Healers (9 page)

Perhaps she had a lover? the police probed gently. Perhaps that was why she kept the weekend away so secret.

“Val? A lover? You must be joking. She wouldn’t know where to start.”

They seemed to find the idea laughable and the impression grew of a reserved woman, well-liked but painfully shy with everyone but her students. The sort of woman who wouldn’t make waves. Certainly not the sort of woman to get herself murdered.

In the end Ramsay put the second murder down to coincidence. Though he’d never liked coincidences and kept his own copy of the interview with Charles McDougal just in case. For two days the investigations went on in tandem. Ramsay’s team, based in Mittingford, were in charge of Ernie Bowles’s murder and an inspector from Otterbridge set up an incident room in police headquarters and took over the Val McDougal case.

The connection with Ernie Bowles came through routine policing, the sort of detailed and repetitive work that Hunter hated. The principal of the Further Education College had cleared Val’s desk and gave the contents to the police for checking before they would be released to her husband. The young detective constable given responsibility for going through the piles of papers, the year-old diaries, the unmarked exercise books, was called Paul Simonsides. He was engaged, unofficially, to Sally Wedderburn, the fiery redhead of Hunter’s fantasies, and made up for her absence with long, if unromantic, phone calls. Sally had been excited about her place on the Bowles investigation. She saw it as her first real chance to shine. She had talked at length about the weird New Age connections, the hippy travellers who had come to rest on Ernie Bowles’s land. And Lily Jackman’s work in the Old Chapel. She had mentioned that specifically. Paul Simonsides was a big man but not the slob Hunter imagined. He was a keen hill walker and a lot of their courting had been done in the hills. Like Prue and Ramsay they had often stopped off afterwards for tea and cakes in the Old Chapel cafe.

Paul Simonsides almost threw the evidence away. It was a small square of card used as a bookmark in a standard text on adult literacy. He glanced at it, thinking it might be a dental appointment card. It was that sort of shape with that sort of print and so creased and dog-eared that it was obviously old. In handwritten script on the printed form an appointment had been made for Mrs. McDougal for 6 p.m. on July 20th of the previous year. But not for a scrape and polish. The appointment was made with Daniel Abbot, acupuncturist. And it was at the Alternative Therapy Centre in the Old Chapel, Mittingford.

That was too much of a coincidence even for

Ramsay’s superior. The investigation became a joint enquiry and because Ramsay had been there since the beginning of it, he took charge.

Hunter had ignored the murder of Val McDougal. He had always found it hard to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Instead he continued with his own routine policing. He didn’t usually enjoy researching into suspects’ backgrounds, but this time it was different. He really wanted to know. He told himself he was interested in finding out what sort of person ended up on the road, but it was more complicated than that. He had convinced himself that Sean Slater was a murderer and wanted to prove it. About Lily Jackman he was obsessively curious.

Slater had a record for at damage and a number of motoring of fences taking without the owner’s consent and driving without MOT or insurance. An outstanding fine remained. The criminal damage related to a farmer’s property in Somerset crops were flattened and windows in the farmhouse were broken during a confrontation following an impromptu festival on his land. Lily Jackman had also been charged with the criminal damage, then the charges had been dropped and she had been cautioned.

Hunter, who had a nose for these things, smelled funny business and phoned the arresting officer. Although the incident had happened more than a year before, the officer still remembered it. It obviously rankled.

“Strings were pulled,” he said.

“How?”

“The mother’s an MR You’ll have heard of her. She sails under her maiden name Bridget Dunn. She’s got a constituency in Bristol and she’s well known round here. A good supporter of the police even in difficult times. She never asked for favours but someone must have thought we owed her one. It was decided that the girl’s offence wasn’t serious enough to warrant the embarrassment which would come her mother’s way if the relationship came out in the press.”

“So it was all hushed up?”

“And they were shipped pretty smartly out of the district.”

“To end up on our doorstep,” Hunter said gloomily. “Well, they’ll find it harder to hush up murder.”

He wasn’t surprised about Lily’s background. Whatever you thought of it, he told himself class always showed. It made her more intriguing, even more distant.

