Murder in My Backyard

Chapter Two

Further north, along the coast, the east wind pushed hard grey waves into Brinkbonnie Bay, blew strands of dry seaweed around the legs of cattle grazing on the dunes and sand into the road in drifts. It was March 1 but still as cold as winter. The small boats kept on the beach for fishing in the summer were still upturned in the carpark next to the shop that sold ice-creams to day-trippers when the weather was good. In the cottages that were so close to the beach that the washing lines stretched out into the sand hills, people listened to the wind and were glad that the tides were low that week.

The bay spread for seven miles in an unbroken sweep of beach and dunes, and Brinkbonnie at the southern point was the only village. It was a straggling, ill-defined place. There was the row of cottages along the water’s edge with the post office and the ice-cream shop as part of the terrace and Tom Kerr’s garage. Inland was green, muddy and bare from a winter of children’s games, overlooked by the Castle Hotel, some pleasant grey-stone houses, and the village hall. Then the road continued west towards Otterbridge, and along it were farms and an occasional monstrous surburban villa.

The Tower was to the north of the village on a rise in the land backed by an old deciduous wood. It was older and more impressive than the church that had been placed beside it. The Tower had been built by a settlement of border reivers who irritated the clansmen of Scotland by stealing their cattle and burning their houses. It stood, facing east, to withstand raiders from the sea. More recently it had been restored, almost rebuilt by an affluent Victorian, and turned into a comfortable house with views over the flat green fields and pools behind the dunes.

Alice Parry looked out of one of the upstairs Tower windows and briefly hoped that the rain would stay off until the family arrived that evening. Rain, she thought then, was the least of her troubles. She absorbed other people’s problems and cared about them as if they were her own. She thought about Charlie Elliot, who had left the army and was such a worry to his father. She thought about Olive Kerr, who helped with the housework at the Tower and who had seemed so strained and nervous since her separated daughter had come to live with her. It was a compliment, she supposed, that they confided in her, and she wished she had answers for them. Then she thought of the proposed development in the village and her responsibility for it and decided that at least she could do something about that. She fetched her coat and outdoor shoes and then set off for the village, leaving the kitchen door unlocked, as she always did, until last thing at night. She walked quickly, ignoring a twinge of arthritis, which seemed to have got worse since her husband died.

The main entrance to the Tower was from the Otterbridge Road, but Alice took the footpath through the churchyard that brought her out by the village hall. She looked at her watch as she came out into the street and saw that it was already two o’clock but thought that it would not matter. Village meetings never started on time.

She was surprised by the number of cars parked in the street. She knew the controversy of the new houses had stirred up feelings in Brinkbonnie, but she had not expected people from the outlying farms to be so concerned. As she walked up the road she saw a few other latecomers enter the hall, but when she reached it the door was shut again. She stood outside for a moment to catch her breath and looked in through the smeared glass pane in the door. The hall was packed with people sitting on uncomfortable wooden chairs. Behind a table on the stage sat Fred Elliot, postmaster and chairman of the parish council.

As she watched he stood up and began to speak. Even from outside she could sense his nervousness. He was used to meetings but would never have spoken in front of so many people before. Mrs. Parry felt awkward now about pushing open the door into the hall in case the interruption should put him off his stride. Before she could decide whether to go in and listen or go away, the door was suddenly opened from inside and she stumbled into the room. There was the sudden smell of damp, the gas fires they used to try to dry the place, and mice.

“What’s this then?” said the big man who had opened the door. It was Charlie Elliot, the mechanic from Tom Kerr’s garage, Fred Elliot’s son. “ It’s a spy from the opposition.”

There was a little embarrassed laughter and, encouraged, he went on.

“Come to gloat, have you, Mrs. Parry? Come to see how much money you’re going to make?”

He looked round for admiration, like a child showing off.

Everyone in the hall was staring at her. She felt hot and angry.

“No,” she said. “Not at all. I wanted to explain. I’m on your side.”

But he would not listen.

“A development in the heart of the village, home for a couple of dozen yuppies. I suppose you think that’s just fine.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I’m on your side.”

He seemed to hear her for the first time.

“How’s that then, Mrs. Parry?” he said, still playing to the audience. “ You’re the one that sold the field behind the Tower to Henshaw. He couldn’t build all those fancy houses on it without you.”

“Away man, Charlie!” Fred Elliot called from the stage. “ This is no way to run a meeting. Give Mrs. Parry a chance.”

“Go on then,” Charlie said sulkily, nodding towards the stage. “You wanted to explain. Go up there and tell us all about it.”

She walked to the front of the hall, her sense of outrage at the position Henshaw had put her in getting her through the awkwardness. She stood on the stage beside Fred. As she spoke she was acutely aware of her southern, middle-class accent. It’s not my fault, she wanted to say. I was born in Northumberland, too. I didn’t ask to be sent away to school.

