The Healers

Chapter Four

News of the murder came to Stephen Ramsay early on Monday morning. He was in a meeting, one of the endless meetings the Chief Superintendent regularly called. The Superintendent was a new appointee. He had been on management courses, spent a secondment in industry. Ramsay supposed the new Home Office plans for accountability and professional appraisal would attract others like him, grey men whose idea of effective management was more memos, more meetings. The talk was of limited resourcing, cuts. Ramsay found it hard to concentrate. The summons from Hunter came as a relief.

They stood together in the corridor outside the conference room.

“Definitely murder,” Hunter said. He tried unsuccessfully to contain his relish.

“Where?”

“A place called Laverock Farm. In the wilds beyond Mittingford.”

“Not a bad day for a trip into the countryside,” Ramsay said and Hunter thought his boss was almost human these days. Almost. It was getting his end away after all this time. Ramsay never talked about Prue Bennett at work but everyone knew what was going on. You couldn’t hide an affair like that in a place as small as Otterbridge.

“Who’s the victim?” Ramsay asked.

“An old bloke. A farmer called Bowles. Strangled.”

“I was only up that way at the weekend,” Ramsay said.

With your fancy woman, Hunter thought, but did not say. He was changing too. Learning some tact with the years. Ramsay heard the silence and was grateful. He and Hunter were rubbing along better now than at any time since they had started working together.

It’s time he settled down, Ramsay thought. He should find himself a good woman. Recognizing the evangelical zeal of the newly converted, he smiled to himself.

Look at him! Hunter thought with a trace of envy. Like the cat that’s got the bloody cream.

The isolation of Laverock Farm was a complication. There was a worry that the scene-of-crime officers, the photographer, the pathologist, might not find it. Ramsay ordered the fax of Ordnance Survey maps. He talked to an inspector in charge of the northern division about using the old police station in Mittingford as a base. When he and Hunter left Otterbridge almost an hour later he saw, with satisfaction, that the budget meeting was still in progress.

They found Ernie Bowles in the farmhouse kitchen, lying on the floor.

“Not a pretty sight,” Hunter said. “But then he wouldn’t have been that when he was alive.” He saw a squat plump man in his late fifties. A paunch bulged over the belt of his trousers. He was wearing a suit of sorts, shiny at the elbows with a stain down one lapel. Hunter was cared for by a doting mother and was prepared to spend half a week’s wage on a designer shirt.

“He must have lived on his own,” he said. “No woman would have let him out looking like that.”

Hunter had definite views on the role of women.

Ramsay said nothing. Hunter’s prejudices dismayed him but he did not want to break the fragile peace between them. He was surprised by the shabby discomfort of the kitchen. In his experience farmers, despite their pleas of poverty, still had a reasonable standard of living. They drove big cars, perhaps not replaced every August now but seldom more than a couple of years old. His ex-wife Diana knew girls who had married into farming families and he had been taken occasionally to visit. They had drunk good red wine in farmhouse kitchens, equipped with an expensive new Aga and a dishwasher and Liberty print curtains. There had been many good years, after all, before the recession. Then it occurred to him that any girl who had been a friend of Diana’s probably had a private income. Perhaps this was more typical. No money had been spent on this place for a quarter of a century. The furniture was not new but there was nothing of quality. No family heirlooms but postwar utility and sixties mass production. The person who had furnished this house had been mean.

They had arrived at the farm before the hordes who always attended a suspicious death. The only other person present was the area’s community policeman, a comfortable middle-aged man, who had been despatched before all the details of Ernie Bowles’s death were known.

“He used to live here with his mam,” the policeman said. “Don’t want to speak ill of the dead, like, but she was a right old tartar. There weren’t many round here who were sorry to see her go.” He looked around him. “Mind you, at least she used to keep the place clean.”

“When did she die?” Ramsay asked. This was what he enjoyed most about an investigation, the digging into the victim’s background, piecing together a picture of the live individual. Hunter hated it. He thought it was a waste of time.

“A few months ago. Just before Christmas.” The constable pulled a face. “I don’t think this floor’s been washed since then.”

“So Bowles lived on his own?”

“In the house, aye. Of course there are those two hippies in the caravan.”

“Oh?” Hunter was immediately interested. Ramsay saw he was preparing to indulge another prejudice. New Age travellers were social security scroungers who had never done a day’s work in their lives. They should be rounded up and deported. And they certainly could all be considered as potential murderers.

“Aye, the girl found him.”

“Girl?” Ramsay asked.

“Well, young woman we’d have to call her now. She’s in her twenties, I suppose. Lily Jackman. Pretty lass. She and her boyfriend have been Bowles’s tenants since last summer. We’ve got a fair few of them round here.”

“Them?” Ramsay asked, dangerously.

“You know. Hippy types. They don’t do much harm. That crew at the Old Chapel in Mittingford seem to attract them. They could all do with a good wash but apart from that

Ramsay heard the words with Prue’s ears. She had her own prejudices. She thought all policemen were narrow-minded bigots.

“When did Ms Jackman find the body?” he asked, emphasizing the “Ms’, a gesture at least.

“She was on her way out to work,” the constable said. “She called in at the house to tell Bowles that the Calor Gas cylinder needed changing. Knocked at the kitchen door and when there was no reply she went in. She used Bowles’s phone in the living room to call us.”

“Where does she work?” Ramsay asked.

“At the Old Chapel in Mittingford. In the health food shop.”