Sean Slater’s background was quite ordinary. Hunter was able to dig out some biographical details but didn’t feel he could understand him and certainly couldn’t understand how he’d ended up with a lady like Lily Jackman. He’d been born in a new town in the West Midlands to respectable working-class parents. He’d done reasonably well at school, better at least than Hunter himself. He’d got a place to read English at one of the less glamorous universities and then, as Hunter put it, after one term he’d flipped. Perhaps the freedom was too much for him, perhaps he’d just cracked up under the strain of academic life. In any event he’d drifted away to join a group of hippies at Stonehenge and until he’d settled in the caravan at Laverock Farm he’d been on the road ever since.

His parents had been frantic and had contacted the police to report him missing. They only knew that he’d disappeared from his hall of residence with twenty pounds in cash and a book of Keats’s poetry. The police traced him through friends and talked to him, but they had no power to drag him back home. He was an adult and able to do as he pleased.

There was no explanation, either, of the midnight wanderings. Hunter tried to find a pattern to them. Was he working? Keeping the work secret and fiddling his benefit? Was there another woman somewhere? Hunter imagined a second caravan in the hills, with a lover, perhaps even children, a secret existence, but no evidence came to light. When he asked Richardson’s farm worker, who lived in a cottage by the Mittingford Road, the man said he had seen Sean about but he couldn’t remember exactly when.

“He always seems to be there,” he said, ‘flitting up the lane or across the hill. Like a bloody ghost come to haunt you.”

A similar blank was drawn on the blue Transit van in which Slater had claimed to have stayed on the night that Ernie Bowles died. Enquiries had been made all over the county but no one had seen it. Hardly surprising, Hunter thought, as it was a figment of Slater’s imagination.

On Tuesday morning he went to the health food shop and talked to the huge woman who owned it. He was told that Lily had been working at the Old Chapel for nearly a year. She was punctual and reliable, always willing to work overtime. Yet despite the positive response to all his questions, Hunter sensed a reserve.

“What’s she like then?” he asked. “How does she get on with the rest of the staff? Friendly is she?”

“No’ the shopkeeper said, ‘she could not really be described as friendly. She rather keeps herself to herself.”

“A bit stuck up?” Hunter prompted.

“Probably not,” the shopkeeper said uncertainly, wanting to be fair. “But that’s sometimes the impression that she gives.”

It was the impression she gave to Hunter. He sat in the cafe drinking coffee and watching her, knowing that he had other work to do but unable to leave.

Chapter Eleven

With the knowledge that Val had consulted Daniel Abbot, Ramsay went back to Charles McDougal. The son James was home too, and it was the boy who let him in. He called to his father then disappeared upstairs, leaving Ramsay only with the impression of intense grief-a white face and large dark-rimmed eyes. Charles McDougal wandered into the hall.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes, come through. I’m just in the kitchen.”

He was staring in a bemused way at the washing machine. A pile of his laundry was on the floor.

“I don’t know which button to press,” he said, ‘to get the door open.”

He looked up pathetically at Ramsay who pressed the release trigger so the door sprang open.

“Great,” Charles said. “Great.” And he pushed the shirts in, then looked at Ramsay again, expecting him perhaps to set the machine in operation. But Ramsay had moved away to the open kitchen door. Let the man work it out for himself.

It was early evening and the sun was still warm. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the smell of the first barbecue of the season. The garden at the back of the McDougals’ house was long and narrow and even to Ramsay’s untutored eye it was loved. The lawn was neatly edged and there were already splashes of colour in the borders.

“Val’s pride and joy,” Charles said. He seemed to-have lost interest in his washing and had joined Ramsay by the open door. There was something of a sneer in his voice, as if gardening was beneath him. “She spent all her spare time out here.”

They walked together on to the roughly paved patio. “It’ll be too much for me,” he said. “I suppose I’ll have to get someone in. If I decide to stay here.”

In his mind he was already moving on, making plans for the future.

“Can I offer you something?” he asked. “Tea? A glass of wine?”

Ramsay shook his head.

“Shall we go in then?” It was his university voice, brisk and authoritative. His domestic helplessness was set aside. “I expect you’ve more questions to ask.”

“I’m afraid so.”