“It’s true that I sold the land to Henshaw,” she said. “But he misled me about the sort of development he was planning for the Tower field. I suppose I was foolish to trust him, but he showed me professionally drawn-up plans. He said there would be twenty small, reasonably priced houses for local families and six retirement bungalows. I talked to members of the parish council and they approved of the idea…”

She faltered. A strand of white hair had become unpinned from her untidy roll at the back of her head. She felt old and self-conscious.

“That’s a bloody big field for twenty-six little houses,” Charlie shouted from the back of the hall. “What did he tell you he was going to do with the rest of the land?”

Mrs. Parry blushed. “I know it sounds naïve,” she said, “but he told me he was planning a children’s play area and football field. I believed him.” She looked round the hall. “ I sold the land for well below the market price,” she said helplessly, “ because I wanted to do something to help the village. I’ve been so happy here. I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry.”

There was a sympathetic silence, but Charlie shouted: “ It’s all very well being sorry, isn’t it, but that won’t stop Colin Henshaw from building eighty executive detached dwellings, each with a double garage.” He sneered as he quoted the exact wording on the planning application. “We’ll be outnumbered. There’ll be more incomers than there are of us. Of course, you’re an incomer, so maybe you’ll feel at home with them.”

“Charlie!” Fred Elliot said sharply. He turned apologetically to Alice Parry. “Go on, pet,” he said.

“The planning inspector has approved Henshaw’s plans,” she said, “ but the council still has time to appeal against the inspector’s decision. That’s why I’m here. We must persuade the council to fight the case in the high court. I want to support your campaign. I don’t want Brinkbonnie ruined any more than you do, and I’ll fight to protect it.”

She sat down to a spasmodic burst of applause and to more jeers and hisses from the back of the room.

Fred Elliot called for a vote on Alice Parry’s idea that they should put pressure on the council to fight the planning inspector’s decision. The motion was overwhelmingly carried and they settled down to form an action committee and to arrange a petition and letters to local councillors. When Alice left the hall to return to the Tower, it was four o’clock.

Outside the wind had strengthened and sand blew up from the street and stung her eyes. In the shelter of the high wall that surrounded the churchyard, she moved more quickly, almost running. She was glad to have attended the meeting-it was better, after all, than staying at home feeling guilty-but there would be a rush now to have everything ready before her visitors arrived and she felt overwhelmed by it all. Her nephews and their families always came to Brinkbonnie on St. David’s Day. It was a tradition that had begun when her husband was alive. He was a Welshman and had demanded that they celebrate the day. She was never sure how much the boys valued the effort she made but kept the tradition for her husband’s sake and because she knew the children enjoyed it. She especially enjoyed the company of the children, and as she grew older she thought she had more in common with them than she did with Max and James. She had never had a family.

She let herself in through the kitchen door at the back of the house and plugged in the kettle to make tea. Tea always had a calming effect. Then she began the preparations for dinner and was standing at the window, beating cream in a large glass bowl, when she saw a young woman walking down the drive. The woman, who was so young that to Alice she was a girl, had been in the village hall, though Alice did not recognise her as a local. As she approached the house she hesitated, uncertain which door to try. Alice opened the kitchen door.

“Yes,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Parry?” the woman said, though she must have known exactly who she was talking to. “ I’m sorry to disturb you. Could I speak to you for a few minutes?”

There was, Alice thought, something of the Gypsy about her. She had very dark hair and her clothes were untidy but exotic and very brightly coloured.

“I’m very busy,” Alice said, but something about the woman was familiar and she was curious. “ You’ll have to come into the kitchen.”

“My name’s Mary Raven,” the woman said. “ Could I talk to you? I’m a reporter with the Otterbridge Express.”

Olive Kerr heard of the outcome of the meeting in the village hall from her daughter, Maggie, who was a barmaid at the Castle Hotel and heard all the gossip. People who had left the meeting early arrived at the pub just before closing time and were eager to talk. Charlie Elliot figured largely in the stories. Maggie passed on a carefully edited version of the events to her mother, but Olive was still indignant.

“He was always a troublemaker, that Charlie Elliot,” she said. “I don’t know why your father had to take him on.” The words were like a refrain; she had spoken them so often before. “ He’s the last person you’d think Tom would want to work with.”

Maggie said nothing. She knew the criticism was directed as much at her as at Tom. The two women were in the kitchen at the back of the house. Although it was only mid-afternoon it was almost dark and the wind blew sand onto the window so that it sounded like hail. Maggie’s sons and her father were watching football on the television in another room.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said. “If I could find us somewhere to live, we’d move out. I’ll phone the council again on Monday.”

