The Healers

Chapter Sixteen

Charles McDougal made no attempt to cook a family lunch that Sunday, though Richard, the older son, was home from university for the weekend. Instead he mumbled something about having work to do and disappeared to spend the day with Heather. Perhaps he had intended to cook one of his elaborate meals for her. Heather had become altogether kinder and more solicitous since Val’s death, though whether this was because she was genuinely sympathetic, or because there was the possibility now that the relationship might become permanent and respectable, it was hard to tell.

The boys, Richard and James, were left to their own devices in the house where their mother had been killed. They had never been close and found now that they had little to say to each other. Richard, secretly, had thought for a long time that James was weird. All that New Age crap was a joke. Richard wanted to save the planet, too, but didn’t believe it could be done with crystals in pyramids and astrological charts. He’d thought James had grown out of it. When he’d asked his mother, that’s what she’d said. But his mother had been part of the problem and it seemed to Richard that they’d egged each other on, daring each other to accept greater follies, more bizarre ways of looking at the world. In the end he’d dismissed them both as potty and couldn’t blame his father for looking for other women.

When Charles disappeared to Newcastle to be comforted by Heather, Richard suggested that the two of them should go into Otterbridge, spend the day together. There were a couple of pubs he knew where you could drink all afternoon. He thought after a couple of pints he might get through to James. He felt a sort of responsibility for him. He blamed that crazy girlfriend James had taken up with last summer. Before that he’d been almost normal. A bit shy, a bit intense, but not cracked. If he could get James to talk about her, Richard thought in a muddled, good-natured way, it might help him come to terms with his mother’s death. He could see that Val’s murder had affected James in a strange way. There seemed to be little grief, but an empty detachment. Richard, who had howled like a baby when he’d first heard, couldn’t understand it.

“Come for a drink,” he said. “The Shakespeare does food. And there’s a good juke box.”

“Go by yourself,” James said, quite abruptly. “You’ll want to see your friends and they won’t like me hanging around.”

So Richard had gone, quite relieved in the end not to have to spend any more time with James. He’d never been one for navel gazing. It embarrassed him. He went into town where he met some friends he’d played rugby with when he was at school. They’d heard about his mother and knew just what he needed. When he’d drunk so much that he was insensible they took him home in a taxi, let themselves into the house with his key and put him carefully to bed.

There was nobody in the house when Richard came home. James left almost immediately after his brother, only making sure that the street was clear before he went out. He walked through the suburban streets, with their smells of roasting beef and over-cooked vegetables, into the town centre. Then he took the main road out of the town which led eventually to the coast. He stopped only once, at a petrol filling station which had a shop attached and which sold cut flowers. He took three large bunches from the tin bucket and paid with a ten pound note. The ten pounds he had stolen from his father’s wallet early that morning. His father would have given him the money if he had asked for it but stealing it was far more satisfying.

The cemetery was huge, bounded by a grey stone wall which stretched for almost a mile along the road. The entrance was marked by Victorian Gothic towers, and a flower seller stood there, a hard-faced, middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair tied up on the top of her head like the plume on a circus pony. James never bought his flowers from her, not only because he found her unsympathetic but because there was something shabby and unprepared in getting them at the last moment. There must be hundreds of regular visitors to the cemetery but he had the sense that she recognized him and he felt her dislike as he walked past her with the flowers he had already purchased in his arms.

His mother would not be buried here. Charles had decided already that she would be cremated. The funeral had been arranged for the following week. By that time the police would be prepared to release the body. It would be a dignified affair but there would be quite a show. The Vice-Chancellor of the university had agreed to read the address.

James always took the same path to the grave, though there were many that he could have chosen. He avoided the main track which cut the cemetery in half and which was busy with people who seemed to have no real reverence for the place families with children who dropped sweet papers and played kiss chase around the graves nearest to the track. Once, James had even seen a jogger die. A woman in black shiny cycle shorts and a sleeveless vest.

He took the path that followed the wall because he liked the smell of the ivy which grew there. That brought him to the grave he had come to visit. He had never met any other mourner there. That would have been unbearable. He needed to feel that he alone remembered her, though he knew that could not really be true and somewhere her parents would be grieving too.

The grave was simple, the headstone obviously newer than most of the others. The flowers he had left on his last visit were dead and shrivelled. He didn’t mind that. It meant that no one else had been there. He squatted cross-legged beside the grave, carefully took away the old flowers and replaced them with new ones. Then he began to talk to her.

He was sorry, he said, that it had taken so long to Sort things out. But he hadn’t forgotten her. He would pay them back in the end.

Faye Dawn Cooper born 1974, died 1993did not answer.

Lily was working. She saw Hunter loitering outside the health food shop door as inconspicuous, she said to herself, as a penguin in a desert. She was used to men staring at her and turned away, but he came in and hovered at her shoulder as she tipped a sack of potatoes on to the shelf.

“Don’t you usually go to the Abbots for your dinner on a Sunday?” he said.

“Not today,” she replied. “We haven’t been invited. They want to be on their own.”

“I suppose you do get a dinner break?” he said.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “I’m off now.”

“Come on then. I was wanting a chat. I’ll buy you a meal.”

