The Healers

Chapter Thirty-three

It was almost dawn when they sat round in the incident room listening to Ramsay tell the story. Bleary-eyed and crumpled, they were too tired to interrupt and they were surprised that he found the energy to keep going. He wanted to explain it, he said, though they thought that motive wasn’t really important not now that the case was over. They should be celebrating.

“It was quite simple,” Ramsay said. “Obvious really once you realized that the story about Faye Cooper was just a distraction. Slater sent the anonymous letter to confuse us. And because he’s always resented the Abbots and the time Lily spent with them. He moved James McDougal’s body for the same reason. To make us think that the murder had something to do with Faye…” His voice dropped so they could hardly hear. “And I suppose it did have a lot to do with the girl in a way.”

He paused and took a breath, not to make a drama out of it because by now they all knew at least the basics of what had happened, but because he wanted the facts straight in his mind before he started.

“Lily Jackman killed Ernie Bowles on that Saturday night,” he said. “She was on her own in the caravan after she’d finished work. Slater, as we know, had wandered off and bumped into his hippy friends. He was stoned out of his brain and sleeping it off in their van. Perhaps that explains some of his feelings of guilt, something of what happened later.

“Lily wanted to make tea but there was no water in the caravan. She took the plastic container to the farmyard to fill it up from the outside tap just as Ernie Bowles arrived back at Laverock Farm from Otterbridge.

“We know what state of mind he was in. He’d arranged to meet a woman through a dating agency and Jane Symons wasn’t at all the sort of person he’d planned. He’d expected sex, and that obviously wasn’t going to happen. And then she’d had the nerve to leave him in the restaurant when they were still halfway through the meal. Ernie was disappointed, angry, frustrated. He wanted to lash out at someone. We know he’d had a fair lot to drink. We know, too, that he’d been sniffing round Lily Jackman for a long while. So when he saw her, in the light of the headlamps, probably not wearing a great deal, bending over the tap in the yard, he thought Christmas had come early.

“Perhaps he didn’t intend more than a bit of a grope. He put his arm around her, tried to give her a kiss, hoping to rescue something from the evening. She pushed him away, and that’s when he really did get mad. He’d been rejected once that evening and it wasn’t going to happen again. He pulled her struggling into the kitchen. It was quite clear to Lily that he intended to rape her. But he was drunk, unsteady and unfit. She was taller than him. Strong enough to lift the sacks of flour and grain in the health food shop. And she was desperate. She got her hands around his throat and she strangled him.”

He paused again and looked round at them. They idled across their desks, heads in their hands, but he had their full attention.

“You see why I say there are similarities with the Faye Cooper case. Daniel Abbot attempted an assault on Faye, but she didn’t fight back. She’d been told by Magda Pocock that she had to take responsibility for whatever happened to her, so she blamed herself. Lily Jackman did fight back and committed murder.”

“That wasn’t murder,” Sally Wedderburn said. “Not the way you’ve described it. That was self-defence.”

“Why didn’t she call us in then?” Rob Newell asked. “If she’d called us at the time, explained, the most serious likely charge would have been manslaughter.”

“She panicked,” Ramsay said. “You must remember that she’d had dealings with the police before and she hadn’t found them particularly sympathetic. She believed the New Age travellers’ mythology. She thought we were all corrupt and brutal, that we wouldn’t take her story seriously.

It’s not really surprising that she went back to the caravan and tried to pretend that it had never happened. Later she came to discover that one or two of us are human after all. She had decided to trust us and confess. That’s what provoked Slater’s little outburst tonight. By then he had a vested interest in keeping her quiet. Besides implicating him in murder it would have made her independent of him again: he wanted to feel that she needed him.”

He stopped and took a sip of almost cold coffee from his mug.

They wished he would get to the point, wondered what he was rambling about.

“It was a mistake to convince ourselves that the murders had all been committed by the same person.” He looked across the room like a teacher in a lecture theatre. “I’m sure you’ve all worked out why Slater killed the McDougals.”

There was no response. They were too tired to play his games.

“What did Lily do on the Sunday?” he demanded. “Come on.

“She had lunch with the Abbots,” Sally Wedderburn said. “And then she went to Magda Pocock’s Insight Group.”

“Where she worked in a pair with Val McDougal,” Ramsay said. “And that’s another parallel with the Faye Cooper investigation. Faye went to a Voice Dialogue session at Juniper Hall. She found it impossible to hide her anxieties and guilt from Magda, who was working as her therapist. Lily had spent all Saturday night alone in the caravan worrying about what she’d done. I don’t think she’d even confided in Sean Slater at that point. In the emotional atmosphere of Magda’s group I think she’d have found it impossible to keep it to herself. Perhaps using one of the other voices, through Voice Dialogue, she told Val exactly what had happened.”

“Why didn’t Mrs. McDougal tell the police then?” Hunter said. “Someone tells you they’ve committed murder you get in touch with the police. She might have been into all that New Age crap but she was a teacher, a respectable woman.”

