Ann Cleeves - The Healers

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.

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 Bowies.

“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 needed 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 cafe.