“You’re welcome here as long as you want,” Olive said, but she was tight-lipped and angry, and Maggie knew it was not only the overcrowding that made her so tense.

The older woman began to put on a coat, punching out the sleeves with her fists, tearing at the zip with furious fingers.

“Where are you going?” Maggie asked.

“To the Tower,” Olive said. “It’s St. David’s Day and the family are coming. I promised Mrs. Parry I’d do her a couple of extra hours before dinner.”

“Shall I give you a lift up in the car?” Maggie asked. “ It’s going to rain any minute.”

“No,” Olive said. “The walk’ll do me good.”

“Take care then,” Maggie said, but her mother had already gone and there was no reply.

Peter Laidlaw divided his year by the times spent at Brinkbonnie. When friends at school boasted about package tours to the Greek islands or Disneyland, he considered them with scorn. No place in the world had the magic of his visits to the Tower.

His father, Max, was a general practitioner in Otterbridge, and the family lived in a big Victorian terrace with tricycles in the hall and gerbils in the kitchen. Nine-year-old Peter was happy enough at home, but his parents were always busy and the house was often crowded with people he did not know. His parents promised him their attention, then found excuses for not fulfilling the promise. His latest campaign was for a tree house in the ash at the bottom of the garden. The excuse for not building it was a rusting tandem that had stood outside since the twins were born.

“There’s enough rubbish in the garden already,” his mother would say, “without making any more. When your father takes that thing to the tip, we’ll think about it.”

Max had bought the tandem when he and Judy were students and he was reluctant to get rid of it. It represented a time of great happiness: evenings in folk clubs, friendships, shared bottles of cheap wine. He had loved to ride with her around the Northumberland countryside. She had looked so striking-a frail Pre-Raphaelite beauty with red hair-and people in the streets had stared at them as if they were celebrities. He had been proud to be seen with her. When Peter was born, Max had fitted a small seat on the back and they had still ridden out together on family outings. Then the twins had arrived and the tandem had been useless, pushed outside to make room for the rocking horse Alice had given them and all the other toys. Now Judy swore at it whenever she went into the garden to hang out the washing and nagged at Max to do something about it. The days of romantic bike rides seemed long past.

It seemed to Max that Judy could not be happy now unless she was part of a group of women. Whenever he came home from work, the house seemed full of them or of other people’s children. But he never complained to Judy. That would be an uncharitable, unliberated thing to do. He had encouraged her to take part in the community activity and presumed she enjoyed it. She had been a nurse and she taught relaxation for the National Childbirth Trust. Sometimes he came home from running an antenatal clinic in the Health Centre to find rows of pregnant women lying on the living-room floor. She volunteered to run a crèche for the women writers’ workshop and every Wednesday afternoon she was exhausted with the effort of entertaining a dozen precocious children, who ground Play-Doh into the carpet and tipped sand down the lavatory. She was a committee member of Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the groups met in their home. It occurred to him occasionally that he would not recognise her if she were not surrounded by a group of women, a coffee mug in one hand, leaning forward earnestly to listen or to make some point. He could hardly remember what she looked like when she was on her own. Even in bed she usually had one or the other of the twins beside her. She was always tired.

“Dad,” Peter said, from the back of the car as they drove out of Otterbridge towards Brinkbonnie, “ what do you get if you cross a sheep with a boiler?”

“I don’t know,” Max said automatically.

“Central Bleating.”

Max groaned.

“That’s very funny, Peter,” Judy said. She looked at Max crossly.

Humour was an essential phase in a child’s development.

“Will I be able to stay up for dinner tonight?”

“Perhaps. If Aunt Alice agrees.”

“Will Sam and Tim? I expect they’re still too small.”

Sensing Max’s irritation, Judy passed a copy of the Beano into the back seat, and for the rest of the trip to Brinkbonnie Peter was quiet.

From Otterbridge they drove east along narrow lanes through farmland. To the south, on the horizon, was the winding wheel of a long-extinct pit and the chimneys of a newly built aluminium plant, but they seemed a long way off. It was late afternoon and the clouds were building for a storm. They drove straight into the wind, and in exposed places the car rocked and buffeted. In the valleys, where rows of trees lined the road, it was almost dark, and when they drove through the villages there were lights in cottage windows. When they drove into Brinkbonnie, it started to rain with slow, heavy drops and the clouds over the sea were so thick that they could not see beyond the first range of dunes. As Max turned into the Tower drive through the high walls covered with ivy, he had to switch on his leadlights to see, and it began to pour. As the car stopped behind the Tower, sheltered a little from the east wind, Alice came out of the kitchen door to meet them, under a huge golfing umbrella, followed by one of her cats. She wore a blue-and-white-striped apron over her clothes and there was flour in her hair.

“My dears,” she said. “How nice to see you.”

