The Baby-Snatcher

Chapter Eleven

Ramsay took the three women out to lunch. He’d only been in the house for half an hour and he couldn’t stand it any longer. He thought they must be going mad.

‘What about Bernie?’ Claire had said, but when they asked Mr Howe he said a sandwich would do for him and continued to practise his magic tricks. So Ramsay called in an eager young constable to stay in the house and they drove away from the Headland, Sal Wedderburn in the driving seat and Marilyn and Claire silently in the back. He was surprised there were no reporters waiting for them in the street. Only the slight movement of upstairs net curtains marked their going.

Ramsay took them to an Italian restaurant in Otterbridge. The food was good and if Claire and Marilyn had unadventurous tastes there was pasta and pizza. All young people ate pizza these days. He felt, unconsciously, that he wanted to give the girl a treat, a small comfort.

He and Prue used the restaurant often and the owner was a friend. It was late and the place was nearly empty. The last customers were preparing to go. Ramsay said gravely that he hoped the restaurant wasn’t about to close. They had been hoping for a place to talk. Marco would understand. And Marco did understand. He flapped a white napkin over a table by the window and said they could stay, all afternoon if they liked. He was there anyway. And with a wink, in an aside to Ramsay, he said that it was always a good idea to keep on the right side of the police.

The restaurant had long windows which looked out on a courtyard, one side of which was formed by the ruins of the town wall. The small trees in the courtyard still looked lifeless but underneath had been planted a bed of crocuses, bright orange, and purple and lit by the pale afternoon sun.

Ramsay watched Marilyn read the menu, hesitantly, always turning back to the cheaper items on the front. At Cotter’s Row money would have been tight and if the family had eaten out at all choice would have been restricted.

‘Have whatever you like,’ he said. ‘ It’s on expenses.’ Which it probably wouldn’t be but she always seemed so anxious that he wanted her, at least, not to have to worry about this. He ordered pasta with a spicy spinach sauce and, on impulse, a carafe of house red. Across the table he could sense that Sal Wedderburn was perplexed, wondering what he was up to, what he was hoping to get out of this. What the bosses would say.

What Claire made of it he could not tell. Meeting her for the first time in the cramped and claustrophobic living room at Cotter’s Row she had seemed entirely out of place. She was a statuesque young woman, large boned, dark haired, dark eyed. Here in the restaurant, with the other guests having left for their offices and only the Italian staff waiting quietly by the bar she seemed more at home. She could have been one of them. She ate with pleasure, drank the first glass of wine quickly and accepted the second when it was offered. You would have said she was there for a family celebration, yet, Ramsay thought, Kath Howe was the nearest thing she had to a mother.

They did not talk of the murder until they had finished eating. By then the sun had left the courtyard. Marco brought coffee in a thermos jug and said he would leave them to it. Throughout the meal Sal Wedderburn had attempted to catch Ramsay’s eye in an unspoken attempt to start the ball rolling. Each time he had ignored her. Now, quite openly, she looked at her watch. He saw it was a torture for her to sit and wait.

‘I expect,’ he said, ‘there are questions you’d both like to ask.’

‘We don’t know anything,’ Claire said flatly. ‘It’s not right, being kept in the dark like this.’

‘That certainly wasn’t deliberate. We didn’t want to give you false information. The details in a case like this take longer to check than anyone realizes.’

‘But now you do know? About how Kath died?’ He tried to place Claire’s accent, and decided north of the county. Berwick. Wooler. Had Kath Howe spoken like that? He couldn’t remember.

‘We know enough to be certain she was murdered. She didn’t slip on the rocks and fall. She was dead when she entered the water.’

As he spoke he was watching Marilyn. The colour drained from her face though there were no tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘When did she die?’ Claire demanded. Her bluntness surprised him. She leant forward across the table waiting for an answer.

‘Some time on Saturday. It might be possible to pinpoint the time more accurately once we know when she last ate but at the moment that’s all we know.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘She was stabbed, possibly with an ordinary kitchen knife. We haven’t found the weapon yet but we’ve begun to search.’ He paused. ‘We might need to look at your house too.’

She looked up, challenging. ‘Why?’

He chose his words carefully. ‘There’s a possibility that Mrs Howe knew her killer. We don’t think there was a struggle.’

He expected a denial, outrage that he could suggest that one of the family might be involved but perhaps she lacked the imagination to realize the implication of what he was saying. He continued. ‘There’s a possibility that Mrs Howe let someone into the house that morning.’

‘Might she have done that?’ Sally Wedderburn asked. ‘Might she have let a stranger into the house? She wouldn’t have been afraid?’

Claire shook her head. ‘Not for herself. She wouldn’t let Marilyn out of her sight but she thought nothing of walking the country roads at night. Besides, Bernie was upstairs all morning, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Sally Wedderburn said. ‘Of course.’ She seemed thrown by Claire’s confidence, her aggression, and fell silent.

‘Obviously we’re trying to form an idea of Mrs Howe’s movements on Saturday,’ Ramsay said. ‘ We need your help for that.’ He turned to Marilyn. ‘ I understand from your father that she walked with you to the bus stop in the morning. Did she wait with you until the bus came?’

Marilyn looked at him blankly as if she had not heard the question and he had to repeat it.

‘She waited until we could see the bus coming down the road then I sent her back. The crossing was clear for once and you can stand there for hours if one train follows another.’ She paused. ‘ To be honest I thought there might be someone I knew on the bus. I didn’t want any of my friends to see Mummy waiting with me.’

