Murder in My Backyard by Ann Cleeves Page A

with presents – flowers and chocolates and bottles of wine. At first I took them back to him. But that only made him angry. He’s got a terrible temper. So now I keep them and take them into the old Cottage Hospital in Otterbridge. Then he tried phoning me at home, sometimes dozens of times in an evening, begging me to see him and talk to him. More recently, he’s taken to following me around the village. When I wake up he’s out on the street looking up at me, and he waits outside the pub at closing time and follows me home. I don’t know what to do. It’s frightening. He’s not normal now. He’s completely obsessed.” She paused. “It’s affecting the whole family,” she said. “ My dad tried to talk to Charlie about it one night after work. There was a fight. Can you imagine it? My father brawling in the street. He must have caught Charlie off balance because Charlie hit his head on the pavement and knocked himself out. Then, of course, Dad felt guilty and that made things worse.”
    “But Charlie’s still working at the garage. Even after the fight?”
    “Yes,” she said bitterly. “ Dad’s a great one for martyrdom. He wants to show the village he knows what’s right even if he finds it hell.”
    “Have you talked to the police about this?”
    “No,” she said. “ How could I? Dad assaulted Charlie. They might charge him. The village think it’s all my fault that Charlie’s in that state. How would it look if I reported him to the police, too? Besides, I’d started to hope that soon it would all be over. He’d become obsessed with the housing development on the Tower meadow. I thought if he became involved with that, he might forget about me. And it seemed to be working. The night Mrs. Parry died was the first evening for a month when he wasn’t there to follow me home after work.”
    Ramsay looked at her sharply, wondering if the words were malicious, if she was accusing Elliot of having played a part in Mrs. Parry’s murder. But she spoke quite innocently. She was simply relieved that she had been allowed to walk home alone.
    “Have you seen Charlie today?” he asked.
    “He was outside the house at lunchtime when I went to work,” she said. “But I’ve not seen him this evening. Do you think it might all be coming to an end?”
    “I don’t know,” Ramsay said. “But I’d better take you home. Your parents will be wondering where you are.”
    He drove slowly down the drive towards the Otterbridge Road. At the junction he had to brake sharply, then skidded because a man stepped out suddenly into his headlights. The man stood for a moment in the road, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lamps with his hands, shocked, it seemed, to see a car coming down the Tower drive. It was only when he turned without apology and walked on up the road that Ramsay recognised him as the red-faced man from the pub.
    “Who the hell is that?” he asked. “What on earth does he think he’s playing at?”
    “It’s Robert Grey,” Maggie said. “ He farms the land behind the village. He lives just up the road, next door to the Henshaws’.”
    “Does he get as drunk as that every evening?”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t know what was wrong with him tonight. He came in at opening time and must have just finished now.”
    At the house behind the garage the lights were still on and Ramsay imagined her father there, waiting anxiously. There was no sign of Charlie Elliot. She ran in without a word.
    It was midnight when he arrived back at the cottage at Heppleburn. He assumed that the envelope stuck in his letter box would be a circular. It was Sunday and there was no post. Before looking at it, he lit the gas fire and made coffee. Only then did he see that it was a card, expensive and hand-delivered, from Diana welcoming him to his new home. He studied it, as if hoping for a clue in the pressed flowers and bland printed message to her motivation. But he did not find one, and when he got in