He took her arm and led her through to the Coffee Shop. Short of screaming, there was nothing she could do about it.

“I didn’t think this was your sort of place,” she said.

“Oh, I’m not fussy. I’ll eat anything, me.”

“Well?” she demanded. “What do you want?” Then she looked around to see if any of her friends were there. It wouldn’t do her reputation any good to be seen socializing with a pig.

“To know what went on between you and Val McDougal last Sunday.”

“What do you mean?”

“This Voice Dialogue business. What did she talk about?”

Lily shrugged.

“The usual. That bastard husband of hers.”

“The idea was that she spoke in different voices?”

“You know about that? I suppose Magda explained. I tried to speak to the critic in her, the part of her that believed her husband when he put her down. It was amazing. It hardly sounded like Val at all.”

“Did it do any good?”

“Well, at least it made her see what was going on. Later she talked about leaving Charles. She was starting to make real plans. She said she’d stay until James went away to college in September. She was always worried about James.”

“Why?”

She paused. “He had a girlfriend. He was crazy about her. She was his first love, you know. She dumped him for someone else and then she died, really suddenly in an accident. He couldn’t handle it.”

“Did she talk about that at the Sunday group?”

“Yeah,” Lily said, ‘she did. She wished she could get James to come along.”

“And what did you talk about?”

“My bloody father and mother and how they screwed me up.” The answer was flip and automatic.

“Not Sean?”

“No,” she said. “Why would I want to talk about him?”

“If you were frightened of him.”

“Don’t be daft.” She gave a short, bitter laugh.

“Where was he on Saturday night?”

“Smoking dope with a couple of drop-outs in a Ford Transit. Listening to old records. Remembering old times.”

“You believe him?” Hunter was scathing.

“Yeah,” she said. “Actually I do.”

“We haven’t traced the van yet.”

“No?” she said. “Well perhaps you haven’t been trying very hard.” There was a brief angry silence.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“Well, I’m sorry, but it wouldn’t be the first time a traveller was fitted up for something he didn’t do.”

“What will happen to the two of you when the

Abbots and Pocock take over Laverock Farm?” he asked conversationally.

She looked at him, suspecting a trap. “Sod it,” she said. “You’ll find out anyway. There’ll be a place for us there. And work. And it’ll be a bloody sight more comfortable than the caravan.”

“So you’re pleased Ernie Bowles is dead?”

She paused. “OK,” she said, ‘so I’m pleased that he’s dead. That doesn’t mean that I killed him.”

They ate for a while. The food wasn’t bad, Hunter thought. For vegetarian muck.

“How do you get on with them?” he asked. “The Abbots and Pocock.”

“Magda’s great,” she said enthusiastically. “Really special, you know. There are lots of people in the business of self-enlightenment and personal growth. Most of them are crap. Magda knows what she’s doing.”

“And the Abbots?”

“Win’s OK. A bit heavy sometimes, a bit intense. And too wrapped up with her kids. But she’s kind. She gives us meals. If it wasn’t for Daniel I think she’d have had us to stay…”

“You don’t get on with Mr. Abbot?”

“I don’t not get on with him. We’re just not very close.”

“What about Mrs. Pocock, Magda? Does she get on with him?”

Lily shrugged. “Not ‘specially. But it’s not an easy relationship, is it, being a mother-in-law?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been one.”

She grinned despite herself.

“There must be more to it than that,” he went on. “If she’s such a special person she wouldn’t have taken against him for no reason.”

“Oh,” Lily said, “I think she had a reason.”

“What reason? Was Daniel playing away?”

Lily nodded.

“And his wife never found out that he was seeing other women?”

“I think she knew. She just didn’t want to admit it’

“Can you give me the names of some of these women?”

But Lily remembered her conversation with Magda the evening before and shook her head. Hunter didn’t push it. He could make his own enquiries and he wanted Lily on his side.

“Do you know Peter Richardson?” he asked.

“I’ve seen him about,” she answered, cautiously.

“I was chatting to him last night,” Hunter said. “He seemed to think that any offer he made on the Laverock land would be accepted. But Mrs. Pocock didn’t know anything about it.”

She looked awkward.

“That might be Sean, she said. “Jumping the gun a bit. I know he was chatting to Mr. Richardson when he came down to see to the animals.”

“Nothing to do with him though, is it?”

“We’d want to be involved,” she said. “I told you, we’ve been promised a place if it goes ahead.”

“What’s the deal then?” Hunter asked. “Richardson slips your laddie a few quid if he can persuade the Abbots to sell him the land without going to auction?”

“No,” she said. “Sean wouldn’t be involved in something like that.” But her voice was uncertain.

If Sean and Richardson were working together now, Hunter thought, perhaps they were working together before. Perhaps they were both behind the murder of Ernie Bowles. It was the closest he’d come to a motive for Sean and he felt quite cheerful.

“Have a pudding,” he said. “Some of that carrot cake.”

She looked at her watch. “No, I’d better go. I only get half an hour for lunch. Thanks anyway.”

“No problem,” he said.

He watched her walk back across the stone flags, her hips swaying, her thin jacket slung over one shoulder like a matador’s cape.