The Healers Read online

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ he’d say. ‘ You need spoiling.’

  Now he was away on a week’s geography field trip, roughing it in a youth hostel in Keswick. Oh well, she thought, tonight I’ll have to spoil myself.

  The house was not large but it was detached and set back from the road. When they had bought it they had scarcely been able to afford the mortgage but Charles had been determined to have it. It suited his need for privacy and reflected his self-importance. There was a small car she did not recognize parked in the road outside the house. Most of James’s friends had cars and she wondered if someone had come to visit him, not realizing he was away, but the driver’s seat was empty and she thought no more about it. As she pulled her car into the gravel drive the security light came on, illuminating the high holly hedge that Charles had encouraged to separate the house from the street. Although it had been Charles’s choice she had come to like the house too. Was that why she still put up with him, she thought, because she couldn’t face moving?

  The front door had two locks, a Yale and a mortice, and she juggled with keys and an armful of books to get it open. Inside, she felt herself relax and made up her mind to put off any decision until later. She would not upset her prized husband-free evening with gloomy thoughts. She always enjoyed Monday evenings: the appreciation of the women from Fullertons, the sense that after all she was achieving something worthwhile at work, made her feel like celebrating and she didn’t see why she should miss out on that tonight.

  She dumped the exercise books on the kitchen table and wandered through to the living room to switch on the television. She must be later than usual because the serial had already started. As she drew the long curtains across the patio doors she thought there was a movement in the back garden. The cat, she thought. The light always attracted him. She expected any minute to hear the cat flap in the utility room door and to feel him rubbing against her legs for food.

  She left the living-room door open so she could watch the television from the kitchen. Did youth hostels have televisions these days? she wondered. James had always liked the programme too. It occurred to her that soon he would be away to university and she realized for the first time how much she would miss him. That would be the time to break away from Charles, she thought. She’d discuss the idea with Magda. Magda would know what to do.

  She did nothing elaborate for supper. Toasted cheese covered with thin strips of smoked ham, and mayonnaise to go with it. She put the plate on a tray and carried it through to the living room, then returned to the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. The thriller was twenty minutes in and the adverts had started. There was still no sign of the cat. She opened the back door and called to him but the signature tune of the programme attracted her back. She ate the meal and drank half a bottle of wine before the ten o’clock news. The worry of the day now seemed slightly ridiculous. It was all a fuss about nothing.

  She might even have started to doze because the front doorbell made her jump, although when she looked at the clock it had still only just gone ten.

  Bloody Charles, she thought. That’s all I need. She imagined him rejected for some reason by Heather. Frustrated. Demanding. She knew that Charles should have a key but it was quite in character, if the key wasn’t immediately at hand, to inconvenience her rather than look for it. The doorbell rang again, more insistently.

  Sod you, Charles, she thought, still drowsy, stumbling from her chair.

  She opened the door, not bothering to attach the chain which Charles had insisted on having fitted. Behind her, in the background, came the noise of the television news. A man’s voice talked of the renewal of the Bosnian Peace Talks. But Val did not hear what he said. The door was pushed open from the outside against her. The babbling television voice hid the sound of her struggles and the muffled screams as the life was squeezed from her.

  Chapter Ten

  There was nothing at first to connect Val McDougal with Ernie Bowles. They had both been strangled, but the methods used had been altogether different. Bowles had been killed manually. The marks of the fingers on his neck had been quite obvious. Val had been strangled by a piece of thin nylon rope, twisted into a noose. It had been left behind at the scene of the crime but it would be of little assistance in tracing the murderer. It had been cut from a ball which had been left outside on the McDougal’s patio – Val had been tying climbing roses on to a trellis there. All this indicated was that the murderer had not come prepared.

  Then what could the victims have in common? They were perhaps of a similar age but there was no indication that they had ever met. Their backgrounds and education would suggest that they led quite different lives. They had lived fifty miles apart and Ernie seldom strayed beyond Mittingford. James McDougal, who might have thrown some light on this, was in a small group on a two-day survival trek through the fells and had not even been informed of his mother’s death.

  Charles McDougal had been of so little help that at first he was suspected of killing his wife. When he was questioned he lied about where he had been all evening. At a university meeting, he told the duty detective who came out early on Tuesday morning, all bleary-eyed from being woken from sleep. A university meeting which had dragged on. Then, when he realized that the detective did not believe him, that he was actually in danger of being arrested, he changed his story and suddenly became very helpful. He said he was sorry to have been so foolish. Shock did strange things to people. The notion that he might have appeared foolish seemed to distress him more than the death of his wife and he made a great effort then to be calm and efficient. He gave the detective Heather’s name and address. She was woken just as it was getting light and confirmed his story. She said that Charles had been with her all evening. Until one in the morning, when he had gone home to find the front door still ajar and his wife’s body slumped at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I thought she’d fallen,’ he said to the policeman who was taking the statement. ‘I thought it was a terrible accident.’

  Later that day Ramsay came to ask him about possible connections with Ernie Bowles.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charles said. ‘I’ve never heard the name before. I suppose he could have been one of her mature students.’

  That seemed unlikely from the beginning and when they checked they found out that Ernie had left school at fourteen and had had no education of any sort since.

  ‘Did your wife have any reason to go to Mittingford?’ Ramsay asked.

  Charles shook his head. ‘ We used to go there when the boys were young. For family picnics, you know. To walk along the river. But we haven’t been there recently. Probably not for years.’

  ‘Did anything unusual happen over the weekend?’ Ramsay asked.

  ‘Not really. She went out on Saturday night. Usually we spent that together.’

  ‘Where did she go?’ It occurred to Ramsay that Val could have been a witness to the Bowles murder. Perhaps that was the connection.

  ‘I’m not sure. Out for a meal with a friend, she said.’

  ‘And the name of the friend?’

  Charles shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. Someone she met when she was on holiday last year.’

  ‘What did she do on Sunday?’

  ‘I don’t know. I went into the university to do some work. I think she went for a walk. She was here when I got back, helping James get ready to go away.’

  ‘And she didn’t seem at all upset or distressed?’

  ‘Of course not. She wasn’t that sort at all.’ But Ramsay thought he would have been so wrapped up in his own affairs that he would not have noticed.

  ‘Perhaps you could give us the names of some of her friends,’ Ramsay said. ‘People who knew her well. People she might have confided in.’

  ‘She didn’t have many friends. Not of, her own. Wives of my colleagues, of course, but no one she was close to. Occasionally people phoned to speak to her. Last autumn she went away for a weekend break. Somewhere in Cumbria. She’d had a heavy term and ne
eded time to recharge her batteries. That’s what she said, though her work never seemed that demanding to me. I think she got to know some people then.’

  ‘And they were the people who phoned?’

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  When Ramsay pressed him for details of the weekend trip he could not help. His affair with Heather had been at the height of its passion then and he had been grateful just to have two days to himself.

  ‘It was a really busy time,’ he told Ramsay. ‘The start of the academic year. You know. I expect she told me where she was staying but really I don’t remember. No. I never had the phone number of the hotel. We didn’t live in each other’s pockets. Someone at the college might know.’

  But her friends from college knew nothing about her holiday either. They remembered her going away, thought it would do her some good. She was too conscientious. Put her heart and soul into her work. She’d swapped one of her classes so she could have Friday afternoon free. But they couldn’t remember where she’d been going or even if she’d said.

  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 café.

  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 criminal damage and a number of motoring offences – 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 MP. 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, Hun
ter 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 café 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.’