The Healers

Chapter Twenty-four

When they got back to the incident room they noticed a change of mood. They had left the team submerged in an air of morose quiet, which had little to do with hangovers, the result of the night before. Nothing was happening and nothing, the team felt, was likely to happen. The case had reached a stalemate. But now there was conversation, a lift of spirits. It was clear that they had been waiting impatiently for Ramsay’s return.

“Well?” he said. “What’s been going on?”

“We’ve traced those hippies, sir. The gang Slater claims to have spent the night with when Ernie Bowles was killed. A postie said he saw their blue Transit up a track just west of Berwick. A man, a woman and a kid. It must be them. We reckon they must have been hiding out up there. They might even have been in on the murder.”

They looked at him expectantly. They all wanted to go to check it out. They were like children, he thought, waiting to be chosen for the school football team. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see hands in the air, to hear cries of “Pick me, sir. I’m the best.”

“I’ll do it myself,” he said, not out of diplomacy but because he felt like a trip out. He could do with a fresh perspective on the case. “You come with me, Sal. You can play with the bairn while I talk to the adults.”

He saw her turn away and realized he’d offended her. Stereotyped again, she was thinking. Why couldn’t Hunter mind kids as well as her? He could hardly explain that he’d only said it to save Hunter’s pride. Really he wanted her along because she was so sharp. She could sniff out a liar better than anyone he knew.

She spent most of the trip in silence to express her disapproval. She was driving and Ramsay followed the route on an Ordnance survey map. They came to a scattered village with a school, a pub, a shop built into the garage of a stone cottage. A sandy track led on to a piece of overgrown woodland and the Transit had pulled off that. If they had not known it was there they would have missed it, though when they walked in through the trees there were traces of a fire, and a makeshift line with washing hanging on it. A few weeks earlier the ground would have been covered by bluebells. Now most were dying though the colour remained in patches, out of the sun.

A little girl with black curls squatted in the leaf mould and rolled out Play Dough on a tin tray. Sally crouched beside her.

“What are you making?” she asked.

“Cakes.” The girl was not curious about them. She did not look up.

“They look lovely. Can I have one?”

“Of course not!” The child was contemptuous. “They’re not cooked. You can’t cook Play Dough.”

“What do you want?” The question came with a slight stutter. They turned to see a tall man in his late twenties who had followed them on foot into the wood. He had a thin face and long straggly hair and reminded Sally of images of Jesus she had seen in stained glass windows. He carried a rucksack on his back. It must have been heavy because he swung it with relief on to the ground. Cans of beans and soup, loose vegetables rolled out.

“What do you want?” the man said again, not aggressively but with resignation.

“I’m Inspector Ramsay. Northumbria Police.”

“Inspector? They’ve never bothered with an inspector before. Hey, Lorna! We’ve got an inspector come to visit.” His voice was Welsh, nervous, rather bitter.

A woman climbed out of the back of the Transit. She wore a crushed velvet skirt, over scuffed suede desert boots, and a long sweater with holes at the elbows. Her hair was tied back with a scarf flecked with silver thread. Ramsay thought she looked more of a gypsy than Romanies he had met.

“You can’t make us move,” she said. “This is common land. We checked.”

“Common land law is very complicated,” Ramsay said. “But we’re not here to move you on.”

“What then? We’ve done nothing.” She was the stronger of the two. She stood with her legs apart, her hands on her hips, facing them out.

“Some questions,” Ramsay said. “That’s all.”

“We don’t claim dole.” She nodded towards the groceries in the rucksack. “We paid for all that ourselves. I make jewellery. Silver and enamel. I can show you… And Wes gets work whenever he can.”

“Though there’s not much call for a classics graduate in rural Northumberland,” Wes said. The stutter was more pronounced.

“You’re a classics graduate?” Sally looked at Ramsay to apologize for butting in, but she was intrigued.

He nodded.

“Then why…?”

“Do I live like this?” He finished the question for her, mocking.

She nodded.

