“Are you sure?” She smiled, easily, motherly, used to respect. “You must be very busy. I don’t want to put you out.”
“No,” he said. “I’d like to take you.”
He had reached a stage in the investigation when there were too many leads to follow, too much to do. He would welcome a break in the confusion, a breathing space. Besides, he wanted to find out more about Mary Raven.
He lifted her basket into the boot and opened the car door for her. She directed him out of the town towards a small modern estate with big houses and gardens full of trees. It was not sufficiently ostentatious, Ramsay thought, to have been built by Henshaw.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned where Mary was going in front of James,” Marjory said, suddenly guilty. “ She likes to keep her leads secret until the story’s finished. I think she’s afraid he’ll cramp her style.”
“Would he do that?”
“No,” she said. “ I shouldn’t think so. He just likes to keep a tight rein on the newspaper. He’s very proud of it.”
“Mary didn’t go home last night,” Ramsay said. “She didn’t say where she’d been staying, did she?”
“No,” Marjory said. “ She said she had a hangover. I didn’t like to tell James that. He disapproves of her drinking.”
“What sort of relationship do Mary and James have?” Ramsay asked.
“Oh,” Marjory said. “ Very prickly. They’re both rather strong-willed. But I think there’s an element of mutual respect, too. She’s a good reporter, you know. James would miss her if she left.”
She pointed to the entrance of a cul-de-sac, where two toddlers played on the pavement with dolls and prams.
“Could you drop me here?” she said. “ Thank you very much for the lift. It’s a long walk and there’s a lot to do this afternoon before the grandchildren come to tea.”
He felt jealous of her calm domesticity. He wanted to invite himself to tea, too. He knew there would be homemade cakes and chocolate biscuits. He was forty. Soon he would be old enough to have grandchildren of his own, but even when he and Diana were very close she had made it clear that children were out of the question. Perhaps she had been right. It would never have worked. Marjory climbed out of the car and declined his offer to carry her bags to the house. He acknowledged her thanks and drove smoothly away.
The decision to talk to Stella Laidlaw was an impulse, like the impulse to drive the receptionist home. James had made it clear that he would be working all afternoon on the Express and Ramsay had never talked to Stella alone. The discovery that Mary Raven had a secret lover made it important to check James Laidlaw’s movements. He was the most likely candidate, and if James were having an affair with the young reporter, Stella might have guessed. That might explain the woman’s nervousness, her lapses into silence, her brittle bursts of conversation.
He drove through the affluent suburbs of the town towards the river. The houses here were older, mock-Tudor mansions with long, sloping gardens and high walls to ensure privacy. Here the children would not be allowed into the street to play. Diana’s sister lived in one of these houses, close to the Otterbridge Lawn Tennis Club, and even approaching the area made him uneasy. He was reminded of awkward, tedious evenings of conversation when his main objective was to say as little as possible and Diana, as bored as he was, became increasingly more outrageous. Diana had always laughed at his discomfort. She had told him to relax and be himself. She loved him, she had said. Her family would, too, if he allowed them to get to know him. Besides, they were too boring to bother about. He did not have her confidence and had never found it that easy.
Ramsay drove onto the gravel drive and waited in the car for a moment, collecting his thoughts, deciding the most important questions to ask. When he walked towards the front door, he saw Stella Laidlaw staring at him from an upstairs window. She must have recognised him, but even after he had rung the doorbell and stood back onto the drive to wait, she did not move. Their eyes met and she stared at him with horror.
When at last she came to open the door, it might have been a different woman. She was smiling, gay, almost flirtatious, but managed just to miss the right tone. She asked him to sit by the fire, suggested that she make him coffee with an insistence that was embarrassing. She was trying too hard to make a good impression.
“Now, Inspector,” she said. “How can I help you?” But as she spoke, she glanced at the small gilt clock on the mantelpiece, and he thought that despite her hospitality she wanted him gone as soon as possible.
“You will have heard that Charlie Elliot was murdered,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, and giggled nervously. “And we all blamed poor Charlie for Alice Parry’s murder. You must feel rather foolish, Inspector, to have allowed another tragedy to occur.”
Ramsay ignored the comment and continued. “We must assume that there was some connection between both murders,” he said. “So I’m talking again to everyone who was in Brinkbonnie on Saturday night. How well did you know Charlie Elliot?”
“Not at all,” she said. “ I’m not even sure that I ever met him, though I go to Kerr’s garage for petrol sometimes and he might have served me there.”
“But you knew of him?”
“Oh,” she said. “I knew of him. Staying with Alice was like taking part in a soap opera. We had to listen to the story of everyone who lived in the village. Over and over again. Charlie Elliot was infatuated with Maggie Kerr and had dropped out of the army when he found out she’d separated from her husband. Then he and Tom Kerr had a fight and Tom punched him on the nose. That was a real scandal because Tom’s a pillar of the church and it was supposed to be a deadly secret, though most of the village must have heard about it in the end. According to Alice, he felt so guilty that he didn’t feel able to sack Charlie from the job in the garage although he was being such a pain in the arse and making Maggie’s life hell. It was quite romantic, but very tedious.”
“Did Alice have any idea how the situation between Elliot and Maggie could be resolved?” Ramsay asked.
“Endless ideas,” Stella said. “All totally impractical and rather interfering. She wasn’t the saint the others have made her out to be, you know, just a nosy old woman. She even talked at one time of having Maggie and the boys to stay as lodgers at the Tower, though goodness knows what damage that would have done.”
“Did she ever talk to Charlie about Maggie?”
“Probably, though she never said. She wouldn’t have told me, anyway. She’d know I’d not approve. Charlie would have told her to mind her own bloody business. And quite right, too.”
Again, as she finished talking, she glanced at the clock. Ramsay paused and changed the subject of the conversation. “I must ask you some questions about yesterday morning,” he said. “ Charlie Elliot was killed between five and six-thirty. I have to know where everyone involved in Mrs. Parry’s case was at that time. It’s a matter of elimination. I’m sure you understand.”
“I don’t know where James was,” she said. “Asleep, I presume. We slept in separate rooms on Monday night. He was very sweet about it but said I was so restless I kept him awake. I was in rather a state on Tuesday morning – I have trouble sometimes with my nerves and it was a bad day. He was there when I woke up.”
“Were you in your room all night?” Ramsay asked.
“No,” she said. “ If you must know, I find it so damned hard to sleep I got up in the early hours and went for a drive. I thought the speed might relax me and help me sleep. It usually does.”