Murder in My Backyard by Ann Cleeves Read Free Book Online

deal with all press enquiries, and Ramsay was left alone with the smell of ivy and wet leaves.
    By then it was eleven o’clock and the congregation for parish communion were coming out of the church. The vicar, his cassock billowing about him in the breeze, stood at the door to greet his parishioners. There had been a christening and the mother stood proudly, holding the baby in its long robe while admiring friends took photographs. Then there was the giving of the amice—the coal, bread, salt, and money wrapped up in a napkin that in Northumberland churches is given to the first child the baby meets—and more photographs. Ramsay wished they would all go, but some of the congregation must have heard about the murder because they came up to the wrought-iron gate and stared at the policeman searching the garden.
    He found his sergeant, Gordon Hunter, in the kitchen talking to Olive Kerr.
    “Sorry to call you out,” Hunter said cheerfully. “How are you settling in?”
    Ramsay said nothing. He disapproved of Hunter’s easy familiarity. Perhaps it had been a mistake after all to invite him into his home. A murder enquiry needed tact and gravity. Yet he noticed that even the straight-backed, straitlaced woman was responding to the sergeant’s attention. Hunter would be making her feel special, playing the part of the attractive, rather wayward son who needed looking after. Soon she would be making him tea and telling him to wrap up warm before he went out because the wind was cold. Hunter whispered something to Olive, which made her smile, then stood up.
    “We need screens,” Ramsay said. “ There are already people in the churchyard staring. They can’t see the body from there, but it’ll not be long before we have the press in the garden.”
    “The press is here already,” Hunter said. “ In the house. One of Mrs. Parry’s nephews is the editor of the Otterbridge Express .”
    “I know,” Ramsay said. He was already feeling depressed. “Tell me who else is here.”
    “Laidlaw’s wife, Stella, and their daughter, Carolyn, and his brother and his family. They’re all in here.”
    Hunter led him through the hall to the warm square room where the family had waited the night before for Alice’s return. As soon as he saw them all, Ramsay knew that these were Diana’s sort of people and the thought triggered a profound unease and an excitement. They could easily have been friends of Diana’s, invited to her dinner parties, sharing evenings at the theatre, meals in dimly lit foreign restaurants. He recognised the style. Although the women wore jeans and hand-knitted sweaters, their wardrobes were probably full of clothes that Diana might have chosen to wear. It had always surprised him that Diana would admit quite happily to having found a bargain in a charity shop or at a jumble sale—“ a real silk shirt and only five pounds”—but refuse to go near the cut-price chain stores in the high street where his mother always shopped. It always seemed to him a strange sort of snobbishness, though Diana always said he had no taste and could not possibly understand. Throughout the interview with the Laidlaws he felt that, with Diana’s arrogance, they were saying the same thing. You’re different from us, they implied. You’re from a different background. How can you possibly understand?
    Yet he felt from the beginning that because they were Diana’s sort of people, he did understand them. It was his secret weapon, that understanding. They would always underestimate him.
    He stood just inside the door and looked around the room. James Laidlaw sat on a worn leather Chesterfield reading an old copy of the Times . He recognised Ramsay and stood up.
    “Inspector,” he said smoothly, “ I’m glad it’s you. It’s always easier to work with a person one knows.”
    Ramsay nodded but said nothing. There seemed to have been no collective support or sympathy, no communication between them even. Max Laidlaw was