Chapter Twenty-Three
By early evening of the same day, Mary Raven had her story. It was complex. She would have preferred to talk to Henshaw, of course. She was convinced that he played a part in it somewhere. But she had evidence enough without him, and she had not tried too hard to find him. She had rattled into Brinkbonnie in the morning, staying long enough to annoy Rosemary Henshaw, then driven on to talk to other people in different places. At the back of her mind all the time there was her concern for Max, and as she drove along, she stared out as if she might see him by chance walking down the pavement towards her. Perhaps the anxiety clouded her judgement because she had no sense of danger.
She had gone to the west of Newcastle to a converted warehouse where an ex-councillor had set up a charitable trust for alcoholics. She talked to the man and all of the residents, as well as an old lady who had lived rough for years, walking from the Scottish borders to the Tees every summer, and who had been persuaded to make her home in this building off the Scotswood Road with its view of the Tyne. Then Mary drove back to Otterbridge to the geriatric hospital and talked to another old lady, her body as fine and frail as a pipe-cleaner doll, her mind as bright and clear as a child’s, her memory perfect. By this time Mary was pushed on not only by ambition but by anger.
When she got to her flat, Mary saw her landlady, who lived in the house next door, staring at her curiously through the living-room window. When Mary moved she disappeared guiltily, so Mary thought: She’s planning to put the rent up again. But the landlady had promised to phone the police as soon as Mary got home. She thought Mary was a nice girl and had never liked the police, so it was a difficult and awkward thing to do.
Inside the flat Mary boiled the kettle, made a mug of coffee, and started in her mind to write her story. Absentmindedly she went to collect her mail from the front door. There was a leaflet about the poll tax, and hand-delivered, still stuck in the flap of the letter box, a note.
“Meet me,” it said. “ Brinkbonnie dunes. Eight o’clock.”
He had signed it with the incomprehensible scribble that could only be deciphered by colleagues and pharmacists.
She stood for a moment in the grimy, ill-lit hall holding the note and staring at it. The coffee mug in the other hand tilted and tipped hot liquid over the carpet and her foot. There was none of the elation she might have expected. She was glad he was safe and had apparently so far avoided arrest, but she was not even sure if she wanted to see him.
I’m tired, she thought. I can’t handle this. Not now. I need a drink.
The day before, she would have been overjoyed to receive such a summons from Max. Now it was just something else to worry about.
She walked into the living room and propped the note in the typewriter her parents had given her as an eighteenth-birthday present. She stared at it anxiously as if it were a bomb. She looked at her watch. It was seven-thirty already. She went to the window to draw the curtains to put off making a decision. The street was empty. Whatever shadow she had imagined had been following her had disappeared. It was all hallucination, she thought. I’m losing my mind. She finished her coffee and took the empty mug into the kitchen. The phone began to ring, disturbing and insistent. Suddenly, just to avoid answering it, she picked up her jacket and car keys and went outside, leaving the light on in the living room and the note in the typewriter.
Carolyn Laidlaw arrived home from school on Friday evening to find the house empty. She had her own key and let herself in, apprehensive about what she might find there. She switched on the radio to Metro, almost expecting to hear on the local news that someone had been arrested for the Brinkbonnie murders, but there was only a bland announcement that the police were following a number of leads.
In her parents’ bedroom she found signs that her mother had left the house in a hurry. There were the clothes that she had been wearing that morning flung on the floor and in the bathroom a tap had been left running. Carolyn was tempted to search through the dressing-table drawers while she had the house to herself, but while she would have welcomed certainty she was frightened about what she might find there.
Her father had said he would be working late and she wondered if she should contact him at the office to find out where her mother was, but she knew that would worry him, so she kept her fear to herself, listening all the time to the radio, until she heard the key in the door. Then she could not stop crying.
The discovery that Colin Henshaw could not have killed Alice Parry left Ramsay with a sense of panic. At first he could not think clearly. Perhaps Henshaw had hired someone to commit the murder, he thought, because his commitment to Robson’s theory was so great that he was reluctant to let it go. But that would not work. If Henshaw had not killed Mrs. Parry, Charlie Elliot could have had nothing to blackmail the builder about, and the motive for the second murder disappeared, too. Ramsay had been certain that this evening would mark the end of the investigation, and now it seemed they would have to start at the beginning again and reconsider all the old evidence. Hunter had been right all along, Ramsay thought. This case was about more than a few houses.
In the police house Hunter was almost asleep. His chair was tilted backwards and his feet were on the desk. When Ramsay came into the room, he sat up slowly and stretched.
“Well?” he said. “How did you get on?”
“Henshaw is having an affair with Celia Grey at the farm,” Ramsay said. “He was there on Saturday night, so he couldn’t have killed Alice Parry. He might have murdered Charlie Elliot, but I can’t see what motive he would have had.”
Hunter knew better than to gloat. “At least we’ve eliminated Henshaw from our enquiries then,” he said. “ That’s a positive move.”
“Yes,” Ramsay said. He did not feel positive. “I suppose so.”
“Someone came to talk to you while you were out,” Hunter said. “He wouldn’t speak to me. Tom Kerr. From the garage.” He looked at the desk where he had scribbled notes on an envelope. “He said he’ll be in all evening. On his own. The rest of the family will be out. He seemed to think that was important.”
Ramsay listened absent-mindedly. Now that Robson’s theory of local activists having been put under pressure by Henshaw seemed impossible, he was not sure what useful information Tom Kerr could have.
“He seemed very keen to talk to you,” Hunter said. “A bit tense and strung-up.”
“All right,” Ramsay said. “I’ll go and see him now. Is there anything from the Incident Room?”
“Yes,” Hunter said. “Some bright P.C. thought he saw Mary Raven’s Mini outside the old Cottage Hospital in Otterbridge. God knows what she was doing there.”
“Well, you won’t know,” Ramsay said, “ unless you ask. Go to the hospital and find out. Max Laidlaw is a doctor. Perhaps he’s hiding out there. I’ll meet you in the Incident Room later.”
At first Ramsay thought that the house behind the garage was empty. Although it was nearly dark, there were no lights on and everything was quiet. When the sun went down, the temperature had suddenly dropped and he waited impatiently on the doorstep to be let in. At last he heard footsteps on the other side of the door and then Tom Kerr opened it and waited silently for Ramsay to follow him into the house.
He must have been sitting, Ramsay thought, just by the light of the fire, but now he switched on a small lamp that revealed the tension in his face. His cheeks were drawn and behind his glasses his eyelids seemed grey and heavy.
“Inspector,” he said. “It was good of you to come. Sit by the fire. You’ll be cold.”
Ramsay sat and waited for an explanation, but the words when they came still surprised him.
“Inspector,” Kerr said. “My conscience has been troubling me. There’s something you should know…”