“Because I’m happier.” He paused. “I had a sort of breakdown. Stress disagrees with me. You wouldn’t think there was a lot of stress teaching Virgil to ten-year-olds in a crummy prep school, would you? But it was too much for me.”

“So you dropped out?” Sally said.

“Or dropped in. Depending on your perspective. Concentrated at least on the important things.”

“It can’t have been easy, with a baby.”

“I don’t think babies are ever easy, wherever you are. We’d like to find somewhere to settle now. Briony’s getting older, you see. She should be at play group soon. We could afford to pay rent but no one wants us. Travellers don’t make ideal tenants apparently. Once we could have had a council house but they’ve been sold off. Except flats on city estates and that would make me mad again. So we’re here. Camping out on common land. Doing no harm to anyone. Hoping that eventually people will get to know us and trust us enough to rent us a place. Even a plot of land to put a caravan.

The phrases came in sharp bursts. Then he seemed to run out of steam and gave a lop-sided grin to show he realized the hope was misguided.

“How long have you been here?” Ramsay asked.

“All winter. About six months.” Sally caught Ramsay’s eye. So Hunter was right, they both thought. Slater was lying all the time.

“You can confirm then that you weren’t on a road near Mittingford the week before last.”

“Why?” It was Lorna again. Suspicions.

“Haven’t you realized that we’ve been looking for you?” Ramsay demanded. “Don’t you ever read the newspapers?”

Wes shook his head.

“Listen to the radio?”

“Yes,” Wes said. “But only Radio Three.”

“There was a murder. A farmer in Mittingford was killed. We think you may have been witnesses. But if you can prove you weren’t anywhere near the place…”

“We might have been there,” Wes said. “On the Saturday night. We’d been to a show in Durham. Lorna sells her jewellery wherever she can agricultural shows, craft fairs. We’d driven down early on Saturday morning. We had a good day and we were late packing up. By the time we got to Mittingford we were both shattered so we decided to pull into the gypsy transit site and spent the night there. What are we supposed to have seen anyway?”

“Did you meet anyone that night?”

“Yes,” Wes said slowly. “A guy called Sean Slater. Why?”

“What time did you meet him?”

They found it impossible to say. Perhaps it was just getting dark. He appeared there at the van, out of the blue. They hadn’t seen him for ages. They could have done with an early night, really, but Sean seemed keen to talk. They listened to some music, drank some wine. The inspector would understand. By that time it was so late that they suggested Sean should crash out with them. There wasn’t much space but they’d managed to fit another sleeping bag on the floor.

“What time did Mr. Slater go?” Ramsay asked.

They considered. “Probably at about seven.” Lorna said at last. “We were back here by nine. The bells were ringing and all the old biddies were on their way into church as we drove through the village.”

“Mr. Slater is an old friend of yours? You know him well?

“Oh yes,” Wes said. “Sean and I go back years.”

“And how did he seem that night?”

“Fine. Perhaps a bit jealous, you know. He was playing with Briony before she went to sleep. I had the impression that he would have liked a kid of his own. He was living with a woman he really seemed to care for, but she didn’t want to be tied down.”

“He didn’t take you to the caravan where he was living?”

“No. We dropped him at the end of the track in the morning, and he said he’d walk from there to the farm.”

“Did he seem upset or anxious?”

“Of course not. We’d had a good night catching up on each other’s news, talking… What is all this about?”

“I think,” Ramsay said, ‘you’ve just cleared your friend of murder.”

They returned to Mittingford more slowly. Ramsay was driving and he was always more cautious.

“Well?” he said. “Were they telling the truth?”

“Definitely,” she said. “They had no idea what we were doing there at first. The story wasn’t prepared.”

“So Slater’s in the clear,” Ramsay said. “At least for the Ernie Bowles murder.”

“Sir, can I ask you something?”

“What?” He was surprised and did not know what to expect.

She grinned. “Let me be the one to tell Gordon Hunter he’s been wrong about Slater all this time.”