Ann Cleeves - Murder in My Backyard

“What happened to him?” Ramsay asked.

“He’s great,” she said. “Really amazing. It’s the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s running a project for the homeless in Newcastle down by the river. But he hates James Laidlaw. He’ll talk to you and you should go to see the centre.”

It wasn’t only the wealthy businessmen and powerful councillors in the area who had been blackmailed by Laidlaw, Ramsay thought. It must have become almost a habit. He had made the same threat to Tom Kerr about his brawl in the street with Charlie Elliot. Ramsay remembered his conversation with the choirmaster in the dimly lit room earlier that evening.

“I could never have gone into the church again,” Tom Kerr had cried. “Not with a story like that splashed all over the paper. How could people have any respect for me?”

“So what did you do?” Ramsay had asked.

“What do you think I did? I paid him and I’ve been paying him ever since.”

Ramsay drew his thoughts back to the office and to the woman who sat with him.

“Now, Mary,” he said. “What has all this to do with Alice Parry?”

“Don’t you know?” she cried, immensely pleased because she thought she still had the power to surprise him.

“Do you mean you really haven’t guessed?”

He did not answer directly. He had never enjoyed lying.

“It’s your story,” he said again. I want you to tell it, I want to know what Alice Parry said to you on the afternoon of her death.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That’s almost irrelevant.”

“All the same,” he said. “ For completeness. Out of interest. I want to know.”

“We talked about Max,” she said. “We were having an affair.”

“Yes,” he said gently. He did not want to hurt her. He paused. “Did you realise Stella Laidlaw was blackmailing him about it?”

She looked up sharply. “ No,” she said. “I hadn’t realised even that she knew about us. She must have guessed. Blackmail must run in the family.”

“Do you know where Max is?” he asked. “We need to find him to tell him what’s happened. Besides, his wife is very worried about him.”

“No,” she said. “ I haven’t seen him since the night you took me in for questioning.” She grinned briefly. “He was there in the flat when the policeman came to fetch me.”

She paused. “He’ll be hiding,” she said. “Poor Max.”

“You must have thought the note arranging to meet you at Brinkbonnie was from Max,” he said. “And you went to meet him.”

“Yes,” she said. “It looked like Max’s writing. James must be an expert in forgery, too.”

She looked up at him. “ How could James know about Max and me. I suppose he guessed.”

“Apparently,” Ramsay said, “ when he realised you suspected him of blackmail, he searched your desk at work. There was an old letter from Max. It was rather explicit. It even mentioned where you met.”

She sat, deflated and very sad, so he felt sorry for her. To cheer her up, he said, pleading: “Tell me the rest of it then. Tell my why James Laidlaw murdered Alice Parry.”

She brightened immediately. “Henshaw had bought James off,” she said. “You must have worked that out.”

Ramsay remained impassive. He did not want to disappoint her and spoil her story. But he had worked it out. After the discussion with Tom Kerr, the explanation was inevitable. Henshaw hadn’t bribed community activists as Jack Robson had thought, he hadn’t needed to. Any village event is considered entirely unimportant until it is reported in the local newspaper. The story gives it credibility. With James Laidlaw in his pocket Henshaw could dictate the image the public received of his development. And of the developer, Ramsay thought, remembering the picture in the Express of Henshaw surrounded by adoring toddlers. Then he remembered the evening he had gone to the Laidlaws’ house and the interview being interrupted by an angry visitor. He realised now that the visitor was Colin Henshaw, furious because he thought James Laidlaw would break their deal.

Mary seemed encouraged by Ramsay’s silence and continued: “Henshaw wouldn’t talk to me, but I think he started paying James after the first editorial about the Brinkbonnie development. He had lots of other plans waiting to be approved by the planning department and he wouldn’t want bad publicity at that stage.”

“Tell me Mary,” he said, “ exactly what you think happened.” He said it to humour her because she needed to feel clever and in control after the assault on the sand dunes. James Laidlaw had already admitted the whole thing to Hunter. But he said it, too, because she was lively and funny and he did not want the conversation to end.

“Mrs. Parry felt guilty about selling her land to Henshaw,” Mary said, “and after I’d spoken to her that afternoon she decided to try to buy the field back. Of course Henshaw refused to sell. There must have been an argument and Henshaw told Mrs. Parry about James. You can imagine him, can’t you, blurting it out in the middle of the row: “You won’t get any support, you know, from that nephew of yours. I’m paying him off. You’ve no chance without the publicity of getting the support for your campaign.” Then Mrs. Parry not wanting to believe it but seeing in the end that it was probably true. Poor Mrs. Parry. How upset she must have been.”

“James Laidlaw was waiting for her in the garden when she got back from the pub,” Ramsay said, taking the initiative for the first time. The pretence that he was the passive recipient of her knowledge was over. After all, he had promised Mary some useful information. “Stella had taken a sleeping pill and it was easy enough for him to leave the room without anyone noticing. He went out through the kitchen door. Max was watching television and didn’t hear anything.”

He pictured James in the windy garden with its smell of ivy and salt in the black shadow of the Tower, waiting for Alice, wondering what Henshaw had told her. Then she had come back, angry and disappointed, threatening to expose him. He had killed her, stabbing her from behind with a knife he had taken from the kitchen as he had followed her into the house.

“I didn’t see James,” Mary said, breaking into his thoughts. She was embarrassed. It was a sort of confession. “ I was in the churchyard waiting for Max. He didn’t turn up. I supposed, of course, that it meant that he’d decided to stay with Judy. I was upset. I thought he didn’t care about me. I left soon after eleven and I saw no one in the Tower garden then. But perhaps James was hiding.”

“No,” Ramsay said. “He couldn’t have been hiding. He was seen by someone in the village.”

“Who?” she demanded. “Who saw him?”

It was his turn to tease her. “Can’t you guess?” he asked.

“Charlie Elliot!” she said, delighted because she had worked it out after all. “ It must have been Charlie Elliot, but you said he was home before Mrs. Parry died.”

“He was,” Ramsay said. “ But he came out again. He was drunk, a little amorous. He’d always been obsessed with Maggie Kerr and he stood in the street and stared up at her window. On his way home he must have seen James Laidlaw standing in the moonlight in the middle of the Tower lawn waiting for Mrs. Parry. It wouldn’t have meant anything to him until the next day when he heard about Mrs. Parry’s death.”

“But why didn’t Charlie tell you about James?” She had taken a notebook from her pocket and was scribbling details in shorthand. The door opened and Hunter slipped quietly into the room, but she took no notice of him.

“Because it would have meant admitting that he was out of the house at about the time Mrs. Parry died,” Ramsay said. “ Besides, he hoped to use the information against Laidlaw.”