“A woman answering your description was seen in the Brinkbonnie churchyard on Saturday night,” Ramsay said formally. “We need to eliminate her from our enquiries.”
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Who saw this woman, anyway?”
“A reliable witness,” Ramsay lied.
“Why are you bothering with this?” Mary cried. “ You know who killed her. Why aren’t you out there looking for him? You’re just wasting time, my time.”
Ramsay said nothing. He knew Hunter agreed with Mary Raven. He thought they were wasting time, too. Charlie Elliot had murdered Alice Parry and run away. If he was innocent, Hunter had said, he would have come forward by now. We’ll find him. He might even have left the country, but we’ll get him in the end. Ramsay sighed. He felt his options were closing. He could not afford another failure. It was easier, perhaps, to accept the general opinion that Charlie Elliot had killed Alice Parry in a drunken rage. It was not so unlikely, after all. He stood up and then, on impulse, wrote the number of the Incident Room on a scrap of paper.
“If you remember anything,” he said, “or come across any information that might help, give me a ring. Inspector Ramsay.”
She looked up briefly and nodded, but he saw her roll the paper into a ball and push it into her pocket before returning her attention to her notebook.
In the street the policemen paused in the sunshine. Hunter wanted to get back to the Incident Room, taking phone calls, tracking down Elliot, but Ramsay seemed gripped by an obsession, haunted, Hunter thought, by the woman in the churchyard.
“I didn’t believe Miss Raven,” the inspector said. “She was lying.”
Hunter stood sullen and unresponsive. He thought Mary Raven was an irrelevance. He was afraid of their colleagues stealing the glory of Elliot’s discovery.
“Go to Newcastle!” Ramsay said. “ Check her story. Find out what time she arrived there and as much as you can about her.”
Hunter nodded unenthusiastically.
“I’ll go back to Brinkbonnie,” Ramsay said, “and check the addresses of the lads in the bus shelter. They might have seen the woman in the churchyard.”
He felt a renewed energy and hope. Mary Raven’s denial became a challenge. He looked again through the café window. She was drinking more coffee and stared anxiously and absent-mindedly towards the wall.
Hunter found the house where Mary Raven claimed to have spent Saturday night in a quiet, scruffy street close to the hospital. There was a Chinese take-away on the corner and rubbish in the small front gardens. Many of the houses were owned by the same landlord and let to students. From one house came the sound of rock music. Outside another group of young people sat on the front steps talking in loud southern voices. Hunter felt he had wandered into an alien land. The group on the steps stopped and stared at him, though by the time he reached the house where Mary’s friends lived they had resumed their conversation. The house was near the end of the terrace, with a CND sticker in a bedroom window and a bicycle propped against the fence. He knocked at the door, hoping that he would find no-one there. Weren’t students supposed to go to college after all? Didn’t they have lectures and tutorials to attend?
The door was opened by a pretty blond girl wearing a kimono. She had a towel wrapped around her hair, bare feet, and pink toenails. She did not seem surprised by Hunter. Nothing surprised her.
“I didn’t expect to find anyone in,” Hunter said. “ I thought you were all at the university.” He would have liked to mention grants, taxpayers’ money, but felt his disapproval would be lost on her.
“No,” she said vaguely. “ Not today. No lectures. I’ll be going in to the library later.”
She looked briefly at his identification card and stood aside to let him into a poorly lit hall. The plaster was peeling onto the floor, and as she walked ahead of him into the living room he saw the small white pieces stuck to the soles of her feet.
The living room was large and well proportioned but almost empty. A huge Japanese paper lampshade hung from the ceiling. There was a settee with a pine frame and brown cushions and an expensive stereo with a shelf of cassettes and a box of records. The carpet was threadbare and not very clean. Hunter sat gingerly on the settee. He could feel the wooden struts of the frame through the thin padding of the cushion.
“Sorry,” she said. “It isn’t very comfortable.” She sat on the floor, her long, smooth legs straight before her, her ankles crossed. She began to dry her hair.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“You had a party on Saturday night,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, unbothered, unafraid. “It was my birthday on Sunday. Did the neighbours complain about the noise? I don’t know why. We invited them all to come.”
“No,” he said. He was finding the interview very difficult. “It’s not that. Was Mary Raven at the party?”
“Yes,” she said. Her hair was long and fine. She pulled out the tangles with her fingers. “ She was here. She stayed the night. She was too drunk to drive home.”
“How did you meet her?”
“I can’t remember exactly.” She considered, frowning. “ She was at university, I think, with some of my friends. I share the house with a couple of postgraduates. I probably met her through them. She always seems to be around. Of course, she’s a lot older than me.” She took the damp towel from her shoulders and folded it on the floor. “What’s this all about?”
“Miss Raven was in Brinkbonnie on Saturday afternoon. We need to eliminate her from the Alice Parry murder. It’s only a formality.”
“Oh.” For the first time she was shocked, even impressed. She looked at Hunter through long, fair eyelashes. “How exciting.”
“What time did she arrive at the party?” he asked.
The girl shrugged. “ She was late,” she said. “We didn’t get home ourselves until the pub shut and she turned up soon after, perhaps eleven-thirty, a quarter to twelve. She was definitely here by midnight. They all sang ‘ Happy Birthday’ to me when the clock struck twelve and I remember Mary joining in. She’s got a terrible voice.”
“And she didn’t leave the party after that?”
“No,” the girl said. “I’ve already told you. She was too drunk. I think she’d been drinking before she got here.”
“Was Miss Raven on her own at the party?”
“What do you mean?” She seemed already to have lost interest and was looking vacantly out of the window.
“Did she have a boyfriend with her?”
The girl smiled, her attention caught again. “ Oh, no,” she said. “We’re never allowed to meet Mary’s boyfriend. He’s a deadly secret. She only talks about him when she’s been drinking and then she starts to cry.”
“Who is he?” Hunter asked.
“I’ve told you I don’t know. None of us have ever seen him.”
“But she must have told you something about him.”
She smiled again. “Nothing useful,” she said. “Only that he’s handsome, stimulating, sensitive. And married.”
“How long has she known him?”
“I think it all started last summer. She disappeared from the scene for a while then, and she’s never gone out with anyone else since.”
“And you have no idea who this man might be?”
“No,” she said. “ Sometimes I think Mary made him up. She can be quite strange at times, you know, a bit intense, and rude. I had thought he might be a figment of her imagination.”
Hunter was reluctant to go. He sat on the low, uncomfortable sofa watching the pretty young woman brush her hair like a veil across her face, hoping that she might offer him coffee, allow him to prolong his stay. But she looked up at him and smiled.
“Is that it?” she asked. “Any more questions?”
He shook his head and she stood up to show him out into the street.
Outside Hunter felt elated. It was twelve o’clock and the smell of ginger and soy sauce lingered in the street, but he was no longer offended by it. If Mary Raven had arrived at the party in Newcastle by midnight, she could not have murdered Alice Parry. Now, perhaps, Ramsay would leave the case alone and admit that Charlie Elliot should be caught and brought to court. He would have to admit that Hunter was right.