“Is she there now?”

“No. I thought you’d want to talk to her. She’s in the caravan with a WPC and that boyfriend of hers.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“Not much,” the policeman said, ‘though I’ve seen him about. He seems to be a great one for wandering. He must walk miles. He doesn’t have any work, not so far as I know. I think a couple of farmers took him on as casual labour at the end of the summer but he wasn’t much use. Not much of a worker, they said. A dreamer. Not quite all there. I don’t think anyone bothers to ask him now, or even if he’s looking. He survives on the dole, I suppose.”

Hunter looked smug but said nothing.

Ramsay turned back to the body. It had the waxy pallor of a tailor’s dummy.

“What about a next of kin?” he asked.

“None, so far as I know. He was certainly an only child. And he never married.”

“His father’s dead too?”

“I presume so. If there ever was a father.”

“Why man, there must have been a father,” Hunter said. “Unless you still believe in the gooseberry bush out here in the sticks.”

“I meant a father living with the family,” the constable replied stiffly. “For as long as I can remember old lady Bowles and Ernie lived here on their own. Perhaps that was why they were so odd the two of them. Even when he was a grown man she used to treat him as a child. They never mixed much with the other farming families.

Reclusive, you could say. Illegitimacy mattered fifty years ago. Perhaps that’s why they kept themselves so much to themselves. It might explain her obsession with religion too. She was a great one for sin was Cissie Bowles. Saw it everywhere. I was called out to a disturbance in Mittingford once. She’d called some lass a harlot because she wore a skirt like a pelmet and walked through the town with her arm round her boyfriend.”

“Bonkers,” Hunter interrupted.

“I don’t think she was really mad. Not loopy. You’d not get any doctor to lock her away. But she was eccentric all right.”

“Perhaps you could find out the family background,” Ramsay suggested. “It’s probably not relevant but I’d be interested to know who the father was. Ask around the district. People will talk to you more freely than to us.”

“Aye,” the constable said, ‘though I don’t know what use it’ll be. All rumour and gossip. Lots of the kids in Mittingford were brought up to think of Cissie Bowles as some sort of witch. You’ll get nothing objective.”

“All the same,” Ramsay said, ‘it’ll give us something to work on.”

“She used to come into town on market day,” the policeman said. “To stock up for the week and pay her bills, even if she had no business. She always wore black. Great black boots like men would wear down the pit. A black coat which was too big for her and flapped around her ankles when she walked. And a black scarf round her head. Wor lass always said she looked like a Russian peasant.” He paused for a moment in memory. “While she was alive everything was paid for in cash. The story was that she wouldn’t trust banks. When they bought the Land-Rover even that was paid for in cash. So the story went.”

“I suppose that provides some sort of motive,” Ramsay said.

“From what I hear Ernie Bowles didn’t make enough to have piles of money around the house. And he’d surely have opened a bank account by now.”

“It wouldn’t really matter, would it?” Ramsay said. “If the murderer believed that there was a secret hoard of cash in the house that would be motive enough. For breaking in at least. Ernie could have surprised the thief.”

Hunter was dismissive. He had two credit cards and a permanent overdraft. In the modern world that was how things were done. He wasn’t going to be taken in by a fairy story about a wicked witch and a pot of gold. “There’s no sign of a search here,” he said. “It’s all pretty mucky but nothing’s been disturbed.”

“And we’ll keep it that way until the SOCO and forensic have been in.” Ramsay said. Most murders were simple: an explosion of family pressure, the loss of control in a fight. Most were aggravated by alcohol and macho self-delusion. But this wouldn’t be simple. He’d need all the help he could get. He turned back to the policeman.

“You’ve spoken a lot about Cissie Bowles,” he said. “I’ve got a clear picture of her. But you’ve not told us much about the victim. What was he like?”

The policeman paused. “He was in the old lady’s shadow. He wouldn’t fart without asking her first. He didn’t have any personality of his own.”

“But when she died, what impression did you have of him then?”

“There was something creepy about him,” the policeman replied. “Something you couldn’t put your finger on.” He smiled awkwardly. “Wor lass always said he was like something that had crawled out from under a stone.”

“So he wasn’t a pleasant man,” Ramsay said.

“No.” the constable assured him, ‘he certainly wasn’t that.”

“The sort of man to make enemies?”

“I wouldn’t have put it as strong as that. But the sort of man to get up your nose.”

They stood for a moment looking down at the body. It wasn’t much of an epitaph, Ramsay thought. Not the sort of thing you’d want inscribed on your headstone.

“And whose nose, specifically, did he get up?” he asked.

There was a pause. “It was all something and nothing,” the constable said at last.

“But?”

“There was a bit of a scrap in the pub a few weeks ago. Peter Richardson’s a local lad. Finished at agricultural college last year. His dad farms the land next to Laverock and they’ve never been friendly. Peter’s always been a hot head and he’d had too much to drink and not enough sense to be quiet. He started throwing a few punches.”

“Why?”

The constable shrugged. “No charges were brought in the end but the story goes that he didn’t like the way Ernie was looking at his lass.”

Hardly a motive for murder, Ramsay thought, not after all this time, but all the same the boy would have to be seen.

“We’ll take a statement,” he said easily, ‘along with everyone else.” He recognized the policeman’s divided loyalties. “Would you mind staying here and waiting for the scientists? We’ll go to the caravan and talk to the woman who found the body.”