Ann Cleeves: The Healers

The fifth book in the Inspector Ramsay series, 1995

On Saturday they went for a ride into the country. Like an old married couple, although marriage had never been discussed, never even been thought of as far as anyone knew. They stopped for lunch at a pub in Morpeth. There were four sorts of real ale and in the back room drinkers were playing traditional folk music on fiddles and pipes. The musicians had between them a large number of children all brightly clothed in what seemed to be fancy dress long velvet skirts and silk waistcoats. The children danced between the tables and ate crisps by the handful but caused no real bother. Ramsay was driving and only took two halves of Gladiator but Prue tried all the varieties of beer and after the meal felt quite tipsy. Since being a student she’d always liked beer but it went straight to her head.

“Where now?” Ramsay asked as they stepped out into the street. It was a warm blustery day in early May. A group of old men walked jauntily down the drive from St. George’s, the big psychiatric hospital, now on the verge of closure. A sudden gust of wind blew a shower of blossom from one of the trees along the drive and covered them in small pink flakes. The men stood still for a moment and then began to laugh, turning slowly round and round so the blossom fell to the ground.

“Where now?” Ramsay said again, not impatiently. He regarded Prue’s drunkenness indulgently. Diana, his ex-wife, had always become aggressive after drinking but Prue got giggly. And amorous.

“Home?” he suggested hopefully. “Yours or mine?”

“Neither,” she said firmly. They seldom got out together and she was going to make the most of it. “A walk up Billy’s Crag and then back to Mittingford for tea and cakes. And I can stock up from the health food shop while I’m there.”

Mittingford was in the middle of nowhere, close to the Scottish border, strangely out of place. It was a pretty little town maintaining a prim Victorian gentility despite the bleakness of the moors which surrounded it. An oasis, almost of civilization. The houses were turned in to a cobbled square and a wide main street with a culverted stream running along one side of it. Even from the middle of the town you could hear the sheep crying on the hills. Despite the flowers which had been planted in gardens, tubs and window boxes Mittingford regularly won best small town in the Northumberland in Bloom competition the grey stone houses and the surrounding high crags gave the impression that it was always in shadow.

The health food shop was in what had once been a large chapel facing grandly on to the square with steps and pillars. Ten years previously the Methodists had built a modern church, easier to heat, and a collection of small business people had taken over the chapel and run it as a co-operative. Hippies, the locals called them, but they weren’t all sixties drop-outs with long hair and sandals. Some were very canny businessmen and the local shopkeepers saw the Old Chapel as dangerous competition.

Ramsay had never been there before but Prue was an old hand. Inside the space had been separated into small shops and craft workshops, which ran along the walls. The centre was a cafe with a stone floor and stripped pine tables and chairs. There they ate tea and cakes surrounded by a group of old ladies who were on a coach tour and had been allowed a twenty-minute refreshment stop. The morning, he learned as he automatically eavesdropped, had been spent in Edinburgh and there would be just time to visit the Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall before dinner in Hexham. Tomorrow would be York. The women were indefatigable, fit and lithe almost to the point of scrawniness. One of them looked at her watch, there was a sound of chairs scraping against the stone floor and they all marched back to their bus.

The health food shop was at the end of the chapel where the altar must have stood. If there had been an altar. Did Mediodists have them?

Ramsay wondered now and found that he could not remember. As a child he had been sent to Sunday school by his devout mother but that had been in a cold and draughty hall. He had a crush on his teacher, Miss Pearson, and there had been pictures to colour. Presumably at some point they must have been taken into the chapel to participate in the service. He tried to picture a likely occasion Christmas perhaps or Harvest Festival but the memory eluded him and he realized, suddenly, that Prue was speaking.

“Sorry?” he said. “I was miles away. What did you say?”

“They’ve converted the first floor, beyond the gallery, into an Alternative Therapy Centre. You know-acupuncture, homoeopathy, re birthing

What on earth, he wondered, was re birthing But he did not ask. Prue would have told him in far too much detail.

“Maddy’s been there,” she said. “For her hay fever. She swears by it. She even went away with them on a sort of weekend retreat.” Maddy was her friend, a solicitor, given, Ramsay thought, to weird fads and enthusiasms which seldom lasted. Still he said nothing. He had learned, during his life with Diana, the value of strategic silence.

Prue pushed open the door into the health food shop. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through a stained glass window on to sacks of grains and pulses. There was a display of organic vegetables misshapen carrots and potatoes still covered in soil and shelves of spices. Prue shopped enthusiastically, asking occasionally for things he had never heard of, topping off her order with whole meal flour, free range duck eggs and yoghurt made from goat’s milk.

“What about you?” she asked. “Isn’t there anything you need?” He shook his head. He did his shopping at Sainsbury’s and though he ate well enough, convenience mattered more than the way the food had been grown. He looked around the shop wondering why he found this temple to culinary correctness so depressing. Perhaps it was because the two members of staff seemed so unhealthy. There was an obese woman whose weight seemed pulled by gravity to the lower half of her body: her head was a normal size but her buttocks and legs were enormous. She presided over the bread and carrot cake. And there was a weedily malnourished young man with staring eyes and a shaved head.

Then another assistant appeared. She must have been reaching to fetch something from behind her counter. She walked out into the central space and stood, caught for a moment in the multicoloured light, almost posing. As if to prove to Ramsay the benefits of healthy eating. She had dark hair, pulled back into a smooth plait, and olive skin. She was tall and strong and though he knew he was staring, he could not take his eyes off her. As bad as Hunter, he thought. Hunter, his assistant, insensitive, prejudiced and lucky not to have a disciplinary charge for sexual harassment on his record.

“Isn’t she a beauty?” Prue whispered and he gave a little cough, as if he had hardly noticed.

Then he watched as she stretched up to reach ajar of coriander seeds from a high shelf. She was wearing a loose T-shirt with wide sleeves and as she stretched the sleeve fell back to show a bare, brown shoulder. Still he could not turn away. She walked back to her counter and he saw that she was wearing sandals with leather thongs across her toes and her feet were very long. She weighed a small amount of the spice on old-fashioned scales, tipped it into a brown paper bag and handed it to a customer without a smile or a word.

Ramsay turned his back on her, deliberately. He opened his arms to take the bags and sacks piled on the counter beside Prue. That night he went home with Prue. He allowed her to cook a vegetarian meal for him, and even admitted that he had enjoyed it.