“No,” she said. She looked sadly at Ramsay. “I’ve told you. He won’t tell me anything at all.”
She turned to the policeman, suddenly angry and upset. “ Max didn’t kill Alice,” she cried. “I know he wouldn’t do anything like that. But I’ll tell you something you should know. Do you know why Stella Laidlaw was taken into hospital, finally, after Carolyn was born? Because the health visitor turned up at the house one day and found her standing over the cot with a bread knife! If you ask James, he’ll have to tell you. Or her doctor. If you’re looking for a culprit, why don’t you talk to her?”
But later, when Ramsay tried to telephone James at the Express office, Marjory told him that James was out all day. She was so skilled at protecting her boss that he could not tell whether she was telling the truth or not.
Chapter Twenty-One
Brinkbonnie was quiet, its people shocked and in mourning. There had been tragedies in the village before-many years before a young boy, the son of a fisherman, had been swept from the beach by a freak wave and, more recently, the teacher’s wife had been killed in a car crash on the Otterbridge Road-but on those occasions the grief was shared. People came together to remember the dead and fight off the sense of their own mortality. After the murders of Alice Parry and Charlie Elliot, that was impossible. There was nothing left to hold people together and households turned in on themselves, sometimes regarding members of their own family with doubt and mistrust. They spoke of Alice Parry and Charlie Elliot as little as possible and regarded the press and the police, who insisted on prying with questions, with equal hostility. Only the very old men, who saw the death of people younger than themselves as some sort of victory, continued to go to the pub and talk about the case with a grim humour.
On the farm on the hill Robert Grey worked as normal until the late afternoon, when he, too, went to the pub and got thoroughly drunk. At home he seemed preoccupied by some secret trouble of his own and he hardly talked to his wife and son. Ian was still at home from school and watched his father with curiosity, as if expecting some sudden, unpredictable outburst. He would have liked to go up to his father and offer him comfort, support, one man to another, but he knew that might offend his mother and he loved her too much for that. So Ian sat in the kitchen and watched his father across the farmyard.
Celia Grey was in the kitchen making bread. She stood at the table pushing and tearing at the dough while the smell of yeast filled the house. Ian was reminded of his grandmother, who had lived with them for as long as he could remember, but who had recently died. When he was younger, the old lady had baked every week. It occurred to Ian then that for generations women who looked like his mother had stood in the kitchen running the farm. In the only sense that mattered, the farm belonged to her. His father’s name, scratched on the five-bar gate, was only a gesture of possession and independence. When the bread came out of the oven and Celia Grey knocked it out of the tins, it was, as he knew it would be, perfect. She was incapable of doing anything badly. She moved the kettle onto the hot part of the range.
“Go and fetch your father,” she said. “ Tell him I’m making some tea.”
He nodded, pulled on Wellingtons, and went outside.
Robert Grey was in the far end of the tractor shed, in the shadow. He stood quite still, with his back to the boy.
“Dad,” Ian said. “Mum said you’re to come in for tea.”
The farmer turned quickly. He was holding a wide screwdriver that looked like a knife.
“No,” he said. “I’ll not come in. I’ll just finish this, then I’ll be out of her way.”
“Dad,” Ian said. “ What are you going to do? Things can’t go on like this.”
The farmer moved towards him, the screwdriver still in his hand.
“No,” he said slowly. “ Things can’t go on like this.”
He threw the screwdriver onto a grubby workbench and walked out across the yard towards the village.
Since Charlie Elliot’s death the post office had been closed, and one of the major talking points in the pub among the old men was their inability to collect their pensions.
“Of course old Fred has had a bad time,” they grumbled, “ but it’s about time he started thinking about other folk.”
Even the news that a relief postmistress would be sent out from Otterbridge the following week did nothing to console them. It wouldn’t be the same, they said. Nothing in the village would be the same.
Fred Elliot would not talk to anybody except his widowed sister who had come down from Berwick to look after him and to her he spoke only in monosyllables. He could not explain to her his sense of responsibility, but he went over it again and again in his mind. He knew it was all his fault. If he had told the policeman about Charlie leaving the house again on Saturday night, his son might still be alive.
“I only did what I thought best,” he repeated to his sister, who clucked about him not listening, not understanding.
“Of course you did, pet,” she said. “Of course you did.”
Sometimes when his sister was busy, he would escape to the shed in the backyard to count and tidy the piles of waste-paper, which he intended to sell to provide funds for the hospital where his wife had died. That gave him some comfort, but his sister always found him there and dragged him back to the fire as if he were a naughty child.
“It won’t do you any good,” she said, “brooding on your own out there.” She sat him in his favourite armchair and made him tea and pretended not to notice that he was crying.
In the house behind the garage Maggie sometimes found the tension almost unbearable. Work was no relief with the old men gloatingly reconstructing the crimes as they slurped their beer. Often, when the boys came home from school, she ran away with them and the dogs to the beach. There they would chase together into the wind, shouting to each other, laughing, trying to forget the solemn silence in the house, the sound of Olive crying to herself in her bedroom when she thought no-one was listening. The boys made death-defying leaps from the highest dunes to the beach and ran along the water’s edge until the water splashed over their Wellingtons.
Despite the secret sobbing, Maggie was more concerned about her father than her mother. It was natural that her mother should be upset. She and Alice Parry had been friends. But in a week her father seemed to have aged so that she hardly recognised him. He had always been the stern one, the one to insist on discipline when the boys misbehaved at table, to supervise their schoolwork. Now he was hardly aware of their presence. The boys sensed it and stole unusual privileges-late television, sweets before meals, rudeness to their mother-but still they failed to provoke him to any reaction.
On Friday morning, almost a week after Alice Parry’s death, Tom Kerr had arranged to meet the vicar in the church to discuss the music for Easter. Kerr was also sacristan and he felt a major responsibility for preparing the church for the festival, but throughout the conversation his mind wandered and he saw the priest looking at him strangely.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This terrible business has upset me. I can’t concentrate on anything.”
“No,” the vicar said. “ Of course.”
Let me talk to you, Kerr wanted to say. I need help. But the moment was lost and the vicar looked at his watch and then hurried away to a mothers’ union meeting in the neighbouring parish. Kerr lingered in the church.
Maggie found him there, sitting on one of the pews close to the aisle, not praying but staring at the light coming through the stained-glass window above the altar.