Peter was trying to open the car door to get out and kicked Sam in his eagerness to climb out. Sam began to cry. Max shouted at Peter for his clumsiness and it seemed there would be a horrible family scene until Alice scooped the baby from the back of the car and made him laugh, sent Peter into the house to wait for his cousin, and greeted the adults with a calm, slightly bemused smile.

“Come in,” she said. “There should be some tea.”

When he met his wife, James Laidlaw was thirty, already editor of the Otterbridge Express with ambitions of better things. He had interviewed Stella Rutherford in a small workshop in a converted barn on the outskirts of Otterbridge. He was preparing an article on local businesses and she was fresh from art school with plans to set up in knitwear design. He knew of her because her father was one of the biggest landowners in the district and he had expected someone loud and horsy. In fact, Stella was pale, fine-featured, and nervous. She chain-smoked and laughed at herself for being so anxious. It was her background, she said. Everyone expected so much of her. Her father had told her she would be a failure and she thought he was probably right.

James had left the interview feeling like a sixteen-year-old in love for the first time, and even now, thirteen years later, he was obsessed with her fragile beauty. She was right, the knitwear design idea had been a failure, and as soon as she had married she had given it up. She seemed not to have the strength to see anything through. Even motherhood, it seemed, was too much for her, and after the birth of Carolyn she had been so severely depressed that she had spent six months in hospital. Her father, an insensitive and self-centred man, had found her illness embarrassing and cowardly. He had never visited her in hospital and since then the family had had little to do with him. Stella claimed to hate him. James had seen her through the bad times, almost glad, it seemed, of an excuse to spoil and cherish her. Even now he considered her before anything. He had been offered a job in Fleet Street but turned it down without discussing it with Stella. He knew she would never survive the move.

He had been working and was home later than Stella had expected. He saw her waiting at the window and felt guilty for making her anxious.

“Do we have to go?” she asked as soon as he came into the house. “I’m not sure I can face it.”

“Nonsense,” he said gently. “You know you’ll enjoy it once you’re there.”

“I won’t,” she said. “ I don’t know why we go. You don’t even get on with Max particularly.”

“Oh, well,” he said easily. “ It’s always relaxing to be with Aunt Alice.”

“She doesn’t sound very relaxed at the moment.” Stella was defensive. “ She phoned not long ago and asked to speak to you. She’s worried about the development on the land at the edge of the village. She wants your advice.”

“That’s not worry,” James said. “It’s guilt because she sold the land in the first place. There’s nothing I can do about it now. We reported the Department of the Environment’s decision in the paper.”

The Express was a local paper with a limited circulation, but James Laidlaw took his journalism seriously. It was not all advertisements and wedding photographs. He had done a piece once about the poor standard of care in an old people’s home, which had been taken up by the big Newcastle papers, and a feature about a county councillor’s corruption had forced the subject of the article to resign.

Carolyn, who was twelve and their only child, appeared quite suddenly beside them. She was wearing a coat and carrying a holdall. She was slight and pale as a ghost, so quiet that they often hardly noticed she was there. Her mother dressed her in old-fashioned clothes, with skirts too long for her, so she looked younger than she was.

“Are we going?” she asked. The question surprised them, so seldom did she take any initiative. “Peter will want me to play with him. He’ll miss me if I’m not there.”

“Do you enjoy these trips to Brinkbonnie?” James asked. Sometimes he wished he had a son, someone noisy and robust to bring life to the house. Even now, when most of her friends had Walkman cassette players and bedroom walls covered with pop-star posters, the only sound to come from Carolyn’s room was the practice scales of her violin.

“Oh, yes!” she said, her eyes gleaming. “It’s the best place in the world.”

When they arrived at the Tower, the front door was still open, but there was no sign of Alice. Max and Judy were in the sitting room drinking tea, not speaking. In the wide, wood-panelled hall there was a pile of baby equipment.

“Look at this!” James murmured to Stella as he stepped over buggies, camping cots, packets of disposable nappies. “ It’s like a travelling circus.”

Peter appeared at the top of the stairs on the first landing and called Carolyn to join him. She dropped her holdall with the rest of the luggage and ran to meet him, but by the time she reached the top he had disappeared into the small room where they kept their toys and were allowed to play. At the top of the stairs Carolyn paused. The house was very quiet. Her parents must have joined Max and Judy. The silence was broken by a muffled whimper. Carolyn moved quietly along the landing and listened again. The noise was coming from Aunt Alice’s bedroom. Aunt Alice was crying. Carolyn stood quite still and felt her own eyes fill with tears. She felt betrayed. That was the sort of behavior she expected from her mother, not from her aunt. Now it seemed all adults were similarly unreliable. She turned her back on her aunt’s room and looked for Peter.