Murder in My Backyard Read Online Free

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.