“And were you?”
“Oh,” she said. “ For a while.”
“When did you leave your husband?”
“About a year ago,” she said. “ Charlie was home on leave and I bumped into him in the Castle. It was good to have someone to talk to, flattering, I suppose, to have him so attentive. Towards the end of the marriage David had hardly noticed me. I told Charlie that I’d left David and that the boys and I were staying at Mum and Dad’s. But that’s all. I didn’t give him any encouragement. He walked me home and gave me a good-night kiss, but I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just pleased we were friends again.”
The heater was beginning to clear the ice from the windscreen and they could see the bulk of the Tower in the moonlight.
“What happened then?”
“Charlie left the army,” she said. “ It was awful. Like a nightmare. He wrote to his father to tell him and Fred Elliot turned up at our house accusing me of leading him on. “You’ve broken his heart once,” he said. “Now you’re meaning to do it again.” His wife had recently died and everything seemed to upset him. I didn’t know what to say or do. I wrote to Charlie telling him there was no point coming home, that I hadn’t changed my mind, but it didn’t do any good.”
“Did you persuade your father to give him a job?” Ramsay asked.
“No,” she said quickly. “ I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. My father thought that if he offered Charlie a job, there would be a reconciliation between the families. You don’t understand what it’s like in a place like this. The village was split in two, with half supporting me and half supporting Charlie. My father’s idea was to bring everyone together again.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“It would have done,” she said, “if Charlie hadn’t been such a bloody fool.” She began to cry. “ He’s worn me out. I don’t know if I can stand it any longer. I think he’s mad.”
“What does he do?” Ramsay asked.
“It started with presents – flowers and chocolates and bottles of wine. At first I took them back to him. But that only made him angry. He’s got a terrible temper. So now I keep them and take them into the old Cottage Hospital in Otterbridge. Then he tried phoning me at home, sometimes dozens of times in an evening, begging me to see him and talk to him. More recently, he’s taken to following me around the village. When I wake up he’s out on the street looking up at me, and he waits outside the pub at closing time and follows me home. I don’t know what to do. It’s frightening. He’s not normal now. He’s completely obsessed.” She paused. “It’s affecting the whole family,” she said. “ My dad tried to talk to Charlie about it one night after work. There was a fight. Can you imagine it? My father brawling in the street. He must have caught Charlie off balance because Charlie hit his head on the pavement and knocked himself out. Then, of course, Dad felt guilty and that made things worse.”
“But Charlie’s still working at the garage. Even after the fight?”
“Yes,” she said bitterly. “ Dad’s a great one for martyrdom. He wants to show the village he knows what’s right even if he finds it hell.”
“Have you talked to the police about this?”
“No,” she said. “ How could I? Dad assaulted Charlie. They might charge him. The village think it’s all my fault that Charlie’s in that state. How would it look if I reported him to the police, too? Besides, I’d started to hope that soon it would all be over. He’d become obsessed with the housing development on the Tower meadow. I thought if he became involved with that, he might forget about me. And it seemed to be working. The night Mrs. Parry died was the first evening for a month when he wasn’t there to follow me home after work.”
Ramsay looked at her sharply, wondering if the words were malicious, if she was accusing Elliot of having played a part in Mrs. Parry’s murder. But she spoke quite innocently. She was simply relieved that she had been allowed to walk home alone.
“Have you seen Charlie today?” he asked.
“He was outside the house at lunchtime when I went to work,” she said. “But I’ve not seen him this evening. Do you think it might all be coming to an end?”
“I don’t know,” Ramsay said. “But I’d better take you home. Your parents will be wondering where you are.”
He drove slowly down the drive towards the Otterbridge Road. At the junction he had to brake sharply, then skidded because a man stepped out suddenly into his headlights. The man stood for a moment in the road, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lamps with his hands, shocked, it seemed, to see a car coming down the Tower drive. It was only when he turned without apology and walked on up the road that Ramsay recognised him as the red-faced man from the pub.
“Who the hell is that?” he asked. “What on earth does he think he’s playing at?”
“It’s Robert Grey,” Maggie said. “ He farms the land behind the village. He lives just up the road, next door to the Henshaws’.”
“Does he get as drunk as that every evening?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what was wrong with him tonight. He came in at opening time and must have just finished now.”
At the house behind the garage the lights were still on and Ramsay imagined her father there, waiting anxiously. There was no sign of Charlie Elliot. She ran in without a word.
It was midnight when he arrived back at the cottage at Heppleburn. He assumed that the envelope stuck in his letter box would be a circular. It was Sunday and there was no post. Before looking at it, he lit the gas fire and made coffee. Only then did he see that it was a card, expensive and hand-delivered, from Diana welcoming him to his new home. He studied it, as if hoping for a clue in the pressed flowers and bland printed message to her motivation. But he did not find one, and when he got in to bed he still was not sure whether he was pleased or sorry to have missed her.
Chapter Eight
The next day, Monday, the murder enquiry moved on like an unwieldy, poorly organised military exercise. At dawn the special patrol group began their search of the beech wood behind the house. Dressed in boots and anoraks, they moved in a single line through the trees, hindered by the frost and snow that covered the dead leaves, swearing about the cold. Some were sent to the churchyard. At first there was no communications equipment and they kept in touch by shouting. They complained, as they always did, of their superiors’ inefficiency. They set up their base in the small police house on the edge of the village but found nothing there to help them. The only equipment provided was a wartime pamphlet showing the identification of German planes and a bucket of sand in case of fire. There had been little crime in Brinkbonnie.
They found the knife quite by chance soon after the search was started. The youngest member tripped on the edge of a flat gravestone and fell, facedown in the snow, accompanied by laughter and jeers. As he stumbled he knocked over a vase of dead daffodils that had been standing on the grave and the knife emerged with the rotting stalks of the flowers.
“You lucky bastard,” someone shouted. “I suppose you’ll take the credit for finding it now.”
But they were all pleased that the murder weapon had been found. It encouraged them that they might find something else of significance.
Ramsay was told about the discovery of the knife in Otterbridge. He was at the police station, supervising the setting up of the Incident Room, the arrival of computer terminals, extra phone lines, and piles of paper. Still no-one had found the screens to block off the corner of the Tower garden where the body had been found, and he, too, muttered about inefficiency. His superintendent was giving all his attention to the press and on every news broadcast there was a shot of him pleading earnestly for information about any unfamiliar cars seen in Brinkbonnie on Saturday night.