Ann Cleeves: Murder in My Backyard

They brought the old lady to him in a wheelchair and he sat in the sweltering day room with its dying potted plants and ancient magazines and listened while she repeated her story. Outside it was dark and eventually the woman slipped into sleep, almost in midsentence. A brisk and cheerful nursing sister who had heard it all before filled in the gaps. It made little sense to Hunter, but he had the intelligence to realise how it might be important. When he emerged from the hospital into the quiet, tree-lined street, he thought that Ramsay would be pleased.

He and Ramsay arrived at the police station at the same time, both excited, both wanting to share their discoveries, so they had to sit in the office and make time to listen before they could make sense of it all.

“It works,” Ramsay said, and thought that Jack Robson had almost been right.

Then they heard that a call had been received from Mary Raven’s landlady saying that the reporter had returned to her flat.

“Send someone to bring her in,” Ramsay said, and then they had to wait. Despite the friction that had been there between them during the course of the investigation, they seemed very close as they shared the anticipation.

The constable sent to fetch Mary Raven came onto the radio in the Incident Room.

“The lights are on,” the constable said, “but I can’t get any reply.”

“Get in!” Ramsay shouted. “ Get hold of the landlady and get in. I’ll be there.”

So he and Hunter drove to Mary’s flat. Hunter was driving, overtaking cars on the main street, jumping traffic lights, enjoying himself. When they arrived at the flat, there was a group of people on the pavement staring inside. The landlady had been found in the local pub and had brought all her friends with her. Some still held glasses. Ramsay tried to send them all home, but the big car with its screeching brakes and Hunter posing like a detective from Miami Vice only increased their curiosity and excitement.

The sight of the crowd troubled Ramsay. He was worried about what he might find inside. The last thing he needed was another tragedy. But the constable who was holding his ground by the front door of the flat shook his head.

“Sorry,” he said. “ I can’t have got here in time. She’s not here. She must have left in a hurry, though.”

Ramsay made a quick search of the bedroom and kitchen before he saw the note in the typewriter. Then he ordered Hunter into the car and they drove away without explaining to the police constable or the watchers, leaving the doors wide open and the landlady complaining about her interrupted evening.

It was already eight o’clock when Mary began the drive down the lane from Brinkbonnie village. It led behind the sand dunes to the Wildlife Trust carpark at the north of the bay where she and Max had parked on the night of their first meeting. She had been held up by an accident on the road outside Otterbridge where the young policeman in charge of controlling the traffic had seemed out of his depth, and she sped through Brinkbonnie, noticing nothing unusual there. The sky was clear and there was a moon. From the lane she saw the Tower and the mass of woodland behind it and the high moors spread beyond. Nearer the track was a pool and flat, grassy fields. She came to the hut where in summer the Wildlife Trust warden stood to collect money for the carpark. She could not see Max’s car but knew it was there. The carpark went on for half a mile, broken into sections by the dunes and the thickets of blackthorn and bramble. He would have parked farther along, she thought, and for a moment she was worried why he thought such secrecy necessary. There was also a feeling of satisfaction that when he was in trouble he had come to her. She drove the Mini only a short distance from the carpark’s entrance and left it in full view, so that if by any chance Max had not yet arrived he would know she was there.

These things-the Mini parked at the entrance to the links, the accident on the Otterbridge Road, which made her late-were to contribute to the outcome of the case.

When she got out of the car, she shivered. She was wearing trousers and a sweater, but there was already a frost in the air and she had been expecting perhaps the same warmth of the night of the Wildlife Trust barbecue. She was very tired and the evening had a dreamlike quality. She was lightheaded and imagined that here, in the same place, she and Max could regain the romantic intensity that had begun the affair. She was already anticipating the elation that followed any contact with Max.

If he’s here, she thought, he’ll be waiting on the shore, at the edge of the water, where I waited for him the last time. She began to climb through the soft sand of the dunes to reach the beach. The silence was impressive. The tide must have been out because there was no sound of water. Uusually at Brinkbonnie, even on the quietest days, there were dogs barking, gulls crying, the noise of a tractor in a distant field. Now there was only the sound of her own breathing and the sand shifting under her feet as she walked. Occasionally she put out her hand to steady herself. The sand was cold and the grains were sharp as ice.

When she reached the highest dune in the system she climbed it and stood there, her arms raised above her head so that her silhouette would stand out against the skyline and wherever Max was he would see her and come to find her. She would have called out to him, shouted over the empty folds of sand, but the silence was daunting and she did not have the courage to break it. From there, for the first time, she saw the sea, the soft, seven-mile waves breaking noiselessly. She had thought he might be waiting on the hard sand by the edge of the tide where she had waited the first time. It would be such a romantic thing to do. She imagined him looking up at her with the same challenge as she had given him. But as far as she could see the beach was empty, broken only by the square chunks of concrete that had been set on the beach in the last war, separating the dunes from the flat sand, to stop enemy tanks from driving inland.

She sat down, holding her knees, grateful after the frenzy of the previous two days for the space and quiet. Suddenly, farther below and behind her, she heard the noise of shifting sand that had marked her own progress.

“Max!” she called. She wanted to see him very much. “ Is that you, Max?” But there was no reply and she thought she must have caused the sand to slide when she sat down. Or perhaps a small animal had made its home there and been disturbed. Even then she was not frightened. She did not know that there was anything to be afraid of, except the possibility that Max had deserted her again. The fear came later.

She stood up and ran down the sand hill to the beach, stopping short this time of the incoming tide. It was too cold for bare feet and she was wearing leather boots that would be damaged by the water. She walked along the tide line where wood and straw, pieces of glass and seacoal, had been washed up with the pebbles and shells. Occasionally she crouched to pick up a smooth stone or a piece of patterned pottery, but she kept her eyes on the dunes, hoping eventually to see Max’s silhouette against the horizon coming to meet her.

After half an hour she told herself he would not be coming. This is ridiculous, she thought, a repeat of that farce in the churchyard. Why do I allow myself to be humiliated by him? I’ve more important things to do tonight. But still, in a way, she was grateful to him, because he had brought her out into the fresh air and when she returned home she would be ready to write the story with a clear head. She turned and began to walk south along the beach, back towards the car.