‘When I spoke to you on Sunday you said the last time you saw your mother was at breakfast.’

‘I was embarrassed,’ Marilyn said. ‘ I didn’t want to tell you that she wouldn’t let me walk to the bus stop on my own.’ She began to cry. Large, silent tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘She was only worried about me. I never worried about her. None of us did.’

‘Except the time when she was missing and you called at my house,’ Ramsay reminded her gently. ‘You were worried about her then.’

‘I was, wasn’t I?’ She seemed consoled by the memory.

Ramsay waited until she had composed herself.

‘Did anyone get off the bus when you got on? Someone who might have followed your mother up the Headland, perhaps caught her up?’

‘No. No one.’

‘Mr Taverner gave you a lift back from school that afternoon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he tell you why he was coming to the Headland?’

‘He’s a friend of the Coulthards who live at the Coastguard House.’

Ramsay turned to Claire.

‘You’ll know him then?’

‘I’ve met him.’

‘Is he a regular visitor to the Coastguard House?’

‘He has been recently.’ She gave a sudden smug little smile which vanished so quickly that he wondered if he’d imagined it.

‘Oh?’

He was hoping for gossip, even scandal, but she said gravely, ‘I expect he’s lonely. His wife died a few months ago. She was Sheena Taverner, the writer.’

Then he realized why the name had been familiar. He had seen Sheena Taverner’s books in Prue’s house; had even met her once at some party to which Prue had dragged him. There had been so many thin, soulful women that he found it hard to place her, but he thought he remembered her. Had Mark Taverner been present too? He could not remember, and turned his attention back to Marilyn.

‘Would your mother have known Mr Taverner?’

‘She’d met him at parents’ evenings. He was my tutor in Year Seven and now he takes me for music. She’d have recognized him.’

‘Where did he drop you?’

‘At the club. He was meeting Mr Coulthard there.’

‘And you walked up the hill by yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Weren’t you worried that your mother might be waiting for you at the bus stop?’

‘No. I told you yesterday. She wasn’t expecting me back until later.’

There was a silence. The restaurant was, by now, very gloomy and a little cold. Ramsay poured more coffee.

‘Did you meet anyone as you walked up the hill?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Perhaps you could concentrate. It’s important that you’re absolutely sure.’

‘I didn’t meet anyone,’ Marilyn explained, ‘ but I saw Claire come out of the house and walk on up towards the Coulthards’. I don’t think she noticed me. The weather was dreadful. She wore her hood up and her head was bent down against the sleet. I shouted but she didn’t hear me.’

Claire did not speak. She continued to stare into the courtyard.

‘I thought you spent all day in the Coastguard House,’ Sally Wedderburn said.

Throughout the conversation Ramsay had been aware of a controlled hostility between the women, and wondered what lay at the root of it. Perhaps they had just got on each other’s nerves cooped up in that house. Now Claire was unapologetic, even defiant.

‘So I went home for something to eat? Why shouldn’t I? Everyone else has a dinner break.’

‘Was Mrs Howe there?’

‘Of course not! I would have said, wouldn’t I?’

‘But Mr Howe was?’

‘I suppose so. Upstairs. He spends hours up there practising.’

Claire lapsed into silence. The carafe of wine was empty but a little remained in her glass. She held it up so the fading light from the window caught it, then she drank it all.

Ramsay was thinking that this might be an explanation for Mr Howe’s belief that his wife had returned to the house. A door had slammed shut and he had assumed it was Kath. But the timing was wrong. Claire’s lunch break would have occurred much later than Mrs Howe’s expected return from the bus stop. Was it possible that so much time could have passed without Bernard’s noticing? Ramsay thought that perhaps it was. Bernard had been concentrating on his rehearsal, his mind, as Marilyn had once said, was full of magic and illusion. Ramsay decided they should work on the premise that Kath Howe had last been seen by her daughter, waved away across the level crossing before she could cause embarrassment.

‘But what would she have done then?’ He realized he had spoken aloud and continued in explanation. ‘ You were all busy. I was wondering how Mrs Howe would usually have spent her time on Saturday mornings.’

The similarity of the terraced house in Cotter’s Row to the Coal Board cottage where he had lived as a child made him think of his own mother. When he reached school age she’d taken a part-time job in a draper’s shop and Saturday had become her cleaning day. He’d been sent out to play in the street while she dusted and hoovered. He remembered her squatting on the stairs, a small, hard brush in one hand, furiously beating the fluff and the dust down into the hall, shouting at him through the open front door to clear out until she’d finished. He couldn’t imagine that Mrs Howe would ever set aside a day for housework.

Her relatives seemed surprised by the question. They looked at each other. Neither answered.

‘I understand she was interested in craft. Dyeing. Spinning.’

‘Aye,’ Claire said. ‘ That was the latest fad.’

‘What were the others?’

‘Botany, watercolours.’ She looked at Marilyn. ‘Is there anything I’ve missed?’

Marilyn shook her head. It was a gesture of distaste, not an answer to the question.

‘Is it possible that she was following one of these hobbies on Saturday morning?’

‘It’s possible. Bernard would be able to tell you. That spinning wheel of hers makes a real racket and the living room’s right under the bedroom.’

‘What else might she have done?’

‘I don’t know,’ Marilyn said. ‘ She walked a lot. Read. There was no regular routine.’

Claire leant forward. ‘The trouble with Kath’, she said, ‘was that she’d never really grown up. She played at things. It was all too easy for her.’ And with that she shut her mouth and became her old taciturn self.