“I don’t know,” Kerr said. “He doesn’t talk to me. He’s very moody. This had made my mind up for me. I’ve been thinking of telling him to leave for a while.”
“He was talking of looking for work in the south,” Ramsay said.
“Was he?” Kerr seemed relieved. “He’s not said anything to me.”
“If Charlie comes back, will you tell him to get in touch? I’ll be up at the police house.”
But Ramsay knew that Charlie was unlikely to return and realised with a depressing certainty that he had allowed a major murder suspect to run away. In the street outside the garage a Radio Newcastle reporter stopped him and asked for an interview, but Ramsay said he had no comment to make and hurried up the hill to the police house. He sent cars up each of the roads out of Brinkbonnie, but by then it was too late. Charlie Elliot had disappeared.
Chapter Ten
Hunter seized on the disappearance of Charlie Elliot as an excuse for activity. While the communications centre at Otterbridge put out a general description of Charlie Elliot and of the car he was driving, Hunter drove at great speed around the country lanes, hoping to make an immediate arrest. He returned to the police house in the middle of the afternoon, disappointed, but still convinced that Charlie Elliot was a murderer. Ramsay knew the danger of jumping to conclusions too quickly and cautioned patience, an open mind.
“Charlie Elliot had an alibi for the time of the murder,” he said reasonably. “His father confirmed that he was in the house by eleven. And then there was the girl he saw in the churchyard. We should be looking for her.”
“What girl?” Hunter demanded. “ Man, that was just Elliot making up stories to throw us off the scent. No-one in the Tower saw a girl. And the old man was lying to protect his son.”
“What about motive?” Ramsay said quietly. “ I thought you said no-one would commit murder for the sake of a few houses.”
“No-one sane,” Hunter said. “We know Elliot was unbalanced, unpredictable. Look at his obsession with that girl in the pub. He’s our man. He can’t have got far. We’ll have him tonight.”
But as the afternoon wore on there was no information about Elliot. No-one had seen the car. The men waiting in the police house became irritable and impatient, and to make things worse Fred Elliot was on the phone every half-hour wanting to know if his son had been found and claiming that Charlie, too, had been murdered.
At half-past six Ramsay had waited long enough.
“I’m going to Otterbridge,” he said to Hunter, “to talk to the Laidlaws. Go and sit with old man Elliot. There’s a chance Charlie will come home when he’s cold and hungry. And you’ll need to break that alibi if you’re to prove Charlie guilty. Elliot might talk while he’s so upset.”
They walked together down the street to the green, where Ramsay’s car was parked. Despite the cold, two teenage boys in black leather stood by the bus stop, smoking a cigarette, passing it between them.
Poor sods, thought Hunter. What else is there for them to do in a place like this?
“Nip over and get their names and addresses,” Ramsay said. “Stella Laidlaw saw some lads at the bus stop on Saturday night. Find out if it was them.”
Hunter went, sauntering towards them, indirectly over the grass. Ramsay thought Hunter had more in common with the boys than he did with him. The sky was clear and there would be another frost. Ramsay shivered as he watched the three figures by the bus shelter. He saw Hunter take a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and hand it around, then the three of them huddled together around the lighter, sheltering the flame from the breeze. He imagined the three in conspiracy against him. “That’s my boss,” he imagined Hunter saying. “But don’t take any notice of him. If you’ve got any information, come straight to me.”
That’s ridiculous, he thought. Diana always said I was paranoid. But his suspicions about Diana had been justified and she had run away eventually with someone who produced television programmes for the BBC in Fenham.
Hunter returned, stubbing out the cigarette with the heel of his designer trainers before he reached the inspector.
“They’re all right,” he said. “Bored out of their brains, but who can blame them in a place like this? They weren’t here Saturday night, but they’ve given me the names and addresses of a couple of other lads who might have been.”
Ramsay nodded and walked on alone to his car. Hunter might be good at communicating with local teenagers, but he had other skills. He had been married to Diana. He knew how to talk to the civilised middle classes.
Max Laidlaw was on call that Monday morning but paid the deputising service to take the duty for him. Judy wanted him to take Peter to school, then spend some time with her and the twins. In the afternoon he had a surgery and by then he would be pleased to leave the house. He told himself he needed time to think. In a sense Alice Parry’s death had changed nothing and there were still decisions to be made. In the chaotic house in Otterbridge he found decisions impossible.
Judy made things worse. All morning she seemed unable to leave the subject of his aunt’s death alone. She followed him around the house demanding his attention, desperate, it seemed, for his opinion. Even while he was shaving she was shouting at him through the closed bathroom door.
“What did you think of Ramsay, the detective?” she asked. “I didn’t know what to make of him. He seemed rather hostile, I thought.” Then: “How did Alice seem to you that night? Was she even more upset than she said?”
“I don’t know,” he shouted, slamming out of the room, almost tripping over her on the landing. “And I don’t bloody care.”
“But you talked to her,” Judy said, catching him up as he ran down the stairs to the kitchen. “You helped her clear up the dishes after supper and she wouldn’t let anyone else into the kitchen. ‘I want a private word with Max,’ she said, and she sent us all away. So what was the great secret?”
“There wasn’t any secret,” he said. “ You know what she was like.”
“At one time you would have trusted me. Now you don’t share anything.” She gave him one of her hurt and vulnerable looks.
“There was no secret,” he said. “Really.”
I’m too soft, he thought. When she looks at me like that, I’d promise her anything. He wanted to make some gesture of affection, but before he could show her how much he cared for her, one of the twins cried for her attention and she turned away.
Throughout the morning the children irritated him. On the way to school Peter was listless and tired, reacting to the smallest provocation with tears or temper, and in the house the twins whined with a mechanical, metallic sound that grated on his nerves.
“Of course they’re demanding,” Alice had said on the evening of her death when they were alone in the kitchen at the Tower. “But you wouldn’t be without them, would you?”
And he had responded wholeheartedly: No, of course he wouldn’t be without them. He loved them.
Now it did not seem so simple, and he longed for the old times, when he was a tandem-riding student, before guilt and responsibility.
When the time came to go to the surgery, Judy seemed to sense his unhappiness. She was concerned about him, she said. She put on boots and a sweater to help him clear the ice from the windscreen of the car and told him to take care when he was driving.
“Drive slowly,” she said. “It’s still very slippery. Perhaps you should walk.”
“I’m only going into town,” he said, though he was pleased that she was worrying about him. “The roads will be clear by now.”
Before he drove off she stood close to him and kissed him. Her nose was cold and the unexpected gesture shocked and touched him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “ It’s been my fault. You will take care?”