He took Ramsay into a small study and sat behind the desk. It was not an attempt to intimidate but he was making a point. I’m an intelligent man, he was saying, with a position in society. I don’t suppose you deal with people like me very often.

“We think we may have come across a link between your wife and Ernest Bowles,” Ramsay said. “It’s not an obvious link and of course we’re keeping an open mind about its importance.”

He handled his dislike of Charles McDougal by being bland and polite, qualities which had irritated his wife Diana into divorce. He set the appointment card, wrapped in a clear plastic envelope, on the desk.

“We found this among your wife’s possessions at college,” he said. “Did you know that your wife had consulted an acupuncturist?”

“No,” Charles said. He picked up the card and studied it.

“Mr. Abbot practises in Mittingford,” Ramsay said. “He’s an acquaintance of Mr. Bowles’s tenants. It’s a tenuous link but of course we’ll have to follow it up.”

“Did she keep this appointment?” Charles demanded.

“We don’t know yet,” Ramsay replied smoothly.

“She can’t have done,” he said with certainty. “She would have said. We didn’t have secrets.”

Except postgraduate students called Heather, Ramsay thought. Charles must have been following the same train of thought because he blushed slightly.

“Had your wife been ill?” Ramsay asked. It had occurred to him that people often turned to alternative therapies when conventional medicine failed.

“Val, ill!” Charles gave a sharp laugh. “She was as strong as a horse. I was the one that suffered. Terrible migraines.”

“Perhaps then she consulted the acupuncturist on your behalf,” Ramsay said.

“She would have said,” Charles answered uncertainly. “Surely she would have told me.” He liked the idea though. He liked the idea that he was at the centre of her thoughts and she’d gone all the way to Mittingford to help him.

“Well,” Ramsay said. “We’ll talk to Mr. Abbot. He’ll remember her or at least have some record of the consultation.”

“Yes.” Charles half got up as though he expected the interview to be over, but when Ramsay did not move he fell back into his chair. “James might know,” he said. “He was very close to his mother.”

“The tenants of the murdered man at Laverock Farm had once been New Age travellers,” Ramsay said. “Their names are Lily Jackman and Sean Slater. Your wife never mentioned them?”

Charles shook his head. “James hung around with a group of hippies last summer,” he said. “Went to the festivals. For the music first but he got into the New Age thing for a while. Read some books. Went to lectures about discovering himself and saving the planet. It was a phase. I knew it would pass. It’s A Levels now and a place at Oxford if he’s lucky.”

“Did he bring any of his New Age friends home?”

“Only one. A girl a bit older than him. Pretty. I can’t remember her name.”

“And he never talked about the Abbots?”

“I don’t think so, but you must understand, Inspector, that I’m a busy man. Work’s important to me. I tried to make time for the boys but I have to admit I never always listened to them as much as I should. There was always something else demanding my attention.”

Yes, Ramsay thought. A student half your age.

There was a silence and again Charles seemed to think that the interview was over. Ramsay decided not to let him off the hook.

“Why would your wife keep a visit to an acupuncturist secret from you?” he asked. “Was she frightened of you?”

“No,” Charles said. “Of course not. But she’d know I’d not approve. She was rather a weak woman, Inspector. She’d do anything to avoid unpleasantness.”

“Why would you disapprove so strongly of alternative therapies?”

“Because they have no basis in reason. A placebo effect, perhaps, on those who need attention and sympathy

And who could blame your wife, Ramsay thought, for wanting those?

“Thank you,” Ramsay said. “You’ve been very helpful.” Bullshit, said Diana in his head. “I wonder if I might talk to your son?”

“James? I don’t see why not. His room’s at the top of the stairs.” A different father would have made more effort to protect his son, insisted perhaps on being in on the interview, but Charles just seemed pleased that his own ordeal was over.

The boy was lying on his bed listening to music, something folky and Celtic which meant nothing to Ramsay but which reminded him of the fiddlers in the Morpeth pub where he had taken Prue. That seemed a long time ago. Ramsay knocked at the door which was slightly ajar. The boy got up, switched off the music, pushed some books from a swivel chair so Ramsay could sit down. He did not seem surprised to see the policeman. Ramsay thought he had been expecting, even anticipating, the visit.