“I don’t think she was sure it had actually happened,” Ramsay said. “Bowles’s body wasn’t discovered until Monday. Perhaps she thought it was an outrageous fantasy. Even if she did believe Lily, do you really think she would have turned her in? I think she would have seen that as a sort of betrayal. Everyone involved in Magda’s group would have assumed that what they said there was confidential. I can imagine her going back to Lily, urging her to give herself up, but in the end leaving the responsibility to her. Of course she never did contact Lily again because on Monday night, just as news of Bowles’s death was coming out, Slater killed her.”

Outside the sky was getting lighter and there was a burst of birdsong. Hunter sat on his usual perch on the windowsill and looked out over the playground. Ramsay continued.

“Lily confided in Slater on Sunday afternoon, as they walked home from the group. He went to meet her. She told him that she’d strangled Ernie Bowles and that Mrs. McDougal knew the whole story. In the morning they pretended to find the body in the farmhouse kitchen and we were called in. She says she didn’t know Slater had murdered Val. Not at first. Perhaps she guessed what he’d done but she didn’t want to admit it to herself. She preferred to imagine her murder as a convenient coincidence. It was only after James’s death that she realized she’d have to do something.”

“Slater killed Val McDougal just to protect the girl?” Newell said.

Ramsay nodded. “That’s what he’s admitted. Lily was babysitting for the Abbots. There was no one at Long Edge Farm because the Richardsons had a do at the agricultural college. Sean knew about that there were posters up all over the town. Anyway, he was prepared to take a chance. We know that he’s got a record for car theft and there would have been other vehicles left outside the holiday cottages. He drove the Fiesta into Otterbridge and parked it in front of the McDougals’ house. He wasn’t concerned about anyone seeing the car. He didn’t think it would be possible to trace it back to him. I’m not sure what he would have done if the family had been there. He would probably just have driven away.

But the house was empty so he waited. He went into the garden and found the nylon rope. When Val McDougal came back to her house he was ready for her… “He had parked the Fiesta at Long Edge Farm and had walked to the caravan before Lily was home from babysitting. I think if she’d ever asked him if he’d murdered Val, he’d have told her. But she didn’t ask. Later he typed the anonymous letter which sent us chasing after the story of Faye Cooper. He’d heard all about Faye, of course, from Lily. The letter was franked in Newcastle because he gave it to a feed rep to post. That was just a coincidence.”

“I don’t understand why he didn’t just leave it at that,” Newell said. “Why did he go after the boy? James didn’t know that Lily had killed Bowles.”

“But Slater couldn’t be sure of that, could he? There was always a risk that Val had passed on Lily’s story. They were close, after all. Everyone said that. More like friends than mother and son. And then he knew that Win Abbot planned to visit the boy. It would be an opportunity for James to pass on his suspicions, hints perhaps that Val had given. Sean convinced himself that Lily was in danger again. He was quite unbalanced of course, more infatuated every day, it was as if he wanted to prove to Lily just how devoted he was.

This time he didn’t bother to steal a car. He took the Land-Rover instead. He was quite reck less and drove down Mittingford High Street, giving our inebriated farmer a shock on the way. Do we know yet where he parked in Otterbridge?”

“Yes, sir.” It was Newell, full of himself. He’d carried out the boss’s instructions and got a result. What does he want? Hunter thought. A pat on the head? “An old chap who works part-time as a gardener saw the Land-Rover. It was in a little cul-de-sac just round the corner from the McDougalsV

“Sean followed James for most of the way by foot,” Ramsay said. “Until he realized where he was heading and he came back for the Land-Rover. When he got to the cemetery, it was empty except for James, sitting on a bench, dozing. It couldn’t have been easier for him…”

Ramsay’s voice trailed off. For the first time that evening he too was feeling tired. They looked at him, wondering if he had finished, hoping they could go to their beds, but he continued:

“When I went to see him later that night he was working in the garden at Laverock Farm. He made a joke about not having made much progress for a whole day’s work. I should have realized then that he hadn’t spent all day in the garden. Lily made the connection. I think that’s when she found she couldn’t delude herself any longer.

“By then, though, there wasn’t only herself to consider. She couldn’t admit to having strangled

Ernie Bowles without telling us about the others. She wanted the killing to stop but she thought she owed Sean more than that. Before we arrived at Laverock Farm tonight she told Slater she intended giving herself up. She was going to come into the station this morning and explain everything to Hunter here. For some reason she trusted him. She gave Slater the night to run away. Instead he found Ernie Bowles’s gun and started talking suicide pacts. Perhaps that’s what he really wanted all along.”

The team ambled out of the station and up the road to the pub for a celebratory breakfast and plenty of coffee. It was almost seven but the sun was bright. It would be another warm day. Ramsay and Hunter were left on their own in the incident room.

“Do you want to see her?” Ramsay asked. “Before she goes off to Otterbridge?”

Hunter did not answer directly. “What will they charge her with?” he said. “Murder or manslaughter?”

Ramsay shrugged. “That’s up to the CPS.” Hunter remembered the straight-backed woman with the dark eyes he’d seen in Cissie Bowles’s bedroom.

“Na!” he said. “She won’t want to talk to me.” Like Sean, he thought, he wasn’t really into independent women.