“You cross the dunes to the beach,” Ramsay said. “I’ll walk back to her car.”
“What do you want me to do if I see her?”
“Nothing,” Ramsay said sharply. “ Not if she’s on her own. Wait until he finds her.”
“Shall I radio for help?”
“No,” Ramsay said. “I’ll do it. But by the time they all get here it’ll be too late.”
The first scream surprised them both. Hunter was only a few yards from the car. He began to run through the dunes towards the beach, swearing at the spikes of marram grass that scratched his hands and the sand that filled his shoes. Ramsay stood and listened, then walked quickly back towards the carpark entrance, his shadow long behind him.
When Mary Raven hurtled down the sand bank and into his arms, he felt only relief. He held her, trying to calm her as she sobbed, awkward at first, then remembering what it was like to hold a woman in his arms. At first she was hysterical in her terror. She tried to pull away from him, tearing at his face with her fingernails and kicking his legs with her heavy boots. Then she recognised him.
“He tried to kill me,” she sobbed. “He had a knife and he tried to kill me. It couldn’t have been Max. Max would never have done a thing like that.”
“No,” Ramsay said, his arms still around her shoulder, trying to stop her trembling. “ It wasn’t Max.”
From the main road they heard the sirens of police cars coming to assist them, and as they came to the end of the track, Hunter emerged from the nearest dune, his hand bleeding, his face triumphant, with his prisoner.
“Too late as usual,” he said, nodding towards the flashing blue lights. It would do no harm, this, he thought. It might mean a promotion if Ramsay didn’t take all the credit.
“Where’s the knife?” Ramsay asked.
“He dropped it in the dunes.” He looked towards the reinforcements. “ They’ll find it.”
“Well, then,” Ramsay said. “You’d better get him back to Otterbridge.”
James Laidlaw looked strangely young without his spectacles. In the half light of the dunes Mary had mistaken him for Max and Ramsay could see how that was possible. James had lost all desire to fight. When they opened the back door of the police car for him, he got in without a word. He sat upright, a respectable figure. He was still wearing a suit. A policewoman who had taken Mary to her car was wrapping her in a rug, pouring tea from a flask.
Hunter was about to drive away when Ramsay tapped on the window. Hunter opened it with hostility, expecting another command or rebuke.
“Well done,” Ramsay said. “That was a good arrest.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ramsay would have liked to take Mary Raven to his cottage in Heppleburn to talk to her. He would have been more comfortable there, without interruptions and telephone calls. He could have made her coffee and waited until she was ready to talk. But he knew it would not do and the interview would have to take place in the police station in Otterbridge, with its institutional furniture and the knowledge that somewhere in the same building James Laidlaw was being questioned, too.
At first she refused to go with him.
“It’s my story,” she said. “I need a phone and a typewriter. No other bugger’s going to get the glory after all this work.”
“It will be your story,” he said, coaxing her with his attention and his gratitude. “ There’ll be no press release tonight. All the papers will know is that James Laidlaw has been arrested. They’ll be desperate to talk to you tomorrow. And, you know, I might be able to give you some useful information.”
So she allowed herself to be helped into the back of his car, complaining only when he drove past the Castle Hotel without stopping to buy her a drink. At the police station he left her for a while in the company of a policewoman, but she seemed not to mind and from the corridor he saw her scribbling intensely in her notebook. He went to talk to Hunter. Laidlaw, it seemed, had started talking as soon as the car left Brinkbonnie and nothing could stop him.
“He asked to write a statement,” Hunter said. “He’s doing that now. He refused to see a solicitor. We’ll have no problem with a conviction.”
So when Ramsay returned to begin his interview with Mary, he knew most of the details of the case. But he gave nothing away. He was diffident, unsure, so she thought he needed her. He let her believe that it was her story after all.
“How did you find out about James Laidlaw’s racket?” Ramsay asked. They drank tea with a little whisky in it. They were at the top of the building and there were no blinds on the windows. Outside spotlights lit up the old walls that surrounded the town and the ruins of the abbey.
“It was just really a wild guess at first,” she said. She was more herself, excitable, proud. She was showing off. “ His decisions about which stories to run were so arbitrary. The Brinkbonnie development was just an example. When the plans first went before the council, he wrote an editorial about the destruction of rural communities. It didn’t bother him that Alice Parry was his aunt. Then, when the village started its own campaign, he began to talk about objectivity and ordered me off. I thought it was just some weird autocracy-that he wanted to show me who was boss-until I did court duty on the morning after Mrs. Parry died.”
She paused to catch her breath. He waited patiently and smiled to encourage her.
“People who appear in court are often much more worried about being in the paper than they are about the fine they receive from the magistrates,” she said. “ James usually did the monthly magistrates court and that was strange in itself. Most editors think themselves too superior to mix with petty criminals-they’re more likely to be taking the magistrates out to lunch. James said it was his way of keeping his finger on the pulse of the town, but of course it wasn’t that at all.”
Ramsay interrupted gently, reluctantly, showing her that he was entertained by her conversation, but that he needed all the details.
“What did happen when you were in the court that Monday?” he asked.
“There was this drunk driver,” she said, making the most of the drama, playing up to him, watching his reaction. “He’d been in court before and he was disqualified for twelve months. But he had his own business and was much more worried about the bad publicity than about losing his licence. He came up to me in the waiting room and asked if there was any way of keeping his name out of the paper. Of course I said it was impossible. He got quite cross and said he had heard it was possible to come to an arrangement about it. He was a wealthy man, he said. Money was no object. At first I thought he was just an isolated loony who was trying it on, but when I considered it later he seemed indignant, almost self-righteous, as if I was treating him unfairly.”
“So James was taking bribes from people who had appeared in court and wanted the fact kept secret?”
“Yes,” she said, and her eyes sparkled because he was listening to her so carefully and following her line of thought so well. “But that wasn’t all he was doing.”
She paused dramatically while he poured her more whisky, then, although he already knew what was coming, he waited, attentive for her next revelation.
“The odd twenty quid to keep a bank manager’s name out of the paper was only chicken feed,” she said. “That wouldn’t keep our Stella in designer frocks and fancy kitchens. So James got more ambitious and the racket with local businesses started.”
“When was that, Mary?” Ramsay asked, quiet and apologetic. “When did the local business racket first start?”
“Years ago,” she said. “Perhaps even before I started on the paper.”