Ann Cleeves - The Healers

“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.

“Do you want coffee?” he asked. “Or did Dad offer you some downstairs?”

“Coffee would be splendid.”

“Only Nescaff,” James said, spooning granules into a mug. The kettle, plugged into a point by the desk, was already full.

When I was your age, Ramsay thought, I didn’t know there was any other sort.

“I suppose you want to talk about Mum, “James said.

“If it wouldn’t be too upsetting.”

“No,” James said. “I want to talk about her. No one else seems to. Friends and everyone have been sympathetic but they don’t like to mention her name. That’s not fair, is it? It’s as if she never existed.” His control was slipping and he turned away.

“And your father?”

“Oh,” James said dismissively, “Dad and I never talk about anything important.”

The kettle boiled and he made the coffee. Ramsay looked around the room. It seemed a typical teenage pit. A rucksack, with clothes spilling out from the top, stood in one corner. The walls were painted black and covered with posters. “Stop the Bloody Whaling’ said one. Another, showing a bulldozer flattening a clump of primroses, read, “I was at Twyford Down.”

“Twyford Down?” Ramsay asked.

“It’s in Hampshire. The Government want to build a motorway across it.”

“And were you there?”

“For a week at the beginning of the summer. There was a sort of protest camp. I went with my girlfriend.”

“What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

James answered automatically, too stunned apparently to wonder what the questions were about.

“Faye. But she’s not my girlfriend any more. She’s not anyone’s girlfriend.”

Ramsay did not follow that up. He had wondered, when Charles said James had brought an older girl to the house if it might have been Lily, but now he lost interest.

“We think there might be a link between your mother’s death and a farmer called Ernest Bowles who was killed near Mittingford last Saturday,” Ramsay said carefully. “Do you know if Mr. Bowles was a friend of your mother’s?”

“She never mentioned him.”

“And she would have done, wouldn’t she?” Ramsay said. “If she were seeing another man she would have told you. You were very close.”

“Yes. We were very close. And there was no one else. She still felt some kind of misguided loyalty to my father.”

“But she did go to Mittingford, didn’t she? She consulted an acupuncturist, Daniel Abbot at the Old Chapel. You must have known about that.”

“Of course. I suggested that she went there.”

“You know Mr. Abbot?”