Ann Cleeves: Murder in My Backyard

“Mrs. Grey! Are you there?” Immediately after speaking he opened the nearest of the doors.

They were sitting together in a small living room. Ramsay guessed that Celia Grey would consider it her own room. It would not be used by the rest of the family. It had no television and he could not imagine a teenage boy in here. The windows were small and it was still in shadow. There was a brick fireplace with a bowl of dried flowers on the grate. On a small sofa Henshaw and Celia sat close to each other. Henshaw was turned towards her, holding one of her hands in both of his. When he saw Ramsay, standing just inside the room, he jumped to his feet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” he demanded. “I thought you needed a search warrant before you did this sort of thing.”

“I did knock,” Ramsay said mildly. “I was hoping to talk to Mrs. Grey, but it’s convenient that you’re here, too.”

“You can’t talk to her now,” Henshaw blustered. “Can’t you see that she’s upset? You know what they found on their land earlier this week. It’s been a terrible shock.”

“Did Mrs. Grey have a shock on the evening of Alice Parry’s death?” Ramsay asked:

“What do you mean?”

“You came here, didn’t you, on Saturday night?” Ramsay asked. Without waiting for an answer, he turned to Celia Grey. “I think your husband was away,” he said, “and you sent your son out into the village. But Mr. Henshaw was late. He had an unexpected visitor. Someone it was hard to get rid of. Was Mr. Henshaw still here when Ian came home? Perhaps we should ask your son.”

“What are you saying?” It was Henshaw again, red-faced with anger and concern. “Bob and Celia are neighbours, friends. I’m here because I heard that Charlie Elliot had been found in the barn. I wanted to offer my help. He’s a good chap, Bob, but not very imaginative. I thought she might need some support.”

“Do you always park your car in the shed so it can’t be seen from the road?” Ramsay asked reasonably, and Henshaw’s outburst seemed unbalanced and irrational.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Henshaw said. “ You should watch what you’re saying.”

Celia Grey stood up and both men fell silent. “It’s no good, Colin,” she said. “He knows. I told you it would all come out in the end.”

“It’s none of their business,” Henshaw muttered. He gazed at her sentimentally. “How could anyone else understand?”

“I’m afraid it is my business,” Ramsay said. “Do you realise that you’re a suspect in a murder enquiry, Mr. Henshaw? We believe that Charlie Elliot was murdered by the same person as Alice Parry. We’re still looking for her killer. If you have any information that would eliminate you from our enquiries, it would be in your interest to give it.”

“Colin was here when Alice Parry was killed,” Celia Grey said. “You were right. My husband was visiting his mother in hospital in the Lake District. I’d rather you didn’t ask my son, but you were right about that, too. Colin was still here when he arrived home.”

“What about Monday evening?” Ramsay asked. “Was Mr. Henshaw here then, too? Is that why you didn’t notice any noise in the farmyard?”

She nodded.

“Thank you,” Ramsay said. They were a strangely matched couple, he thought. She seemed so upright and cold. He could picture her dressed in Puritan black and white as one of the New England settlers, motivated by principle and guilt.

Henshaw, in contrast, was driven by greed and ambition and seemed to have no sense of morality at all. Yet he looked at her now with tenderness and admiration and he had done everything in his power to protect her. “ It would have been easier,” Ramsay said, “if you’d told me straightaway.”

“I couldn’t have Celia bothered,” Henshaw muttered. “ I had to consider her reputation. She has her position in the village to think about. Don’t you know she’s chairwoman of the WI?”

There was no irony in his voice. It seemed to Ramsay then that Henshaw was the innocent and Celia Grey was the corrupter of souls. He wondered when and how the relationship had started. He thought it could have no future.

“Now I know all about your affair,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me what really happened in your conversation with Alice Parry.”

“Nothing,” Henshaw said rudely. “I’ve told you everything that happened. There’s nothing more to say.”

Ramsay did not believe him, but time was slipping past and he was no nearer to reaching a solution. He left them, closeted in the half darkness, sharing their secret, frightened affection.

By early evening of the same day, Mary Raven had her story. It was complex. She would have preferred to talk to Henshaw, of course. She was convinced that he played a part in it somewhere. But she had evidence enough without him, and she had not tried too hard to find him. She had rattled into Brinkbonnie in the morning, staying long enough to annoy Rosemary Henshaw, then driven on to talk to other people in different places. At the back of her mind all the time there was her concern for Max, and as she drove along, she stared out as if she might see him by chance walking down the pavement towards her. Perhaps the anxiety clouded her judgement because she had no sense of danger.

She had gone to the west of Newcastle to a converted warehouse where an ex-councillor had set up a charitable trust for alcoholics. She talked to the man and all of the residents, as well as an old lady who had lived rough for years, walking from the Scottish borders to the Tees every summer, and who had been persuaded to make her home in this building off the Scotswood Road with its view of the Tyne. Then Mary drove back to Otterbridge to the geriatric hospital and talked to another old lady, her body as fine and frail as a pipe-cleaner doll, her mind as bright and clear as a child’s, her memory perfect. By this time Mary was pushed on not only by ambition but by anger.

When she got to her flat, Mary saw her landlady, who lived in the house next door, staring at her curiously through the living-room window. When Mary moved she disappeared guiltily, so Mary thought: She’s planning to put the rent up again. But the landlady had promised to phone the police as soon as Mary got home. She thought Mary was a nice girl and had never liked the police, so it was a difficult and awkward thing to do.

Inside the flat Mary boiled the kettle, made a mug of coffee, and started in her mind to write her story. Absentmindedly she went to collect her mail from the front door. There was a leaflet about the poll tax, and hand-delivered, still stuck in the flap of the letter box, a note.

“Meet me,” it said. “ Brinkbonnie dunes. Eight o’clock.”

He had signed it with the incomprehensible scribble that could only be deciphered by colleagues and pharmacists.

She stood for a moment in the grimy, ill-lit hall holding the note and staring at it. The coffee mug in the other hand tilted and tipped hot liquid over the carpet and her foot. There was none of the elation she might have expected. She was glad he was safe and had apparently so far avoided arrest, but she was not even sure if she wanted to see him.

I’m tired, she thought. I can’t handle this. Not now. I need a drink.

The day before, she would have been overjoyed to receive such a summons from Max. Now it was just something else to worry about.

She walked into the living room and propped the note in the typewriter her parents had given her as an eighteenth-birthday present. She stared at it anxiously as if it were a bomb. She looked at her watch. It was seven-thirty already. She went to the window to draw the curtains to put off making a decision. The street was empty. Whatever shadow she had imagined had been following her had disappeared. It was all hallucination, she thought. I’m losing my mind. She finished her coffee and took the empty mug into the kitchen. The phone began to ring, disturbing and insistent. Suddenly, just to avoid answering it, she picked up her jacket and car keys and went outside, leaving the light on in the living room and the note in the typewriter.