Ann Cleeves - Murder in My Backyard

When she was sitting in her car, trying to coax it to start, she decided not to go into the office immediately. She could not face James until her head was better. Besides, she needed time to work out for herself the implications of Alice Parry’s death. It was the first Monday of the month and the magistrates court would be sitting in Otterbridge. James Laidlaw usually covered the court himself, but Mary thought it unlikely that he would remember it today. It would provide a reasonable excuse for her absence from the office.

The courthouse was a red-brick building between the police station and the cattle market, with the same air of depression as an urban social security office. The waiting room was thick with smoke. There was a queue at the tea bar run by the WRVS and by then she was desperate for coffee. In a corner a well-dressed solicitor was talking to his client for the first time. Occasionally there were shouts of recognition as defendants waiting to go into court called to old friends.

Mary left her coat in the office of a friendly probation officer and slipped into the court, onto the press bench behind the prosecuting solicitor, just as three elderly magistrates came into the room. In the warm, calm, wood-panelled room Mary Raven listened to the cases and dozed until early afternoon. When the court finally rose at two-thirty, she felt she could not put off going to the office any longer. On the way out she was stopped by an anxious businessman who had been convicted of drunk driving and was convinced that he could persuade her to keep his name out of the Express , but she arrived at the High Street at three o’clock.

In the Express office James Laidlaw heard Mary’s car from his desk and walked to the window to watch her arrive. The car’s exhaust had been going for days and she claimed not to have the time or the money to get it mended. He wondered sometimes why he had ever employed her. Her lack of organisation was legendary. He watched her climb clumsily out of the small car and heard her come up the stairs. Then she burst into the office, dropping scarf, keys, files onto the floor.

“Don’t look at me like that, Marg!” she said to the receptionist. “You’ve got to be kind to me. I’ve got a hangover.”

“Where have you been?” James asked, standing in the doorway.

“Magistrates court,” she said. “ It’s the first Monday of the month. I knew you wouldn’t want to do it today. The flasher from Whittingham was up. Otherwise it was all motoring.”

“Oh.” James was momentarily distracted. “ What did he get?”

“Remanded for social enquiry reports,” she said. “ There were a couple of drunk drivings and a strange thing happened-” She broke off, realising that legal gossip was inappropriate. “ I’m so sorry about your aunt Alice, James,” she said. “ Isn’t it awful? She was such a nice lady.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She was.”

“I met her, you know, on the afternoon before she died.”

“Yes,” he said. “ She told me.”

“She was so sympathetic. So easy to talk to.”

“Have the police been to see you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “ They might have been to the flat. I haven’t been in much. I went to a party in Newcastle on Saturday night and stayed with friends in town. I didn’t get home until late last night. When exactly did she die?”

“Saturday night,” he said. “At about midnight.”

“So she died soon after I’d seen her,” she said. “Do the police know who killed her?”

He shrugged. “ They won’t tell me,” he said, “but there was a lot of ill feeling in the village about the new housing development.”

“I know,” she said. “I was at the residents’ meeting on Saturday afternoon. They were really angry.”

He looked at her sharply. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “ Why were you there? We’d decided not to cover the Brinkbonnie development because I couldn’t be objective.”

“I thought I could cover it objectively,” she said. “And if you didn’t want to run the story, someone else might.”

“We don’t work that way here,” he said. “I intend to run a paper with standards.”

“I’ve got standards!” she cried. Her face was flushed and he thought she looked like a moody teenager. He did not know how old she was. She had worked for him for five years and had seemed no younger then than she did now. He knew very little about what she did when she was on her own. She had kept her student friends and her social life seemed to consist of wild, alcoholic parties and evenings in smoky pubs.

“I thought it was a good story,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “ I didn’t mean to snap. I’m upset.” He looked at her. “She didn’t say anything that might help the police find out who killed her? They’ll want to talk to you, anyway.”

She shook her head. “We ended up talking about personal things,” she said. “She was so easy to confide in.”

“I’ll miss her,” he said, and returned to his desk to work.

They left the office together at five o’clock. He wondered if he should phone Stella to tell her that he was on his way home but decided against it. He had been half expecting her to ring him, to demand his presence back at the house, but there had been no call and that was a good sign. He pulled the glass door tightly shut behind them, then went down the stairs into the street. There was a smell of stale beer from the pub next door.

“Where are you off to tonight?” he asked, as he walked her to her car.

“Home,” she said bitterly. “ To an empty flat.”

He waited until she got into the Mini and revved it into life, then with grating and erratic lurches drove it away up the street. By now it was very cold. With the darkness the temperature had dropped. He thought for a moment of the plight of the swan on the river, trapped as the ice spread, then started quickly home, resisting the temptation to go into the Blue Anchor for a drink to warm him up first.

As Mary Raven drove from the Express office to her flat, the depression that she had kept at bay with alcohol and frantic activity since Saturday night returned. Persistent and awkward questions repeated themselves in her mind, and she was very tired. She saw the lights of a large supermarket that stayed open late in the evening and realised she was hungry and that there was no food in the house. She turned sharply into the carpark. The motorist behind her hit his horn and she mouthed obscenities to him in her mirror.

She took a trolley and began to wander aimlessly down the aisles. The place was almost empty and the few shoppers she met intimidated her with their efficiency. They were well-dressed women on their way home from work with lists in their hands and a detailed map of the shop in their heads. They would have, she could tell, strong views on artificial additives, and she imagined that they looked at the contents of her trolley with disapproval. Defiantly she lifted pies, ready-cooked meals, and several tins of rice pudding from the shelves. What was the point in eating healthfully when you felt like dying? At the off-licence beyond the checkout she bought two bottles of wine and four cans of lager. Outside it was dark and the trolley had a wheel jammed. When she got into the car, she felt like crying.

She saw Max’s car, empty, parked outside her flat when she arrived there and read the licence plate by the street light with disbelief. She had been dreaming about Max for two days and had thought she would never see him again. The sight of the car, solid and familiar, made her think she had been a fool to be frightened. After all, she knew Max. He was a doctor, caring and gentle. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Her fears had been caused by lack of sleep and an overactive imagination.