and once he let the old man into the house it might be hard to get rid of him. Yet there was always the possibility that he had useful information.

  “Come in,” he said. “ I’ll make you some tea.”

  “Well,” Robson said. “If you’re sure you’ve time.” He scrubbed his boots on the doormat and stepped in, looking around him with unembarrassed curiosity. “You’ve a nice place here. And a canny view.”

  “Aye,” Ramsay said. “Unless Henshaw gets planning permission and there’s a new estate built at the end of the garden. There’ll not be much of a view then.”

  “You don’t want to worry about that,” Robson said. “Building out there would extend the boundary of the village and that’s not in the structure plan.”

  “The structure plan didn’t count for much in Brinkbonnie.”

  “No,” Robson said. “ Well, I’m here to talk about that.”

  Ramsay took Robson into the kitchen and made strong, sweet tea the way Jack liked it.

  “Have you come up with anything?” he asked. He felt suddenly optimistic. Surely Jack would not be here so early in the morning if he did not think he could help.

  Robson sat on a painted wooden chair. “I’ve no evidence,” he said. “Nothing I can lay my finger on. But I’ve got a theory.”

  Ramsay was disappointed. He wanted something more concrete than theories.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “I’ve been through all the records,” Robson said. “I’ve gone back five years. I’m sure Henshaw’s found some way of manipulating the system. He even managed to get planning permission for sites where other developers had previously been turned down.

  “So how’s he doing it?”

  “It’s nothing to do with the council,” Robson said. “ I’ve already told you I’m certain of that.”

  “Is it one of the officials then? Someone in the planning department?”

  “No,” Robson said. “I think the corruption is more grassroots than that. You can have a village with a well-organised community group that successfully fights off any development, then along comes Henshaw and miraculously all the opposition disappears. It seems to happen again and again.”

  Ramsay was listening impassively. “ Tell me your theory,” he said.

  Robson paused and poured out more tea.

  “Most protest groups have one or two activists who do all the work,” he said. “ The rest turn up at the meetings—if the weather’s not too bad and there’s nothing good on the telly. It’s the same in any political organisation, and in most places you find the same people running everything—they’re school governors, on the parish council, even running the WI. If Henshaw managed to threaten, bribe, or blackmail the activists in each group, there would be no real opposition left. The organisation would fall apart. Then the Department of the Environment inspector would think that no-one cared sufficiently about the development to make a fuss and he would let it go through.”

  “But to prevent your activists from being effective, Henshaw would have to have detailed information on people all over Northumberland. It hardly seems likely.”

  “He’s got a lot of contacts,” Robson said. “A lot of people owe him favours. And we know he’s used dirty tactics in the past. Besides, he wouldn’t have to do it in every case. Only when it seemed likely that other methods wouldn’t work.”

  Ramsay had been standing throughout the conversation and moved to the window to look down the dene. His mind was working very quickly and he felt suddenly light-headed. For the first time he had a plausible motive for Alice Parry’s murder. She had the confidence of everyone in the village. If Henshaw had chosen leading members of the Save Brinkbonnie group as victims of his persuasion, it was quite possible that Alice would have heard about it. Perhaps, when she went to see Henshaw in an attempt to buy back the land, she had tried some gentle blackmail of her own. Ramsay imagined her standing up to the developer: “ Sell me the land or I’ll tell everyone what methods you’ve used to get your own way. My nephew’s a newspaper editor. He’ll be glad of the story.”

  Rosemary Henshaw had said that Alice was angry when she came to the house. Nothing could be more daunting, Ramsay thought, than a middle-class lady spurred on by righteous indignation. But perhaps Henshaw had called her bluff. Perhaps he had pointed out to her that the people most likely to suffer from exposure were the people whose indiscretions had made them potential victims of blackmail. That would explain her distress in the pub after she had left him. Then perhaps he had decided that her knowledge was too dangerous, and he had followed her and murdered her before she reached home. There was a lot of conjecture in the theory, but it fitted the facts. Ramsay was attracted to it, too, because it made Henshaw the most likely suspect. If he were convicted of murder, Ramsay’s view would be safe.

  “Well?” Robson demanded, breaking in on his thoughts.

  “What do you think?”

  Ramsay turned back slowly to face the room. “ It’s very interesting,” he said noncommittally. “ I’m grateful for all your help.”

  “I don’t want your gratitude, man. I want to know if you think I’m right.”

  “I think it might be worth following up,” Ramsay said.

  Jack was thrilled. “ What do you want me to do? I’m a well-known man in this county. I could speak to a few people.”

  “No,” Ramsay said. The last thing he wanted was Jack Robson frightening off Henshaw before they had proof. “We have to be discreet, you know, and it’s a police matter now. But you can help all the same.”

  “How?” Robson asked. “Just tell me, man. I’ll do anything I can.”

  “I’ll need a list of names,” Ramsay said. “ Members of residents’ associations or community groups living in areas where Henshaw’s recently won a planni
ng appeal. The activists you were talking about. The people who do all the work. Can you do that?”

  Robson was disappointed. He had expected something more exciting. He wanted a challenge.

  “Aye,” he said. “ I can do that for you. I can think of someone now who led the group in Wytham before those houses went up. Her name’s Jane Massie. She’s involved in everything that goes on in Wytham. I’ll write down the address for you. She lives in that big house opposite the new estate. You can have a longer list later if you need it.”

  Ramsay nodded gravely. He stood on the front step and watched Robson walk quickly down the road on his way to work in the school.

  In the kitchen Ramsay emptied the teapot and rinsed the mugs. He preferred to have things tidy to return home to. He was determined in his new home not to descend into bachelor squalor. As he tidied the room, he was testing Robson’s theory against the facts. It might work, he thought. It might just work. But who would Henshaw have approached in Brinkbonnie to influence the opposition? Charlie Elliot? Fred Elliot? Tom Kerr? All were prominent members of the Save Brinkbonnie group and possible candidates. He felt he needed to spend more time in Brinkbonnie, listening to the gossip, getting a feel for the place, before he could make a sensible judgement.

  But that would have to wait. The most immediate concern was to talk to Max Laidlaw. Ramsay thought that the doctor would be less able to stand up to questioning than Mary Raven. He was weak and indecisive. Besides, the police had the illegal prescription given to Stella, and faced with that evidence he might be persuaded to admit his relationship with Mary. An affair with one of the practise’s patients would provide another motive for murder, Ramsay thought, if Alice Parry had found out about it, and as he was always telling Hunter, it was important to keep his options open.

  Ramsay drove to the Health Centre in Otterbridge, thinking that it might be more tactful to talk to the doctor there than at home. He waited patiently behind an old woman whose joints were swollen with arthritis while she collected a repeat prescription, then asked to see Dr. Laidlaw.