Ann Cleeves - Murder in My Backyard

Someone had put a bunch of daffodils on the pavement outside the post office. It was a form of apology. No-one believed that Charlie had murdered Alice.

In the house behind the garage the Kerrs were finishing a meal. As the policemen approached they heard Maggie shouting at one of the boys that it was rude to leave the table without asking to be excused. The snapping ill temper seemed out of character and her voice was strained. Olive Kerr let the policemen into the house. As she opened the door to them she realised she was still wearing a pinafore and took it off, apologising.

“We’re not ourselves today,” she said.

When Maggie saw Ramsay and Hunter, she turned on the boys again. “Go on and run the bath,” she said. “ You’re big enough to do it yourselves now.” Then, when she thought they were about to argue: “You can use some of my bubble bath. It’s on the bathroom shelf.” They leapt away up the stairs, whooping with glee.

Olive took the half-empty plates into the kitchen, and when she came back they were still standing, staring at each other. At the head of the table, his head bowed so that the bald patch gleamed in the electric light, stood Tom Kerr.

“I expect you’ve come about Charlie Elliot,” she said. “We heard this afternoon. It’s a terrible thing to have happened.”

“Sit down,” Olive Kerr said, and obediently they all sat around the dining table like delegates at some conference, or, Ramsay thought, very aware of Tom Kerr, like members of a church committee. He almost expected the man to suggest that they pray. It wouldn’t do any harm, Ramsay thought. They didn’t have much else to go on.

“How can we help you, Inspector?” Tom Kerr asked, and the normal quiet voice broke into Ramsay’s fantasy and startled him.

“I need to ask your daughter some questions,” Ramsay said. “ If you feel you have any information to help us find out who killed Charlie Elliot, I’d like to hear from you and Mrs. Kerr, too. But I’m here to speak to Maggie.”

“Would you like us to leave you alone with her?” Tom Kerr asked, but Ramsay shook his head. Something about Kerr’s still, almost fanatical presence concentrated the mind. He turned to Maggie.

“What time did you get home on Saturday night?” he asked. “I spoke to the regulars at the pub, but you didn’t tell me what time you got back.”

“It was late,” she said. “Gone one o’clock.”

“Did you see Charlie Elliot as you came back from the Castle?”

“No,” she said. “He’d left the pub much earlier. I think I told you. It was a relief.”

“We know he arrived home at about eleven,” Ramsay said. “But his father tells us that he went out again later. Fred presumes that he’d gone back over the green to walk you home.”

“No,” she said. “ Really. I didn’t see him.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“No,” she said. “Not until I was almost home. Then I saw my father.”

Tom Kerr looked up. “It was so late that I was beginning to worry about her,” he said. “I’d gone out to see if I could see her coming. I could see that she had just left the pub, so I waited for her. I didn’t see anyone else, either.”

“You knew we were looking for witnesses who had been out on Saturday night,” Ramsay said. “ Why didn’t you come forward before?”

“I wasn’t out,” Kerr said. “Not strictly speaking. I was only several yards from the front of the garage. And I’ve told you. I saw nothing.”

“When I saw Dad waiting, I began to run,” Maggie said. “ It was very cold, although he was so wrapped up you’d have thought he was out on an Arctic expedition. I didn’t see anything.”

“Did you notice if there was a light on in Fred Elliot’s cottage?” Ramsay asked.

She shook her head. “I was just so glad not to see Charlie,” she said. “I didn’t see anything else.”

There was a silence.

“Did Charlie Elliot try to get in touch with you after he left Brinkbonnie on Monday afternoon?” Ramsay asked.

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“We know he made a phone call on Monday night,” Ramsay said. “It wasn’t to you?”

“No,” she cried. “And anyway I wasn’t here on Monday night. I was working.”

Ramsay turned to Olive and Kerr.

“Was there a phone call here on Monday night?” he asked. “Perhaps from someone who did not answer when you picked up the receiver?”

But they shook their heads. “We were here all evening,” Olive Kerr said, “and the only call was for Tom from the vicar.”

Then Ramsay began to share Hunter’s impatience. This talk wasn’t getting them anywhere, just leading them round in circles. He should have trusted his original instinct and concentrated on getting Mary Raven to talk to them. He knew that if he could persuade her to tell them why she was in the churchyard, at least some of the confusion would disappear. So they left the Kerrs in a hurry, almost rudely, refusing offers of tea and food, and they drove to Otterbridge. But when they arrived at Mary Raven’s flat, it was dark and empty and the other tenants claimed not to have seen her all day. The policemen waited in the car for hours, with Hunter ranting about search warrants and, if that was impossible to arrange, breaking down the door and feigning a burglary. By midnight Ramsay was so desperate that he thought he might give in to this folly and knew it was time to go home.

On Wednesday morning Stella Laidlaw had still not seen Max. She had expected him to arrive the day before and had been prepared for him from early morning, as expectant and smartly dressed as a lover. She imagined that every car that approached the drive belonged to him, and by late afternoon she was in a frenzy of anxiety in case James came home from work before Max arrived. At four o’clock she phoned the surgery, but the receptionist said Dr. Laidlaw was out on an urgent call. Stella did not believe her and shouted and made a scene. Then she phoned Max at home, but Judy answered and Stella put the phone down without saying anything. There was a temptation to spite Max by telling Judy all she suspected, but secrecy, Stella knew, was her greatest source of power.

When James came in from work on Tuesday night, he found Stella more tense than he could remember. She was sobbing and shaking. She wished she was dead, she said. She wished it was all over for her, too. James tried to comfort her. He felt exhausted himself, but he put her to bed like a child and sat with her until she finally slept. In the morning the crisis seemed to be over and her confidence restored. She woke quite normally. He tried to insist on staying with her, or on fetching the doctor to be with her, but she sent him to work. She was at her most charming, apologising for making so much fuss the night before. She was so much trouble to him, she said. She did not know how he put up with her.

Carolyn watched her mother’s performance with a new, dull detachment. In the past, scenes like these would have upset her dreadfully. She would have hidden in her bedroom, her head under the blankets, trying to persuade herself that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Now the hysteria hardly touched her. She wondered why she had ever considered her mother’s moods of such importance.

She watched the weeping woman with curiosity, as if her mother were a strange child throwing a tantrum in the street. James and Stella were so wrapped up in each other that they did not notice the change in Carolyn. They did not realise that she had hardly slept for nights and that she had eaten little. When she made her way to school, she stumbled with tiredness.

James was relieved to leave the house, but all day he was thinking about Stella, remembering how she had been before Carolyn was born, wondering if she would ever be like that again. Wednesday was the day before publication, the busiest time for the Express , but he could not forget her.