The Healers

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.

“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?”

“Not personally. But I’d heard of him, through Faye. And she dragged us along to one of his lectures.”

“Why did you suggest that your mother go to see Mr. Abbot?”

“Because I hoped he would help her. She’d been really uptight for months. Dad was always putting her down, belittling her, you know, even in front of other people. He said she only taught dummies. Anyone could do that. Then he started seeing this woman at college… That only seemed to make him worse. More arrogant, more full of himself, you know.” He paused, drank the last of his coffee. “Mum started getting panic attacks. Rushing in her ears, palpitations. She thought she was dying. She went to her GP who wanted to put her on tranquillizers. I said “No way” and suggested she went to the Old Chapel.”

“When was this?”

“Last summer. When I came back from Twyford she was really bad. She’d just broken up from college and she was always worse in the holidays.”

“We found an appointment card among her things for July 20th. Would that have been her first visit to Mr. Abbot?”

“Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure if she actually saw him again but she got involved with other activities at the Old Chapel. That’s where she was on Sunday afternoon.”

“Was she?” It was more than Ramsay had hoped for. “Thank you, that’s very helpful.” He paused. “We know that your mother went away for a weekend last autumn, but we can’t trace where she was staying. Might she have been with friends from the Old Chapel?”

James took a long time to answer. He turned away and his eyes filled with tears.

“She was at a weekend retreat at a place called Juniper Hall in Cumbria. It was organized by the people from the Old Chapel…” He paused and Ramsay thought he was going on to say more, but he fell silent, absorbed it seemed by memories of his own.

Just one last question,” Ramsay asked gently. “Do the names Lily Jackman and Sean Slater mean anything to you?”

James shook his head and Ramsay was not quite sure whether the gesture meant an answer ‘no’ or simply that he could not face any more questions.

On the way back to Mittingford Ramsay called in at Prue Bennett’s house. She lived in Otterbridge, not far from the McDougals. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d known Val. He thought that they would have got on. But when he pulled up outside there were no lights at the windows and though he rang the front doorbell over and over again there was no reply.