Ann Cleeves - Murder in My Backyard

She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “ The village just seemed to give up and accept its fate.”

“It wasn’t that one or two prominent members of your committee dropped out?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was nothing like that. The committee remained remarkably united. They were very supportive.”

There was a pause. Hunter drank his tea.

“It couldn’t have been that at the end of the campaign you all got”-he hesitated, searching for the word he wanted- “complacent? You thought you would win so you didn’t bother to put up much of a fight?”

“No,” she said. “Really, I’ve thought about it and I’m sure our tactics were just right. My husband’s in public relations and he advised us. Look, if you’re interested, I can show you a file of letters I sent asking for support-to councillors, the local M.P., the media. I kept copies of them all. We had a concerted attack in the last couple of weeks just before the appeal was heard.”

She disappeared into another room and returned with a yellow envelope file bursting with typewritten notes and letters. She sorted through them and took out a handful to show Hunter.

“Look,” she said. “All these are dated in the month before the appeal. I really don’t think we could have done any more. We just didn’t get the response from the public that we could have hoped for. Perhaps the campaign had just been going on for too long and they had a sort of protest fatigue. This sort of development had happened so often in the county that it just didn’t seem exciting anymore.”

“Do you know Henshaw?” Hunter asked. “ Personally?”

She laughed. “ No,” she said. “We don’t move in the same social circles.”

“Did he ever approach you during the campaign?”

“Not during the campaign,” she said. “ He came here afterwards, when the inspector’s decision was finally made public, to gloat. He stood on the doorstep and shook my hand and said that now that the due process of law had been completed he hoped we could be good neighbours.”

“What did you say?”

She shrugged. “What could I say? As far as I knew he was right. Everything was legal and aboveboard. I was as gracious as I could manage, wished him luck for the future, and asked him for a donation for playgroup equipment. As he was so keen to be a good neighbour. I’m on the playgroup committee and we’re always short of money.”

“Did you get your donation?” Hunter asked.

She smiled wryly. “Oh, yes, we got it. And just as the bulldozers were moving in, there was a picture in the local paper of Henshaw surrounded by grateful toddlers and piles of new toys. He knows more about public relations than my husband.”

“Yes,” Hunter said. “I see.” So Ramsay was wrong again, he thought. He should have more sense than to believe Jack Robson’s fairy stories.

She looked at her watch. “I haven’t been a lot of help, have I?” she asked. “ If there’s nothing else you want to know, I’ll have to be out soon to collect my older boys from school. I should avoid that while you’ve got the chance. There’ll be no peace then.”

She let him out of the back door and into the garden again. As he left he saw her rounding up her sons, scolding them halfheartedly for the state they were in, laughing as she gathered them to her.

In the police house Ramsay sat alone and waited for something to happen. He was not sure what he was expecting but sensed that they were close to some resolution. He put out a general call that he should be notified of Mary Raven’s whereabouts, but he did not want to apprehend her. If they found Max Laidlaw, he should be brought in for questioning immediately.

He telephoned Judy, who answered the phone very quickly.

“Yes,” she said. “ Who’s there?” He could sense her holding her breath, praying that it was her husband.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s Inspector Ramsay. I was calling to find out if you’ve heard from your husband.”

“No,” she said. “ I’ve heard nothing. No-one seems to know where he is.”

The children must have been returned to her because in the background he heard one of the children calling for a drink.

“Try not to worry,” he said. “ If Max does get in touch, perhaps you could let me know.”

“Yes,” she said. She sounded exhausted. “Of course.” She seemed not even to have the energy to replace the receiver because as he pressed the cradle to cut off the call he heard the toddler talking again.

The afternoon wore on and he waited for a knock at the door, for the message that someone in the village wanted to talk to him. He switched on the light to make the place more welcoming and phoned the Otterbridge Incident Room again. Mary Raven had been seen in Otterbridge, they said. They were keeping an eye on her.

“Don’t lose her!” Ramsay said. “And don’t pick her up unless she takes you to Max Laidlaw.”

He settled down to wait again.

He welcomed Hunter’s return at least as a break from the tension, but he was disappointed that it was the policeman and not one of the locals who stood outside waiting to be let in.

“Well?” he demanded as soon as Hunter was inside. “How did you get on?”

Hunter shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “ Robson’s theory won’t work. Jane Massie was really committed to the campaign to stop the houses being built. I believed her. She showed me evidence, too. She wrote lots of letters all the way through. There’s no way that the campaign collapsed because she dropped out, and she says that the same committee ran the thing all the way through. No-one made any excuses to leave or not pull their weight.”

Ramsay was listening intently. “Did Henshaw make any approaches to her while the planning process was going through?” he asked.

Hunter shook his head again. “ Not until it was all over,” he said, “and then he gave a donation to the village playgroup. Jane Massie runs that, too.”

Then Ramsay lost patience. He had been waiting long enough. He wanted to talk to Henshaw again, to confront him with his wife’s statement that he had left the house on Saturday night after Alice Parry’s visit. He felt that the builder was mocking him.

“Stay here,” he said to Hunter. “I’m expecting someone from the village to make an approach. Be gentle with them. I don’t want them frightened off.”

He slammed the door behind him and walked quickly across the green to the Otterbridge Road. Perhaps it was because he was so angry and preoccupied that he made the same mistake as he had on the night after Alice Parry’s murder and walked into the Greys’ farmyard instead of the Henshaws’ drive. The place was quiet. He felt rather ridiculous, standing in the muddy farmyard looking round him absentmindedly, and the embarrassment of his previous mistake returned. He imagined Celia Grey looking down on him from one of the upstairs windows, sneering at his indecision. It would be impossible now to turn round and go away. Charlie Elliot’s body had been found on Grey’s land, so he had a perfectly good excuse for being there. So, still imagining that he was being watched, trying to present an air of purpose, he walked towards the back door. If it had not been for his pride, he would never have seen Henshaw’s Rover tucked into one of the machinery sheds. Only the bumper was showing.

The back door was slightly open and the kitchen was empty. He knocked and called, but no-one answered. He waited, still thinking that his approach had been seen, then pushed open the door and went inside. The farmyard had been full of late-afternoon sunshine and long, warm shadows. When he entered the shadow of the kitchen, he shivered. He put his hand on the top of the range, but it was cold. The kitchen was much tidier than it had been on his previous visit, the sink and draining board empty, the work surfaces clear except for a bowl of rather mucky, recently collected eggs. The tile floor had been washed and in one corner it was still damp. He moved on through the door that led into the rest of the house, into the entrance hall where he had stood with Celia Grey on his last visit, trying to persuade her to allow him to talk to her son. The sun came in from an upstairs window and lit the specks of dust in the stairwell. There were two other doors leading from the hall. Both were huge and heavy and must have blocked out all sound. Both were shut tight. He called out and his voice echoed over the stone flags: