Chapter Sixteen

When it was dark, Hunter and Ramsay met in the police house. Outside was a glass-faced notice board with the faded photograph of a child who had been missing for five years and would look quite different now, even if she was still alive, and a poster about car theft. Every rural police house seemed to have the same notice board and to be built to the same design.

Ramsay had been to Otterbridge to face the anxieties of his superintendent.

“So you were right about Charlie Elliot,” the man had said. “Well, well. You know I always trust your judgement.”

“Elliot could still have murdered Alice Parry,” Ramsay had said impatiently. His superior seemed incapable of logical thought and chose his theories according to convenience and what would provide maximum publicity.

“Do you think so?” The superintendent had seemed surprised. “Well, as I said, I’m prepared to trust your judgement on that. Just keep me posted, Steve. The door’s always open, you know.”

“We’ll need a press release,” Ramsay had said. “ I’ve just been given a provisional time of death for Charlie Elliot as between five and six-thirty this morning. We’ll need anyone who was out in Brinkbonnie to come forward.”

“Of course, Steve.” The man had relaxed. “You can leave that to me.”

Hunter had just come back from the hill. He was flushed from the afternoon in the open air and full of good humour. Even the discovery that Ramsay had proof that Mary Raven had been in Brinkbonnie on the night of Mrs. Parry’s murder could not suppress him.

“Why was she lying then?” he asked. “She can’t have anything to do with the murder. I told you. She was at the party in Newcastle before midnight”

“I don’t know,” Ramsay said. He felt that he still knew very little. “ Perhaps she knows who killed Mrs. Parry and she’s trying to protect him. Perhaps she has reasons of her own. Did you find out anything else from the student in Newcastle?”

“Yes.” Hunter was grinning. “Mary has a boyfriend.” Ramsay looked at him sharply. “Who?”

“She won’t tell them. It’s all a big secret.”

“But they’re her friends. They must know something about him.”

“I don’t think so.” Hunter was eating a Mars bar. He screwed the wrapper into a ball and threw it towards a waste-basket in the corner of the room. “It seems that Mary’s a bit of a loner. She goes to their parties and gets drunk with them, but she doesn’t talk to them much.”

“Is the boyfriend married?” Ramsay asked.

“The girl thought so.”

“Perhaps she was waiting for him in the churchyard,” Ramsay said. “But why Brinkbonnie? Because he lives here?”

“Or perhaps he was staying at the Tower,” Hunter said. “It could be Max Laidlaw or James.”