Murder in My Backyard Read Online Free Page A

It was not all advertisements and wedding photographs. He had done a piece once about the poor standard of care in an old people’s home, which had been taken up by the big Newcastle papers, and a feature about a county councillor’s corruption had forced the subject of the article to resign.
    Carolyn, who was twelve and their only child, appeared quite suddenly beside them. She was wearing a coat and carrying a holdall. She was slight and pale as a ghost, so quiet that they often hardly noticed she was there. Her mother dressed her in old-fashioned clothes, with skirts too long for her, so she looked younger than she was.
    “Are we going?” she asked. The question surprised them, so seldom did she take any initiative. “Peter will want me to play with him. He’ll miss me if I’m not there.”
    “Do you enjoy these trips to Brinkbonnie?” James asked. Sometimes he wished he had a son, someone noisy and robust to bring life to the house. Even now, when most of her friends had Walkman cassette players and bedroom walls covered with pop-star posters, the only sound to come from Carolyn’s room was the practice scales of her violin.
    “Oh, yes!” she said, her eyes gleaming. “It’s the best place in the world.”
    When they arrived at the Tower, the front door was still open, but there was no sign of Alice. Max and Judy were in the sitting room drinking tea, not speaking. In the wide, wood-panelled hall there was a pile of baby equipment.
    “Look at this!” James murmured to Stella as he stepped over buggies, camping cots, packets of disposable nappies. “ It’s like a travelling circus.”
    Peter appeared at the top of the stairs on the first landing and called Carolyn to join him. She dropped her holdall with the rest of the luggage and ran to meet him, but by the time she reached the top he had disappeared into the small room where they kept their toys and were allowed to play. At the top of the stairs Carolyn paused. The house was very quiet. Her parents must have joined Max and Judy. The silence was broken by a muffled whimper. Carolyn moved quietly along the landing and listened again. The noise was coming from Aunt Alice’s bedroom. Aunt Alice was crying. Carolyn stood quite still and felt her own eyes fill with tears. She felt betrayed. That was the sort of behavior she expected from her mother, not from her aunt. Now it seemed all adults were similarly unreliable. She turned her back on her aunt’s room and looked for Peter.

Chapter Three
    Mary Raven sat in her car and dreamed of her secret lover. She had met him, one beautiful summer’s evening, at a barbecue on the wild, uninhabited part of the Brinkbonnie dunes owned by the Northumberland Wildlife Trust. The party had been organised by the Trust, and she was there partly because she was sympathetic to the cause and partly to cover the event for the Otterbridge Express . At first it was a predictable evening. The fires took too long to light, the sausages were burnt on the outside and pink in the middle, and bossy women with jolly Girl Guide voices shouted to them as if they were children:
    “Come on , everyone. There are hundreds more sausages.”
    Mary drank too much red wine from a plastic cup, then climbed over the dunes to look over the sea. It was late but still light, the sky’s violet and gold reflected in the wet sand and ebbing sea. Behind her she heard the children complaining as they were rounded up for bed, the first chords of guitar music, the strains of a protest song. The empty beach stretched south for seven miles towards Brinkbonnie village.
    When he climbed up the dune and sat beside her, she was not surprised. Perhaps she had wandered away from the crowd in the hope that she would be followed. It was that sort of night: hot, romantic. She was ready for excitement and some sort of sexual adventure. When she saw who it was, she was not surprised, though at the time almost anyone would have done. She had been aware of him all